Paris was home of first moving sidewalk

•Paris was the home of the first moving sidewalk — way back in 1900.

•When working with animals in show business, it isn’t always easy to make them do what the director wants them to do, so trainers have come up with various ways to trick the animals. For instance, if you ever see in a movie or on television a dog looking at a picture in a book, you can be sure that it’s not the image that holds its attention; in all likelihood, there’s a fair amount of cheese smeared on the page.

•Before he became a famous painter, Peter Paul Rubens was an ambassador for Belgium.

•According to The New York Times, the most popular bra size in the United States is 36C. Ten years ago, however, the most popular size was 34B. Is the change attributable to the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery? Or is there some other explanation?

•It’s been reported that Scottish actor Sean Connery, of early James Bond fame, believes in reincarnation. It seems that he thinks that in a past life he was a railroad builder in Africa, and that the cause of his death was heavy drinking.

•William Shakespeare holds an almost hallowed place in the canon of English literature today, but he was not always universally revered. Lord Byron said in 1814, “Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales.” Byron may have been an accomplished poet himself, but he was certainly a failure as a prognosticator.

Thought for the Day: “People are still willing to do an honest day’s work. The trouble is they want a week’s pay for it.” — Joey Adams