Strange BUT TRUE

• It was French playwright and actor Louis Verneuil who made the following sage observation: “The prime purpose of eloquence is to keep other people from talking.”

• With only two known to exist, the rarest U.S. postage stamp is an 1868 1-cent Benjamin Franklin Z-Grill, so called because of the shape that was impressed into the stamp. One of the Z-Grills is in the collection of the New York Public Library, and the other was sold in 1998 for $935,000. That's not the end of the story, though; in 2005, the same stamp was traded for a block of stamps valued at $3 million.

• The year 1828 was a sad one for winemakers. For unknown reasons, 80 percent of the bottles of Champagne bottled that year exploded.

• There is a law on the books in Maine that prohibits having your shoes untied in public. I assume that one is not much enforced.

• In 2002, in an effort to be more environmentally friendly, Ireland decided to try to reduce the use of plastic grocery bags by levying a 15-cent tax on each one. It worked, too — use of the bags dropped by 95 percent.

• Sir Christopher Wren, who designed the famous London landmark St. Paul's Cathedral, was an astronomer, not an architect. His other achievements included developing a method for calculating eclipses and devising a way to measure the rings of Saturn.

• Back in 1935, the owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball team predicted that night games were “just a fad.” He wasn't much of a prognosticator, it seems.

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Thought for the Day:

“It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.” — Andre Gide