A single cell, removed from a living heart and placed in solution,
continues to beat.

In 1850.  Levi invented his blue jeans, the Navy stopped flogging
sailors, Pinkerton opened a detective agency, Dickens came out with
"David Copperfield," Bunsen dreamed up his burner, Folger offered coffee
ready-roasted and ground, Tennyson wrote "'Tis better to have loved and
lost...", and Napoleon ate his first tomato.  Big year, 1850.

What do you say to somebody who asks, "Where do you find the time...?"
Try this:  "You don't have to find it, if you don't lose it."

Well diggers in Mongolia's Gobi Desert hit water in nine out of 10
borings.  Oftentimes a few feet down.  Certainly within 500 feet.  The
Gobi is afloat, evidently.

Two hundred and sixteen car drivers started out in 1903 on a 870-mile
race from Paris to Madrid.  Few people along the route ever before had
seen a car.  So they waited in the road.  By the time the lead car had
gone 343 miles -- when the whole thing was called off -- the racers had
killed 550 spectators.

Students majoring in which subjects put away the most liquor?
Collegiate surveytakers learned business majors drink the most,
education majors the least.

The people of different countries answer the telephone differently.
Greeks say the equivalent of "Come in."  Germans give their names.
Russians open with "I'm listening."  Italians start with the directive
"Pronto" meaning "read."  What the Japanese say amounts to the same as
"Excuse me."

If on a single occasion a man hits his wife, it's not a certainty he'll
do it again.  If on two different occasions he hits his wife, it's
highly likely he'll do it again.  The same applies to the woman who hits
her husband.  So say those who've made a study of family violence.

The Incas of Peru had popcorn but no movies.  When did they eat it?

In 1880 something happened in the Montana mining town of Wickes that had
never happened until then in any Montana town -- the locals opened a
church before they opened a saloon.  What this did for Wickes is clear
from everything you've ever heard about the place.

You know what makes a bear look funny when it walks?  It lifts both
right feet together, then both left.

If King Charles II hadn't been so promiscuous, Great Britain wouldn't
have so many dukedoms.  Every time he had an illegitimate son, said son
wound up as a duke.  Six of them.  Charles also had five nephews.  They
wound up as dukes, too.

Naturalists who trap birds for science say the most difficult to catch
is the cardinal.

Much is made of the fact that Alaska has so many more men than women.
Clearly, though, few care as much as did Bob Hope in his heyday.  When
he went to Fairbanks, he took along 130 girls aged 17 to 25.

Computer runs turn up revelations:  It's now known big-busted women
survive accidents better than men do.

 Q. What's the difference between "code" and "cipher"?
 A. Code uses words. Cipher uses numbers for letters.

The kiss is still under study by England's researchers.  They now think
it's not the the kiss on the lips that's most likely to turn on a woman,
but the kiss on the back of the neck.  Our Love and War man offers no
argument.  Access isn't always convenient, he notes, but many a man
executes by sneaking up on her while she's brushing her teeth.

Musicians say an ordinary "A" becomes an "A Sharp" in the Vienna State
Opera House.  Bright acoustics.  The point:  An instrument tuned for one
room may not be tuned for another.

Yes, fish yawn.

 Q. How come we refer to beat-up cars as "jalopies"?
 A. Dealers shipped such cars a half century ago through
Mexico's Vera Cruz to a refurbishing city 70 miles
inland. The cars then were sent to market in Mexico City.
When a clunker here looked as though it were ready to be
sent down, those in the know referred to it by the name
of that Mexican refurbishing city - "Jalapa."

You know how you raise your eyebrows to show a questioning attitude?
Monkeys do it, too.

 Q. Name the only sport in which neither the spectators
nor the participants know the score until it's over.
 A. Boxing. In theory.

In Virginia, a club of widows and widowers threw a dance to build
membership.  Only for other widows and widowers.  No unqualified guests,
no matter how lonely.  So each arrival was required to show the death
certificate of the dead spouse at the door.

The "stark" in "stark-naked" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "steort" meaning
"rear end."  Colloquial versions abound.

Most affectionate, those male muriqui monkeys of Brazil.  They have long
strong tails, and spend most of their time hanging upside down by same
with their arms around one another.  Females just sit and watch.
Wondering, I guess, about heredity and environment.

Am told you speak every language known in the western world when you say
"Hallelujah."

The man who designed the early distinctive Coca-Cola bottle wanted to
pattern it after either a "coca" or a "cola," but he couldn't find a
picture of whatever they were.  In the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1910,
though, he did find a picture of a cocoa bean, so that was his pattern.

A correspondent says the Russians have trained bears to play hockey.
I've seen bears and I've seen hockey.  It's too rough for bears.

Pritnear every household nationwide a century ago had a canary in a cage
wherein was wired a cuttlefish bone.  The bird was supposed need that
bone.  To peck at.  To help its digestion.  To sharpen its bill.  This
started when Japan opened its ports.  Cuttlefish bone for canaries was
one of Japan's first wedges into world trade.

Am told natural rubber is called "caoutchouc."  By some maybe.

Bears can't snarl.  They don't have the right muscles to make their lips
curl that way.  Taxidermists err.

 Q. A woman pictured in a bathtub is sexy but a man
pictured in a tub is sort of funny. Why?
 A. She is nude, he is naked. The dictionary doesn't
adequately explain the difference -- "nude" suggests
"natural," "naked" suggests "defenseless."

For the benefit of that man in Everett, Wash., who says he personally
checks out everything he reads here:  From Venus, the Earth looks blue.

 Q. What's the name of the fish that breathes through its
fins.
 A. Blenny.

Icelanders drink more milk per capita than otherlanders.

 Q. Many lawyers when they say "defendant" emphasize the
last syllable - "de-fen-DANT." That's wrong. It should be
"de-FEN-dant. Why do they do that?
 A. The affectation started as a reminder to themselves
and their typists that the last syllable is spelled with
an "a." The mispronunciation is turning into a signature
quirk of the profession.

The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five
must be straight.  These straight sections are usable as airstrips in
times of war or other emergencies.

The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston,
Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can sail
under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears
never stop growing.

David Prowse, was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars.  He
spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be
dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.

Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.

In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.

Barbie's measurements if she were life size:  39-23-33.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full
moon.

Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is
necessary.  When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still
had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and
whites.

No word in the English language rhymes with month.

The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each
gallon of diesel that it burns.

There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal
category.

Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City,
after the Catholic Church.

Cat's urine glows under a black light.

Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible computer wasn't
considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's
Flight Simulator.

The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook macaroni, and about a
gallon to clean the pot.

In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

Babies are born without knee caps.  They don't appear until the child
reaches 2-6 years of age.

The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in
Colorado.

Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously

If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have
$1.19.  You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being
able to make change for a dollar.

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike
factory workers in Malaysia combined.

No NFL team which plays it's home games in a domed stadium has ever won
a Superbowl

The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It To Beaver".

In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was burnt down but
only 6 people were injured

Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son.

One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today because cotton growers in
the 30s lobbied against hemp farmers --they saw it as competition.  It
is not chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine.

The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports
games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the
Major League All-Star Game.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older

The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan"

"Naturally northbound robins travel 67 percent faster than southbound
robins," explains a client.  "They're on their way to their breeding
grounds."

King Arthur legends come from ancient tales.  Recent translations reveal
he met with his followers in a "tabled rotunda," a sort of temple.
Understandable how "tabled rotunda" came down as "round table."  But the
fellow had no round table, evidently.

Historically there always have been more unmarried men in French Guiana
than in any other country.  Same goes there for unmarried women.  This
is no mystery to those who know its penal colony history.

An experienced salesman contends:  "You can never sell anything to a man
while his arms are crossed."

Scientists say primeval fish kept their balance in water with
fluid-filled sacs on the sides of their heads.  The human ear evolved
from these sacs, they say.  It's noteworthy, they think, that sacs now
in the human middle ear still affect balance.

 Q. How come pictures of the Tower of London never show
any tower?
 A. Isn't any tower. It's a walled-in complex of
buildings, that's all.

Porpoises can hear boat whistles, but not foghorns.

On the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Tonjoghe leaves are
narcotic.  Natives chew them.  And smear the leaf paste over their
bodies.  Then breathe heavily on wild bee hives before they raid said
hives.  The bees don't sting them.  Can't.  They're out of it.

Wrote author John Brunner:  "If there is such a phenomenon as absolute
evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."

Harvard University rejects fewer applicants than does the Ringing Bros.
Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

The Czech composer Bedrich Smetana suffered that ear ringing malady
known as tinnitus.  He did not find it difficult to describe:  "It's a
shrill whistle of a first inversion chord of A-flat in the highest
register of the piccolo."

The Paradox frog of the Amazon starts out as a 9-inch tadpole and ends
up as a 3-inch frog.  That's life.

Your heart doesn't work quite the way your whole body works.  Your body
rests about a third of your life.  In sleep.  Your heart rests about a
sixth of your life.  Between beats.  But your body doesn't take any
special rest while your heart is still.  And your heart doesn't take any
special rest while your body is still.

 Q. Where's the biggest swamp?
 A. Brazil. The Gran Pantanal in Mato Grosso State. More
than half the size of Minnesota, that one.

All fathers of quarterbacks believe in heredity.

All of Holland's windmills turn counterclockwise.  That's what I said.
But a savvy client writes:  Not from inside where the miller works - to
him, the windmill turns clockwise.  Quite so:  Point of view is
everything.

Something else that distinguishes February from other months is it's the
most misspelled.

 Q. Who are those people who won't let women eat eggs in
the belief that eggs make women too sexy?
 A. Three groups in South Africa: the Tembo, the Fingo and
the Nguni. Oldtimers among them still claim a woman who
eats eggs becomes so eager for romance she chases any man
in sight. If this interests you, sir, I believe the
Agriculture Department offers booklets on how to raise
chickens.

A Polynesian cook of considerable savvy says that on those rare
occasions when he's called upon to tenderize an octopus, he doesn't beat
it by hand, but just tosses it into the washing machine.

Once a male bird with an elaborate courtship ritual gets started, he
loses himself in his own performance, evidently.  Take the female away
and he doesn't even notice her absence until he's finished the whole
show.

A Fairbanks client writes, "Anchorage is a nice town, and it's only a
half hour from Alaska."  This is the same fellow who says of Alaska's
summer, "If it falls on a weekend, we barbecue."

 Q. Who invented pockets in clothing?
 A. Who isn't known, but when is. Pockets didn't come
along until the late 1500s, Shakespeare's era.

 Q. What killed that writers' writer, Sherwood Anderson?
 A. A toothpick he swallowed at a cocktail party.

 Q. Where'd we get the exclamation "Wow!"?
 A. It was coined by a vaudeville performer, otherwise
unidentified. "Wow" first turned up in print in a
December 1920 issue of Collier's magazine.

Countdown to rocket blastoff was invented not by space agency
dramatists, but by movie director Fritz Lang in 1929.  He came up with
the bit to heighten one scene's tension while filming "The Woman on the
Moon."

An historian advises that medieval Englanders routinely drank beer for
breakfast.  So?

 Q. What was the most successful patent medicine of all
time?
 A. Hop Bitters. Heavily laced with alcohol, that one. It
was concocted in 1873 by Asa T. Soule of Rochester, N.Y.
Made him a millionaire. Soule offered the University of
Rochester $100,000, if it would change its name to Hops
Bitters University. The school said no.

Report is more than 30 million people speak Wu.  Amazing!  Don't know
how they do it.

The phrase "to sleep like a top" has nothing to do with that spinning
toy.  Comes from the French "taupe" meaning "mole."  To sleep as a mole
sleeps, undisturbed in its burrow.

During the beetle mating season, scientists aimed their video camera at
the only entrance of a hollow log, then put 30 females therein.  The
tapes show 900 fly-in males per hour.  A house record, I believe.

Your bathtub will empty faster, if you're in it.

Ancient Hawaiians beat fruit trees that refused to bear.  That's what I
said.  A master grower explains:  "It's called 'scorring,' and not only
ancient Hawaiians did it.  By crushing the bark in several places with a
club, you interrupt the normal flow of sap between the leaves and roots,
and shock the tree, triggering it to set the fruit.  It's common
practice today."

Not since the United States became a nation has there ever been a time
when its Gulf Coast was not a prime arena for smugglers.

 Q. In horse lingo, what's a "crop out"?
 A. A foal that can't be registered as a Quarter Horse
because of its markings. Even though it may have been
born to pedigreed Quarter Horses. If it has any white
bigger than a silver dollar back of its head or above the
knees, it can be registered as an American Paint, but not
as a Quarter Horse.

Little wonder physicians specialize.  No way can they keep up with it
all.  The National Library of Medicine near Washington, D.C., subscribes
to 24,000 medical periodicals.

It's reported to be a physiological fact that women see better than men
in dim light.

If more people knew that "cordate" means "heart-shaped," says our
Language man, more people would use the word.

It was a ritual among the Incas to bury selected children alive high
above the permafrost line in the Andes.  These remains have been found
on more than 100 mountain peaks.  They are the best preserved mummies in
the world.

You say it snows a lot in Minneapolis?  Maybe so, but not as much as in
the Grand Canyon.

What can a woman do to develop her bustline?  The Father of Medicine,
Hippocrates, prescribed for that, too.  He advised small-busted women to
sing.  Loudly.  At every opportunity.

One theorist opines, "Most of the young men who wear beards were bossed
around by their mothers and sisters.  They grow whiskers because it's
something women can't do."

 Q. When you spread your hand, that skin between your
thumb and forefinger, what's it called?
 A. Purlicue.

 Q. When was the great Children's Crusade to the Holy
Land?
 A. It wasn't. That such took place in 1212 long has been
taught. But scholars now say it didn't happen. About
30,000 children in France and 20,000 in Switzerland, most
under 12, were indeed recruited. But the majority were
sold into slavery of one kind or another. The rest
scattered. None made it to the Holy Land.

 Q. In the Old West days of the great trail rides, weren't
the black and white cowboys integrated?
 A. On the job, pretty much. Elsewhere, they went their
separate ways. Dodge City had segregated bordellos.

 Q. The great French poet Francois Villon -- how did he
die?
 A. Nobody knows. He was into poetry and crime. He wrote
much, stole habitually, murdered repeatedly, and
disappeared.

What was so special about the century between 550 and 660 B.C.?  All of
Asia's existing major religions were formulated or reformulated to come
to the fore then.  Confucius' philosophy.  Taoism by Lao-Tze of China.
Buddhism by Gautama of India.  Jainism by Mahavira.  And Japan's Shinto.

Our Love and War man thinks it noteworthy that most bridal veils are
made of a nylon material called "Illusion."


Women tend to conform publicly, but rebel privately.  Men tend to
conform privately, but rebel publicly.  Or so say students of human
behavior.

One French phrase for a hangover translates:  "My eyes aren't opposite
the holes."

Lot of societies traditionally measured time by nights, not days.  The
ancient British with their "fortnight" meaning two weeks.  The American
Indians with their count of moons, not suns.

Not every fruit buyer knows the ordinary yellow banana you get at the
store is a variety called the "Cavendish."

Whereabouts of this tombstone I do not know, but the picture in hand
clearly shows this inscription:  "Here I lie between two / of the best
women / in the world:  My wives.  / But I have requested / my relatives
tip me / a little toward Tillie."

In what's now Australia once lived a carnivorous kangaroo.

Was none other than that renowned showman P.T.  Barnum who popularized
goldfish in this country.  He imported some in 1850.  Thereafter it was
a mark of distinction to be one of those city visitors who'd actually
seen a goldfish.

A foot a minute - that's how fast a silkworm ejects liquid silk.

How long was the Jesse James gang in action?  Put that query to the
fellow on the next stool.  Unlikely he'll know.  A myth lingers that the
career of the James Gang was violent but brief.  Not so brief, really.
They robbed for 35 years.  From 1847 to 1882.

 Q. Did the great French writer Voltaire walk with a cane?
 A. At every opportunity. He owned 80.

When silk stockings became widely available in the 1920s, women started
to wear short dresses.  It wasn't the silk but the leg they chose to
show, opines a scholarly lady who has studied the subject.  She contends
feminine modesty is a myth.

Not only do Chinese citrus growers infest their orchards with certain
ants - so those ants can kill other insect pests - but into the trees
said growers rig thousands of little bamboo ladders for them.

 Q. What U.S. city in the 1940s was known as "First in
Shoes, First in Booze, and Last in the American League"?
 A. St. Louis.

Item No. 3927-C in our Love and War man's file details part of the law
in medieval England against illicit romantic affairs.  A widow caught in
the physical act could be fined 20 shillings, but a young unmarried
woman so apprehended was only liable for 10 shillings.

One authority says a man's muscles produce enough heat to boil a quart
of water an hour.  His muscles maybe.

Prince Charles owns first refusal rights to dead whales washed up on
Cornwall's beach.

The turbellarian worm possesses both testes and ovaries, so can mate as
either male or female.  When giving sperm, it's indiscriminately
promiscuous.  When receiving sperm, it's extremely selective.  But to
draw parallels is unwarranted, and our Love and War man won't put up
with it.

Last I heard about 250 underground coal deposits were still burning out
of control.  It's a little publicized fact that such concealed fires
have been smoldering under this country for hundreds of years.

Pregnant wildebeests have at least some control over when they deliver.
A herd's expectants get together and give birth at the same time.

 Q. Is a "pair of twins" two people or four people?
 A. Four, technically. But nobody's technical in this.
It's a redundancy, if used, and what it means is what
it's always intended to mean -- two people.

The conquistadors wanted gold.  When they also found platinum in South
American rivers, they threw it back, believing in time it would ripen
into gold.

