10 things I didn't know until last week

1. New Zealand was the only team that went through the 2010 Football World Cup undefeated.
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2. The penguin mascot of Penguin Books is named ‘Frostie’ after Eunice Frost, who became an editor at Penguin in the late 1930s and went on to be its first female director. In 1958 she became the first woman in publishing to be awarded an OBE for services to literature.
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3. Named after the German word for fantasy or imagination, Fanta was originally a product created in Nazi Germany due to the inavailability of Coca-Cola during World War II.
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4. The Chinese yuán and the Japanese yen both mean “round object” in their respective languages.
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5. In 2009, Iceland became the first country with an openly gay head of government, when Johanna Sigurdardottir became prime minister.
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6. Ridley Scott didn’t like the name Blade Runner for his 1982 sci-fi flick and tried to rename it ‘Gotham City’, but Bob Kane (comic book creator of Batman) wouldn’t sell the rights to the name, so it returned to being called ‘Blade Runner’.
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7. The itinerant Roma people of Central and Eastern Europe - better known by the pejorative term, Gypsies - originated from India. They left the subcontinent in the 11th century, possibly following the Muslim invasions.
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8. The “art title” is the name of the movie as it appears in fancy lettering in the middle of the poster/ad, whereas the “billing title” appears again in the billing box, which appear at the bottom of the poster. While they both are the same, their relative sizes dictate the type sizes of the names of the stars on the poster.
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9. In the Russian version of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’, the ‘Ask the Audience’ lifeline isn’t used as often as the others because the audience often gives wrong answers intentionally to trick the contestants.
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10. The name ‘Amanda’ literally means “she who is to be loved.”
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