Quotes from John Lloyd

I probably did pack a lifetime's work into the 1980s.

You can analyse a joke and say it's funny because this guy thought this was going to happen, and that happened, and it's surprising. But not all surprising things are funny.

The universe is fractal. The closer you look at it, the more interesting it becomes.

Maybe the universe is a giant practical joke and we don't know the punchline.

You can't predict anything. How can you be certain about anything when everything is chaos and we're not in control?

In 2010, the BBC spent nearly £230,000 on tea, but only £2000 on biscuits.

Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machine gun to kill a hedgehog.

In the 1950s, to allow babies of students at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to enter the premises, they were re-defined as cats.

J. M. Barrie founded a celebrity cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse.

James Joyce married a woman named Nora Barnacle. She once said to him, 'Why don't you write books people can read?

Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don't eat rice.

René Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.

About 200,000 academic journals are published in English each year. The average number of readers per article is five.   The average numbers of readers of any given published scientific paper is said to be 0.6.

Almost any domestic cat can run faster than Usain Bolt.

There is no known scientific way of predicting earthquakes. The most reliable method is to count the number of missing cats in the local paper: if it trebles, an earthquake is imminent.

From 1934 to 1948, the motto of the BBC was Quaecunque, Latin for 'Whatever'.

If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, a million lives could be saved a year.

As a baby, Oliver Cromwell was abducted by his grandfather's pet monkey.

When John Hetherington ventured out in public wearing the first top hat, it was considered so shocking that children screamed, women fainted, and a small boy broke his arm in the chaos.

Viking names included 'desirous of beer', 'squat-wiggle', 'lust-hostage', 'short penis', 'able to fill a bay with fish by magic', 'the man who mixes his drinks' and 'the man without trousers'.

There are enough diamonds in existence to give everyone on the planet a cupful.

In 1917, John D. Rockefeller could have paid off the whole US public debt on his own. Today, Bill Gates's entire fortune would barely cover two months' interest.

The Wars of the Roses weren't called that. Sir Walter Scott invented the name four centuries after the conflict.

The phrase "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" is often said to refer to a metallic grid with circular holes in it, set under a pyramid of cannonballs on a ship's deck to keep it stable. When this "brass monkey" got cold enough, the metal contracted and the cannonballs all popped out. In fact, the phrase means exactly what it says; the fake nautical euphemism is an attempt to make its rude humor more acceptable.