A clever convict who went over the wall in bloodhound country escaped
the dogs simply by wearing another man's shoes to the river and changing
to his own shoes on the other side.

 Q. What retail outlet sells the most bridal gowns?
 A. The Salvation Army stores, market researchers believe.
A fact known to few but certain brides and their mothers
is that countless costly gowns, each worn but once, wind
up as astonishing bargains in such stores.

Lot of lemmings don't march off cliffs, you know.  They stay home.  To
take care of their families.

An authority on Peru contends four out of five men who hold down steady
jobs there have mistresses.

Archers in old England put a live cat in a leather sack and swung it
from a tree limb for a target.  Mr. Shakespeare alluded to the practice
in "Much Ado About Nothing."  As previously mentioned, it's where we got
the old-timey term "no room to swing a cat."  What, you contradict?  You
mention cat-of-nine-tails?  Nope.  The "swing a cat" phrase appeared in
literature 100 years before the cat-of-nine-tails was invented for
flogging.

Few grasp the fact that Antarctica is bigger than China and India
combined.

Recluses, those people who hole up, refusing to go out into the world,
tend to be indifferent to food.  The famous Collyer brothers of Harlem,
for example, ate almost nothing but peanuts and oranges.

 Q. At a bullfight where the bulls are really killed, how
many bulls die during one afternoon performance?
 A. Six. Three matadors work. Each kills two. Takes about
20 minutes to finish off each bull.

Dolpo is a remote place in Nepal.  Life is tough there.  To survive, a
family needs three working grownups -- one to farm, one to take care of
the livestock, and one to buy and sell things at the distant markets.
So one woman commonly marries two men, usually brothers.

It was none other than that Roman Catholic scholar, Lucius F. Cervantes,
S.J., who said, "The higher a woman's IQ, the more she is likely to be
masculine in outlook.  The higher a man's IQ, the more likely is he to
be feminine in outlook."

Keepers of P. T. Barnum's renowned elephant Jumbo fed him great
quantities of beer and booze, and he eventually evidenced a craving.  An
alcoholic elephant?

In the fields of Trinidad, the African slaves were forbidden to talk but
not forbidden to sing.  So in the French-Creole dialect called patois,
they sang to each other constantly -- stories, warnings, gossip,
complaints, whatever chit-chat came to mind.  That was the original
calypso.

If the mother needs help with the kids, the father tends to stay with
her to give that help.  If she doesn't, he doesn't.  This is not a Love
and War man item, exactly.  It's a scientific claim about all animal
species:  "The male is usually monogamous, if the female is reliant, and
usually polygamous, if the female is self-sufficient."

What intensely interests the medical researchers is the fact that the
lamprey can regenerate its spinal cord.

 Q. What's wrong with serving wine with salad, pray?
 A. Nothing, if the salad contains no vinegar. Wine thinks
it's too good for vinegar. Wine doesn't much care for
sulfur, either. That's why you're not supposed to serve
wine with eggs.

Pure iodine is solid.

Michelangelo's last name was Buonarroti.  As a youngster, according to
the historical footnotes, just about everybody who knew him thought he
was a rotten kid.  Geniuses don't make good children, evidently.

What other animal can you name, besides the snail, that only has one
foot?

Ink is older than paper.

In the evolution of the old standard wedding ceremony, "for better or
for worse" was preceded by "For Fairer, For Fouler."

If you've ever invented anything, please note:  Many firms offer to
promote your invention for a fee.  Researchers did a study on them.
Paul Turley of the Federal Trade Commission has been quoted as saying,
Not a single one of 30,000 people who paid such promoters ever made a
profit.

Not everybody in Alaska's Fairbanks knows it's against the law there to
give beer to a moose.

You don't hear much about the great French surgeon Ambroise Pare.  He
was doing his best work about the time William Shakespeare was born.  It
was Pare who taught doctors to seal wounds by sewing them up instead of
burning them with hot irons.

It was that sage Dr.  Robert Anthony who said, "The one who loves the
least controls the relationship."

 Q. There are places in this world where you can only move
in one direction. Name a couple?
 A. North Pole, South Pole.

A plant fertilizer called "CC-84" came out in 1984.  Said to be twice as
potent as steer manure.  But it didn't do too well on the market.
Finally, sellers changed the name to "Kricket Krap."  Sales quadrupled.

Frank Lloyd Wright liked to design houses with front doors you couldn't
readily see.  Sometimes, couldn't even find.


 Q. What's the oldest thoroughfare in London?
 A. The Thames River. Did you read it's now the cleanest
city waterway in the world? Remarkable, if true. For
years, even the fish had to hold their noses -- picture
that -- and then there weren't any fish.

When a cat closes its eyes, it shuts two lids over each.  What you don't
see is how each inner lid moves not up or down, but outward -- from nose
toward ears.

Any real battles in the near vacuum of outer space -- never mind the
"Star Wars" sound effects -- would be fought in silence.

Confucius was of the opinion that music gives a sort of pleasure that
human beings can't do without.

"Three on match" was deemed unlucky after British soldiers in the Boer
War said three lights from one match gave enemy snipers time to aim.
Then Swedish match king Ivar Kreuger promoted the notion worldwide to
sell more matches.  Superstitions rarely spread by accident.

Most widely used medical tool in the world is the clinical thermometer.

In Italian, you don't "take" a bath, you "do" one.  That "let's do
lunch" line is mock Italian?

In the old West, lads took jobs as cowboys and lasses as hired girls.
There were apprentices and greenhorns and some students, but those aged
12 to 19 weren't called "teenagers."  People went straight from
childhood to work and marriage.  There was no such recognized category
as "adolescence."

In old Rome, it was legal until 374 A.D. for parents to kill their
infants.

Grown birds don't sleep in nests.

"Janitor" started out as a fancy name for the building caretaker.
Because such a worthy always carried keys.  Even as did "Janus," the
Roman god of doors.  In trying to give that job title a little class,
those who picked "janitor" after "Janus" had a lot more imagination than
those who picked "stationary engineer" or whatever.

What would you do with a fifth?  Take it?  Drink it?  Or play it?
Musicologists say a third of all the melodies in the world are based on
one musical interval -- a fifth.

A light going away from you starts to look red.  A light coming toward
you starts to look blue.  Not sure why.  Ask somebody qualified to tell
you.

In 525 B.C., the Persians whipped the Egyptian Army.  A cunning Persian
officer lined up a row of cats in front of his troops.  The Egyptians
soldiers thought the cats were sacred.  They wouldn't fire off any
arrows.  But the Persians would.  They killed just about everything in
front of them except the cats.

Your body, if typical, makes about an ounce of alcohol a day.
Remarkable.  Almost enough.

Can you explain why an owl's hoot doesn't echo?  It doesn't.

A designer of women's clothing says she can enhance every feature of the
female body -- neck, shoulders, waist, so on -- except the elbows and
knees.  Clothing must be cut for these either to cover them or draw
attention away from them.  Nobody, she says, has good-looking elbows and
knees.

If a honey bee flaps its wings 435 times a second -- that's normal -- it
plays the A above Middle C. Listen.  If it's playing E, it's tired.

 Q. Nitpickers say high noon is not the same as 12 o'clock
noon. What's the difference?
 A. High noon is when the sun is at its zenith, not always
the same as clock noon.

Blood, it's said, is the most nutritious of all foods.  It's long been
in demand in China.  Northern Europeans brought it over, too.  In
sausage mostly.  That and head cheese are still in the good delis.  As a
lad on the farm, I had opportunities to decline both.  You don't see
many blood foods in neighborhood markets anymore.

Only one African country has never been under European rule.  Can you
name it?  Say Liberia.

If a tickler tickles you, you won't laugh unless you trust the tickler.
That doesn't sound like a scientific fact, but it is.

The "apple pie" in our "apple pie order" comes from the French
"nappes-lies" meaning "folded linen."  The idioms for neat and orderly
mean the same in both languages.

 Q. What happened to that old Alaskan town of
Mumtrek-holo�gamute?
 A. Was renamed Bethel. For some reason.

So modest were the lady-type ladies of a century ago that when one of
same went to her doctor, she took a doll with her to point to where it
hurt.

Say male and female hikers suddenly get hit by a strong chilling wind.
The men, elbows in tight, fists clenched at the waist, are inclined to
face into it, and plow forward.  But the women tend to turn their backs,
head down, arms folded, and wait for it to blow over.  Scientists think
this doesn't suggest men are braver while women are smarter.  It
evolves, they believe, from the ancients when sharp cold storms
interrupted breast feeding.

 Q. In symphony talk, what's the "Bayreuth hush"?
 A. That moment of silence as the conductor raises his
baton.

Ancient fur traders bought hides in bundles of 10.  They dickered over
them some.  The word "dicker," in fact, comes from a term meaning "10
hides."

Marriages among blind people last longer statistically than marriages
among people with good eyesight.  Or so our Love and War man has been
informed.  He doesn't doubt it.  It's common knowledge the blind tend to
be better lovers than the sighted.  For two reasons:  1. It's quite
comfortable for them to communicate with their hands.  And 2. And they
make love with inner visions of each other which remain forever as they
so desire.

Feed your leech once, and you won't have to feed it again for a couple
of years.

 Q. Which of these U.S. military officers was the last to
become a five-star general -- George Washington, George
Marshall,
 Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Hap Arnold or Omar
Bradley?
 A. George Washington -- by Act of Congress in 1976.

A jet plane breathes more air between takeoff and 30,000 feet than you
or I breathe in 20 years.

 Q. Why does a kangaroo have a callous on the underside of
its tail?
 A. It has to push with its tail to jump. A kangaroo can't
jump with its tail off the ground?

 Q. The prayer gesture of placing the palms together in
front of the face -- is it mentioned in the Bible?
 A. Not there. It goes all the way back to a pagan
practice of binding the hands to show submission to
various gods.

 Q. Aren't coyotes scared of donkeys?
 A. Evidently. Some Texas sheep ranchers post female
"guard donkeys" to protect their flocks from coyotes.

Chinese women of old swallowed 24 live tadpoles in early Spring to
insure five years without conception.  Have you seen China's population
statistics?  Must've run out of tadpoles.

A woodpecker with its beak -- even as a logger with an ax -- strikes
alternate blows, left, right, left, right...

You know how some people strangely change when they get behind the
wheel?  Radiate arrogance?  Revel in righteous indignation?  Intimidate
by tailgating?  Challenge with an obscenity?  An advanced student of
personality pitfalls says this also happens to numerous individuals when
they start to carry guns.  Their behaviors strangely change.

Word is it takes at least six cubic feet of beans to make a bean bag
chair comfortable.  Impressive.  Also impressive, if you get laid off,
you can eat it.

In England long ago., syphilis was the French pox.  In France, the
Spanish pox.  In Spain, the Italian pox.

A homicide investigator says no seasoned law officer picks up the murder
gun with a handkerchief.  That's more likely to mar the fingerprints
than preserve them.

Yes, gliders fly higher than prop planes.

A confined octopus can escape through any aperture wider than the
distance between its eyes.

Claim is the first place in history where all human beings were welcomed
regardless of race, color or creed was Providence, R.I.

Exercise may reduce some of us, but it's not going to knock the fat off
that bird called the golden plover.  One such weighed only two ounces
less than it weighed at takeoff after flying 2,400 miles non-stop.

No other U.S. city has more palm trees than Los Angeles.  Nor more
poodles.  So write a song:  "Poodles and palms"?  I'd do it, but I don't
know how.

On every foxhunt, one hunter was assigned as "whipper-in."  He had to
whip stray hounds back to the pack.  Whence the term for that
Congressional worthy, the "whip."

Though crossword puzzles were invented in 1914, "crossword" didn't get
into any of our dictionaries until 1930.  So even if nobody in your
family is older than the puzzle, surely somebody in it is older than the
word.

Takes about as long to make a really artistic quilt as to make a baby.
That's the contention of those who know something about both.

Most prostitutes have low rich voices.  Not husky.  Melodious.  So says
a seasoned police officer.  Why?  Don't know.

 Q. What makes you say ants are fattening?
 A. Aardvarks eat ants. Aardvarks get fat. Ants are
fattening.

 Q. How come naked chickens, that experimental breed
without feathers, have no commercial value?
 A. Slow to grow. They burn up too much energy just trying
to stay warm.

A science-minded soul, hoping to double his production, flew to
Scotland, had himself cloned, and brought back his Second Self, only to
learn that Sorry Sequel would utter nothing but vile profanity.  Fearing
ruin, the Original lured his Lascivious Lookalike up a mountain, pushed
him off a cliff, and went back down the trail in deep relief.  But
witnesses saw it all.  Police charged the fellow with making an obscene
clone fall.  Forward this to someone who was your friend.

Doctors told patients that pepper was a sex stimulant.  Long long ago.
Just before Columbus sailed.

No bone in your body now has in it anything therein seven years ago.

Film studios in Japan's Kyoto get loud with talk.  To onlookers who
understand no Japanese, it's just noise.  But every now and then, out
jump such unmistakable syllables as "speed" and "okay" and "cut" and
"wrap" and "take."

In 1741, sailors discovered Steller's cow, a 30-foot-long sea creature.
It's meat tasted pretty good.  Go get 'em, men!  Twenty-seven years
later, the big beasts were all gone.  Extinct.

 Q. What bird can fly backwards faster than any other?
 A. Crocodile bird, the one that perches in the open
mouths of crocs to pick their teeth. No whimsy here, it's
the quickest.

Did the German poet Heinrich Heine love his wife or hate her?  He left
all he owned to her -- on the condition she remarry.  "Because," he
wrote in his will, "then there will be at least one man to regret my
death."

 Q. I'm going hunting next fall. Are a deer's antlers in
front of its ears or behind?
 A. In front. Don't go.

 Q. What does an elephant need a trunk for?
 A. To reach the ground.

 Q. Who were "The Friendly Friends" of Chicago?
 A. A group of madams who met periodically in the early
1900s to plan mutal protection. Not until they compared
client lists did they fully realize they could influence
the most powerful men in the city, state, nation.

If you were in an elevator that suddenly plunged toward the ground,
would it do any good to jump up just before it hit bottom?  Forward this
query to your friend, the physics whiz.  Am told the answer is no.  But
why?

 Q. What are the odds my legs aren't the same length?
 A. Fifty-fifty.

Say you're in a a land inhabited only by two tribes, the Liars and the
Truthers.  The Liars always lie, the Truthers always tell the truth.
You come to a fork in the lane.  One route leads to safety, the other to
danger.  A native sits nearby.  If you're allowed only one question,
what can you ask the local to learn which path leads to safety?  Forward
the foregoing riddle to the best figure-it-outer you know.  Without the
following.  Ask:  "Which way would another member of your tribe say
leads to safety?"

In a glass of water with melting ice in it, the water stays as cold as
the ice as long as there's any ice chip left.

The otter always eats its fish ashore.

A kiss -- if it's got that kick in it -- sends more messages through
your body than you can count.  One extends nerves in the spinal column.
One boosts blood pressure.  One increases pulse.  Others perk up
production of insulin and adrenalin.  Rather not itemize them all.  I'm
too bashful.  Our Love and War man notes with interest the one that
sharpens up your hearing.  As though nature meant for you to know if
anybody's about to walk in on you.

 Q. You know those birds that lay eggs on cliff ledges?
How come the eggs don't roll off?
 A. Eggs of ledge layers are pointed on one end so they
roll in tight little circles.

 Q. Of all the music ever pressed to disk, which got the
largest single print order of one recording?
 A. Whales singing. The National Geographic sent it out in
an issue.

What's a "Temple of Cloacina"? asks a client.  Says she saw those words
carved on the door of a little building out in the country.  Cloacina
was the Roman Goddess of Disposal.  Believe her name used to show up on
outhouses.

 Q. What makes an "infant" different from a "baby"?
 A. "Infancy" comes from the Latin for "without language,"
so a baby is only an infant until it starts to talk.

A "noggin" is also a half a cupful of whatever.

You've seen pictures of the oldtimey hobble skirt.  The woman of high
fashion once wore it.  Why is curious.  In 1908, Wilbur Wright took a
Mrs. Hart O. Berg up in an airplane over France.  Her skirts flew wild
until she tied them around her ankles.  A Parisian dressmaker thought
that nifty, so introduced the hobble skirt to suggest the wearer was the
sort who flew around in airplanes.

 Q. How does a lobster breathe?
 A. Takes in water through its legs, lets it out through
its head. Odd, but not to the lobster, who thinks we
breathe funny maybe.

Whatever else the renowned Wyatt Earp did or didn't do, he traveled.
The record shows he was fined in 1900 for assaulting a policeman in
Nome, Alaska.

When a Roman peasant died, friends turned a harrow upside down, used the
spikes for candle holders, and put the body on it, thus to drag the
remains to burial.  Our word "hearse" came from the Latin for "harrow."

A "micro" is considerably smaller than a "mega," is it not?  Computer
programmers know all about this.  So ask one such how many microphones
you'd need to make a megaphone.

Even in wildlife parks, bears scoop out their own dens, sometimes right
beside manmade dens provided for them.  Instinct.

 Q. Only one soldier in U.S. military history wore a
velvet uniform. Name him?
 A. George Armstrong Custer. Designed it himself.

The real Sherlock Holmeses are those archeologists who dig and dust for
fossils.  If a jawbone is preserved in fine-textured rock, they know the
place of death was covered with still water.  If it's in gravelly rock,
they know the place was covered with fast flowing water.  When Alexander
Graham Bell died in 1922, the telephone people interrupted service for
one minute in his honor.  They've been similarly honoring him
intermittently ever since, I believe.

Some executives contend they save considerable time by not opening their
mail until the end of the day.

