Trivia

Everybody knows the song classic “As Time Goes By.” How odd it is, therefore, that hardly anybody knows the name of the man who wrote it - Herman Hupfeld.

A horse can’t see up, either.

Earliest of the circus clowns looked like ordinary men, not clowns, as they sang songs and told funny stories. Crowds got bigger. So did the Top. Along came the three-ring show. Nobody could hear the clowns. Even to be seen, they had to dress wildly and paint themselves in a spectacular manner. The clever storytellers departed for other circuits. The costumed mimes took over the circus jobs.

Q. What brand of bicycle was first manufactured in the United States?

A. Columbia. At Westfield, Mass. In 1877. The company is still turning them out.

Two out of five toys sold in America - some Barbies, Mickey Mouse variations and Ninja Turtles among them - come out of China.

A Native American asks and tells: “Do you know how Indians judge the severity of a coming winter? By the size of the white man’s wood pile.”

That South African antelope called the blesbok is almost the color of grape juice.

No state permits its wine retailers to give away corkscrews.

Ask your family baseball authority whether Babe Ruth really wore a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep his head cool. Footnotes say he did. And changed it every two innings.

Phrase tracers contend literary conversationalists, not blue-collar talkers, coined the phrase “out in the sticks” to mean unlovely rural places. Originally, they claim, this was an allusion to mythology’s notion that souls went to Hades by crossing the River Styx. Maybe so; don’t know.

Am told honeybees have hair on their eyes. Can you say they don’t?