STRANGE BUT TRUE - Dec. 16, 2010

It was prolific British author G.K. Chesterton who gave the following sage bit of advice: “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

When Richard Nixon first ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (which he won in 1946), he funded his campaign largely with money he won playing poker while serving as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II.

From 1863 until 1945, the city of Vicksburg, Miss., didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July holiday. This is because during the Civil War, the Confederate city was surrendered to Union forces on that day, an event that was considered to be one of the turning points of the war.

It was once thought that when snakes went through their version of hibernation they rejuvenated themselves, and therefore that serpents lived forever.

There’s talk everywhere these days about the growing problem posed by the fact that people in the U.S. are becoming more and more overweight. Interestingly, when the International Journal of Obesity was first published, in 1993, it was 509 pages long; the 2006 edition totaled 2,322 pages. Coincidence?

It was one Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist, who invented the adhesive used today in Post-it notes, but he had no luck promoting his invention. Six years later, one of his colleagues, Art Fry, came up with a use for it that stuck (so to speak). While sitting in church one day, Fry’s attention wandered from the sermon to the scraps of paper he used to mark his place in the hymnal, which kept falling out. Connecting his annoying problem and his friend’s invention, the Post-it was born.

Thought for the Day: “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

(c) 2010 King Features Synd., Inc.