Harry's Gang: Accidental discoveries

Sydney J. Harris was a columnist I read as a kid in the Duluth News Tribune. One of my favorite recurring columns was his “Things I Learned En Route to Looking Up Other Things.” I suppose a newspaper columnist, like a personal injury and divorce lawyer like me, is often looking up things and accidentally discovering interesting facts. Here’s some of mine from the past year or so:

• The city of Minneapolis, due to the occupational hazards associated with milling, became a national powerhouse in the artificial limb industry. By the 1890s there were six businesses set up to make prosthetic limbs, and they shipped their products across the county and controlled, by some estimates, 75 percent of the national market in prosthetics.

• Each adult member of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community earned about $84,000 per month from their casino as of 2004. That’s over a million dollars a year.

• A dolphin rests one-half of its brain at a time. One side of their brain sleeps; then it wakes up, giving the other half time to sleep. This allows the dolphin to keep breathing and moving through the water as it sleeps.

• I heard this on WKLK’s music station: There’s a famous song from the hard rock band Nazareth called “Hair of the Dog.” The band is Dutch, so English is not their first language. If you know the song, you know the refrain, and it’s not “Hair of the Dog.” Or is it? “Hair” “Hare” and “Heir” all sound alike. An “heir” of a dog may be a son of a dog. The dog may be female, which has a name not often used in polite company. So the “Heir of a Dog” may also be called a “Son of a B#@*&.” Well, you get the idea.

• Did you know there’s no law against public intoxication in Minnesota? Minnesota Statute 340A.902 — look it up.

• Bert and Ernie, best friends on Sesame Street, are named after characters from the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Bert was the police officer who got punched by George Bailey, and Ernie was the cab driver.

• It’s impossible to sneeze and keep your eyes open.

• A marathon is not 26.2 miles, because that’s the distance between Marathon, Greece and Athens. No, that distance is about 25 miles. After the modern Olympics games were revived, one of the first was held in England. The organizers of the event wanted the long-distance run to start at Windsor Castle, and end in the stadium where the rest of the events were held. That distance was 26.2 miles, which has been used ever since. It’s also, coincidently, the exact distance between my father’s tavern in Two Harbors and Grandma’s Saloon in Duluth. I know this because the first Grandma’s Marathon started in our parking lot back in 1977.

• October is the longest month of the year. Not only does it have 31 days, it also is the start of daylight savings time, giving it one more hour than any other month.

• People have been using varieties of the term “Xmas” as early as Dec. 5, 1902. I know this, because I saw a Duluth Herald newspaper clipping from that date, and Big Duluth (“The Satisfactory Shopping Place”), owned by Williamson and Mendenhall, had a pretty nice ad that states: “Your X-Mas Buying … why not start early this year?” But what struck my friend Nick Schutz is that, back in 1902, Dec. 5 was considered “early” for Christmas shopping.

• The kiwi fruit is not the genetic cross between a banana and a strawberry. If my brother Bill told you that, like he told me once, don’t believe him, like I did. It’s not true.

Pete Radosevich is the publisher of the Pine Knot News community newspaper and an attorney in Esko who hosts the cable access talk show Harry’s Gang on CAT-7. His opinions are his own. Contact him at [email protected].