It’s a funny world in which we live

•It was once illegal in Connecticut for a woman to appear in public with bare arms.

•Crime novelist Sue Grafton has made a wildly successful career out of a fantasy she never followed through on. During an acrimonious custody battle, she imagined poisoning her ex-husband to get him out of the way. She knew she could never commit murder, but she said “the next best thing was to put it in a book and get paid for it.” The result was “A Is for Alibi,” which was published in 1982, and she’s written a new novel every year since then.

•I’d be willing to bet that Lane Olinghouse had children. That was who once said, “The quickest way for a parent to get a child’s attention is to sit down and look comfortable.”

•Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus advocated the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. He also thought the sun was about 2 feet in diameter.

•When it feels threatened, the three-banded armadillo will curl itself into a ball, with its tough hide on the outside. It’s been reported that the armadillo curls into such a perfect ball, in fact, that one could bowl a strike with it. The report offers no word on where the finger holes are, though.

•A Belgian man named Franz Heinan was known as a health nut – he used to lecture his friends about their poor eating habits. It was perhaps poetic justice, then, when he died after choking on a handful of vitamins.

•If you have even a single ounce of fleas, you’re in trouble: That’s about 80,000 of the annoying little critters.

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Thought for the Day: “Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.” – Robert Louis Stevenson