Strange but True

CONTRIBUTED BY: SAMANTHA WEAVER

• It was American author and critic H.L. Mencken who made the following sage observation: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.”

• The condor is the largest flying land bird in the Western Hemisphere — and one of the slowest in reproducing. The female lays only one egg every two years.

• Those who study such things claim that Napoleon Bonaparte was afraid of cats.

• Confectioner Milton Hershey suffered through founding two candy companies that ended in failure, then succeeded on his third attempt, and finally sold that company and used the proceeds to found the Hershey Company. After all his hard work, though, he seemed to be less interested in enjoying the fruits of his labors than in helping others. In 1909 he established the Hershey Industrial School for Orphaned Boys, and 10 years later he donated control of the company to a trust for the school. Today the institution is called the Milton Hershey School, and it continues to have a controlling interest in the candy company.

• Don’t consider yourself uneducated if you’ve never heard of anthropodermic bibliopegy; the practice of binding books with human skin is not (one can hope) common in modern times.

• Scotsman John Paul Jones is best known for his naval exploits for the nascent United States during the Revolutionary War, and for his infamous utterance, “We have not yet begun to fight!” Most people don’t realize, though, that he was born John Paul and only adopted the surname “Jones” on his first trip to America, where he came to flee charges in the deaths of two sailors under his command.

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Thought for the Day: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein

(c) 2014 King Features Synd., Inc.