"The Art of Looking Sideways"

[fiefoe]

Trivia fans, drop whatever is in your hand and prepare to swoon. But do bring along a grain of salt as well.

• A similar atavistic visitation was Caesar's war horse, and Alexander the Great's some 200 years before. Both steeds had toes instead of hooves.
• In 1857 naturalist Gerard Kreff on an expedition in the Australian outback caught two rare bandicoots. Desperately hungry, he ate them. They were, he later discovered, the last pair.
  
• For Polynesian navigators.. "the most sensitive balance was a man's testicles."
• Gainsborough sometimes worked on his larger paintings with a six-foot brush made from a fishing rod.
  
• The elephant's trunk contains 60,000 muscles.
• Giraffes only sleep for five minutes every 24 hours.
  
• 'Nitwit' is an early American expression concocted from the Dutch 'Ik njet weet' ['I don't know'].
• The first cloned sheep was named after Dolly Parton as her cells were extracted from mammary tissue.
  
• 'Field and Stream's review of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover': Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate.
• Trilobites, crustacean-like creatures that inhabited the oceans for 300 million years, had eyes made of crystal - or to be more precise calcite. The same stuff as the white cliffs of Dover.

Trivia make good analogies:
__ To participate illusions have to be translatable. As George Balanchine confessed, in no way could he depict his mother-in-law through dance.
__ Like a genuine panama hat which can be rolled up and passed through a wedding ring.

?? Like the Chinese courtesan who covered herself with a thin layer of grain and then let a hungry duck eat away until her charms were revealed.
?? Lady Caroline Lamb, in the embraces of her unattractive husband, 'Oh, to be in England now that April's there.' {A cursory search points to Robert Browning instead, who's quite junior to Lady L.}

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