Trivia

Q. In the jargon of alcoholism, what’s a “dry drunk”?

A. A temporary spate of nervous tension, disordered emotion, and sometimes unreasonable thought in a former drinker.

Can you refute the claim that horses so dislike the smell of camels they won’t stay with them in the same stable, corral, even pasture?

Don’t buy a cantaloupe with a torn stem. That means it was picked when immature. So advises a household hinter.

If owls didn’t have feathers on their feet, they couldn’t swoop down on their prey so silently.

Ancient Romans of the well-to-do variety thought it wise to send their infants to shepherds to be nursed in the clean mountain air. But when they tried to retrieve their babies, the shepherds had taken them away. To unknown valleys. Never to be found. The children were turned into herder slaves. The shepherd boy of countless fairy tales could have been just about anybody’s kidnapped child.

What Sir James Barrie said was: “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”

A California leaf-nosed bat can hear a caterpillar’s jaws munch.