STRANGE BUT TRUE - March 25, 2010

* It was Benjamin Disraeli, 19th-century British Prime Minister and the first Earl of Beaconsfield, who made the following sage observation: “The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.”

* You’ve probably never heard of Hurley, Wisc., but if you lived in the area, you’d know that the town is home to a 15-foot-tall corkscrew. It can be found, appropriately enough, outside Corkscrew Liquors.

* Except for the queens, all wasps die in the autumn.

* The Japanese ruling family is the oldest continuing hereditary monarchy in the world. The current emperor, Akihito, is the 125th holder of the title. Interestingly, he’s also a marine biologist and has published papers on ichthyology in both English and Japanese scholarly journals.

* For reasons that aren’t quite clear, in Sweden, it’s illegal to train a seal to balance a ball on the tip of its nose.

* It was March 15, 1952, when the largest amount of rainfall in a single 24-hour period was recorded. It was the island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, that had the misfortune to receive a whopping 73.62 inches of rain on that Ides of March. That’s more than 6 feet of rain in a single day!

* Feel like you have a lot more stuff than you used to? You’re not imagining things — and you’re not the only one. According to the Self-Storage Association, the number of businesses offering on-premises storage of all those things you can’t find room for at home has increased nearly 10 times since 1964.

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Thought for the Day: “I no longer worry about being a brilliant conversationalist. I simply try to be a good listener. I notice that people who do that are usually welcome wherever they go.” — Frank Bettger

(c) 2010 King Features Synd., Inc.