• The need to stand out among breakfast cereals was so great that Post Toasties decided to use cartoon animals on its boxes and paid its cartoonist $1.5 million in the first year.  Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot to you (although I would draw a helluva lot of animals for that amount), but now consider that this was during the Great Depression. That artist was Walt Disney, and he used the money to build the Disney empire.
• During the Civil War, the Union used hot air balloons, directed by aeronaut Thaddeus Lowe, to spot enemy soldiers and coordinate Federal troop movements.
• On the dashboard of most newer model cars, there is an arrow next to the gas gauge that indicates on which side of the car you will find the gas tank.
• The Strike Team on The Shield was based on the LAPD Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit.
• In the game of paintball, the maximum safe velocity of a shot is 300 feet per second (about 200 miles per hour).  Anything faster can break the skin and result in profanity the likes of which could rip a hole in the ozone layer.  A chronograph is a device used to measure paintball velocity.

It’s important to personal development to strive to learn something every day.  Here are a few of the things I know this week that I didn’t know last week.

• There are these enormous rocks in Death Valley (called sailing stones) that (by means unknown) move across the desert leaving trails in the sand.
• Anthropologist Louis Leakey believes that the foul body odor of humans could be part of early man’s survival.  Predators avoided eating people because they smelled so bad.  I worked with this guy a few years back who proudly refused to use soap or deodorant.  It’s funny that a predator wouldn’t eat him, because he smelled like warm bologna.
• After Philip K. Dick died, some fans created a PKD android that mimicked his mannerisms, sported face recognition software, and quoted the writer’s work.
• No American has technically died of old age since 1951.  That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
• John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987) is part of a thematic film trilogy, including The Thing (1982) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995).