'The truly useful book of useless information'

Author: Terence Mirabelli

Publisher: Faraxa Books / 2024

Pages: 225

Did you know that the average Maltese person consumes over 60 tonnes of food in a lifetime?

Or that a person from Birkirkara became the ruling prince of Moldova?

Or that bits of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, is buried inside Dock One at the Dockyard?

This book delivers exactly what it promises - packed with news and fascinating facts you never realized you didn't know. Or even wanted to know.

The book establishes a sort of primacy - the sheer amount of difficult words it includes. Here's a small sample: spuddle, galaphobia, triskaidekaphobia, interrobang, agnotology, radioles. And more.

This book also risks angering its readers in at least two localities in Malta.

It includes a long list of patron saints for many categories of people.

Among the patron saints listed there is St Cajetan (or Gaetan) who is much loved by the people of Hamrun.

The book, however, includes three categories of people who include the saint as their patron saint - the unemployed, those seeking a job and the workers.

Then, the book continues, St Cajetan is also the patron saint of gamblers.

The author does not explain where he got this assertion from but those my age surely remember the years when devotees used to block the roads leading to Marsa and Qormi, from Hamrun Square, next to then Mid-Med Bank, especially when there was a World Cup.

However, it is the worthy devotees of St Nicholas of Bari, Siggiewi, who stand to be turned red-hot with anger when they read that their beloved saint is the patron saint of... prostitutes.

Such a snippet will no doubt come handy at the Ta' Qali Stadium during a game.

There are also, you would be happy to know, patron saints for almost anything, including saints who are not saints yet, like Carlo Acutis, who will be declared a saint in April, patron saint of the internet.

Then there is a list of the most strange museums in the world - the Ghost Museum, the Icelandic Phallological Museum (or Penis Museum), the International Banana Museum, the Museum of Bad Art, the Museum of Broken Relationships, the Museum of Death and the Museum of the Weird to say nothing of the National Poo Museum.

And two incredible events - on 26 January 1972 Vesna Vulovic, who was a flight attendant on a JAT flight fell 10,160 metres to the snow-covered ground and lived.

And just 33 days before this Juliane Koepcke survived a 3,000 metre fall after the plane she was on disintegrated in a storm and broke apart.

The author says he is planning more books like this.