Strange But True: 1,000-year-old corpse

By Lucie Winborne

• According to Cunningham's Law, the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to pose the wrong answer.

• Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong once asked President Richard Nixon to carry his bags through customs for him because Armstrong was "an old man." We feel pretty sure Nixon wasn't aware the bags contained marijuana.

• In 2015, the 1,000-year-old corpse of a Buddhist monk was discovered inside an ancient statue of Buddha.

• Never mind Freddy Krueger's mutilated face and clawed glove -- Wes Craven designed his red-and-green-striped sweater after he read in Scientific American that the human eye has difficulty recognizing those particular shades. Therefore, just looking at his pullover is subliminally unsettling!

• The first item sold on eBay, for $14.83, was a broken laser pointer, to someone who kept a collection of broken laser pointers.

• Costa Rica has the world's only sloth orphanage.

• During the Apollo 12 mission, a 2 1/2-ton piece of the lunar module was experimentally crashed onto the surface of the moon, with a quite unexpected result: The moon "rang like a bell" for nearly an hour.

• Dockers recently increased the size of their coin pockets to accommodate the growing size of smartphones.

• In 1999, 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed was making up to $74,000 a day in the stock market by using internet message boards to manipulate prices. The government eventually caught up with him, but he was still able to keep half a million dollars of his gains.

• Vending machines kill more people per year than sharks.

• Pork was once used in Spain during the Inquisition to show that one wasn't Jewish or Muslim.

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Thought for the Day: "Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." -- Franklin P. Jones

(c) 2023 King Features Synd., Inc.