Trivia

For those who eat in the dining room, those few, design experts say you can encourage harmony at meals if you decorate the walls of that antique arena with the color peach.

There’s a maternity shop in Dallas named “Daddy Did It.”

Q. Where’d we get the expression, “For Pete’s sake!”?

A. It first alluded to St. Peter, which itself was a substitute for a higher name-in-vain epithet.

List croquet as the first outdoor game in which women competed on equal terms with men.

Middle names were actually forbidden by law in some parts of early New England.

Q. I can’t find Fort Atkinson on my map of Nebraska. …

A. Get an older map. It was Omaha’s original name.

Q. What’s the insect that cooks its food?

A. You mean the Dalmatie ant? It chews grain, forms it into patties, and bakes them in the sun. Pretty close to cooking.

Q. How big is the biggest sort of fish?

A. About the size of a city bus. The whale shark. Maybe 40 feet long at 13 tons.

Even though two-thirds of New Jersey, the Garden State, is farm and forest, it’s statistically more densely populated than Japan. They really jam up in the cities.