It was a fact that the boy could only remember stuff if it was in some way numbered.
It was all pretty weird, really. He knew he was seven, but beyond this it meant that all sorts of interesting facts without numbers just couldn’t be retained. Despite this setback, he knew that over sixty percent of the world’s lakes are in Canada, that ninety percent of the world’s population lives in the Northern Hemisphere, that Russia has eleven time zones, that the surface of the sun is around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, that cats sleep an average of fifteen hours a day, that the largest bowling alley in the world is in Japan and has one hundred and sixteen lanes, that the shortest war in history, the Anglo-Zanzibar war, lasted thirty-eight minutes!
He also knew that Finland has been ranked as the happiest country in the world for seven years straight, that around eighty percent of orange cats are male, that winds on Neptune can blow faster than 1,200 miles an hour, that the sun is about four hundred times larger than the moon, that a giraffe’s tongue can be twenty inches long, that lions can sleep up to twenty-one hours in a day, and that the human circulatory system is more than 60,000 miles long.
He knew for certain that Walt Disney holds the most Academy Awards, it being a total of twenty-six, that wearing a necktie could reduce blood flow to your brain by up to seven and a half percent, that your brain alone burns around four hundred to five hundred calories each day, that approximately ten percent of people are left-handed, that your heart beats an average of 100,000 times each day, that octopuses have three hearts and that in 2004 Neil Armstrong’s hair was sold for three thousand dollars.
All this wonderful information, but there’s the rub, d’you see? It has its downside.
Like the day he got lost in the city and couldn’t remember his name. When this was asked for, by the nice policeman who found him wandering around looking lost, all he could tell him was a house number and a post code.
This whole thing is very hard to believe!