Strange but true
BY SAMANTHAWEAVER

. This may come as a surprise to you -- then again, perhaps it won't -- but if you're like the average person, you forget 80 percent of everything you learn on any given day.

. Americans eat, on average, 350 slices of pizza every second. That's all Americans put together, of course, not on an individual basis.

. It was journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken who made the following sage observation on the state of the relationship between the sexes: "Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier."

. Most people are afraid of snakes (and unjustifiably so, I would say), so it might come as a surprise to you that it doesn't even make the list of top 10 phobias. The No. 1 phobia is the fear of spiders, followed by the fear of social situations and the fear of flying.

. Leonardo da Vinci was a multitalented man -- painter, sculptor, musician, writer, architect, mathematician and, of course, inventor. Despite his many successes, however, it's been reported that his last words were, "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not achieve the quality it should have."

. On the benefits of nature: Researchers studying people who recently had surgery found that patients who had a view of trees had to stay in the hospital for shorter periods of time and used fewer painkillers while they were there.

. Next time you're having a nightmare in which you can't move, in the dream you should try to blink your eyes or wiggle your tongue. Those who claim to be knowledgeable about such things say that will end the paralysis.

***

Thought for the Day: "Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person." -- Mark Twain

(c) 2007 King Features Synd., Inc.