Our Love and War man monitors superstitions, too.  One of same --
spawned in the cotton era of the Old South -- held that those who made
daylight love in cotton fields at harvest time would have good luck.
The notion spread even as religious conviction.  The devout multiplied.

Anatole France wrote, "We do not know what to do with this short life,
yet we yearn for another that will be eternal."

Riddle:  You're captured by the enemy.  You're about to be executed.
The executioner insists you make one last statement.  You'll be hanged
if and only if your statement is true.  You'll be shot by firing squad
if and only if your statement is false.  You might want to put this
query to the Sherlock among your email acquaintances without immediately
supplying the following sentence that will save your life:  "You'll
execute me by firing squad."

Ugly creatures, lobsters.  Most remain unmated.  Not surprised.

In the hope of improving her memory, Eleanor Roosevelt at her doctor's
suggestion ate three chocolate-covered garlic balls every morning before
breakfast.  It's a matter of historical record that she and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt took their meals at opposite ends of a long long table.

The original mincemeat in mincemeat pies was the flesh of small birds.

Researchers say fewer letter carriers are bitten by dogs in England than
anywhere else, but it's not known whether this is due to the temperament
of English dogs or to the speed of English carriers.

"Illth" is the opposite of "wealth."

A sailor's traditional uniform has a square flap from the collar down
the back.  Client asks how that peculiarity of costume got started.  In
that antique age the flap was there to protect the uniform material
underneath from the tar in the sailor's pigtail.

A big whale's lung is probably about the size of your car.

Only captive-born and people-raised parrots can be taught to talk.

If you know a "Debbie," however spelled, short for "Deborah," however
spelled, ask her what her name means in both Greek and Hebrew.  She
should say "bee."  That goes for Melissa, too, might add.

 Q. Did President Warren Harding die of natural causes?
 A. Presumably. He got sick coming back from a trip to
Alaska, died in San Francisco, and his wife wouldn't
permit an autopsy, so people speculated. They do that.

Fix that!  Did I say football was the only field game that used a
spherical ball?  Oops!  A client who knows something about rugby set me
straight on that one.

 Q. How much of the population is still up at midnight?
 A. One in nine, about. One in 24 is still up between 3
and 5 a.m.

"If a cure for aids isn't soon found," writes a client with more
experience than he cares to detail, "the disease will change the
American penal system.  Gang rape is a horrible fact of prison life.  To
sentence a young man to the penitentiary now is the same as sentencing
him to death."

Drivers drive faster when other cars are around.  Whether those cars are
behind, in front, beside.  Curious how it works.

 Q. In a traditional wedding ceremony, the bride's veil is
raised just before the vows are exchanged. Why?
 A. So the groom can see that the girl behind the veil is
the girl he expected. At least, that's how the tradition
began. Earlier, brides and their families had been known
to run in ringers from time to time.

Second only to Miss Piggy among deep thinkers, Mrs. Wiggs, the one with
the cabbage patch, said this:  "In the mud and scum of things ...
Something always always sings."

In the Shaker homes of yesteryear, all things loose were hung on wooden
wall pegs.  Between meals, even the chairs.

Popcorn at the movies really got going when corn prices dropped to
nearly nothing in the Great Depression.  But you'd think it were
foreordained.  Thirty years earlier at the Columbian Exposition on 1893,
Charley Creton, inventor of the popcorn popper, first showed off his
device right next to the first display of Thomas Edison's motion picture
camera.

 Q. Why did early man stop making cave paintings.
 A. No time. He took up farming.

If you carry coins in your pocket, it's highly likely you'll have at
least one dated within a year of today.  A medical examiner who checks
out what's left of people who died long ago in the Maine woods says such
coins usually tell him the year of death.

 Q. What do newlyweds fear most, if anything, on their
wedding nights?
 A. A shortage of money.

No doubt you were brought up to believe it's bad manners to point at
somebody.  It's either impolite or downright taboo, depending.  Can you
name any society in human history where that has not been the belief?
Neither can I.

 Q. If fish don't chew, how come they've got teeth?
 A. To glom onto what they catch. It's slippery down
there.

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when
one will do," said Thomas Jefferson.  He meant keep it short.  Jefferson
was brief, but not biblically brief.  In a mere 25 words, Proverbs 30:33
in the King James' explains what makes butter, what causes nosebleeds
and what happens when you lose your temper.

Client asks if the Best Man ever has a spoken line at a wedding?  Not
unless it was:  "What ring?"

Only before its first meal of the day can the electric eel zap out that
640 volts.

Do your dentures, if any, have your social security number marked on
them?  Three states, at last report, required that by law.  Montana,
Illinois and Minnesota.

It was the late actor Raymond Burr who said a wedding ceremony is where
"a bride is well-groomed and a groom well-bridled."

It's said she who was a "big sister" when young never outgrows being a
"big sister" to everybody?  Will you buy it?

Old England's saltwater sailors didn't much admire the young Royal
Marines.  However nifty in land battle, those untraveled marines aboard
ship were naive.  So sporting sailors told them tales about seabirds
that flew backwards, whales with heads at both ends, island savages who
milked pigs.  That's where we got "tell it to the marines."

Lot of animals have hands, sort of.  And can hold them out flat.  But
only humans can turn the palms of the outstretched hands up then down or
down then up.

You know why our distant ancestors stopped hunting to take up farming?
They figured out how to make beer.  Or so contends one scholar.

In 1477 -- just 15 years before Columbus first sailed toward the
Americas -- Archduke Maximillian asked for the hand in marriage of Mary
of Burgundy.  To prove he meant business, he presented her with a
diamond ring.  That did it.  Men have been giving out diamond engagement
rings ever since.

Yes, deer will eat meat.  So will rabbits.

Extremely premature infants tend to become left-handed.  So report
hospital researchers.

No woman who occasionally questions her worth should forget the claim of
the late zillionaire Aristotle Onassis:  "If women didn't exist, all the
money in the world would have no meaning."

A lifelong gambler contends he has made his cost of living by offering
this bet on baseball games:  "That the winning team will score more runs
in one inning than the loser scores in the whole game."

"Ukraine" means "frontier."  You know the religious denomination there
that's growing fastest?  Baptist.

George Bernard Shaw said no man manages his affairs as well as a tree
does.  Willa Cather said what she liked about trees was "they seem more
resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."  I once
worked for a farmer who said, "A tree can teach you how to grow up right
where you are."

Takes a newborn chameleon a couple of weeks to change colors to match
backgrounds.  It's born white.

Various young men polled on their opinions of the sexiest name for a
girl repeatedly have nominated "Christine" for that distinction.

You might try putting both salt and pepper in your fresh orange juice.
That's the custom in Pakistan.

An ingenious youth went hitchhiking around the country, but rides came
too slowly.  Until he got one bright idea.  Then people readily stopped
for him.  He cut the side out of a large gasoline can, hinged the cutout
back in place, and used the can for his suitcase.

You're always in the exact center of the rainbow you see.  This is not
just philosophical, it's scientifically accurate.

 Q. What's the commonest name for a pet dog?
 A. Lady. Is it an inadvertent insult to women? Don't
believe so. But some say a female dog shouldn't be
labeled with a synonym for woman anymore than a woman
should be labeled with a synonym for a female dog.

If you were you born before 1957, you've probably had the measles.
Almost all born earlier have, medical researchers say.

 Q. "Why do city dogs live longer, statistically, than
country dogs?"
 A. Small dogs live longer than large dogs, and city dogs
tend to be of the smaller variety.

 Q. What's the difference between a pie and a tart?
 A. The tart is openfaced.

A mother's observation:  "My son has to be pushed into the bathroom, and
dragged out of the pool.  My daughter has to be dragged out of the
bathroom, and pushed into the pool."

Medical records contain accounts of women who've given themselves
cesarean sections and men who've given themselves appendectomies.

Among the least publicized of "natural wonders," I think, are the 3,000
islands off the coast of Maine.  You hardly ever hear anything about
them.  But they make an island cluster comparable to any in the world.

Do you pronounce a plural "s" with a hiss or with a buzz?  Both, right?
Take "lips" -- that's a hiss.  Take "bugs" -- that's a buzz.  Immigrants
fret about it.

A marriage between people near the same age meant trouble.  That's what
the traditional Native Australians believed.  But when older women
married younger men and older men married younger women, that was all
right.  Each was expected to marry more than once.

 Q. There are six classes of musical instruments:
"string," "woodwind," "brass," "percussion," "keyboard"
and "other." In which is the harmonica?
 A. "Other."

The Omaha Herald in 1877 printed this advisory to passengers of stage
coaches:  "Spit on the leeward side."

Developers of home tracts preferred the term "cul-de-sac" to "dead-end
street."  Don't believe they knew the literal meaning of "cul-de-sac" is
"bottom of the bag."

Among tribes of northern Europe during the Dark Ages, theft was punished
severely by decree of tribal council, but murder wasn't.  Murder was a
family affair.  No laws covered it.  It was settled by feud.

Don't you think "Cinnamon" -- it's bark -- is a good name for a puppy?

If you order your delivered pizza uncut, it should get to your place
about 10 degrees hotter.  Or so says a pizza maker.

 Q. You once said a restaurant owner years ago found a way
to keep his waitresses and cooks from fighting with each
other. How?
 A. He narrowed the pass-through window horizontally. They
could see each other's waistlines but not each other's
eyes. People don't fight as much, he said, if they can't
see the looks on the others' faces.

Writes a client:  "Your Love and War men is right.  Girls tend to marry
men like their fathers.  That's why mothers cry at weddings."

Bands first started showing up at sporting events for a reason.  Sabbath
rules in many places prohibited games on Sunday unless town musicians
thereat intermittently played hymns.

This once-famous 16th century naturalist got the notion that spiders
were not only beautiful but therapeutic.  He turned a bunch of them
loose in his house.  And when his little daughter got sick, he emptied a
sackful of them on her head and body, thinking they would make her well.
They didn't.  She was terrified.  The father was Thomas Muffet, the
daughter the real life Little Miss Muffet.

Ninety-four percent of the hunters who go out to shoot wild turkeys come
back without wild turkeys.

To that lengthy list of arts and crafts invented by the Greeks, add
counterfeiting.

Writes a recently divorced woman:  "The day I got my divorce papers, I
went to the closest singles bar, picked up a man, and took him home for
what you call physical romance.  I'd never done anything like that
before.  I haven't done it since.  The day you're divorced, you go a
little crazy."  Our Love and War man has put her note in the folder
tagged "Lounges Close to the County Court House."

If offered "genuine stolen costume jewelry" when in Mexico, be advised:
A lot of those peddlers are dishonest, and much of their jewelry isn't
really stolen at all.

 Q. When you're talking about somebody who's elderly, how
old does that person have to be, technically, to be
called "old"?
 A. One sociological definition decrees a person is "old"
only when too aged to carry on a social function.

In Spain's Basque country are dozens of men's clubhouses.  Early
evenings, the men go there to cook gourmet meals and eat same.  Wives
visit only twice a year, and not all think that's bad.  Most are said to
be glad to have their evenings to themselves.

It was Russell L. Hawes of Worcester, Mass., who ruined the market for
sealing wax and signet rings.  He invented the envelope.

 Q. What's honey -- a liquid or a solid?
 A. It can't make up its mind. Even as ketchup,
mayonnaise, face cream and toothpaste. You can call them
"thixotropic" substances, if you're the sort who'd call
them "thixotropic" substances.

When the old Hollywood moguls changed the name of Marion Morrison to
John Wayne, they wanted to impress the new first name upon the public.
So in his next five pictures he was cast as John Drury, John Steele,
John Mason, John Trent, John Bishop and John Holmes.

Client asks how the figures on Mt. Rushmore compare in size to the Great
Sphinx of Egypt.  Rushmore's are twice as big.  About 60 feet from chin
to forehead.

Not all that many years ago Iraq's Saddam Hussein was photographed
holding up a baby.  That did it.  Other Iraqi men picked up their babies
in public then.  Theretofore, they hadn't.  Men didn't.

Greenland's schools teach fur sewing.

 Q. What was a "heart and hands" woman in the Old West?
 A. A mail-order bride. Offering affection and work. There
were a lot of them. And a lot of them didn't get much for
what they gave.

 Q. Why do the people of Tibet stick out their tongues as
a greeting?
 A. They don't, anymore. But did. Goes back to when
Tibetans believed poisoners had black tongues while
well-meaning folk did not.

You know how believers think they see omens in tea leaves?  Cree Indians
of Northern Manitoba vary that.  They think they see omens in TV sets.
They don't let their kids look.  Too intense.  Cathode ray tubes, they
think, emit supernatural signals about future dangers.  They try to read
said tubes the way others read teacups.  Think of that!  Guidance from
television.

When musk oxen fight musk oxen, it's always ox to ox -- no two ever gang
up on one.  You can say this, too, about sheep and goats.  But you
cannot say it about men and monkeys.

As for animals that eat animals, the biggest -- whales -- prefer the
littlest, or almost the littlest -- krill.

Your marriage has the best possible chance of success, if:  1. Neither
you nor your matrimonial mate was an only child. 2. You were married in
a church. 3. You both lived out in the countryside as youngsters. 4. You
each like your own mother and father. 5. The wife worked before
marriage. 6. You don't move often.  And 7. The wife is at least a year
older than the husband.  This, according to statistical studies at the
University of Chicago.

A contributor reports that half the bus drivers in America are women.
I've requested a report on the other half.  Stand by.

 Q. How long does the average dairy cow last in that job?
 A. Not quite four seasons. Most big dairies turn over 30
percent of their milking stock every year.

Sex stimulates the adrenal gland.  The gland secretes cortisone.  The
cortisone relieves pain and swelling in inflamed joints.  So explains a
medico when he tells certain of his patients what they ought to do for
their arthritis.

In your hands and wrists are all but six of the 60 bones of your arms.
In your feet and ankles are all but eight of the 60 bones in your legs.
So?  Nothing much.  Just that the bones are where the action is.

California's Syndicalism Act was a dilly.  It held that anybody who
joined a "forbidden" organization could be jailed for up to 14 years.
In 1925 under its provisions, 72 sorry souls in California were sent up.

 Q. Why do so few thunder storms come up in the early
morning?
 A. They need warm air rising.

At age 2, a little girl will drink a glass of milk with a grasshopper in
it.  At age 5, she will only drink the milk after you've fished out the
grasshopper.  At age 7, she won't drink it, if it ever had a grasshopper
in it.  So say the child psychologists.  Interesting.  Am tempted to add
that by age 18, she'll drink a grasshopper more readily than a glass of
milk.

Women eat more hotdogs than men do.

 Q. In throwing a knife, are you supposed to throw from the blade or from
the handle?
 A. If it's blade-heavy, from the handle.  If it's
handle-heavy, from the blade.  Balance it on your finger.  If it
balances an inch from the tang on the blade side, it's blade heavy.  If
an inch from the tang on the handle side, it's handle heavy.

All polar bears have bad breath.  And that goes for eagles, too.

Toastmasters in ancient Greece and Rome were supposed to announce who
was to drink a toast.  And to whom.  And when.  And how much.  Object
was to control the drinking.  They failed.

The paper clip was invented in England in 1900.  To fill a growing need
there.  Historians note the 50-year rise of the paper clip coincides
with the 50-year decline of the British Empire.

You get more mail on Thursdays, if typical.

 Q. How did the Old West travelers jolting along in wagon
trains keep eggs from breaking?
 A. Packed them in lard.

A bank robber flees.  A cop gives chase.  After a turn or two, the
escapee is out of sight.  Which way did he go?  The officer knows a
fleeing suspect won't wait for cross-traffic to clear, so will turn
right, almost always.  The cop turns right.  That's routine police
savvy.

The Spanish "charqui" means dried meat.  That's where we got our word
"jerky."

At least one in every five South Koreans is named Kim.

Sleep researchers in 1959 started then suddenly stopped tests in which
volunteers were prevented from dreaming.  The volunteers, in layman's
lingo, went crazy.  Medicos now believe anything that repeatedly
interrupts your dream patterns affects your sanity -- drugs, liquor,
torture, whatever.

Nowhere in that book we now call Alice in Wonderland is any mention of a
"mad hatter."  A "hatter," yes.  But no "mad hatter."

Pepper is a vine.

 Q. How do bullfrogs fight?
 A. Each tries with its forelimbs to hold the other
underwater until the weaker gives up.

When checking the food in your pantry and refrig, bear in mind:  Foods
normally hard -- carrots and crackers -- have gone bad if they're soft.
Foods normally soft -- pudding and bread -- have gone bad if they're
hard.

Eucalyptus leaves contain a narcotic.  That cute little koala lives out
most of its life stoned.

In California's High Sierras grow the aromatic incense cedars.  Just
about all the wood in U.S. wooden pencils comes from those trees.

If you want your daughter to be secure in her old age, convince her
early she's especially good at math.  When she grows up, she'll convince
her husband, so he'll be pleased to unload upon her the odious chore of
managing the checkbook.  The hand that runs the checkbook is the hand
that rules the world.  Our Love and War man said that.

"Who was the first black movie star?" asks a client.  Lincoln Theodore
Perry.  If your granddad doesn't recognize the name, mention Perry's
marquee moniker:  Stepin Fetchit.

 Q. Do people shot in armed robberies feel much pain?
 A. Most don't, evidently. Researchers checked out medical
records of bullet-wounded men. To learn 65 percent of
them felt no pain at impact.

 Q. You never met anybody who could correctly spell all
the words in a certain sentence, you said. What sentence?
 A. "Outside a minuscule cemetery sat an embarrassed
peddler and an harassed cobbler, gnawing on a desiccated
bone while gazing on a lady's ankle with unparalleled
ecstacy."

