If I didn't know it, perhaps you didn't either

  

              Bertrand Russell is reputed to have said, "There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." Useless or not depends on the reader, wouldn't you say? I'm bad (or good, depending) about jotting down items and information that is new--or news--to me. How about I share some of those things with you? I'll have no comments or opinion, just facts.

            * Early cameras produced photographs with great depth of field, revealing each pore, hair and blemish. - David Brooks' column, Arkansas Democrat- Gazette, 98/5).

            * Chiasmus = the use of two clauses in a sentence in reversed order to create an inverse parallel. An example from Frederick Douglass: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." - (Ibid).

            * Knives are the most common murder weapon in Britain, which has strict gun-control laws. - J. Lawless & D. Kirka, Associated Press/ AD-G (8/5).

            * America's oldest post office is in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, with about 4,000 residents. The post offce is 200 years old. In the News, AD-G, (8/5).

            * Two-point-two million Americans are behind bars, and half of them are there for drug-related offenses, according to the White House. - F. Lockwood, AD-G, (8.4).

            * Dubai International is . . . the Mideast's busiest airport and is the world's busiest air hub in terms of international passenger traffic. In 2015, it handled "some 78 million passengers . . ." - A. Schreck, AP, (8/4).

            * A definition of memoir: "[T]o provide an intimate and stationary narrator beside us on the couch . . . reflecting on what s/he sees now, in the long view, that is more informed than what s/he could see at the time." - N. Kusz, New York Times Book Review, (3.8. '15, in a review of Girl in the Dark.)

            * There are 50+ Muslim-majority nations in the world. - B. R. Gitz, AD-G, (8.1)

            * Women have been running for president ever since Victoria Woodhull was nominated by the National Reform Convention in New York in 1872. Ineligible because she was under 35 . . . she attracted considerable attention, but no votes. - Cokie Roberts, writing in The Saline Courier, (7.29, 2016)

            * In 1884, Belva Lockwood, the first woman to practice law before the Supreme Court, was nominated for the Equal Rights Party, receiving 5,000 ballots cast by stalwart men. Not until 1964 - after the 1920 passage of suffrage--did another woman, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, enter the presidential race. She ran against the "Four Horsemen of Calumny: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear." She took on bully Joe McCarthy while the GOP men quivered "in their boots." In 1972, Shirley Chisholm ran, but G. McGovern won the nomination - (Ibid)

            See you anon.