Strange But True: August 1, 2019

* It was French playwright and actor Louis Verneuil who made the following sage observation: "The prime purpose of eloquence is to keep other people from talking."

* With only two known to exist, the rarest U.S. postage stamp is an 1868 1-cent Benjamin Franklin Z-Grill, so called because of the shape that was impressed into the stamp. One of the Z-Grills is in the collection of the New York Public Library, and the other was sold in 1998 for $935,000. That's not the end of the story, though; in 2005, the same stamp was traded for a block of stamps valued at $3 million.

* The year 1828 was a sad...