Strange But True: Baker on the Titanic

By Lucie Winborne

• In Birmingham, England, 2.5 million Mills & Boon books were pulped to create the top layer of the M6 toll road.

• A dog that had been kicked by a driver returned with a bunch of its friends and proceeded to trash the man's car, chewing up the fenders and wipers.

• Charles Joughin, the chief baker on the Titanic, allegedly treaded water for two hours before being rescued from the sunken vessel. He later claimed that the copious amounts of whiskey he consumed before the ship went down kept his body warm enough to survive the subfreezing ocean temperature.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger once eloquently said: "I love Thanksgiving turkey. It's the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts."

• Alcatraz holds an annual Indigenous Peoples' Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering, also known as Unthanksgiving Day, to commemorate the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz and to protest the colonialist history of Thanksgiving.

• Instead of saying something like "the cat's pajamas" or "the bee's knees," the French say "the baby Jesus in velvet shorts."

• The red parasol moss Splachnum rubrum grows only on moose poop.

• In 2013, an American man named Ashrita Furman took the title of "the most bananas sliced with a sword on a slackline in one minute" by slicing 36 of them in 60 seconds.

• Some birds change the size of their brain every winter.

• In the 1970s, the NFL team now called the Seattle Seahawks opened a competition in which the public could suggest and vote on a name for them. About 1,750 suggestions and 20,000 entries were received.

• "Subdermatoglyphic" is the longest word without duplicate letters.

Thought for the Day: "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me." -- Steve Jobs

(c) 2025 King Features Synd., Inc.