STRANGE BUT TRUE - Aug. 13, 2009

• It was Canadian educator Laurence J. Peter who made the following sage observation: “An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.”

• You might (or then again, you might not) be surprised to learn that in this country, the most popular meal, for both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich. And the beverage to go along with that meal is more than likely going to be a soda.

• If you’re like the average home-owning American, you can paint the entire exterior of your house with 30 gallons of paint. If you’re the president, though, it takes quite a bit more: The White House requires 570 gallons to cover it.

• You’ve probably been to a restaurant with a dessert called Death by Chocolate, but the real-life event is less appetizing. A worker in New Jersey recently fell into a vat of boiling chocolate and perished before co-workers were able to pull him out.

• It seems that Japan has a vending machine for just about anything you can think of — even fresh eggs. Here’s how it works: The machine has about 10 doors, behind each of which is a mesh bag full of eggs. You drop in coins totaling about $2 to unlock one of the doors. Simply open the door, pull out your eggs and be on your merry way!

• The town of Waco, Texas, has an entire museum dedicated to the popular soda Dr Pepper. Even more surprising is the fact that it gets more than a hundred visitors a day, on average.

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Thought for the Day: “There are two types of people — those who come into a room and say, ‘Well, here I am!’ and those who come in and say, ‘Ah, there you are.’” — Frederick L. Collins

(c) 2009 King Features Synd., Inc.