Strange BUT TRUE

* It was nonviolent Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi who made the following sage observation: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

* In 1905, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, became one of the first people ever to be fined for speeding.

* Appropriately, the patron saint of bankers is St. Meingold.

* Ever wonder how BVDs came to be called that? From the

names of the men who originally manufactured them: Bradley, Voorhies and Day.

* Less than half the people in the world use a spoon, fork and knife to eat. The rest use chopsticks, just a knife or their hands.

* In Babylon 4,000 years ago, it was accepted practice that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and so that time became known as the honey month — what we know today as the honeymoon.

* People who pick chili peppers in Costa Rica have to wear special suits to avoid getting blisters just from coming into contact with them.

* The Pledge of Allegiance was published in 1892 in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World. It didn’t contain the words “under God,” though, until 1954, when they were added by an act of Congress in an attempt to check the creeping advance of “Godless Communism.”

* Abraham Lincoln was the only American president to witness battle firsthand while in office.

* A caterpillar has 4,000 muscles. Thought for the Day: “Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it, and that a very severe one.” — Hannah More