Yesterday’s posting involved bad poetry so today I’ll be moving on to a few usual truths. If you’re lucky you might win a few bar bets using these tidbits of trivia. If you only win one drink, then your efforts in reading this post will have been worth it.

• The custom of men buttoning their clothes from the right and women from the left comes from the fact that men traditionally dressed themselves and were typically right-handed. Women were more often addressed by maids, who preferred to work from their right – the wearer’s left.

• The phrase “last laugh” is derived from the laugh-like sound a bullet shot through the heart sometimes causes an innocent victim to make before death.

• You can form the number 12, 345, 678, 987, 654, 321 by multiplying 111, 111, 111 by 111, 111, 111.

• The “WD” in WD-40 stands for Water Displacement. The “40” came about because it took the creators that many attempts to get the formula correct.

• According to Hollywood lore, silent film actress Norma Talmage started the tradition of stars putting their footprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater when she accidentally stumbled onto the freshly laid sidewalk in front of it in 1927.

• Pepsi-Cola was the first foreign consumer product sold in the former Soviet Union.

• Kissing was once a crime in England. In the mid-1400s, King Henry VI declared it was a disease spreader.

• The San Andreas Fault is slipping about 2 inches per year, which means that Los Angeles will be a suburb of San Francisco in 15 million years.

• The shortest reign of a Portuguese king was 20 minutes. When the royal family was ambushed in February 1908, the king died immediately and his heir, Luis Filipe, died 20 minutes later.

• On Christopher Columbus’s fourth voyage to the New World, he saved the lives of his crew by convincing Jamaican natives that he made the moon disappear during a lunar eclipse in 1504.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.”

Napolean Bonaparte