Strange But True: April 12, 2018

* It was Edna St. Vincent Millay, a playwright and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, who made the following observation: “A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.”

* I don’t know who studies such things, but those who do say that over the course of a lifetime, you’ll probably spend about three years in the restroom.

* Despite numerous arrests and trials, famed 19th-century outlaw Frank James was never convicted of anything and never went to prison. He died in 1915, at the age of 72, of natural causes.

* In Germany in the 1500s, a court physician by the name of Oswaldt Gabelthouer wrote a medical book full of remedies that he guaranteed would be effective. For insanity, the patient must cut his or her hair close to the head, then tie two halves of a ram’s liver to the head. A severe case of epilepsy, he claimed, could be cured if the patient wore the right eye of a wolf and the left eye of a she-wolf on a thong about the neck for three months; also, the patient had to forgo bathing during that time. There’s no mention in the record at hand of how a patient would go about redeeming the guarantee.

* When groups of shrimp end up with too few males to sustain the population, some of the females turn into males.

* If someone called you a “mumpsimus,” would you be flattered or insulted? It seems that the appropriate reaction would be to take offense. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a mumpsimus is “a stubborn person who insists on making an error in spite of being shown that it is wrong.”

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Thought for the Day: “Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.” — Ambrose Bierce

(c) 2018 King Features Synd., Inc.