Trivia

It took James Watt two days to design the first steam engine. And 10 years to come up with a working model. What happened in that decade between conception and execution - the intricate chain of unreported little drudgeries - that was what gave us steam power.

Q. Bees shed hair, and birds shed feathers. Settle a barroom bet. Do fish shed scales?

A. No, sir. Clink!

Q. The slit in the lower back of a man’s suit coat - what’s it for?

A. Comfort on horseback. Or it was when the antique fashion got started.

Some nearsighted people also suffer from a sort of night-blindness. And 99 out of 100 so afflicted are males.

Traffic signs come in five coded colors. Green permits. Yellow warns. Red prohibits. What do blue and orange signify? Surveytakers put the query to numerous citizens who, even as you and I, had seen such signs repeatedly. Most could not recall: Blue indicates motor services. Orange means construction.

Q. Where can you throw snowballs year-round from one hemisphere to another?

A. On a glacier atop Cayambe, an inactive volcano in Ecuador.

William Henry Harrison, U.S. president briefly, refused to talk politics on Sunday.