Strange BUT TRUE

• It was 18th-century American novelist and poet Herman Melville who made the following sage observation: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”

• Those who study such things say that the three subjects that spark the most arguments in a marriage are money, children and driving. Of course, any couple that has had to figure out a teenager’s auto insurance costs already

knows that.

• Dogs can be xenophobic, too — those are the pups that are afraid of strangers.

• You’ve heard of standing desks, right? These work surfaces — which are designed to allow people to stand rather than sit while accomplishing their tasks — have become quite popular in recent years. Standing desks are not a new invention, however; they reportedly were used by such notable historical figures as Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Winston Churchill.

• According to scientists, time can be measured more accurately than length.

• If you’re sick of naysayers, you might want to try becoming a yeasayer for a day. Yep, that’s a word — it refers to a person with

a confident and positive outlook. (Note: It also can mean a yes-man — someone who agrees uncritically with others — but let’s be confident and go with the positive definition.)

• It’s been reported that 16th-century English theologian John Wesley, founder of Methodism, never ate an evening meal.

Thought for the Day:

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.”