Strange BUT TRUE

• It was pop art icon Andy Warhol who made the following sage observation: “It’s the movies that have really been running things in America since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look when you feel about it.”

• Those who study such things say that by the year 2020, more data will be created in a single hour than had been created in the entire world over the 30,000 years leading up to the 21st century.

• A woman in Tennessee was once arrested for biking while intoxicated — she was on a stationary bike at the gym at the time.

• When the Coca-Cola Company first started marketing its product in China, the advertisements used Chinese symbols to spell out the brand’s name phonetically. It was only after the ads had been published that the marketers learned that those symbols spelled out the phrase “bite the wax tadpole.”

• Earthquakes occur at a rate of about one every minute around the world. About eight of those each year are considered to be major, registering above 7.0 on the Richter Scale.

• Velcro came to market in 1957, after a Swiss inventor named George De Mestral spent nearly 10 years developing the idea. His inspiration came to him in 1948 on a hike, when he had difficulty removing tenacious little burrs from his clothes. He reasoned that if he could create synthetic burrs, they could be used as fasteners.

• When Great Britain’s current Queen Elizabeth — then Princess Elizabeth — wed Prince Philip, their wedding cake weighed a whopping 500 pounds.

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Thought for the Day: “I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.” — W. Somerset Maugham