Way out there

• An Italian man named Paolo Fusari was discovered to have been cheating on his wife. In a rage, his wife tried to shoot him, but she missed; the bullet lodged in a nearby oak tree. It seems Fusari got a lucky break there, but that bullet must’ve had his name on it. Thirteen years after the attempted murder, he was trying to remove the tree — using explosives. The blast “shot” the bullet again, this time killing Fusari.

• Another of Ambrose Bierce’s cunningly accurate definitions: “Optimism: The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.” Noted wit Kin Hubbard put in his two cents’ worth on the topic, too: “An optimist is a fellow who believes what is going to be will be postponed.”

• In its early days, the Atlantic City Boardwalk was actually removed every winter after the tourist season.

• Are you a fan of word games? Do you, like uncounted people across the globe, get your daily fix from a newspaper’s crossword puzzle? If so, you have Arthur Wynne to thank: He’s the journalist who invented the addictive little pastime. The very first one appeared in “The New York World” newspaper in 1913. Wynne actually named the puzzle “Word-Cross,” but the man setting the type accidentally changed it to “Cross-Word” — and the name has stuck ever since.

• Jim Nabors — better known as TV character “Gomer Pyle” — once worked as a typist at the United Nations.

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Thought for the Day: “Some people are willing to work only if they can start at the top and work up.” — Dr. Robert Anthony