Strange BUT TRUE

• Along with henna, old-fashioned hair dye ingredients included the blood of black cows and crushed tadpoles in warm oil.

• While filming “Jailhouse Rock” in 1957, Elvis Presley inhaled his tooth cap as he slid down a pole in the opening dance number. It lodged in his lung and required surgical removal, but aside from a little hoarseness for a few days, the King made a fairly easy recovery.

• Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter getting stuck to the roof of your mouth.

• That little white paper strip coming out of the top of Hershey’s Kisses is called a plume and was originally introduced by the company to distinguish the product from phony knock-off candies.

• The popular kids’ game “Operation” was invented by John Spinello, a sophomore at the University of Illinois in 1962, as part of a class assignment. Sadly, he only made $500 off the game after selling the prototype.

• By the way, in case you’ve ever wondered, the “patient” in “Operation” is named Cavity Sam.

• “Gigi” author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette could only write after she had plucked all the fleas off her cat.

• Many inventions and discoveries have come about through the medium of dreams, including the alternating current generator, the sewing machine, Google, the periodic table and DNA’s double helix spiral form.

• If you had to pick a “standard” pencil color, you’d probably think of a yellow-gold shade — and that’s no accident. When pencils went into mass production in the 1890s, the finest available graphite fillings came from China. Manufacturers wanted everyone to know that they used only the best Chinese graphite, so they painted their pencils yellow, the traditional color of Chinese royalty.

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Thought for the Day: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.