WE'RE WITH YOU in thinking that $4 is an awfully high price for a gallon of gasoline, but we can think of one everyday liquid that costs more, and that's bottled water. On a recent day we checked in our local supermarket, we found a six-pack of Evian selling for $9.99. That works out to a lofty $6.32 per gallon.
n "Trivia Wanted" Category of the Month: Celebrity Connections. We love discovering unexpected connections between two famous people from unrelated fields. One of our favorites: Pop singer Olivia Newton-John is the granddaughter of German physics Nobelist Max Born. So if you have a thing or two to share, and long to see your name and hometown in newspapers throughout this great land, please let us know.
What was Life like 50 years ago? Article subjects in July 1958 issues of the magazine included "Puppeteer for Moppets" Shari Lewis and the (very short-lived) return to fashion of the men's flat-topped straw hat, a.k.a. "boater." A full-page ad suggested taking a "Cantoneasy kitchen holiday" with the Chun King brand of canned chicken chow mein. Eponym of the week: Augustus D. Juilliard. The son of French-born immigrants, he was born at sea in 1836 while his parents were en route to the United States. He became wealthy in the textile-distribution business, and was a patron of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and an early president of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1924, the trustees of his estate established the music school named for him. Weird Wide Web: Is it really that uninteresting to watch grass grow? Here's your chance to decide for yourself. Visit www.watching-grass-grow.com, and you can view a live webcam feed of a grassy area that's updated every three seconds. Or, for a little extra excitement, you can watch a minute-long movie featuring a full year's worth of it. Word of the week: "Googlewhack." It is a recently coined verb, to type two words into the Google search engine, without quotation marks, and get only one result. The glory derived from such a discovery must by definition be an anonymous one Web-wise, because the posting of it online would cause a second result from a Google search. (Thanks to Peter Gordon of Great Neck, N.Y.) Les Paul and Mary Ford had a minor hit in 1955 with "Magic Melody," which ended with the familiar "shave and a haircut" musical phrase, without the final two notes ("two bits"). After receiving complaints about the omission, Capitol Records released the two-second "Magic Melody Part 2," consisting only of those two notes, which is said to be the shortest recorded tune. Stanley Newman is the editor of the Newsday Crossword. Reach him at StanTrivia@aol.com or www.StanXwords.com.
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