Strange But True: Camels have straight spines

By Lucie Winborne

• If all the stars in the Milky Way were grains of salt, they’d fill an Olympic-size swimming pool.

• The Louvre museum in Paris was originally built as a fortress to repel Vikings.

• In 1887, a group of men added Susanna Madora Salter of Argonia, Kansas, to a mayoral ballot as a prank intended to embarrass and curtail the influence of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of which she was an officer. Instead, she won over 60% of the vote and became America’s first female mayor.

• Olympic medalist Mark Spitz was famed for his large mustache in an era when swimmers shaved their bodies to become more hydrodynamic. He once joked to the Russian team’s coach that his mustache helped him swim faster by deflecting water from his mouth and making him more bullet-shaped. The following year, a mustache was sported by every member of the male Russian team.

• Despite their humps, camels have straight spines.

• The first use of the word “Superbowl,” credited to a Chinese writer named Lom Ba Di, dates to the third century.

• In 2008, Chile minted 1.5 million 50-peso coins with a spelling error, only noticing a year later they’d spelled “CHIIE” instead of “CHILE.”

• Honeybee venom has been found to destroy some types of cancer cells.

• There’s a Google map for Mercury, Venus, Earth’s moon, Mars, Pluto, three out of four of Jupiter’s moons, and all but one of the round Saturnian moons.

• Juan Ponce de Leon brought cattle when he landed at Charlotte Harbor in 1521, his second trip to La Florida. When he came under attack, four of his heifers and a bull fled into the scrub, thus introducing cows to America.