Trivia

Not all audiobooks are sold to the sightless. Market researchers say the biggest group of buyers are truck drivers.

Your history teacher may have told you that John Alden was a coope, aka barrel maker, but may not have told you he was invited to sail on the Mayflower primarily to take special care of the ship’s beer barrels.

In Ireland is a donkey sanctuary, yea, a retirement home for aging donkeys. Head count there at last report: 120.

What you and I call Halloween’s trick or treat was once known in the Appalachians as “Beggars’ Night.”

Q. Where are the world’s most beautiful sunsets?

A. Florida’s west coast has to be a candidate for that distinction. Sunset watching is such a ritual thereabouts that some places - Key West, for example - ask ships to leave the harbor an hour before sundown so they won’t clutter up the view. That’s odd, isn’t it? I thought ships enhanced a view.

The wit Judy Tenuta tosses out this rhetorical query: “Have you ever dated someone because you were too lazy to commit suicide?

Quite a year was 1908. Half of all Americans lived on farms or in towns with fewer than 2,500 people. The University of Missouri opened the first professional school of journalism. And a Swiss chemist named Jacques Edwin Brandenberger invented cellophane.