STRANGE BUT TRUE

• It was British doctor and author Alec Bourne who made the following sage observation: “It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.”

• In 2007, a world record was set off the coast of Brazil when a single wave was caught by 84 surfers.

• Have you ever heard of a book called “Never Again” by Doug Nufer? Probably not — it’s not on any bestseller lists and hasn’t been reviewed by any notable critics. It’s quite possibly unique in literary history, however; in its entire 192 pages, not a single word — even basic words such as a, an, the, of and for — is used twice.

• If you were to stack up a million $1 bills, they would weigh about one ton.

• The Twist dance craze in the 1960s changed the culture in America and spread around the world.

Most people don’t realize, though, that the song “The Twist,” which started the fad, wasn’t originally sung by Chubby Checker, though he was the one who sent the single up the charts and has since been irrevocably associated with the dance.

The song was originally written and performed by an R&B singer named Hank Ballard.

A deejay in Baltimore saw teenagers dancing to Ballard’s song and called Dick Clark, host of “American Bandstand.” Clark loved it and invited Ballard to perform the song on the show, but it didn’t work out.

Instead, Clark found someone else to perform the song: Ernest Evans, who changed his name to Chubby Checker.

It made his career.

• Colonel Sanders started selling chicken when he was 65 years old, and his only goal was to make $1,000 a month.

***Thought for the Day: “It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.” — George Burns

(c) 2012 King Features Synd., Inc.