Just sitting here this morning with three layers of clothes on and my feet still feel like blocks of ice. We decided to turn off the heat two weeks ago to save a few bucks when we thought “Spring had Sprung”, but we should’ve known better. Wrong again. Never let it be said that Maine doesn’t fail to deliver on crappy weather. So here I sit at my computer with my little space heater preparing to supply you with some straight facts you didn’t know you needed to know. Here they are . . .

• The world’s oldest surviving recipe is a formula for making beer. It was discovered outside Baghdad in 1850 on a 3800-year-old Sumerian clay tablet.
• A fetus acquires fingerprints by the end of the first trimester.
• In 2003, the personal fortune of JK Rowling, best-selling British author of the widely popular Harry Potter books, surpassed that of the Queen of England.
• Voltaire, the French philosopher, novelist, and ardent atheist, once held up the Bible and proclaimed, “In 100 years this book will be forgotten, eliminated.” Less than 50 years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society bought his house in order to produce and distribute Bibles.
• You can in fact get cooties. Cooties are lice.

• George Clooney once vowed never to remarry or have children, but Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman each bet $10,000 that he’d be a father by age 40. On Clooney’s 40th birthday (May 6, 2001), the actresses conceded defeat and sent their checks. Clooney returned their money, betting double or nothing that he wouldn’t have any kids before turning 50.
• Cigars are called “stogies” because pioneer drivers of Conestoga covered wagons made in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, preferred the long, cheap cigars available in that region. Over time, “Conestoga” was shortened to “stogie.”
• The term “What in tarnation!” derives from the expression “What in eternal damnation!”
• The percentage of American men who say they’d marry the same woman if they had to do it all over again: 80%. The percentage of American women who say the same: 50%.
• There are 2,598,960 possible hands in Texas Hold ‘Em.
• Lucifer is Latin for “Light Bringer”.

NOW YOU KNOW