Strange But True: Mar. 1, 2018

* It was Danish scholar and critic Georg Brandes who made the following sage observation: “Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.”

* You doubtless know who Thomas Edison was — the American inventor of such things as the light bulb, the phonograph and the motion-picture camera. You never learned that he was blind, though, did you? Of course you didn’t — he wasn’t blind. However, even though he could see, historians say that when he was reading, he preferred Braille to printed text.

* Have you ever heard of a lipogram? It’s a work of writing that deliberately leaves out one or more letters of the alphabet. For instance, in 1939 a man named Ernest Vincent Wright published a 50,000-word novel titled “Gadsby,” in which the letter e was not used once — the longest lipogram in English.

* Those who study such things say that the trunk of an African elephant has more than 60,000 muscles.

* You might be surprised to learn that the White House had a telephone installed before indoor plumbing was.

* I have some bad news for lovers of the snooze button: Experts say that you’re better off not using it. Researchers have found that the last few minutes of sleep are more beneficial if they’re uninterrupted, so it’s better to go ahead and set your alarm for 10 minutes later to begin with.

* A study of prison inmates’ medical files revealed this interesting tidbit: The higher the levels of testosterone in a male inmate, the younger that inmate was when he was first arrested.

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Thought for the Day: “I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that’s ever happened to me has taught me compassion.” — Ellen DeGeneres

(c) 2018 King Features Synd., Inc.