Did You Know? (7-27-07)

• Wayne’s World was filmed in two weeks.

• The raised reflective dots in the middle of highways are called Botts dots.

• Samuel Clemens’ pseudonym “Mark Twain” was the nickname of a riverboat pilot about whom Clemens wrote a needless nasty satirical piece. Apparently, Clemens felt guilt later and adopted the name as a nom de plume as some sort of expiation.

• Every time you lick a stamp, you’re consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

• The derivation of the word trivia comes from the Latin “tri-” + “via”, which means three streets. This is because in ancient times, at an intersection of three streeets in Rome (or some other Italian place), they would have a type of kiosk where ancillary information was listed. You might be interested in it, you might not, hence they were bits of “trivia.”