 Q. Who were the lifelong famous lovers who never saw each
other naked?
 A. Robert and Elizabeth Browning, the poets who left
personal footnotes.

Grownup baboons have brown hair and brown skin, and they slap one
another around in some mighty fierce fights, as though violence were
natural to them.  Baby baboons have black hair and pink skin, and as
long as the hair remains black and the skin pink, the grownup baboons
won't hit them, as though babies were naturally exempt from violence.

An oldtime jazz musician told me once what he enjoyed most at late-night
jam sessions was:  "...To play the old stuff like I've never heard me
play it before."

 Q. Isn't chess the only game without the element of
chance?
 A. If it weren't for the luck in selecting who gets the
first move, you could say that.

Her eyes are what a man first notices about a woman.  None other than
Havelock Ellis so declared.  He did not explain why.  Our Love and War
man says the eyes are what a woman first notices about a man, too, and
the explanation is simple:  We first look at the eyes to find out if the
eyes look back.

Three out of four murderers have less than average intelligence.
University studies suggest murder usually occurs because the murderer
doesn't have enough imagination to solve the problem any other way.

In the mid-1960s, scientists came up with straight bananas, but nobody
would buy them.

 Q. Wasn't Samuel Colt, the inventor of the revolver,
sentenced to hang for murder?
 A. That was his brother, John C. Colt. He didn't hang,
though. He got married in his cell, then stabbed himself
to death. He'd killed a printer with a hatchet, John had.
I can understand, but he shouldn't have done it.

History records that President Andrew Jackson profoundly believed - one
- man had innate integrity, and - two - the earth was flat, not round.

Any fisherman will tell you it's against the law to use goldfish for
bait.

 Q. Was there a real "Little Jack Horner"?
 A. So it's believed. One Thomas Horner in 1543 was sent
by the Abbott of Glastonbury with a gift to King Henry
VIII. A pie of sorts, containing deeds to several
valuable manors owned by the monastery. Horner's family
shortly thereafter revealed possession of one such
estate. That's what the nursery rhyme meant. He stuck in
his thumb and pulled out a plum. Imagine that! A real
estate ripoff by Little Jack Horner.

Editor of the London Post figured there wasn't all that much news in
1719, so he decided to run a short chapter of fiction every day.  First
newspaper serial, that.  It was Daniel DeFoe's "Robinson Crusoe."

Our Love and War man is pondering this claim of a social observer across
the northern border:  "What distinguishes Canadians from all others on
earth is the ability to make love in a canoe."

If you don't think bluffing is the key to poker, bear in mind the word
"poker" comes from the French "Poque" meaning "bluff."  French settlers
played "Poque" in New Orleans.  That's where others turned it into
poker.

The woman who tapemeasures 36-26-38 has the ideal bodily proportions in
the opinion of one historical figure who probably evaluated more female
figures than any other man ever.  Not P. T. Barnum.  He judged
elephants.  I mean Flo Ziegfeld.

 Q. What's the name "Kenneth" mean?
 A. "Handsome." Or once it meant that. In Gaelic.

 Q. How do we know the poet Emily Dickinson was a fairly
small woman?
 A. Outside length measurement of her coffin: 5-feet-6.

First wife of England's King Richard II was Anna of Bohemia.  She had
some sort of hip problem that prevented her not from riding horses but
from riding astride.  So the king decreed all women likewise had to ride
sidesaddle.  None too practical for most vigorous young women, that
custom, but it lasted hundreds of years.

 Q. Where'd that old name for a dog -- "Fido" -- come
from?
 A. Latin. Means "trusting," roughly. It's a cousin of
such words as fidelity, faithful, fiduciary.

One of the most successful business promotions in U.S. history was
sponsored by the International Apple Shippers' Association in 1930.  It
recruited 6,000 peddlers.  Within months, ragged street figures selling
apples became a standard Depression picture.

Item No. 7314C in our Love and War man's file is the observation of
French novelist Anatole France:  "Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is
the strangest."

India wants to stop polluting the sacred Ganges River.  So it's building
electric crematoria thereby.

When women with money look around for matrimonial mates, they try first
for a money match.  When men with money look around for matrimonial
mates, they try first for a bedroom match.  So says a student of the
social scene.

Skywriting pilots say "S" and "K" are the hardest to write.

Nothing endangers a lake more than its own outlet, cutting ever deeper
and wider, eventually to drain it.

On file at the Florida Bureau of Vital Statistics, I'm told, are such
individuals' real names as "Skyrocket," "Teflon," "Lavoris," "Apple,"
"Cherry Pie" and "Full-Dress Coat."

As a "typical American," if that you be, you annually eat 25 pounds of
lettuce but only four pounds of cucumbers.  Don't you like cucumbers?

If it has hooves, it eats plants.

Matrimonial agencies in The Philippines in recent decades have received
numerous applications from North American men in search of "docile
domestic wives."  There, too, such may be found, no doubt.  But that
picture of the Filipina is distorted.  Two out of five research
scientists in The Philippines are women.

Cheese prices imitate meat prices.  Meat goes up, cheese goes up.  Meat
goes down, cheese goes down.  Cheese has no imagination.

 Q. What's the difference between a snowstorm and a
blizzard?
 A. It's just a snowstorm until the temperature drops
below 20 degrees F. and the wind goes past 35 mph. Then,
sir, it's a blizzard.

Of pasta it has been said:  "A minute in the mouth is a lifetime on the
hips."

Our Language man -- he's compiling a list of new terms synonymous with
"Be quiet," "Pipe down," "Shush" -- has added:  "If you lose the
picture, honey, turn off the sound."

It's not uncommon for Maine moose, citified by hunger, to walk through
storefront windows.  The moose is to the deer family what the turkey is
to the fowl -- stupid.

Legal debate continues in England over whether a man should still have
the right to the return of his engagement ring, if and when his bride
elect calls off the wedding.  Such a right has been the man's there for
many generations.  But the new morality contradicts the old.  A
spokesperson says:  "The woman is not a record player that he can return
to the shop for a refund after he has misused the machine for months."

 Q. Can the South American sloth wag its tail and wiggle
its ears?
 A. You've been reading up on it, eh? No tail, no ears.

The Kalash tribespeople of Pakistan sod the roofs of their mountain
houses.  Their big complaint:  The goats eat the shingles.

 Q. Who first said, "Ignorance is bliss"?
 A. What English poet Thomas Gray said was: "Where
ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.'" It was sort
of like that old Navy wall plaque: "When the Captain is
wrong, it don't pay to be right."

You want to start a riot?  Under the law, you need at least three
persons.

What a lot of people don't know is some of the most difficult
destructive fires burn in swamps.

 Q. What do the Chinese mean by "chunging" an expectant
mother?
 A. When delivery is difficult, the Chinese rarely rely on
cesarean section but rather on "chunging." This simple
procedure calls for attendants to grasp the lady's arms
and legs, and to bounce her up and down, literally
shaking the baby into daylight. Sounds a bit roughhouse,
but American doctors who've witnessed it say it generally
works.

An ounce of don't-say-it is worth a pound of didn't-mean-it, I'm told.

It was Cervantes who defined a proverb as a short sentence derived from
long experience.

Trying too hard can botch it up, all right.  Experimenters put hungry
rats in a tricky maze at the end of which was food.  Those that hadn't
eaten in 12 hours solved the route in about six tries.  Most of those
that hadn't eaten in 36 hours needed 20 tries.  But some of the really
hungry ones finally just sat down and wrung their paws.

No, alcoholic midgets have no special group called "aa".

The feminine in Latin for wolf is louvre.  And any student of art will
tell you The Louvre is now what used to be the palace in the wolf field.

 Q. How much oxygen would have to be in the atmosphere to
make the whole earth burst into flame?
 A. About 24 percent. It's now 21 percent, about the same
as it has always been.

The late J. Edgar Hoover when in sunshine tried to maneuver himself into
positions where nobody could walk on his shadow.

Mozart considered himself a pretty nifty billiard player.

A certain husband in ancient Athens was told by a male associate that he
had bad breath.  He asked his wife, "Why didn't you tell me?"  His wife
said, "I thought all men smelled like that."  This historical footnote
suggests how isolated women were then and there.  The early Athens woman
was rarely allowed to meet any man other than her husband and a relative
or two.

 Q. What are the three most common nouns in American
English writing?
 A. 1. Time. 2. People. 3. Way.

Something else you can do to kill time at stoplights is count the famous
singers whose dads were preachers:  Alice Cooper, Lou Rawls, Glen
Campbell, Rita Coolidge, Aretha Franklin.  Any others?

When feeling romantic, all the male humpback whales sing to the females
of the species.  Our Love and War man is not into whales.  He does not
know how a female whale knows which male she prefers.  Because all the
males -- almost like beach boys -- sing the same song in any given year.

 Q. Two of Europe's capital cities are built each on seven
hills? Rome is one. What's the other?
 A. Lisbon.

If you don't think a pig is fast, throw a rattlesnake at it.  No, it
doesn't jump away.  It attacks.  Gourmet pigs dine on snakemeat.
They'll clean the snakes out of a field in nothing flat.

Fish auctioneers in Japan wear long open black sleeves.  Buyers reach
into the sleeves and bid by secret signals with finger pressures.  No
quaint little provincial game, this.  It's how it's done in the whole
multi-zillion yen fish industry.

Believe I forgot to mention a woodpecker's tongue is longer than its
head.

Wrote Peter Chippindale in the United Kingdom's New Statesman:  "A good
police force is one which catches more criminals than it employs."

Our Love and War man does not know where to file this item:  "In A.D.
585... the second (Christian) Council of Macon ruled that no male corpse
should be buried beside a female corpse until the latter had
decomposed."

Switzerland's law for years hasn't allowed children under 12 to ride in
the front seats of cars.

Curious, is it not, that the industrialized nation with some of the most
advanced technology -- Japan -- is the nation with the lowest percentage
of flush toilets?

 Q. Does Pope John Paul II play poker?
 A. He did.  Matter of record that
when he visited the United States as a cardinal, he sat in on a poker
game, smoked a cigar while he played, and let it be obvious he knew all
the rules.

Dominos fall over at a speed of about 33 per second.

One ancient Greek named Alcestis opined that the ideal ages for marriage
were 30 for the man and 16 for the girl.

The Hanuman Doka is the old Royal Palace at Katmandu, Nepal.  It's
decorated with what some call the world's most spectacular erotic art.
Explicit depictions of sex acts.  Believers think of it not as
pornographic but as symbolic of creation.  Its URL?  I've no idea.

One of the most romantic places in all of Italy is the Island of Goats.
In Italian, goats are Capri, you knew that.

First of the widely heralded sex researchers was Dr.  Alfred Kinsey.  An
Eagle Scout, he.  Kinsey began his career, as widely reported, with a
study of gall wasps.  He was interested in the birds and the bees,
truly.  Client asks if his early writings foretold his later fascination
with sex.  No, though you might think so.  His first scientific paper
was titled "What Do Birds Do When It Rains?"

U.S.  Navy regulations of 1848 prescribed as punishment 12 strokes of
the whip for showing up on deck naked.

Skeletal remains show that nobody nobody nobody who lived 10,000 years
ago in what's now Pakistan had dental cavities.

Chair makers study changes in the average human body from generation to
generation.  They say the hindside of the male appears to be getting
bigger, though not much, while that of the female is growing smaller,
likewise not much.

When the bear is less than a mile upstream -- if there's a bear left --
the salmon can smell it -- if there's a salmon left.

Would you regard bourbon as corn liquor?  Better be.  Federal law
decrees bourbon must be at least 51 percent from corn.

At the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris is a room with a view, a
trysting place for lovers.  And why not?  That's what the tower
designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, intended it to be.  But for himself.
It's open to the public now.  It wasn't when the tower was completed in
1889.  Eiffel used the place then for nothing other than his own
romantic meetings.

 Q. In psychiatric talk, what's "the windfall syndrome"?
 A. Serious emotional upset brought on by sudden wealth.
Happens sometimes to lottery winners, insurance
plaintiffs, inheritors.

Scholars say there has never been a speaking human society that didn't
tell stories.

 Q. Does the skunk have a six-shooter?
 A. That, or a five-shooter, or four-shooter. If the first
shot misses at 12 feet, the skunk fires again. Did I
mention a skunk fires tracers? The spray gives off an
eerie phosphorescent glow.

Four basic rules to avoid bankruptcy:  1. Itemize. 2. Analyze. 3.
Utilize.  And 4. Moonlight.

A bloodhound's droopy ears channel scent to its nose.

Madagascar is both modern and ancient.  The modern:  The first
commercial 747 landed there in 1980.  The ancient:  Greeters at the
airport ritually slashed the throat of a hobbled zebra as a blood
sacrifice to ensure fine future flights.  Barbaric, no?  Yet the native
philosophies include deep antique notions preached by the heaviest heads
of history.  One common Madagascar proverb:  "All who live under the sun
are plaited together in one great mat."

Mailmen in Egypt complain they too often are bitten by camels.

It can now be said that the football fans who've seen a "clothesline
tackle" outnumber those who've seen a clothesline.  July 25, 1997

"Lloyd" is Welsh for "gray."

A recent British study concludes without explanation that men into heavy
drink are more likely to sire baby girls than baby boys.

 Q. What's the longest single-syllable word in English?
 A. Longest our Language man has found so far is
"squirreled."

A man's second marriage, if any, is more likely to happen at age 33 than
at any other age, say the statisticians.

 Q. Is it possible for chemicals in a human body to catch
fire?
 A. Only flammable one in readable concentrations therein
is alcohol, according to medical researchers. Enough of
it to burn would come long after enough of it to kill.

Were you aware you now can buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken at the
Great Wall of China?

Item 4644B in our Love and War man's Marriage files is this observation
by British socialite Margot Asquith:  "To marry a man out of pity is
folly; and if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow
who has "never had a chance, poor devil," you are profoundly mistaken.
One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak..."

No, glass doesn't shatter underwater.

 Q. What's a "Bateson's Belfry"?
 A. A bell-and-cord device fitted into 19th century
coffins. Willed there by the dying who wanted a way out
in case they were buried alive. A few word mechanics
think the sound of it gave us the old street phrase "bats
in the belfry."

World's fastest indoor sport?  Table tennis.

 Q. How come zoos weren't able to breed cheetahs in
captivity until 1960?
 A. It was first learned then that female cheetahs have to
run fast and far before they ovulate. That's what they do
when free in the long chase by the males.

In seven out of 10 investigated killings of children under age 9,
homicide detectives accumulate evidence against one or both parents.  So
report the crime statisticians.

Client asks, Who lived longer - Marie Antoinette or Marilyn Monroe?
Credit Marie by one year.  She was beheaded at age 37.

 Q. Haven't the southeast Asians domesticated elephants?
 A. Tamed, not domesticated. It's said an animal species
has to be bred selectively in captivity to be classified
as domesticated. Those elephants traditionally have been
caught young and trained.

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in
the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in
the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if
the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural
causes.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and
purple.

Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people
without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the
expression "to get fired."

Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".

There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John
Hancock and Charles Thomson.  Most of the rest signed on August 2, but
the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.

"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South
Pacific.  When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber
machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded
into the fuselage.  If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it
got "the whole 9 yards."

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."

The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.

The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots.

Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden.
The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm.  All traffic
stopped as people switched sides.  This time and day were chosen to
prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and
been too sleepy to realize that *this* was the day of the changeover.

The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II
killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

Dr.  Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."

In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam."

Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson."

More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.

The term, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from
Ancient Rome.  The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye
gouging."  Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be
disqualified was to poke someone's eye out.

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them
looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.

Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.

Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from and old English law which
stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your
thumb.

An ostrich's eye is bigger that it's brain.

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds

"Sainte Terre" is French for "Holy Land."  During the Crusades, many
unhurried homeless with nowhere to go identified themselves simply as
"Sainte Terre" folk.  Some but not all language experts think that's
where we got the word "saunter."

What!  You thought rayon was a synthetic fiber?  Not at all.  It's made
of wood or cotton linters, but no poly whatever.

The writer William Faulkner at first personally manufactured -
handprinted, illustrated, so on - his own books.

This is retold of railroad magnate Henry F. Huntington, a California art
patron.  On his deathbed, he sent for two men he'd done business with -
a dealer in paintings and a seller of rare books.  Why them?  He said he
wanted to die like Christ - between two thieves.

Left-handers don't play jai alai, either.

There was a time when French ladies in the royal court wore their
hairdos so high that in their carriages they sat slaunchways,
unaccustomed as they were to doing that, or stuck their heads out the
windows, unaccustomed as they were to doing that, or lay down on their
backs.

Statisticians say about half the people murdered had themselves been
arrested at some time in their lives on personal violence charges.

 Q. In science, what's the "Clever Hands Effect"?
 A. That's the "Clever Hans Effect," research reveals.
Used to be a horse called "Clever Hans." In 1904, a
retired German school teacher taught that horse - or
thought he taught him - to solve small arithmetic
problems and tap out the answers with a hoof. It's
believed by many the teacher did not realize he
influenced the horse by raising his own head at the
appropriate moment, thus signaling to stop the tapping.
When testers today send unconscious clues to subjects,
it's called the "Clever Hans Effect."

An option offered with the Packard of 1902 was an ammonia gun to
discourage tire-biting dogs.

On Denmark's Faeros Islands, no man can pick up his liquor ration
without showing a revenue certificate to prove he'd paid his taxes.
Claim is Faeros residents are the world's most conscientious taxpayers.

Lot of cowboys in Venezuela ride barefooted - but with spurs.

 Q. Sauna baths are supposed to be good for your
circulation, right?
 A. That can't be right, can it? Historically, more men in
Finland have died of heart disease - per capita - than
have the men of any other nation.

