Trivia

California dry goods merchant Levi Strauss gave his first “waist-high overalls” an arbitrary stock number of “501.” It took a few generations before the marketers dragged “501” out of the archives to play it in the jeans’ brand name.

How can you call yourself a Baker Street Irregular if you don’t know where Sherlock Holmes kept his tobacco? In a Persian slipper.

Birds sleep about half the time.

You can put an alligator to sleep by rubbing its stomach.

You don’t read much about China’s sandstorms, but they’re dillies, evidently. Report is one sometime back buried 330 miles of railroad track with about 100,000 tons of sand.

Q. How come books printed before 1850 survive while books printed later are crumbling?

A. Earlier paper was alkaline, later paper acid.

Most Christian hymns are in German.

Theodore Roosevelt dearly loved his mother, Martha, and his first wife, Alice. Both died on Feb. 14, 1884. No historian, insofar as I know, has ever been quite able to convey the enormity to Roosevelt of that stunning blow. Who could?

Vince Lombardi also said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”