Strange But True: Limbo world record

By Lucie Winborne

• McDonald's is the world's largest toy distributor.

• The ice cream bean is a fruit with a taste very similar to its namesake vanilla ice cream. The tree that the bean grows on is native to the Americas and can reach nearly 100 feet tall, with bean pods up to 6 feet long.

• Anyone who moves to the Villas Las Estrellas, a settlement in Antarctica, must first have their appendix preemptively removed, because the nearest hospital is over 625 miles away.

• The limbo world record is under 6 inches.

• In 1994, West Virginia prison inmate Robert Shepard braided dental floss into a rope as thick as a telephone cord, used it to scale an 18-foot wall, and escaped.

• King Richard II once had to pawn his crown because he was such a spendthrift.

• The first Olympic race took place in 776 B.C. and was won by a chef named Corubus. Moments after receiving his first paycheck, he hired a cook and an agent.

• Swedish athlete Ari Petrof is a National Sauna Champion. He once stayed in a 212 F sauna for five hours and 10 minutes.

• The band called Postal Service took its moniker from the fact that members originally used USPS to send each other music tracks, due to their conflicting schedules.

• Golf balls were made of wood until the 16th century.

• Spam mail got its nickname from the canned meat after a Monty Python skit that made fun of Spam as tasting "horrible and being ubiquitous and inescapable."

Thought for the Day: "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time." -John Lubbock

(c) 2021 King Features Synd., Inc.