 Q. Has any man ever died of a vasectomy?
 A. Not insofar as the records show.

World's first submarine was made of leather.  A Hollander named Cornelis
Drebbel stitched it together.  In 1620.

Those who know all about the fellow responsible for the Gutenbourg Bible
will tell you Johann traded off his father's surname of Gensfleisch for
his mother's surname of Gutenbourg - because Gensfleisch means
"gooseflesh" and Johann didn't think much of that.

Animals with deeply set eyes - this is the pattern - eat animals with
bulgy eyes.

Madagascar smells like an oldtimey ice cream parlor.  So say world
travelers.  Helps to know Madagascar grows more than half the world's
vanilla beans.

Do you like your first name?  If not, don't admit it.  Columbia
University psychologists say people who like their first names usually
like themselves, and people who don't, don't.

Do you know why the Solomon Islands were named after King Solomon?
Spanish explorers sold the notion that island gullies were packed with
gold, even as King Solomon's mines.  To get financial backing for their
South Pacific trips, they repeatedly alluded to the African treasure.
The "Solomon" in Solomon Islands became a sort of sardonic tag before it
turned into a real name.

Sir John Hawkins was a slaver licensed by Queen Elizabeth I. He packed
his forlorn human cargoes into ships named "Jesus,'" "Angel" and "Grace
of God."

Kindly refute the claim, if you can, that horses don't breathe through
their mouths.

A chicken closes its eyes from the bottom up.  Looks creepy.

"The alcoholic wants to function but doesn't think he can without a
drink while the drug addict wants to drop out but doesn't think he can
without a fix."  So proclaims a scholar now into Chapter 2 of Addictions
101.

A woman in an open convertible drove topless along the Hollywood
Freeway.  Ten cars crashed.  The local paper's headline over that story:
"Bares 2, Rams 10."

Louisiana men buy far more diamond rings for themselves than do the men
in any other state.  Or so say those who sell jewelry to those who sell
jewelry.

"How grateful I am to the gods," say the Chinese, "that I was not born
before tea."  Indeed.  And there are those who say it about bowling,
bridge and bourbon.  One school of philosophical thought contends every
expression of gratitude is a sort of healthy prayer.

The real Hungarian goulash is a soup.

 Q. Why do a woman's feet get bigger after the birth of
her first child?
 A. When that happens -- and it does happen to some --
it's because the childbirth hormones that enlarge the
elastic pelvis ligament do the same to ligaments in the
feet.

That part of Canada with the best-educated population is the Yukon.

Early Indians treated coughs with syrup from the boiled bark of cherry
trees.  Settlers copied the medications.  Druggists bottled them.  They
remained on the market for generations to create a tradition of taste.
It's why so many utterly unrelated cough concoctions today are
cherry-flavored.

Many know Bram Stoker wrote "Dracula," but few pause to ponder that his
real name was Abraham.

In the matter of family phone calls, the sister-to-sister conversational
combination is more frequent than any other.  By three to one, according
to one major provider.

Pollsters asked numerous grownups what they thought of their own
appearances.  A computer run on replies indicated single adults are five
times more likely than married to regard themselves as "good-looking."
Why are the married so much less inclined to make that claim?  Or is it
conceit that explains why so many of the single are still single?

Among baby birds of prey, you can assume the females are the ones with
the big feet.

Police statisticians report half the shoplifters who get caught in
Washington, D.C., have studied in college.  Not shoplifting.  Other
subjects.

Combined ages of a wife and husband add up to 98.  He's twice as old as
she was when he was the age she is today.  What are their ages?  If you
email only the question to your network math maven -- try it -- you
should get back this reply:  He's 56, she's 42.

That phrase "Blue Monday" did not start out as a household expression
for laundry day.  It goes back to the old sailing ships.  Monday was
traditionally when seamen were stroked with the cat o' nine tales for
infractions logged during the previous week.

Most snakes breathe in waltz time.

Indians lived on San Nicolas Island, 75 miles off Southern California,
until 1830.  A ship went out to remove them to the mainland that year.
But a young Indian woman jumped overboard and swam back.  The captain
thought she'd left a child or some such, so let her go, figuring he'd
come back for her later.  When others did indeed go for her again, she
hid from them.  It wasn't until 1851 that an expedition found her.
She'd camped alone there for 21 years.

 Q. What's the body temperature of a hibernating bear?
 A. Brave men learned it's 91 degrees F.

Liederkranz cheese originated not in Europe, but in Monroe County, New
York.  It was named in honor of the Liederkranz Singing Society of New
York City.

In South Africa, the women of the Tembo, the Fingo and the Nguni tribes
are forbidden to eat eggs.  Belief is eggs are so sexually stimulating
to women that they who partake of same go mad for men.  See your travel
agent.


 Standard of measurement of a barrel of oil is 42 gallons,
but there is no barrel that holds exactly a barrel of
oil.

 You know how a little animal freezes in its tracks when
scared? That suits the cobra just fine. It waits for its
target to stop all motion before it strikes. So a snake
charmer when close doesn't stop. Just keeps on swaying.
That's said to be the charmer's secret.

 Q. What were the first standardized serially produced
items made by humans?
 A. Printed pages.

 Those who know all about ancient Greece say natural
blondes thereabouts, imported or otherwise, dyed their
hair black.

 Surveys show 40 percent of those who changed doctors say
they did so because their doctors "didn't answer
questions honestly." Could be. How many do you suppose
would change doctors if their doctors did answer
questions honestly -- 90 percent?

 That coffeepot's perforated basket for grounds has a
name, too: "biggin."

 A career counselor says every young man who learns
small-engine repair will always have a way to make a
living.

 It's recorded that women of old Italy put belladonna in
their eyes to makes themselves appear more attractive.
Researchers recently wanted to find out if it worked. So
asked a sizable sampling of men to point to the
best-looking of two photographs of a woman. In one, her
eyes were dilated. They all picked that one.

 A scientific study on cannibalism reveals people meat is
nutritionally excellent and easily digestible, but
stopped short of recommending it.

 Erle Stanley Gardner wrote 140 novels between 1933 and
1938.

 Q. I know ground-nesting birds lay bigger eggs, but why?
 A. Ground-nested chicks hatch fully developed. With legs
ready to run. To get away from fierce felines and the
like.

 Q. Before sailors got hammocks, my dad says, they slept
upside down, hung with their knees bent over yardarms,
like bats. Is that true?
 A. Whimsical fellow, your dad. No, before Columbus picked
up the hammock trick from New World inhabitants, Europe's
sailors just curled up on decks amidst ship junk.

 Q. What do TV writers mean by "the button"?
 A. Last line in an act of a TV show. It's supposed to
hold the audience through the commercial.

 Seventy percent of an elephant is water, and you can say
the same for an ear of fresh corn.

 Men recall what they read better than women do. So
concluded Harvard researchers who gave 10-minute tests
with a 350-word passage. Men came out ahead. Some of the
researchers credited superior male concentration. One, a
woman, said, "Lip readers always remember better."

 Q. How come Italy's Rome doesn't have a subway system?
 A. Every time the denizens start to dig one -- they've
tried repeatedly -- they run into "priceless
archeological treasures" and quit.

 People who dislike their own first names tend to dislike
themselves. So aver Wesleyan scholars after a study of
the matter.

 A dairy farmer writes: "You bet I put up 'No Trespassing'
signs. A riled cow is deadlier than a relaxed bear. A
goose in a temper tantrum is a lot more dangerous than a
calm snake."

 Forty-three percent of the U.S. labor force work in
office buildings. That's to say, go there.

 Scholars examined mummies found in the Chilean Desert.
Many had bone fractures -- 20 percent of the males, 50
percent of the females. What the scientific detectives
thought significant was the females' fractures mostly
were in face and forearm. A horror story, clearly.
Domestic violence of 7,000 years ago.

 You've heard oldsters say, "That's the ticket!" It
started out as a bit loftier line of approval: "That's
the etiquette."

 There are butterflies that smell like chocolate.

 Q. What's a "pyrrhic victory"?
 A. A win that costs too much. In 281 B.C., King Pyrrhus
of Epirus, Greece, sent his troops against the Romans at
Heraclea. Pyrrhus won, but lost so many men he said, One
more victory like that and we'll be out of it. Or words
to that effect.

 That ocean beast called the stingray never sees what it
eats. Its eyes are atop its head, it's mouth beneath.

 It was in Karl Jung's last interview he said: "A
particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a
rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment."

 No two cypress trees are alike. Hardly even close.

 Q. Where'd we get that phrase "keeping up with the
Jones"?
 A. Used to be a comic strip by that name. About 1913.

 Go back to medieval Frenchmen who hunted with dogs. Their
version of "Sic 'em!" was the cry "Hare!" Through twists
in talk over the centuries, we got a word out of that:
"harass."

 On Galapagos Island is a peculiar kind of finch that
stabs other birds with its beak and drinks their blood.

 The Eiffel Tower is remarkably light. A steel scale model
a foot tall would weigh less than an ounce. The Tower
itself weighs 10,000 tons, but that's nothing for its
size.

 Q. Why is "ragtime" called that?
 A. Started out as "ragged time." Notes were played
between the beats. Syncopated.

 May come as a small surprise to some that the divorce
rate among former Miss America and Miss Universe
contestants is a bit lower than the national average.

 Q. Name some of the old Hollywood movies in which Cuba's
Fidel Castro played parts?
 A. "Holiday in Mexico." "The Heat's On." "You Were Never
Lovelier." "Bathing Beauties."

 True, U.S. business wizards after World War II guided
Japan toward its economic glory, but Japan's own planners
developed its earthquake survival program, the world's
best. A futurist predicts it will be Japanese experts who
someday oversee the rebuilding of much of California.

 Animals called cold-blooded get hotter than animals
called warm-blooded.

 Q. How come it took 100 years after the automatic
dishwasher was patented to get it on the market?
 A. First, not enough hot water. Then, electricity
outdated it. Finally, better detergents had to be
developed.

 That word "buckaroo" came about as a slang twist of the
Spanish "vaquero" even as did "mustang" from "mestengo."

 If you shop for a jump rope, make sure its handles reach
your armpits when you step on its middle.

 The ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed cotton
trees grew little live sheep. These nibbled grass
roundabout. Then died. Left nothing but their wool. This
suggests why he became known as "The Father of History."

 Q. Does a dog ever dig up a bone it buries?
 A. Not a pet dog. Burying it is instinct, triggered by
plenty. Digging it up is instinct, triggered by
starvation. If the dog is fed well enough, it's not
likely to get around to that starvation instinct. Or so
say the vets.

 Q. Do baby bats nurse?
 A. They do. If a mother bat could talk, she'd tell you
about it, no doubt. Her baby is born with a full set of
sharp teeth.

 Q. What's a yakow?
 A. Cross between and yak and a cow. Such there be.

 Q. Doesn't the crayfish have eyes in its tail?
 A. One eye there, two in its head.

 When a decked-out man stands in front of a full-length
mirror, he judges for himself how he looks, and lets it
go at that. When a gussied-up woman stands there, she not
only judges for herself how she looks, but considers how
she looks to others. Women much more so than men can
imagine another's point of view. They're better able to
see themselves as others see them. Such was the claim of
the eminent Theodor Reik.

 Can you prove Benjamin Franklin didn't invent the
harmonica?

 To make a grown man look childlike, an artist need only
paint the eyes oversize. So says a portraitist.

 Prostitutes of Paris long ago had to report to police.
This let a French scientist named Parent-Duchatelet study
their hair colors. Between 1816 and 1831, one prostitute
in every 7.43, he learned, was blonde. Most significant!
he believed. Years later, others checked out hair colors
of Parisian women in general. One in every 7.43 was
blonde.

 All warm-blooded mammals, born live to feed on mother's
milk, have hair, at least some hair. And all the young of
same play.

 Q. Quick, what automobile's initials have more syllables
than its name?
 A. Volkswagen?

 It was football's great running back Paul Hornung who
said: "I'd rather score a touchdown than make love to the
prettiest woman in the United States." Maybe so. Still,
thing about football, it's only in season a few months a
year. Don't know about Hornung.

 Close examination of fossil mosquitoes from 40 million
years ago show they look just about the same as that one
dining on your arm.

 You can get away with calling her "fabulous," but don't
call him a "fabulist." That means liar.

 Lot of ancient Egypt's pet cats wore ear rings.

 When Great Britain got its first escalator in 1911 -- in
Earls Court -- denizens thereabouts were scared of it. So
those empowered hired one Bumper Harry to ride up and
down on it all day to promote public confidence. Bumper
had a wooden leg.

 "Worst thing infidelity does is make it impossible to
talk honestly with the one you love." Our Love and War
man couldn't find anyone who said that, so he said it
himself, and filed same.

 There's a scientific explanation of why a heron stands so
much of the time on one leg: It's to rest the other one.

 It was Ambrose Bierce who described a cabbage as "a
vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head."

 There's still a sizable body of medical folk out there
who think most headaches are caused by "trying too hard."

 Q. If a sheet in sailor-talk is not a sail, what is it?
 A. A line that holds the angle of the sail. That's where
we got the phrase "three sheets to the wind" meaning
"drunk." On the old ships, three lines loose in the
breeze let the ship wallow.

 A hummingbird's tongue is shaped like a "W."

 Q. Which has bigger lips? -- the Statue of Liberty or a
hippopotamus?
 A. Statue's, three feet wide. Hippo's, only two feet
wide.

 Parallel parking a car is an unnatural act. Neither the
build of the driver nor that of the car is appropriate
for such a contortion. We can't change the driver's
build. But the car's we can. Your assignment is to design
a car a driver can parallel park without wrenching the
neck. Your schematics will be due next Tuesday.

 Q. How do you explain the fact that 29 per cent of
murders by women occur in kitchens?
 A. That's where the knives are.

 Cafe cashiers say men sometimes forget their change, but
women never do.

 No rooster was ever henpecked, true. But the male
parakeet is henpecked. The female parakeet picks on him
unmercifully. Except during the mating season. Nobody's
henpecked during the mating season.

 Hard to like a man who pronounces "Beelzebub" correctly,
isn't it?

 Q. Where's that place called "If"?
 A. In the Mediterranean. Little island off the coast of
France.

 Q. Didn't Jules Verne in his "Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea" actually invent the periscope?
 A. Sort of. He described such an instrument in sufficient
detail to prevent a later inventor from getting a patent.

 A titillated zebra sounds a little like a fox terrier.

 Our Fahrenheit temperature scale, devised in Germany, has
been obsolete there for more than a century.

 Consider unmarried women age 29 and older. Do you regard
same as "social rejects"? Ridiculous! So why do 88
percent of them so regard themselves? Such was reported
as one finding in a Female Psychology study. "An
unmarried woman can achieve high professional status,"
said one of those queried, "but only the married woman
attains high social status."

 Writing worried Plato. Thought it might discourage
memory.

 Takes 18 bee hummingbirds to weigh as much as a shot of
whiskey.

 Did I mention how Pekinese dogs became so popular?
British soldiers captured Beijing then called Peking in
1860, and looted same, taking even its little dogs.
They'd never before been seen in the Western World. The
Royal Army gave one to Queen Victoria. In allusion to how
it was acquired, she named it "Looty." Owning a Pekinese
thereafter became the thing.

 Claim is everything you cook in a microwave is boiled.
You buy that?

 Q. Those workers who built the Great Wall of China, what
did they eat?
 A. Sauerkraut and rice.

 What's "seeded" mean to you? For seeded raisins, you take
the seeds out. For seeded rye bread, you put the seeds
in. This is inconsistent. Fix it.

 Q. Who coined the phrase "Hi Tech"?
 A. The late Yale Professor Derek deSolla Price has been
so credited. In 1960. Actually, his was the full term
"high technology."

 To follow a scent, a bee zigzags. As the scent starts to
fade, the bee reverses its direction, again and again.
What a bee does not do is fly in a beeline.

 Catfish taste with their tails, I'm told.

 In a few old buildings where early Americans partied, the
dance floors were supported by steel buggy springs to
give them bounce.

 Quite a few counties in eastern states measure little
more than 10 miles in any direction from the county seat.
That layout was intentional. To let a farmer with horse
and wagon get to town and back in one day.

 Q. What's normal body temperature of a polar bear?
 A. 98.6 degrees F.

 Sculptors of old used this standard to do statues of the
ideal woman. Make the figure seven and a half times the
length of the head. The neck, one third the head's
length. Shoulders, three times the head's width. Bust at
its widest point on line just below the armpit.
Waistline, slightly less than two-thirds the height of
the figure from the ground. Hips, an arm's width wider
than the bust.

 Nationals of no other country change addresses more
frequently than Americans.

 What, you can't name the pilot who first flew an airplane
solo over Australia? None other than Harry Houdini. So
renowned an escape artist was he, little mention is made
of his accomplishments in flight.

 Q. On a belt near the buckle there's always a little loop
that you thread the belt through. What's it called?
 A. The keeper.

 Q. How often did polar Eskimos of old feed their dogs?
 A. Every second workday, once a week in winter layoff.

 Q. How long has it been since catalog companies could
send buildings by mail?
 A. Since 1916. One entrepreneur then mailed a 40-ton
brick house. That did it.

 Q. Do crabs have noses?
 A. No, sir, they get their oxygen through discs on their
legs.

 Did you recognize the sound of your own voice the first
time you heard it played back on tape? Tests show two out
of three people don't.

 In Benjamin Franklin's day, if the house had a rug on the
floor, it was a home of the rich. Or well off, anyhow. In
Philadelphia then, only three houses in every 100 had
rugs.

 Here's a small fact you can toss out for question and
comment while waiting around in the nave: It is now known
that porcupines engage in recreational sex.

