Odd laws, other peculiarities

Wed., June 11, 2008

Samantha Weaver King Features Syndicate

•There is a law on the books in Maine that prohibits having your shoes untied in public.

•Carpool lanes are becoming more widespread as big cities across the country try to cope with increasing traffic congestion, and people are coming up with more and more creative ways to take advantage of this fact. When one pregnant Arizona woman was pulled over for driving with no passengers in the carpool lane, she claimed that her unborn child qualified as a passenger.

•There is a museum for almost everything, it seems. In Mount Horeb, Wisc., for instance, there is an entire museum dedicated solely to mustard. At last count, it had more than 3,000 jars of the condiment.

•The company now known as Clorox was originally called the Electro-Alkaline Company.

•If you’re one of those people who suffer from a fear of flying but don’t give a second thought to your daily commute, you might want to consider these statistics: Your odds of dying in plane crash are 1 in 15 million; your odds of dying in an automobile accident are 1 in 237.

•The small Central American country of Costa Rica has more species of mammals and birds than are found in all of the contiguous United States and Canada combined.

Thought for the Day: “Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men.” — Samuel Johnson

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