Trivia

Sat., April 12, 1997

L.M. Boyd Crown Syndicate

Q. Why does the Eisenhower interstate system require one mile in every five to be straight?

A. So those mile-long sections can serve as airstrips in emergencies.

If a baseball rotates 15 times between the mound and home plate, its spin is 1,800 rpm.

Medieval folk ate a lot of pigeons.

Q. Didn’t every Mississippi riverboat have a gambler aboard?

A. Just about. Some steamboat captains held the superstition that it was bad luck to set off without a professional gambler. One such, the most famous of the lot, George Devol of Marietta, Ohio, made his living with cards on the Mississippi for 40 years.

Almost nothing else can grow amid sagebrush.

According to the records at hand, in The Netherlands’ Rotterdam is based a charter boat captain who goes by the name of Skip Towne.

In the late 1800s, Giraud Foster invented those closure snaps for clothing. You might expect to read he was flimflammed out of his patent for a pittance. But no, in 1898, he built a $2.5 million estate on 400 landscaped acres in Lee, Mass., and hired 100 servants to take care of the place.

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