Trivia

Native to southeast Asia is a plant called the colocasia that sheds water profusely from its leaves and intermittently trembles violently for causes still unclear.

Q. Which is heavier - a cubic foot of aluminum or a cubic foot of concrete?

A. Aluminum. It weighs 168.5 pounds. Concrete, 145 pounds.

Female penguins prefer fat males who look as though they’re able to incubate a newly laid egg for weeks without starving to death.

Suicide rate among alcoholics is reported to run 58 times higher than the national average. Statistics vary, but one set suggests a third of the people who take their own lives have suffered the profound liquor experience.

A column of air one-inch square and 600 miles high weighs about twice as much as the average newborn human baby.

“A woman who doesn’t know how to flirt is like a rose without a fragrance.” That, too, is in our Love and War man’s file folder, waiting for a label.

Q. Where do the people of Venice, the city of canals, bury their dead?

A. First, on the cemetery island of San Michele. Then a decade or so later, the older remains are moved to an ossuary farther seaward.