You're wrong, and this book has the answers!

Think you know the facts? Think again!

There are certain things a person just knows — that there are 50 states in the United States; that centipedes have 100 legs; that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet.

Wrong, wrong and wrong ... as authors John Lloyd and John Mitchinson obligingly point out in "The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong" (Harmony, 266 pp., $19.95).

The correct information?

• Four of those 50 supposed states are "commonwealths" (Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts).

• Centipedes have anywhere from 15 to 191 pairs of legs, but none has ever been found with exactly 100 legs (the closest was 96).

• Crapper can take credit for the manhole cover, the ballcock and the bathroom showroom, but flush toilets date back to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 200) in China.

Also, we owe the necktie to Croatia (where it was called "hravat," hence "cravat"). And ostriches have never been observed burying their heads in the sand.

Lloyd and Mitchinson serve up these and other diverting tidbits in a spry manner, as they battle an ignorance apparently afflicting us all.

Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times book critic