Strange But True: Lobster's Brain

By Lucie Winborne

• Pixar required its entire staff to take a graduate-level ichthyology (the branch of zoology that studies fish) class to help improve the authenticity of "Finding Nemo."

• Television inventor Philo Farnsworth got the idea for how the medium would work when he was just 14 -and while plowing potatoes. He built the first working prototype seven years later, but died at 64 in relative obscurity due to a series of legal battles.

• A 20-year-old gallon of McDonald's McJordan BBQ Sauce sold for $10,000 simply because it had Michael Jordan's name on it.

• A lobster's brain is located in its throat, its nervous system in its abdomen, its teeth in its stomach, and its kidneys in its head! It also hears using its legs, tastes with its feet, and tends to favor one front limb, meaning it can be right-clawed or left-clawed.

• After the Comstock Laws banned birth control in 1873, the makers of Trojan condoms found a way around that restriction by selling the prophylactics as a protection against STDs.

• Queen is the only band in which each member individually wrote more than one No. 1 hit.

• In North Korea, anyone who cuts down trees or starts a forest fire in protected areas could face the death penalty.

• When Joseph Stalin's first wife died, he said: "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died, and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity." He would go on to execute her brother, her sister and her cousin.

• No one actually "won" the war of 1812.

• Chicago was raised over 4 feet with screw jacks in the 19th century in order to install the U.S.'s first sewer system.

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Thought for the Day: "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." -Herman Melville

(c) 2023 King Features Synd., Inc.