WEIRD, BIZARRE and UNUSUAL Volume II Excerpts

In Marilyn vos Savant's column 'Ask Marilyn', in a July 2007 Sunday's Parade magazine, she provided a list of questions by readers which were too much fun in themselves to be answered. Examples: (1) "I notice you have the same first name as Marilyn Monroe. Are you two related?" (2) "Do you think daylight-savings time could be contributing to Global warming? The longer we have sunlight, the more it heats the atmosphere." (3) "Who gets to peel all those popcorn shrimp?" (4) "Can a ventriloquist converse with his dentist while his teeth are being worked on?"

The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3 states: The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at lease one Representative. In 1911, Public Law 62-5 was passed limiting the number of members to 433, determined by decennial apportionment, with a provision to add one permanent seat each for Arizona and New Mexico when they were admitted as states. Had this limit not been set, by the year 2000, with a population of 281,421,906, there would've been 9,381 members in the House of Representatives!

Teri Horton, a 70-year-old retired lady trucker, found an abstract painting at a San Bernardino thrift shop, with an asking price of $8. Even though she disliked the painting, her offer of $5 was accepted, so Horton took the painting home, as a gift to a friend. Once home, another friend suggested she have the painting appraised by an art critic, who found it was an original Jackson Pollock painting, worth millions. (Last heard, this lucky woman had turned down an offer from a Saudi Arabian of $9 million, saying her "asking price" was at least $50 million.)

On his 36th birthday, February 23, 1669, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) had a rendezvous inside Westminster Abby, where he kissed the lips of Katherine of Valois. Later, in his diary, Pepys described his encounter with this Queen consort of King Henry V of England, using passionate phrases such as, "I did kiss her mouth," "I did kiss a queene." "I had the upper part of her body in my hands." But, sadly, their relationship was doomed from the start. While it is never polite to ask a woman her age, Katherine received the lusty lips of Pepys exactly twenty days, one month, plus two-hundred and thirty-two years after her death, in 1437.