Trivia

Some laws are hard to repeal. Take that old one in Kentucky that requires every citizen in the state to take a bath at least once a year. No legislator wants to stand up and shout, People ought not be forced to do that! It remains on the books.

Russians refer to the small states around them with a term that translates the “near abroad.”

The first California condor hatched in captivity - at the San Diego Zoo in 1983 - was fed by a keeper manipulating a condor hand puppet.

Q. Did the various bubonic plagues really cut the world’s population in half?

A. That has been conjectured. But nobody really knows.

Men wore feathers long before women did, according to those who study such matters.

Pollsters say 44 percent of the people reuse aluminum foil.

Q. Aren’t the weasel and the ermine related?

A. Not just related, they’re the same animal. Summer dark-coated weasel, winter white-coated ermine.

The six-pound bird that lays a one-pound egg is the mother kiwi. She carries it for 34 days, then carries another. The father kiwi doesn’t have it all that easy, either. He sits on the two eggs for 90 days. And broods. In every sense of the word, I imagine.