Trivia

Q. Where do people cure their dead for months in smoke houses?

A. In Papua, New Guinea, that has long been the tradition.

Those experimentalists who like to adventure in hair colors, say: Be careful of red. It’s the hardest dye to remove.

Q. How many women does the average man make love to in his lifetime?

A. “Nine is typical,” say some sex statisticians. No comment, says our Love and War man. He believes a man with an opinion on this matter should gaze fixedly out the window and pretend he didn’t hear the question.

If the moon were 10 times closer, the tides would be 1,000 times higher.

How reliable these historical footnotes are I just don’t know, but they record that one Henri Tragne of Marseille, France, accepted challenges to fight five duels between 1861 and 1878. And that each of his first four opponents fell dead of unknown causes before any shot was fired. And that the fifth opponent did not, but Tragne did.

Q. Where’d we get the old baseball term “doubleheader”?”

A. From the old railroad term “doubleheader” - two engines on one train.

The cocaine kick from one coca leaf of the sort chewed by some South American Indians evidently is not mighty. Experts say it’s about the equivalent of the caffeine in one cup of coffee.

Q. Can you name the only foreign-born wife of a U.S. president?

A. The former Louisa Johnson, research reveals. Wife of John Quincy Adams. She was born in London.

Disciples of Confucius preached duty to family and state. Disciples of Lao-tze pleaded for harmony with nature. “Support of people” vs. “defense of nature.” It’s an old argument, isn’t it?

Makers of both Saab and Volvo reportedly have reinforced the front ends of their new cars to hold up better in collisions with moose.

What Leo Durocher actually say was, “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you an idiot.”

Q. How long did it take the world to get a billion people?

A. From time unremembered to 1800. Significant lagniappe: By 1930 - just 130 years later - it had reached two billion. Then 3.3 billion by 1965.

That word “cyberspace” was coined by science fiction writer William Gibson in his 1984 novel “Necromancer.”

The butterfly bat is so small its tip-to-tip wingspan is only about an inch.

During the American Civil War, historians say, the British sympathized with the Confederacy, the Russians with the Union.