Following Trump’s belief that Haitians are eating cats in Ohio because he ‘saw it on TV’, we are preemptively fact checking other things he might have seen on his favourite programmes.
Does the Sun have a child’s face?
For many years the sun was portrayed as having the face of a child. Trump was so smitten with The Teletubbies that he modelled himself on a Teletubby character that he created called Trumpy-wumpy who was orange.
The sun does not have a child’s face.
Can dogs do Kung Fu?
The programme Hong Kong Phooey featured a dog who was a mild-mannered janitor called Perry who at a police station. When a crime was reported he would disappear into a filing cabinet and emerge disguied as Hong Kong Phooey, an inept martial arts crime fighter who is invariably saved and succeeds thanks to Spot, a cat.
Dogs can’t do Kung Fu, and are no good as janitors due to the lack of opposable thumbs.
Does someone covered in liquid nitrogen shatter if they receive a blow?
This has featured in films and television programmes. In the James Bond Goldeneye film the Russian hacker (Boris Grishenko) gets frozen by liquid nitrogen and then shatters
In the X Files episode “Roland”, Mulder and Scilly visit a crime scene where the victim’s head has shattered after being immersed in liquid nitrogen.
Humans, and animals, do not shatter if they have been immersed in liquid nitrogen.
This is because animals have collagen in them that retains elasticity even when frozen with liquid nitrogen. I have done this experiment with rat cadavers left over from a practical and left them in liquid nitrogen overnight. Despite being tapped with a hammer with increasing force they did not shatter. I was unable to replicate the experiment with a Russian hacker as there were none available at the time.
Can squid play the clarinet?
In the underwater documentary series SpongeBob Square pants Squidward is sometimes shown playing a clarinet. Experts have debated the feasibility of this. The first issue is that clarinets are famously wind instruments that need air to be blown through them which wouldn’t work underwater. There is also the small matter of squid not having lungs to blow air through them.
Squid cannot play clarinet.