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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday October 21, 2003
Things you always never wanted to know
Karl Marx once served as a reporter on the New York Herald Tribune (the paper was then known as the New York Tribune). In 1848, he worked in the London office of the Tribune, and his boss, the managing editor, was Richard Henry Dana, who became world-famous as author of "Two Years Before the Mast."
Tobacco is a food. Though hazardous if smoked, its leaves contain a number of nutritional substances that can sustain life for a time if no other food is available.
No one has ever been able to domesticate the African elephant. Only the Indian elephant can be trained by men.
A bird "chews" with its stomach. Since most birds do not have teeth, a bird routinely swallows small pebbles and gravel. These grits become vigorously agitated in the bird's stomach and serve to grind food as it passes through the digestive system.
The Black Plague killed so many people in the French city of Avignon in the 14th century that Pope Clement was obliged to consecrate the entire Rhone River so that bodies could be thrown into it en masse for group burials.
It was the style among 18th-century Englishmen to wear pantaloons so tight they had to be hung on special pegs that held them open, allowing the wearer to jump down into them. This was the only way fashionable gentlemen could get their trousers to fit properly.
A mature, well-established termite colony with as many as 60,000 members will eat only about one-fifth of an ounce of wood a day.
From ancient times until the 19th century in China, long fingernails were considered a mark of great beauty and, for members of the scholar-ruling class, a symbol of distinction indicating that they never worked with their hands. To protect their nails ÷ which were sometimes more than 2 inches long ÷ from cracking, both men and women attached special silver or gold covers to them. They wore these protective shields even when they slept.
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