 It's said, still, infidelity is extremely rare among
gypsy women.

 Hobbyists who collect specialty items -- stamps, comic
books, glass, baseball cards -- rarely save things
meaningless to them -- old clothes, twine, broken
furniture. Hoarders of meaningless things rarely collect
specialty items. Odd how that works.

 Sometimes baby sharks -- even before they're born -- eat
other baby sharks.

 Q. Is it true some golfers go to psychiatrists to improve
their game?
 A. A phenomenon of the 1960s, that. If any do so now,
they keep quiet about it.

 First, the male bluebird chooses a nesting site. That's
his. Then the female picks one she likes. And takes
whichever male goes along with it. Sort of like country
club society.

 Q. Is there such a thing as elephant candy?
 A. Chewing tobacco might come closest. They like that.

 Were you ever afraid of a baseball? If not, you've never
played the real game. So says one authority who avers:
There has never been a major leaguer at the plate who
wasn't sometimes scared of the ball.

 No bat is blind.

 Q. Why is a business company called a "firm"?
 A. Once, it alluded to an official signature under which
the owner "confirmed" business transactions. But it wound
up as the designation for the company itself.

 Q. Just one sort of bird lays its eggs only in the early
morning. Name it.
 A. Duck.

 Couples who go to marriage counselors rarely tell them
the truth. At first, anyhow. So contends one such
professional. This practitioner says it's the counselor's
job to dig out the truth, and reveal it to the embattled
pair. Oftentimes, though, when the two finally see the
truth, they wonder why they stayed together so long.

 When you start to go to sleep, your eyes get warmer. But
when you actually go to sleep, they cool down some.

 Overweight people have been studied too much maybe, don't
know. But add this to the obesity data: Men and women who
move rapidly up the economic ladder are more likely than
others to pick up superfluous pounds aplenty.

 "He who hesitates is lost." Everybody said that. But its
mother thought, delivered by Joseph Addison, was: "A
woman who deliberates is lost."

 Q. What wood makes the best log cabins?
 A. Cedar. Then spruce, pine, fir. In order. That's
according to U.S. Forest Products lab testers.

 Building contractors in Colonial times were known as
undertakers.

 Q. When did kissing first turn up in recorded history?
 A. About 4,000 years ago. In what's now India. Mentioned
in a book called "Rig-Veda." From there it went west to
Persia and on. The Greeks were particularly taken with
it, historical footnotes indicate. Still are maybe, don't
know. Check it out with Greeks of your acquaintance.

 When you yawn -- as you no doubt will do shortly -- you
take in three times more oxygen than you do with a normal
breath.

 If it begins with "zymo," it has to do with beer,
brewing, fermentation. Good nickname for a beer drinker,
"Zymo."

 Q. Do gorillas talk to themselves?
 A. That they do, evidently. The renowned Koko, taught 600
words of American sign language, was seen on a video
monitor to sign lengthy monologues.

 The more muscular frogs are females.

 Q. How long is the annual alligator mating season?
 A. Three days maybe a week.

 Q. Where'd we get the phrase "keep the ball rolling"?
 A. From the winning presidential campaign of William
Henry Harrison in 1840. His Whigs made huge balls -- 25
feet in circumference, some of them. Painted same
brightly. With political slogans. Then rolled them
cross-country. From Boston to Baltimore and elsewhere.
Onlookers turned out along roads to catch glimpses. Each
Harrison team had one objective: "Keep the ball rolling."

 Hoboken is in Belgium.

 Even your bones are 22 percent water. Or better be.

 Q. You said it was bad manners in the Old West to ask a
man how many beeves he owned. Why?
 A. Was no different than asking him how much money he
had. Or how much capital. That word "capital," in fact,
came from the Latin "kaput" meaning "head" as in "head of
cattle."

 Q. What magazine in the United States has the highest
circulation nationwide?
 A. "Modern Maturity."

 Maine's Portland is regarded as a northerly city, is it
not? Do you likewise consider sunny Monaco on the French
Riviera as northerly? If not, why not? It and Portland
are at the same latitude.

 The British Army got in trouble in the Sudan in 1884. Big
trouble. Got in, but couldn't get out. To bring them
home, the War Office paid $15 Million to a travel agency,
Thos. Cook & Son. It took 27 steamships, 28 ocean liners,
650 sailboats and 800 whaleboats. Granddaddy of Cook's
tours, that one.

 Once more: The stirrup changed how men fought. The horse
collar changed how men worked. Which was the more
important invention?

 The Maoris, those Polynesians on New Zealand, are taught
to speak exactly. Not "some birds," but "five birds," or
however many. Not "took a walk," but "walked to the
Two-Tree Rock," or wherever. They demand literal
accuracy. Try talking that way. Tough.
 "Are you willing to relocate?" A question common to job
application blanks, that. Employment recruiters say
applicants most likely to check yes are women in the
Midwest.

 Pretty dexterous, those Yellowstone bears. They can
neatly take the wrappings off sticks of chewing gum.

 Q. Words of what fictional character have been translated
into the most languages?
 A. Mickey Mouse.

 Q. Does Arizona have any real lakes?
 A. Understand Stoneman Lake is the only natural one. But
the state has more than 230 manmade reservoirs, and 30 of
those are pretty sizable.

 Q. You said the ancient Greeks were the big kissers. But
I've read the Romans had the kissingest culture...?
 A. Romans took to it, sure enough. They chewed spices to
enhance the experience. They popularized it locally and
exported it all over. Another example of how old Rome
commercialized Greek art.

 Q. What's the longest main street in any one U.S. town?
 A. The Main that runs through Island Park, Ida. For 33
miles.

 To enter a rich man's house in Morocco, you usually have
to walk through a battered creaking door in a windowless
gray wall. It's only after you're inside that you notice
the gold and marble elegance. The Moroccan with money
says he is seen in the eyes of Allah as equal. And he'd
prefer the tax collector see what Allah sees.

 A month-old house mouse is ready to breed.

 That animal with the finest hair is the bat.

 Most young men, when they want to talk about their
troubles, turn to women. But as they age through their
40s, fewer do so. Then in their 50s, more again seek out
women for these so-called soul conversations. This
passes. By their 70s, most men simply do not discuss
their personal problems with women at all. Such were the
findings in one more scholarly study.

 Mexico law specifically stipulates that sex magazines
sold there can picture only one bare breast per page.


One thesaurus offers 17 words for an honest man and 193 for a thief.
Figures.

Canned goods shelves in supermarkets have to be kept extremely clean.
So no can sticks when picked up.  If a can sticks even slightly, that
signals leakage.  And leakage from a can suggests the food therein is
bad, dangerously bad, maybe even deadly bad.

Get it right:  That clockwise swirl on the shell of an eastbound snail
is on its south side.

Elephants can uncork champagne bottles with their trunks.  At least,
some can.

You sometimes come across the phrase "lonely widow" as though the two
words belong together.  They don't, evidently.  Surveytakers report the
great majority of widows say, in effect:  "If I have a choice, I prefer
to live alone."

Age of the average Old West cowboy was 24, time spent in that line of
work, seven years.

Everybody knows what "left in the lurch" means, but hardly anybody knows
what a "lurch" is -- a decisive defeat wherein one gameplayer beats
another by an overwhelming score.

X-ray a live snake and you'll kill it.

What Anne Marie Grosholtz learned how to do best was make death masks.
Of guillotine victims during the French Revolution.  As Miss Piggy says,
A girl has to go with what she's got.  Anne Marie turned her craft into
a tidy living.  She became the Madame Tussaud of wax museum fame.

It was the accepted practice in Babylonia 4,000 years ago that for a
month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law
with all the mead he could drink.  Mead is a honey beer, and because
their calendar was lunar-based, this period was called the "honey month"
- or what we know today as the "honeymoon."

Before thermometers were invented, brewers would dip a thumb or finger
into the mix to find the right temperature for adding yeast.  Too cold,
and the yeast wouldn't grow.  Too hot, and the yeast would die.  This
thumb in the beer is where we get the phrase "rule of thumb."

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts.  So in old England,
when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind
their own pints and quarts and settle down.  It's where we get the
phrase "mind your P's and Q's."

Beer was the reason the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.  It's clear
from the Mayflower's log that the crew didn't want to waste beer looking
for a better site.  The log goes on to state that the passengers "were
hasted ashore and made to drink water that the seamen might have more
beer."

After consuming a bucket or two of vibrant brew they called aul, or ale,
the Vikings would head fearlessly into battle often without armor or
even shirts.  In fact, the term "berserk" means "bare shirt" in Norse,
and eventually took on the meaning of their wild battles.

In 1740 Admiral Vernon of the British fleet decided to water down the
Navy's rum.  Needless to say, the sailors weren't too pleased and called
Admiral Vernon, Old Grog, after the stiff wool grogram coats he wore.
The term "grog" soon began to mean the watered down drink itself.  When
you were drunk on this grog, you were "groggy", a word still in use
today.

Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the
rim or handle of their ceramic cups.  When they needed a refill, they
used the whistle to get some service.  "Wet your whistle" is the phrase
inspired by this practice.

In the middle ages, "nunchion" was the word for liquid lunches.  It was
a combination of the words "noon scheken", or noon drinking.  In those
days, a large chunk of bread was called lunch.  So if you ate bread with
your nunchion, you had what we still today call a luncheon.

You quote Lord Byron when you deliver that antique saw:  "Truth is
stranger than fiction."

Q. You said cows hate spinach, barn owls snore, and spiders can't chew.
But have you forgotten female goats have beards?
A. Quite so.  Do remember, though, elephants get flat feet, moths hear
through their hair, and starfish have no brains.  I also vividly recall
that yaks give pink milk.

Neatest of all housekeepers -- a place for everything and everything in
its place -- are the blind.

Just about everything the sloth does worth doing -- including giving
birth -- is done while upside down.  Did I tell you a sloth never cleans
itself?

Have you ever heard of a machine called "Hired Girl"?  Came out in 1919.
So successful was this clothes washer that it completely changed one of
the nation's great farm machine makers, Maytag.

Most tormenting time of day for most withdrawing from nicotine is said
to be around 7 p.m.

Q. How much heroin is a "key"?
A. That's short for kilogram.  Or 2.2046 pounds.

Many a sleeper who prefers a hard mattress thinks it tends to keep the
back straight.  That's not what it does, says a medical specialist.  It
forces the sleeper to turn over more frequently, thus countering the
stiffness that comes from sleeping too long in one position.

Serious stamp collectors have something else in common -- they tend to
show up for appointments right on time.  Or such is the curious
contention of a student of human behavior.

What you're most likely to forget to take along on your vacation,
surveys show, are postage stamps.

Say you see two women at a party.  You don't know that one is 23 years
old, the other 25.  But can you readily guess their ages?  If you're a
woman, you probably can.  If you're a man, you probably can't.  So says
a male psychologist.  He says he does not know why women can see the
subtle differences between 23 and 25 while men can't.

Q. What word in English has the greatest number of different meanings?
A. "Set."  With 58 as a noun, 126 as a verb and 10 as an adjective.  At
last count.

The Mayflower, too, hauled slaves.

In prose and poetry, one character is more important than any other --
the character the author assumes.  In writer talk, that's called "point
of view."  Playful word mechanics redo famous bits from different
viewpoints.  "Mary Had a Little Lamb," as told by the lamb.  "Tiger,
Tiger, Burning Bright," as recited by the tiger.  James Thurber put
himself to sleep nights rewriting Poe's "The Raven," as chanted by the
raven.  Try it.  Do "The Pledge of Allegiance" from the point of view of
the flag.

Q. You said no U.S. law ever required a wife to take her husband's name.
Wasn't it the law in Hawaii once?
A. When Hawaii was a monarchy, yes, but not since.

If your face is perfectly proportioned -- it is, isn't it?  -- the
distance between your eyes is equal to the width of one eye.  Or so say
the experts.

You've long known that "corpus delicti" means not just "the body," but
"the body of the crime."  Have you noted, though, that in fiction the
term only crops up in cases of murder, never of rape or robbery or
kidnapping.  Yet conviction for any crime whatsoever needs a "corpus
delicti" -- substantial proof that a crime was committed.

Q. How many bats can a pair of bats produce in one year?
A. One.  Change "bats" to "field mice" and you get one million.

Q. How many children were fathered by the original Siamese twins, Chang
and Eng?
A. 22.

Newspapers once really did come "hot off the press."  In lead type
times, compositors fingered heat, and pressmen leaned against it, and
news boys took the chill off by sticking their hands into broken
bundles.  All the noisy places in a newspaper were boilerroom warm.  On
bitter cold days, printers stayed inside, or wanted to.  Here and there
in the mechanical rooms were crannies big enough to hide bottles.  What
oldtimers drank was the temperature of tea.

Believe I forgot to mention that mice can't stand the smell of fresh
peppermint.

Q. What does a gorilla do to show anger?
A. Curls its fingers.

No woman is ever really surprised by a matrimonial proposal.  Nor by any
sort of romantic overture, in fact.  So said that Love and War authority
Theodor Reik.  It was his belief that in uncriminal social behavior the
female of the species always sets the stage.  For either stop or go.
And usually rehearses the proceedings in her mind.

Q. How many miles do I walk when I play 18 holes of golf?
A. You, about five.  Me, about 10.

How would you describe the shape of your face?  Choose from the seven
face types:  oval, round, square, pear, oblong, diamond and heart.

A barnacle lives all its life upside down.

Civic officials in Athens, Greece, truck in chips of marble from Mt.
Pentelikon and scatter them around the Acropolis.  So tourists can take
them.  Instead of hacking chips off walls of the temple.

A long-distance bicycle rider said:  "At first, we had trouble with the
chasing dogs, but we figured out how to handle that:  We stopped washing
our socks."

A "belfry" was called that before anybody ever hung a bell in one.

Writes a client:  "When you try to put together the money you need for
Christmas, you see why St.  Nicholas is also the patron saint of
pawnbrokers."

Q. Why does hockey have three game periods instead of four quarters as
basketball and football do?
A. Three periods permit two breaks each long enough to resurface the
ice.  It's the condition of the ice, not the players, that dictates the
timing of the breaks.

"Feisty" comes from the old word "feist" which was a "small dog."

Among recipes collected by Mary Randolph of Virginia in 1824 was one
headed:  "How to Make Oyster Ice Cream."  You don't see much oyster ice
cream around anymore, sure don't.

Melting of snow as it falls on seawater makes a hissing sound.  A human
can't usually hear it.  But a dog can.

Q. Where'd we get that phrase "at loggerheads" meaning "ready for a
fight"?
A. A loggerhead was a fireplace poker.  Most hearths had two.  Drinkers
heated mugs of liquor by plunging red-hot loggerheads into them.  And
swinging same at each other sometimes.

Marine biologists say they discover 100 new species of fish every year.
Maybe so.  Don't believe they fish where I fish.

The new wears off everything, what?  Take country inns.  They change
owners on an average of every seven years.

Long-distance running in competition used to be called "pedestrianism."
First such runner of renown -- in the 1860s -- was an American Indian
named Deerfoot.  It was he who fixed the popular conviction that Indians
could outrun whites anywhere anytime.

When a baby beaver reaches age 2, the parent beavers kick it out.  No
debate.  It goes or they kill it.

That word "rascal" can be legally libelous.

The balding John Breck was a paper chemist in Springfield, Mass.  From
1908 on, he experimented to find a cure for his baldness.  Eventually,
he wound up even more than a millionaire as the nation's leading shampoo
maker.  He died in 1965, still bald.

Your field of vision is 45 degrees.  An eagle's is 110 degrees.
Besides, an eagle can fly.

The Hungarian National Anthem contains special praise for Tokay wine.

Those researchers who dig up statistics on romance say half the illicit
affairs happen between noon and 3 p.m.  Most any woman who engages in
such, they say, knows in advance what to expect, even if she doesn't
know she knows.  Clue is her selection of underwear in the morning.

Hard to break, those old habits.  Take blackboards.  Nobody calls them
greenboards.

What, you didn't know llamas were native to South Dakota?

A trial lawyer gives this advice to women charged with crimes:  "Female
jurors are tougher than male jurors.  Insist on the least possible
number of female jurors, unless you've just killed your husband."

Ireland's Irish eat seaweed to fight the common cold.

Ingenius lifeguards on some beaches in France strapped rubber handles to
the backs of big Newfoundland dogs and trained them to swim to anybody
who called for help.  It worked.  Correspondents say such dogs are still
saving lives.

That color you see best just before dusk is green.  Look at your lawn
then.  Doesn't it appear greener than usual?

Q. How do Washington, D.C., tourists spend most of their time?
A. Standing in line.  Or so a Washington Post reporter has written.
Among those who make the traditional museum-and-memorial rounds, the
average daily line time -- five hours.

Another classified ad that attracted some attention read simply:
"Vasectomy Sale!  Playpen, $15.  Walker, $12.  Bassinet, $10."

Q. I was born in 1952.  What other insignificant things happened that
year?
A. First "Mad" magazine came out.  Dick Clark started "The American
Bandstand" on TV.  Hank Williams sang, "Your Cheatin' Heart."  Gary
Cooper starred in "High Noon."  Ray Kroc said, Let's franchise
MacDonald's.  And something called myxomatosis killed off about half the
rabbits in France.  That's all I can think of.

A tenth of the full-term babies are left-handed.  But more than half the
babies born at least two months prematurely are left handed.

English is the only language that capitalizes the personal pronoun "I."

Pupils of a woman's eyes dilate when she sees a man who excites her
romantically.  So say researchers.  Women of old Italy put belladonna in
their eyes.  It enlarged their pupils.  Presumably it made them appear
romantically excited by every man they looked at.  Remarkable, that
belladonna.  I recall one girl in school like that.  She must've sent
off for it.

