Strange but true

*During the Great Fire of New Orleans in 1788, priests refused to allow church bells to be rung as fire alarms because it was Good Friday. As a result, 856 buildings burned during the conflagration.

* Ancient Egyptians believed that men menstruated too and that blood in men's urine and stool was a positive sign of fertility. Little did they know that parasitic worms were the likely cause.

* It would take less than six months to get to the moon by car at 60 mph.

* It's not every day that a man in love demonstrates his affection by holding a funeral, but future president Ulysses S. Grant wasn't every man. When his future wife Julia's pet canary died, he painstakingly fashioned a small coffin for it, which he painted yellow, then summoned eight of his fellow military officers to Julia's house, where he conducted a service for the bird.

* Babe Ruth once said he knew he didn't swing hard enough if "a little poop didn't come out."

* August Rodin's work "The Age of Bronze" was so realistic that some people thought he'd actually sacrificed a real person inside the cast.

* English poet Lord Byron was a student at Cambridge University when he took issue with the ban on keeping dogs as pets, so he came up with a unique way of getting back at the school: Since there was no prohibition in the fine print against bears on campus (probably because they'd never had a pupil quite like Byron before), he not only found a bear to keep as a pet, but also took it for walks around the grounds on a leash.

* Despite being raised and identifying as Jewish, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen spent five years in seclusion at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996.

*** Thought for the Day: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." Mark Twain

(c) 2020 King Features Synd., Inc.