American patriot Thomas Paine narrowly avoided being executed by the French. He fooled the prison guards by painting a cross on his cell door, thus avoiding the guillotine.
When it came time to secede from the union, delegates from Georgia were almost evenly split.
The National Gallery of Art has online audio files of how to pronounce the names of artists (www.nga.gov/education/vgt_pronun.shtm). You can find more Dutch artist names pronounced at www.stanford.edu/~sipma/dr1.MP3. By the way, Van Gogh is pronounced more like “Van Hawk” than “Van Go” or “Van Gock.”
Mick Fleetwood appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation in a fish head.
Only one in 19 men were convicted for the 14,449 rape allegations in the UK last year.
This article appears in November 24 • 2006.