Things you always never wanted to know

· Cows have four stomachs. Often when a calf is born, the farmer will make it swallow a magnet. That is to attract the various nails, staples, tacks, bits of wire and so on that the cow may ingest while grazing. (That odd hunger is known as "hardware disease.") When the animal is slaughtered, the butcher will remove the magnet along with the metallic debris, and sell the mass of iron and steel for scrap.

· There is a house in Rockport, Mass., built entirely of newspaper. The Paper House at Pigeon Cove, as it is called, is made of 215 layers of newspaper.

· The horns protruding from the head of the famous statue of Moses by Michelangelo were a mistake. It's true that the translated Bible describes Moses as having horns coming from his head. That, however, was an error on the part of the translators. In Hebrew, the words for "horn" and "ray of light" are spelled identically. The translators misinterpreted "ray" for "horn," and thus Moses is often portrayed in western art looking like a devil.

· Up to the age of 6 or 7 months, a child can breathe and swallow at the same time. An adult cannot do this. (Try it.)

· Flamingos are not

naturally pink. They get their color from their food, tiny blue-green algae that turn pink during digestion.

· The sound heard when holding a seashell the ear does not come from the shell itself. It's the echo of the blood pulsing in the listener's own ear.

· While seven men in 100 have some form of color blindness, only one woman in 1,000 suffers from it. The most common form of color blindness is the red-green deficiency.

· Of all professionals in the United States, journalists are credited with having the largest vocabulary: approximately 20,000 words. Clergymen, lawyers and doctors each have about 15,000 words at their disposal. Skilled workers who have not had a college education know between 5,000 and 7,000 words, and farm laborers know about 1,600.