Things you always never wanted to know
By running a temperature as many as 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than its surroundings, the feverish skunk cabbage melts it way to the surface of snow.
When the Portuguese historian Joao de Barros wrote "Decadas da Asia," his monumental history of the Portuguese empire, King John III was so pleased he gave him an area of about 130,000 square miles - the whole state of Maranhao in Brazil.
There's an O. Henry bar in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, where the American writer lived for a few months in 1897 while a fugitive from justice, under indictment for embezzling bank funds in Texas. The bar's specialty is a drink called Lost Blend, after one of O. Henry's stories.