Interesting things that aren't necessarily completely obvious

[David Williams]

Each date is not equally likely to fall on each day of the week. You have the usual 28-year cycle with 21 normal years and 7 leap years, and within that everything is balanced. However, when the year ends in 00, it's only a leap year if the first 2 digits make a number that's divisible by 4. So 2000 was a leap year, but 1900 wasn't and 2100 won't be.

With 303 non leap years and 97 leap years in 400 years, that gives 146,097 days. And that number is divisible by 7. Because of that, it creates an imbalance and you get a 400-year cycle instead of a 2800-year cycle. And as 400 is not divisible by 7, it's impossible for each date to have the same probability of falling on each day of the week.

Years ago (pre-internet) I read an article about Friday 13th, which included the statement that the 13th falls on a Friday more often than any other day - without any explanation. This seemed unlikely, until I followed your logic, and realised it was possible. Faced with a long train journey, and with pencil and paper only, I decided to check it out. It's not quite as laborious as you might think. In normal times the calendar repeats every 28 years and all days are equally represented. So if you start at, say, 1/1/1901 you don't need to consider the 196 years to 31/12/2096, and you can knock out any 84 year period in both the next two centuries are well. Turns out it's true. (confirmed by Google in a second).

[Philip A]

Malabo is no longer the capital of Equitoreal Guinea! Go figure.

[Marc Meakin]

You can decide if its really obvious but im reading Kathy Burkes autobiography ( very good it is too)and Perry out of Kevin and Perry was based on Perry Fenwick ( Billy Mitchell)

[Philip A]

Wacky Races only had 1 series.

[Marc Meakin]

Wacky Races only had 1 series.

17 episodes , id watched for years and never knew

[Philip A]

Hello Kitty is not a cat.

[Gavin Chipper]

Hello Kitty is not a cat.

I saw that on the BBC. I mean, if it looks like a cat and quacks like a cat...

Edit - It just seems meaningless. It even has "Kitty" in the name. It would be like "revealing" that Scooby Doo was just another human character in the show.

Edit 2 - OK, just looking at the BBC article again, the bit I read was:

Yuko Yamaguchi took over design duties for the character — who isn't actually a cat, but a little girl from London — in 1980, five years after she first launched.

I didn't read much further, but looking now it later says:

Unlike other Japanese exports such as Pokemon, there is little backstory to the character of Hello Kitty. Sanrio has said she "isn't a human, [but] she's not quite a cat either".

Wikipedia says:

In 2014 an anthropologist was told by Sanrio that Kitty White was not simply a cat (i.e. "depicted on all fours"), describing her as a little English girl called Kitty White, from outside London.[10] Following reports that interpreted this to mean she was human, a Sanrio PR representative said that the organization had "never said she was a human", explaining anthropomorphization by comparing the character to Mickey Mouse: "No one would mistake the Disney character for a human–but at the same time he's not quite a mouse. Just like Hello Kitty isn't a human, she's not quite a cat either."[48] Sanrio stated further, "Hello Kitty was done in the motif of a cat. It's going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat."

OK, so she's not not a cat. She's a fucking cat. And I've just wasted a good few minutes of my life researching something completely irrelevant.