Strange BUT TRUE

• It was beloved 20th-century English novelist, journalist and critic Eric Arthur Blair — better known as George Orwell — who made the following sage observation: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”

• In August of last year, Charles City, Iowa, saw an overthe-top display of irony when a local bar named DeRailed was struck by — you guessed it — a derailed train car.

• Thanks to Peter Jackson’s films, you’re probably familiar with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series, even if you haven’t read the books. There’s been quite a lot of scholarship about the novels. Most of the research focuses on literary analysis and historical analogies, and understandably so; a work of fantasy doesn’t seem to lend itself to scientific analysis. However, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics recently published an article titled, “Simply Walking into Mordor: How Much Lembas Would the Fellowship Have Needed?” In it, Skye Rosetti and Krisho Manaharan make public their calculations of the caloric intake that would have been necessary for the Fellowship to walk 92 days to Mordor: pre- cisely 1,780,214.59.

• A survey from retailer Long Tall Sally found that 40 percent of American women own shoes that they know they can’t walk in, but wear them anyway. The average woman claims she can last two hours in painful shoes.

• You probably know that “fuzz” has been a common slang term for police, but did you ever wonder why? It began in the United Kingdom, where police officers in London sometimes wore fuzzy hats.

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Thought for the Day:

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” — William J. Clinton