Trivia

Birthing custom once called for the midwife to put pinches of snuff in the nostrils of an overdue woman. So she’d sneeze. Thus induce delivery.

Pumpkin beer? Early American colonials brewed it.

Q. Delaware’s early gunpowder mills were designed, I’ve read, so if one exploded, it’d blow out over water. How?

A. Three walls of stone, one of wood. The wooden wall faced a creek.

Q. Why do arctic rabbits run upright on their hind legs while other rabbits don’t?

A. They can’t get leverage to hop in new snow, so they’ve improvised genetically.

Modern inventors do their best work between the ages of 34 and 43. So says a scholar who did a computer run on numerous research engineers and their creations. Those inventors may be older by the time their patents pass through the paper mill, but they mostly were of the aforementioned ages when they first came up with their bright ideas.

Q. What proportion of the men and women in the United States drink some sort of alcoholic beverage at least occasionally?

A. Men, 68 percent. Women, 47 percent. Roughly. That’s a federal government estimate.