Strange But True

CONTRIBUTED BY: SAMANTHA WEAVER

• It was beloved American author Kurt Vonnegut who made the following sage observation: “Laughing or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do.”

• If you removed all the phosphorus from your body, you’d have enough to make about 250 matchheads.

• Those who study such things say that boys who have first names that are considered to be strange or peculiar have a higher incidence of mental problems as adults than boys with more traditional names. The correlation was not found to hold true for girls.

• The next time you’re at a holiday gathering and someone has had a bit too much to drink, you can say that person is cherubimical; it’s much nicer than calling a family member a drunk.

• You may have learned that the distress signal SOS stands for “Save Our Ship,” but that’s a myth. That signal was chosen because in Morse Code, it’s easy to remember and transmit the three dots, three dashes and three dots that represent those letters.

• There was a time when it was illegal in Hawaii for a woman to eat a coconut.

• According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest documented living parrot is more than 80 years old. Cookie, a Major Mitchell’s cockatoo, has lived at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois since May 1934.

• The New Orleans Saints were admitted to the National Football League on Nov. 1, 1966 — All Saints’ Day. The team, however, was named for the iconic New Orleans jazz song “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

• If you’re an American who has a garden, you’re more likely to be growing tomatoes than any other vegetable or fruit.

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Thought for the Day: “You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.” — Sacha Guitry

(c) 2014 King Features Synd., Inc.