No two members of the Screen Actors Guild can have the same name.

Q. What's a yawn do for me?
A. Gets rid of your excess carbon dioxide.

The W. S. Gilbert of the renowned Gilbert and Sullivan team built a
tennis court on his estate.  And played often.  But rarely won.  He hit
the ball too hard.  He refused to develop that thing called "touch."  To
improve his score, he had the court lengthened.

Young wives blame themselves if their husbands chase other girls, but
seasoned older wives whose husbands stray blame the husbands.  So say
the marriage counselors.

The egg always emerges large end first.

Strongest cat in the world is said to be the 800-pound Ussuri tiger.
Hunters out of Khabarovsk in the mountainous Russian Far East chase it
with Laikas, the Siberian hunting dogs.  Though strong, the huge tiger
is defensive, not aggressive.  The dogs circle it.  The hunters close
in.  Now get this:  They pin it down with forked sticks, jam a piece of
wood in its mouth, and throw a blanket over its head, then bind its paws
with thongs.

If she was a good-looking woman in 16th century England, she was called
a "broad."

Lewiston, Ida., is west, I say west, of Needles, Calif.

Redbook magazine in 1975 concluded from its own survey of 100,000 women
that "Sex and religion seems to be a marriage made in heaven."  It
reported "the religious female is the most sexually satisfied, the most
sexually active...woman in the country."

You know about Jack Dempsey, the great heavyweight.  And you know about
J. Paul Getty, the great financier.  But did you know Getty once was
Dempsey's sparring partner?

You know that sort of dating service whose clients trade photographs
before they meet?  It's not the receiver of the photograph who benefits
most, I'm told, but the sender.  Shyness is what gets in the way.  The
photograph helps.  The surprised sender says, "She's seen my picture and
is still willing to go out with me.  Amazing!"  Or something like that.

They made booze out of pumpkins, too, the early colonists did.

Q. What professional is most likely to hold down some extra job?  A
police officer?
A. That's what I thought, but researchers say the school teacher merits
the distinction.  One in 10 so moonlights.

The formal gown, worn by Queen Eizabeth II at her coronation, had two
hidden pockets.  To hold cola bottles.  She knew it was going to be a
long ceremony.  Bound to get thirsty.

Q. How much land did the United States buy from Napoleon in the
Louisiana Purchase?
A. No land from him.  Only the right to govern and
tax.  That cost $15 Million.  But more than 20 times that much was
subsequently paid to Indian tribes for lands they were willing to sell.

If there weren't any dust, there'd be no clouds.

Q. Which four fingers do keyboarders use most?
A. In order:  Right thumb, first finger of the right hand, first finger
of the left, second finger of the left.  These do 63 percent of the
work.

Albert Einstein timed how long it took his hat to dry when he came in
out of the rain.  He also timed how long it took his hair to dry when he
didn't wear his hat on a rainy day.  His hair dried more quickly.  So he
stopped wearing his hat in the rain.

Over Miami streamed an aerial banner that read:  "I Love You, John.
Divorce Your wife."  An unidentified young woman had hired the pilot to
make that flight.  It came to pass that he learned from countless
telephone calls that there are in Miami countless wives of husbands
named John.

Q. What's an "infix"?
A. A word placed within another word to modify its meaning.  Such as
"abso-darned-lutely."  That's not just a quaint exception.  It's done
all the time in Arabic.  And is pretty common in American Indian
languages, too.

"Unwanted children" are much in the TV news of late, but unwanted
children certainly aren't new.  Numerous English parents regarded the
colonies in America as a sort of reform school to which they could send
their difficult youngsters as bond servants.  To say it plainly, they
sold them.

Hardly any woman wears her hair the length she'd really prefer.  Or so
says a lifelong beauty salon operator.  "Most every woman," says this
expert, "settles eventually for a hair style the way she settles for a
husband - the one that's easiest to manage."

The giraffe is another of those animals that can close its nose.

Do men treat women as inferiors?  Do women treat men as inferiors?
Debate goes on.  But a scholar contends gender has little to do with it.
The real war, says this savant, is between the overconfident and the
underconfident.  People who feel superior versus people who doubt their
worth.  Those who insult against those who lash back.  Two huge
emotional armies, ablunder in offense and defense, stepping all over
each other.

Women who use canes outnumber men who do so by three to one.

 Nature may have balance, but literature doesn't. In all
those animal stories, there have been hundreds of dogs
named Wolf, but insofar as I know, not one wolf named
Dog. Why not?

 Q. Any quick way to get ketchup out of a bottle?
 A. Stick a soda straw all the way to the bottom -- with
your finger over the top of the straw -- to force in some
air.

 The powerful William the Conqueror became the even more
powerful Duke of Normandy, and thereafter enforced the
Truce of God. It forbade violence on Mondays, Tuesdays,
Thursdays and Fridays. This cut murderers down to a
three-day week.

 Almost all monkeys hate women. Animal trainers say that.

 A century or so ago, a Lutheran congregation in
Frederick, Md., signed up a German theological student to
come to this country as their "redemptioner" -- an
immigrant who sold his servitude for years to pay his
ship passage. A sort of slavery, really. Think of that!
The congregation owned the pastor.

 "Women who teach music," writes one of same, "have little
trouble finding husbands. I know. I found three this
week."

 What the pendulum did first was measure the human pulse.

 Electric power companies run two modes: normal and peak.
They switch into peak around 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. for
breakfast and dinner loads. In recent decades, one thing
more than any other has sent them scrambling across their
network of grids for more power and forced them to
upgrade greatly their peak gear. It is the handheld
hairdryer.

 There's no mention of sugar in the Bible, the Talmud or
the Koran.

 You've seen both pictures and reflections of it, sure
enough, but do you not find it curious that you've never
actually seen your own face?

 Our Love and War man's files are replete with ways
societies have recognized marriages in their midsts. But
none has been practiced more universally than this one:
The man just doesn't bother to go home come morning.

 You know how Egypt's King Menes died? A hippo ate him.

 If Queen Victoria hadn't named a daughter Louise, that
Canadian lake would've been called something else.

 Generations of Japan's women have expected to be slimmer
at age 50 than at age 25. That was always the pattern
there. Until the westernization of the last 50 years. But
Japan's women now do not expect to be slimmer at age 50
than at age 25. And they're not.

 No horse can catch a healthy giraffe.

 Among university enrollees, the percentage of athletes
who graduate is greater than that of the students
overall.

 A Florida father gave his daughter Kim a convertible the
day she got her driver's license, and put this bumper
sticker on it: "Please report any discourtesy or reckless
driving by Kim to her father at (phone number)." A
beautiful girl, Kim. Nobody reported anything. But the
phone rang constantly: Is Kim there?

 Q. What's the motto of the "Man-Will-Never-Fly Society"?
 A. "Birds Fly, Men Drink."

 "Crestfallen" comes from the way a fighting rooster's
crest droops when he's whipped.

 A sampling of 17,000 is plenty big enough to produce
accurate data. That's how many students the testers
checked in Great Britain -- to learn near-sighted
youngsters are at least a year ahead of students
generally. The bespectacled caricature of the nerd is
accurate, evidently. Kids who wear glasses appear to be
smarter.

 Police get usable fingerprints at only three out of 100
crime scenes.

 The two islands of New Zealand -- north and south -- are
not of the same chain. Geologists now realize they're
entirely separate, riding different tectonic plates. It's
between those two islands where the two tectonic plates
collide.

 Youngsters who watch no TV at all do poorly in school.
Youngsters who watch TV all the time do almost as poorly.
Here's a good place to say something profound about
moderation. You say it.

 In old England, hanging day was Friday, and the hangman's
pay per job was 13 pence. That combination, however
unreasonably, added another eerie aspect to superstitions
about Friday the 13th.

 'Tis writ that St. Augustine once amazed himself by
reading without pronouncing the words. From such
indications, scholars say they know all writing
originally was meant to be read aloud.

 That land-locked lake known erroneously as the Caspian
Sea is five times larger than Lake Superior.

 If you have a painter of pictures in your family, ask
that artist to illustrate a white egg on a white
tablecloth. Done well, it's supposed to prove advanced
technique.

 In the Gaelic of the Scots, the name "Cameron" means
"crooked nose."

 Those Mongols called the Giliams live in lodges, carve
totem poles, wrap their babies like papooses and grow
tobacco. How their patterns resemble those of the some
early American Indians is noteworthy.

 Q. If it's possible to hear corn grow -- as I've read --
what does it sound like?
 A. Crumpling of cellophane, sort of. It crackles. As
expansion breaks husk fibers.

 You see the E.R. Squibb name every time you go to a drug
store. Firm founder Edward Robinson Squibb first supplied
ether to doctors. At his Brooklyn, N.Y., shop, some of
that ether blew up in his face, and burned off both his
lower eyelids. He never again could fully close his eyes.
To sleep, he put court plasters over them.

 More than half the houses nationwide have basketball
hoops.

 You know what scared Sigmund Freud? Ferns. Couldn't stand
them. They gave him the creeps.

 Q. What's the longest stream in the Northern Hemisphere
that doesn't outlet in ocean waters?
 A. Bear River in northeastern Utah. Starts in the Uinta
Mountains, wanders 500 miles through three states, and
empties into Great Salt Lake about 90 miles from its
source.

 A duck is persnickety about when to lay an egg. Early
morning, or not at all.

 If you're a wrestling promoter whose athletes aren't
tough enough to take those dreadful falls, you can still
make a few bucks in mud wrestling matches. They're a lot
safer.

 Doctors no longer tell patients salt and pepper are
dangerous sex stimulants. But that isn't the item. The
item is they used to.

 It's said every unpaid assassin buys the fantasy that
public opinion will vindicate the killing.

 You might want to email this query to your friend, the
master of detail: "Is it true I'd have to count to 1,000
before I'd get to a spelled-out number containing the
letter 'a'"?

 Writes an aged client: "I grew up in the Ozarks where
thousands of domestic pigs escaped into the woods every
year. I never knew anybody who bought pork."

 It has been said prison rape gets about as much attention
as a centipede with a sore foot.

 Q. I'm now surprised to read the Republican elephant and
the Democrat donkey were created by our American Consul
General in Ecuador...?
 A. Artist Thomas Nast, who'd drawn them earlier, held
that job at the time of his death in 1902.

 Q. Whatever happened to Shawmut, Mass.?
 A. Changed its name on Sept. 16, 1630, to Boston.

 England's Queen Mary died in 1694, and her husband, King
William III, ordered all members of the court to put on
black robes. Clearly, the judges liked them. They've been
wearing them ever since.

 Lower F,3 on the harmonica is said to be exactly the same
frequency as the mating call of the Mediterranean fruit
fly.

 Market research reveals most households in Ireland use
instant potatoes.

 If a single woman has numerous male friends, they tend to
differ from one another greatly. If a single man has
numerous female friends, they're likely to be similar in
some respects. Or so it's averred in Item No. 2192B of
our Love and War man's files. Those differences in men
interest the woman, evidently. What interests the man in
a woman, presumably, is some particular quality, even if
he doesn't realize it.

 Surely "strengths" is not the only nine-letter word in
English with just one vowel, but I can't think of
another. Can you?

 Q. How did you contrive to say bubonic plague "ravished"
India when clearly you meant "ravaged"...?
 A. Beats me. Brain lock. Rats!

 Recall that line "One for my master" in "Baa baa
blacksheep"? It alluded to the Crown's export tax on
wool.

 New Jersey's beaches were flagged in the 1880s, too. But
not for pollution. A white flag then meant "Ladies Hour."
A red flag, "Male Nude Bathing."

 "Earliest lesson a sports reporter learns," writes one of
same once bruised, "is never do your drinking where the
players drink."

 Big year, 1617. Smallpox killed Pocahontas. Japan set up
the world's most renowned red-light district, Yoshiwara.
King James I let Sir Walter Raleigh out of jail. Bubonic
plague ravished India. And that Scot math whiz John
Napier first used a decimal point.

 Q. Can't a squirrel climb a tree faster than it can run
on level ground?
 A. Squirrel watchers say so.

 Researchers say they still don't know why a full moon
only appears half as big when you look at it while
standing on your head. Photographs by cameras turned
upside down look normal. Some trick in the eye and brain,
evidently.

 Q. Epaulets, those shoulderboards on old military
uniforms, what are they for?
 A. Just decoration now. Originally they were supposed to
protect the soldier from sword cuts.

 Q. Where on earth does morning come up first every day?
 A. East Cape at the water's edge of Siberia.

 In the list of actors on a stage play program sometimes
is the name George Spelvin. But there is no George
Spelvin. When an actor plays two roles, that's the name
credited for the second role.

 Q. Does any human society eat live animals?
 A. Live invertebrates, yes. Oysters. Clams. The edible
animal doesn't have to be dead. It just has to be mute.
People eat living things but not living things that
squeal when bitten.

 When you meet a Sert on a street in Turkey, he strokes
his beard instead of tipping his hat. If you, too, are a
Sert, he does. If you're not a Sert, he probably ignores
you. Serts don't have much truck with strangers.

 The more money a man makes, the less likely he smokes.
The more money a woman makes, the more likely she smokes.

 "What mystifies me," writes a client, "is how my cat can
hunt at night when it's supposed to be color-blind." Some
scientists think cats detect an infrared glow given off
by animal life. Maybe so, don't know. Most mysterious.
What I infer is what our Love and War man has known for
years -- that the people in the house still have no idea
what's going on in the alley.

 Son, if you think it appropriate, you might tell your
Mom: The Aztecs were extremely clean. The Spanish
conquistadors were extremely dirty. The Spaniards won.

 That passion for buying unnecessary things is known as
"oniomania."

 Most psychiatrists like to dance. But few surgeons do.
Such was noted during evening entertainment at a medical
convention.

 Before a woman does something immoral, if ever, she may
worry about it a great deal. But once her mind is made
up, she justifies, and rarely feels guilty afterwards. A
man, though, doesn't fret overmuch before the evil deed,
but tends to be remorseful afterwards, and may take quite
awhile to justify. So contends a French writer named
Joseph Joubert.

 Military leaders around the world have learned they
easily can draft 15-year-old boys into their armies if
they promise the parents will be given cash in the event
of those draftees' deaths.

 A dressed doll or plaything of some other sort is called
a "poupee" in French. It's where we got the word "puppy."

 Q. Who was the first celebrity to endorse any product?
 A. Baseball great Honus Wagner. In 1905, he let his
autograph be imprinted on a Louisville slugger bat. That
started it. He was the Father of Endorsement Advertising.

 Q. Who first sculpted a nude woman?
 A. A Greek named Praxiteles. Insofar as is known. In the
5th Century B.C. Of Aphrodite, goddess of love and
beauty. She was the wife either of the fire god or the
war god. Mythmakers debate it.

 It was the earlyday Mormons around Salt Lake City who
became most widely known for their "dog coats." The less
affluent of them shaved their dogs and wove the cuttings
into course cloth.

 A hotwalker at the track told me he talks to horses. I
asked him what the favorite had to say. The exerciser
quoted the horse: "'Oats! Oats! Oats! How come the jockey
gets 10 percent?'"

 What does "frail" mean to you? Fragile? Delicate? Easily
broken? To me, too. But its No. 1 meaning is "readily led
into evil." In some street jargon, a frail is a woman.
And something not even all grape growers know: A frail is
50 pounds of raisins.

 What piece of furniture changed book publishing? The
coffee table. It brought on the stream of those big,
glossy, illustrated books, a stream still streaming.

 Men have made fortunes by adding water. Liquor sellers.
Milk sellers. Ham sellers. Juice sellers. Cola sellers.
And then there was Daniel Drew, the financier who began
as a cattle drover. He fed his stock lots of salt the
night before the big sale. Next morning his beeves drank
thousands of dollars worth of pounds in water before
weigh-in.

 Only a very few of the people who've made baseballs over
the years have understand how the game is played.

 For the woman who tests the gambits of romance, what one
line can she deliver to catch the full attention of the
fellow at hand? "I can't get you out of my mind" has been
submitted. Effective, says our Love and War man. But not
as intriguing as "You're so different." However, when all
else fails, the old standby always works: "You're too
dangerous."

 Q. When somebody dies, who owns the body?
 A. Nobody. Survivors claim it only for disposition.
Legally, a dead body is as curious as a cloud. It can't
own anything. Not can it be owned by anybody.

 The original Marquess of Queensbury rules for modern
boxing stipulated no fighter could put springs in his
shoes.

 Many a German cadet endured pain for the distinctive scar
on the cheek to show he'd fought an academy duel. In the
British army, where spectacles weren't allowed, numerous
gentlemen wore monocles. Prussian brass found identity
behind great mustaches. Historically, military tradition
gets much from the affectations of its officers who
accept uniform clothing but long to look special.

 Do you unpack your luggage when you stay in a motel? Few
do, surveys show. One guest in five, to be specific. Only
the guests with luggage were surveyed.

 In the hope of relieving his chronic constipation, a
Denver man named Henry D. Perky in 1893 invented a
machine to make what he called "little whole wheat
mattresses." The first shredded wheat.

 Q. How did Sir Alexander Fleming change Spain's
bullfighting?
 A. Before he invented penicillin, countless toreros died
of infected wounds. After, even the smallest arenas were
equipped with penicillin syringes. And the performances
became much more exhilarating. Said one cape artist: "Now
I can stand closer to the bull."

 A reconstructed Stanley Steamer automobile sometime back
drove from Los Angeles to New York on $4.50 worth of
furnace oil.

 Before they were called coffee tables, they were called
cocktail tables. Prohibition forced the name change,
never changed back.

