First Posted: 3/6/2014
By Samantha Weaver
* It was President John F. Kennedy who made the following sage observation: “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
* If you’re planning a trip to Kentucky anytime soon, you’d better keep a close rein on your interactions with strangers. It seems that flirting there is illegal and could get you 30 days in jail.
* If you’re like me, social situations can be a nightmare of trying — and usually failing — to remember the names of all your new acquaintances. The next time you find yourself struggling to name the person you’re conversing with, you can always segue into this interesting tidbit: The inability to remember names is technically known as anomia.
* Those who study such things claim that more Jell-O is eaten in Utah than anywhere else in the world.
* W.H. Auden was already a celebrated poet when he left Great Britain for America in 1939. His admirers on the other side of the Atlantic, therefore, may have been surprised that when he arrived in the U.S. he moved into a run-down house in Brooklyn Heights with roommates ranging from novelist Carson McCullers to composer Benjamin Britten to stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.
* The state of Colorado is named (unsurprisingly) after the Colorado River. In Spanish the word means “reddish,” a reference to the appearance of the water in some places.
* According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 21 percent of all people living in America speak a language other than English at home. While Spanish is the most frequently spoken after English, several Chinese languages, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese and German are each spoken in more than a million households across the country.
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Thought for the day: “Dogma is the sacrifice of wisdom to consistency.” — Lewis Perelman
