Strange But True: April 25, 2019

* It was American actress, screenwriter and notorious sex symbol Mae West who made the following sage observation: “You only live once. But if you do it right, once is enough.”

* The world’s highest tides are found in the Bay of Fundy, located in Nova Scotia, Canada. There, the difference between high and low tides can be as much as 50 feet.

* If you’re a blood donor, you’re part of a significant minority. In the United States, less than 5 percent of the population donates blood every year.

* The first sound recording ever made was created in 1877 by Thomas Edison. It was a musical selection: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

* Cars weren’t allowed on the island of Bermuda until 1948.

* What’s in a name? Well, a great deal, it would seem — at least according to those trying to make it big in Hollywood. Joan Crawford was born Lucille La Sueur, Roy Rogers was Leonard Slye and Dean Martin was Dino Crocetti. Issur Danielovitch (wisely) changed his name to Kirk Douglas, and Archibald Leach decided he preferred to become famous as Cary Grant.

* Are you a cacographer? You may not be, but if you spend any time at all online you’ve certainly run across a few. A cacographer is someone who can’t quite grasp the rules of spelling.

* Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Boris Pasternak wrote the novel “Doctor Zhivago” (later famously adapted to film). When the book was first published in 1957, in Italy, it earned great acclaim. However, it was decades before Pasternak’s countrymen could legally read it — the book wasn’t allowed to be published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Thought for the Day

“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

-–Oscar Wilde

(c) 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.