First Posted: 6/26/2014

By Samantha Weaver

* It was civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. who made the following sage observation: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

* In 1811, London became the first city in the world to reach the milestone population of 1 million.

* If you’re like one-third of American men, you’d like a shot at hosting “The Tonight Show.”

* You might think that hot dogs are a relatively recent food offering, but you’d be wrong. The first sausages were created more than 3,500 years ago when ancient Babylonians began stuffing spiced meat into the intestines of animals.

* If you hear the word “Bilbo” you might think of a famously adventurous hobbit, but a bilbo also is a finely tempered Spanish sword.

* Elvis Presley reportedly was worth $10 million when he died in 1977.

* In Western medicine in the 19th century, experts believed in a phenomenon called “maternal impressions,” which posited that what a pregnant woman looked at could influence the appearance of her child. This belief set off a rush of pregnant Parisian women heading to the Louvre to gaze at the lovely artworks, hoping to give birth to attractive babies.

* If you were at a certain street corner in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on a certain day in 1962, you would have seen a startling thing: After plunging through the atmosphere, a 21-pound chunk of the Soviet Sputnik IV spacecraft made impact at the corner of Park Street and North 8th Street.

* Half of first-time marriages in Kentucky involve teenagers.

* Those who study such things say that after Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride, he billed the Massachusetts state house 10 pounds, 4 shillings to cover his expenses.

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Thought for the day: “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.” — Paul Erdos