Things you always never wanted to know

· Chocolate was once considered a temptation of the devil. In Central American mountain villages during the eighteenth century, no one under the age of 60 was permitted to drink it, and churchgoers who defied the rule were threatened with excommunication.

· Andrew Jackson, two weeks before the end of his second term as U.S. President, gave a public reception. An enormous cheese weighing 1,400 lbs. had been presented by the dairymen of New York, and the public was invited to help itself. In two hours, the gigantic cheese, four feet in diameter and two feet thick, was demolished.

· Seventy-three parties were on the ballot for an election in Italy in 1968. One was Friends of the Moon, which sported exactly one candidate.

· During the Renaissance, blond hair became so much de rigueur in Venice that a brunette was not to be seen except among the working classes, kind of like today ÷ though I wonder if contemporary blondes, artificial or not, would use "de rigueur" to describe it. Venetian women spent hours dyeing and burnishing their hair until they achieved the harsh metallic glitter that was considered a necessity.

· Nitrous oxide was discovered in 1800, and it was also discovered that you could get "high" off of it, granting the user a giddy, intoxicated feeling and a "releasing of the emotions." People laughed inanely, so it was called "laughing gas." For a while, parties were organized at which people sat around inhaling its fumes.

· A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists.

· The army of the Netherlands is unionized. Overtime pay for KP and for guard duty on the weekend are among the innovations.

· Peter the Great had his wife's lover executed and his head put into a jar of alcohol. She had to keep it in her bedroom.