Strange BUT TRUE

• In the 1800s, popcorn was often eaten as a cereal with milk and sugar.

• Players of the video game “Call of Duty” have spent more hours thus engaged than the entire course of human existence.

• There are more than 400 Scottish words for snow.

• The longest surgical procedure in history, in which doctors separated a pair of Nepalese conjoined twins who were born with a shared brain cavity, took place in Singapore in 2001 and lasted 103 hours.

• Cats born in May were once thought to be not just poor rodent killers, but prone to bringing home snakes.

• Valentine’s Day weddings are apparently 18-36% more likely to end in divorce.

• A Harvard study found that a person’s IQ can drop by as much as 13 points when they are under financial stress, due in part to the amount of brain power used to think about such burdens that causes distraction.

• Alexander the Great loved his horse, Bucephalus, so much that when it died in 326 B.C., he named the town of Bucephala for it.

• “Guerrilla grafting” is the illegal process of turning city-maintained sterile fruit trees into fruit producers by splicing compatible branches onto the sterile trees with branches from the fruiting trees.

• When Indian police caught a thief who allegedly stole a gold chain from a woman on the street in Mumbai, the miscreant swallowed the object. An enema was subsequently administered at a hospital, but no results were achieved, until the man was force-fed over 40 bananas — one of the best digestive food aids — after which he was made to clean and disinfect the chain before relinquishing it.

••• Thought for the Day: “Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.” — Danny Kaye