 How do you feel about parking meters? Citizens of
Preston, Ida., didn't much care for them. So years ago
they outlawed such. But with ceremony. Pallbearers put a
parking meter in a casket, hauled it through the streets
in a funeral procession, and formally buried it with
solemn graveside rites.

 Among the Yanomamo Indians of Brazil, tradition long held
that any man who murdered another man was free to take
home the victim's widow. Lot of killings in that tribe.

 Japan closed itself off from the rest of the world in
1638. Thereafter until 1854, any Japanese fisherman
shipwrecked on a foreign shore was not allowed to return
to Japan.

 What's a trylon? What's a perisphere? Hardly anybody on
the campus can tell you. Yet all the denizens at the
Senior Citizens Center know those words identify the
triangular and spherical symbols of the 1939 World's
Fair. So? Nothing much. It's just curious how two words
like that can come suddenly into the language, be on
everybody's tongue, I mean everybody's, for several
years, then simply go away.

 Maybe you didn't know the Junior Chamber of Commerce
started out as a temperance organization committed to
universal sobriety. It changed.

 Working girls in established houses of ill repute are
employees, not independent contractors. The IRS has so
decreed.

 Q. Is there any country where you can get to everyplace
by boat?
 A. Finland comes pretty close. In the Summer, anyhow.
With 31,000 miles of navigable rivers, canals and lakes.
More such waterways than anywhere else.

 On one bridge in Boston is the graffito: "10 Smoots." On
another: "18 Smoots." On a third: "42 Smoots." Other
bridges thereabouts are similarly labeled. Research
reveals a Harvard fraternity used a fellow named Smoots
as a measuring unit, turning him end over end to
determine the lengths of the bridges.

 In that great butter state of Wisconsin, a sheriff once
was fired for serving margarine to his county's
prisoners.

 Q. Who were the first women to work for the Federal
Government?
 A. Sarah Waldrake and Rachael Summers. In 1795. Got 50
cents a day for weighing gold coins in the Philadelphia
mint. In the minds of the men of that era, true ladies
were trustworthy. Ideal for the job.

 About those stone walls of New England -- their
construction, it's said, was fueled with apple brandy.
And you can look at the wall and see how much fuel was
used.

 Only a very few of the people who've made baseballs over
the years have understand how the game is played.

 For the woman who tests the gambits of romance, what one
line can she deliver to catch the full attention of the
fellow at hand? "I can't get you out of my mind" has been
submitted. Effective, says our Love and War man. But not
as intriguing as "You're so different." However, when all
else fails, the old standby always works: "You're too
dangerous."

 Q. When somebody dies, who owns the body?
 A. Nobody. Survivors claim it only for disposition.
Legally, a dead body is as curious as a cloud. It can't
own anything. Not can it be owned by anybody.

 Carmakers have spent thousands and thousands of dollars
to make sure their door handles don't tend to break
fingernails.

 Q. I thought Stanley said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume.
But it says here John Rowlands said it...?
 A. John Rowlands was a street kid, born in Wales, the
illegitimate son of a Welsh girl. He spent his childhood
in workhouses. Shipped out to America as a cabin boy.
Wound up in New Orleans. A merchant named Henry Morton
Stanley took him in, adopted him, educated him, and the
young man later took Stanley's name. He was indeed the
same fellow who years later in Africa said, "Dr.
Livingstone, I presume."

 In the lobby of the Continental Hotel in the strict
Moslem city of Dacca is this sign: "Ladies in shorts may
be stoned."

 Q. How blind do I have to be before I'm considered
"legally blind"?
 A. If your better eye can't be corrected with glasses to
more than 20/200, that's it.

 "Women are most impressed with bald, intelligent,
hairy-chested, modest men." So concluded a national
magazine after a survey of readers. If you know a man who
fits the description, you might wish to email this note
to the fortunate fellow with your congratulations.

 The otter is a weasel. It has a lovable disposition. The
fisher is a weasel. It has a hateful disposition. That's
weasels for you.

 Q. You said Herbert Hoover was the first president to
have a telephone on his desk. What bunk! A phone was
installed there in the late 1870s!
 A. In the hall, yes. And for 51 years, the presidents
went out to the hall to use it.

 Tahitians love chili. They hold chili cookoffs now.

 You might want to email this to the girlfriend on the
diet: "Advisory: Post the following line on your
refrigerator: 'The most famous female in America -- The
Statue of Liberty -- weighs 225 tons.'"

 What that telephone fellow Alexander Graham Bell really
wanted to do was turn the garbage of U.S. cities into
alcohol. No, to power cars.

 Gold jewelry is quite special to most women. Such has
been the case historically. There's a reason, says an
expert. Generations of women lived without property
rights. Their gold jewelry was about all they had if
their marriages broke up.

 Writes a precise client: "The true dolphin is a fish, not
a mammal. Those Miami football players do not have the
true dolphin on their helmets. They ought to be called
the Miami Bottlenoses."

 Can you explain why 97 percent of all the undeveloped
islands along U.S. coasts are in the South?

 In the 1940s, a corporate vice president named Ed Goodman
scribbled a line on a 3 by 5 card. He certainly didn't
know then it would become, as surveys now suggest, the
most widely recognized advertising slogan of all time:
"When you care enough to send the very best."

 In cemeteries around Switzerland's Zermatt are graves
marked with pickaxes and climbing ropes.

 "I couldn't quit smoking," writes a client, "until I
started drinking milk instead of coffee, tea or cola. A
head game, I guess. When I drank milk as a kid, I didn't
smoke."

 Pythons eat leopards.

 Q. If you could visit China, what would you like to see
first?
 A. A fire drill.

 From Scotland's County of Moray spread countless folk
whose progeny you now may know by the surname of Murray.

 Artists in the Middle Ages painted pictures - friezes --
on outside walls between the floor and roof of buildings,
and also in those spaces between the levels. Each frieze
illustrated some sort of narrative. That's how "story"
got to be a word in architecture. Two-story buildings,
three story buildings, so on.

 "A taste of the bait is worth the pain of the hook." Who
said that? A political candidate? A sex offender? A
trout? Who?

 Another thing that makes the ruling dynasty of Japan
unique is it has no name.

 In almost all nudist colonies, the teenage offspring of
members are not required to strip, if they don't want to.
Teenagers by themselves aren't allowed to join. A legal
matter.

 At night, if you want to see the chicken without the
chicken seeing you, use a red light.

 "What am I supposed to think," asks a client. "when I
find a Gideon Bible in my daughter's handbag?"

 Camels have webbed feet.

 Sound intensity is measured in decibels. Were you aware
the "bel" in "decibel" alluded to the name of Alexander
Graham Bell? He measured degrees of deafness.

 Widows travel. Widowers don't. That's not perfectly
accurate, but it holds up fairly well as a rough
generality. Can you explain why widows and widowers
differ in this travel thing?

 Every baby octopus is born an orphan.

 Rain storms in ancient Germany washed over old ruins.
They exposed curious gold coins. These, from before Roman
times. The coins were called "rainbow plates." They were
what led to the "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow"
fancy.

 In the early days of America, black slaves and women had
this in common: They changed their last names every time
they came under the control of new masters.

 What makes me morose is a hummingbird eats sweets all day
long and never gets fat.

 Q. Why do I get wrinkles on my face, but nowhere else on
my body?
 A. Because your face is the only place in your body where
the muscles are attached to the skin. Elsewhere they're
attached to your bones. That's why your face can express
emotion, but your backside can't.

Young girls in Sweden and Great Britain tend to be first
to buy new shades of fingernail polish. Other makeup, too.
Marketers monitor them. Follow their leads.  What's offered
at cosmetics counters worldwide depends in many cases on what
appeals to those 12-year-olds.

Q. Why do some countries make it a crime to commit suicide?
A. Maybe so governments legally can confiscate the property
of the deceased.  That's how it worked in ancient Rome. Laws
are made of money, it's said.

Men dress to look like other men. Women dress to look unique.

 "Best way to deal with the drug menace," suggests one
authority, "is make it all cheap by making it all legal.
Then ostracize users. Treat them as though they did not
exist."

 In August of 1861, an American named George Grant, living
in London, read that Prince Albert was ill. Seriously.
Terminal maybe. Grant bought up all the black crepe in
London. Albert died. Grant made about $250,000, a huge
fortune then.

 Every actor, it's said, gets a qualm going on stage
before a live audience. It was the moment before the
moment of looking out across the orchestra pit that gave
us the old phrase "to face the music."

 Q. Can you confirm the claim that a ferocious bull won't
attack a naked human being?
 A. Hard to find an authority on this. Those who know
won't explain the circumtances wherein they found out.
Such has been reported, though.

 It can't be an international airport if it doesn't stay
open 24 hours a day.

 Q. Isn't it true the death rate always goes down during a
doctors' strike?
 A. Yes, during every such strike on record where
statistics are available. In Canada. In Los Angeles. In
South America's Colombia, down by 37 percent. In Israel,
down by 50 percent.

 A young man who frequents singles establishments says his
most successful opening line has been: "I'm glad you're
not her."

 England's archives list women charged with witchcraft
between 1556 and 1718. You might want to email this note
to your acquaintance named Ann, if any, to let her know
hers was the most common name of accused witches.

 Q. I thought grizzly bears were vegetarian...?
 A. They're 85 percent vegetarian. It's a curious fact of
life, is it not, that 15 percent of anything can ruin its
reputation?

 If you cut your tongue, it heals without scar tissue

 Everybody uses first names now. Had that been the custom
in previous centuries, you'd be familiar with Buonarroti,
the fellow we call Michelangelo, and you'd know Van Rijn,
now recognized by most merely as Rembrandt. Alighieri
would be a household name, too. For Dante. So would
Santi. That's Raphael.

 Insofar as I know, nobody has ever been convicted of low
treason.

 Snakes can't back up.

 That the first General Motors car was put together by a
fellow named David Buick maybe you know. But were you
aware it was he, too, who figured out how to make white
porcelain stick to iron. That's what gave your
grandparents those shiny white bathtubs.

 Q. What was the first gun carried by soldiers?
 A. The harquebus. A matchlock invented in the 15th
century. The Spanish infantryman got it. Portable, yes.
But it usually was fired from a support.

 In 1815, Pvt. John Wilson, a lifelong teetotaler, was
sent by the British Army, to the Bangalore garrison in
India. There, the record shows, he declined the customary
daily ration of rum. That infuriated his commander. A
court martial convicted him of "an act of rebellion." He
was shot.

 "Aquiline" means "eagle-like." The word almost invariably
compares a nose to a beak. Why not aquiline fingers, like
an eagle's talons? Or aquiline eyesight, like an eagle's
vision? It's always aquiline nose. There's more to an
eagle than its beak, you know.

 You can tell an experienced dog trainer from an amateur
by how loud the command is. Dogs have keen hearing. The
pro speaks in a normal tone. The amateur speaks too
loudly. So says a trainer of trainers.

 Another of the simpler ways to lose weight, it's said, is
eat an apple half an hour before every meal.

 Earliest of the dime novels didn't cost a dime and
weren't novels. They cost a nickel and were called
biographies. About when everybody realized they were
90-percent phony, the price went up.

 Clients write: "What I think of when somebody says 'death
and taxes' is death only collects once."... "What gets me
is this is supposed to be National Apathy Week, and
nobody cares."... "What I can't figure out is how
hailstones were described before golf balls were
invented."

 Q. Hollywood people use the Italian "ciao" pronounced
"chow" for hello or goodbye. What's it really mean?
 A. Hello, goodbye, whatever you want it to mean. That's
now. Take it all the way back to the Latin "sclavus,"
though, and it meant, "I am your slave."

 Q. How come nobody puts up statues of famous people in
the parks anymore?
 A. A face on a statue of a human being looks ghastly when
lighted from ground up. Like a midnight TV spook. The
secret is to light it from above. That's hard to do in
parks.

 What almost all youngsters do in museums is touch the
irresistible noses of stuffed animals. Compulsively. Like
blowing the fuzz off dandelions. Or taking care not to
step on cracks in sidewalks. A place such as the
Smithsonian has to send a nose touchup specialist around
routinely.

 Q. What's the Federal Government's acronym "POSSLQ" mean?
 A. "Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters."

 Still unsettled is why builders of early bridges covered
same. So horses wouldn't shy over water. So decking
wouldn't ice up. So timbers wouldn't dryrot. Another
explanation is rarely heard. Builders had considerable
experience in putting up barns but little in putting up
bridges. What they built were what they knew how to build
-- open-ended barns suspended between river banks.

 That huge California chicken ranch called Egg City
reportedly sells about $75,000 worth of droppings every
year. Remarkable. With that kind of market, my old Army
unit could have supported itself.

There's a story about an MIT student who spent an entire
summer going to the Harvard football field every day
wearing a black and white striped shirt, walking up and
down the field for ten or fifteen minutes throwing birdseed
all over the field, blowing a whistle and then walking off
the field.  At the end of the summer, it came time for the
first Harvard home football team, the referee walked onto the
field and blew the whistle,  and the game had to be delayed
for a half hour to wait for the birds to get off of the field.
The guy wrote his thesis on this, and graduated.

 The US Postal Service recently began advertising
on the web about reaching a "90% on-time delivery
for first class mail" milestone. Only the USPS
would brag about delivering nine billion, three hundred
and thirty thousand pieces of mail LATE.

 You know where Brownsville, Texas, is -- around here you
won't find many who realize that nearly half of Mexico is
farther north than that town.

 Q. Early settlers wanted their settlements close to
water, I realize. But why did they build so many more on
rivers than on lakes?
 A. Not just water. Running water. For mill sites. Where
there was a mill, there would be a town.

 Eleanor Roosevelt carried a handgun.

 In no human tribe have left-handers been the majority.

 If you and your housemate mate do not look at each other
much when you speak, something's wrong. The party who
declines to make eye contact has an attitude problem. Or
so says one counselor on matters romantic. Refusal to
make eye contact also can be a sign of depression, it's
said.

 How to make a small room look bigger: Paint the baseboard
the same color as the carpet.

 In January of 1939 near the Long Island community of
Stony Brook, an extraordinary high tide during a cold
snap filled up a lagoon with about 5,000 bass, and froze
the whole shebang. Salted seafood set in ice. Nobody went
hungry. The population fished with pickaxes.

 Q. Has Australia ever had a gold rush?
 A. Indeed. In the 1850s. It drew the expected crowds.
Great way to sell real estate, a gold rush.

 Q. Somebody once screamed "Fire!" in a packed theater and
hundreds of people were trampled to death. We've heard
about it all of our lives. Where'd it actually happen?
 A. Chicago. Iroquois Theater. In 1903. Of the 2,000
patrons, 575 died.

 Deeply depressed people don't doodle. Medical specialists
say that. Odd, if true.

 Q. At the start of the railroad era, what country made
the best train locomotives?
 A. England. By far. That's why U.S. railroad tracks are
exactly as wide -- at 4 feet 8 1/2 inches -- as ancient
Roman chariot wheels. The Romans left chariots on the
British Isles. Later, carts and coaches were patterned
after them. Tramways on which horses pulled such carts
were built to the same width. Likewise, eventually,
railroads. Americans bought the good English locomotives,
so built their tracks, too, to the ancient Roman specs.

 Q. The color "ecru" is beige, right?
 A. Sort of. It's not really a color. Means raw,
unbleached.

 No Pilgrim could wear that Pilgrim's hat -- wide brim,
high crown -- unless he owned property worth at least 200
pounds.

 Q. How do we know the Egyptians as far back as 2500 B.C.
did surgical operations?
 A. Such are depicted. On old tombs, significantly.

 Berthed ships make groaning whining noises -- rubbing of
wood against wood -- heard nowhere but along the
waterfront. If you've lived around those sounds, the
memory of them never goes away. It's said seafarers and
longshoremen hear them in their sleep until they die.

 Tennis players might quote Shakespeare's Henry VI: "O
monstrous fault!" Basketball players, Henry V: "Hear the
shrill whistle." Bowlers, The Tempest: "Mercy on us, we
split." Golfers, King John: "Give me an iron." Baseball
players, Othello: "You did bid me steal." Hockey players,
A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Gentle Puck, come hither."

 Great horned owls lay round eggs.

 Q. Did the Eskimo of old believe in God?
 A. They did. They thought God, the Supreme
Environmentalist, created polar bears to prevent humans
from over-multiplying. So they wouldn't eat up everything
in one season.

 Charlie Chow owned a hotel on Kirkland Lake, Ontario. He
built an extremely loyal following. He died in 1972 at
age 86. His estate was worth more than $5 Million. He'd
never learned to speak English.

 Q. Where was the first concrete road in America?
 A. Woodward Avenue in Detroit. Motorists came from
hundreds of miles to drive on it. Some went home.

 Q. The "sleaze" in "Sleaze Factor" comes from "sleazy," I
know. But where'd we get "sleazy"?
 A. Civil War soldiers used the word to complain about
inferior material of their coat linings. A junk import.
"Sleazy" was slang for "Silesia."

 Q. How did the great magician Blackstone stop his pulse
at will?
 A. Tucked a wadded cloth under his armpit and clamped
down. Anybody can do it.

 Pretty bad, that blizzard of 1888. Reporters at the old
New York World noted a freezing horse in the street
below. They hauled it upstairs to the city room. And
revived it by pouring brandy down its throat. Down
theirs, too. Much laughter, revelry, then that condition
which appears as sleep. Next morning, headaches, and a
taste like the taste of pennies. But the horse wouldn't
leave. Kept nuzzling their pockets. They had to get a
block and tackle to drag it down and out.

 Q. What's the oldest apartment building in the country?
 A. The Upper Pontalba on Jackson Square in New Orleans.
So it has been reported, although I can't prove it.