Friend, here are some interesting facts you can toss into a really dull conversation.

The reason old-time fire-stations had circular stairways and brass poles is that the horses kept to pull the fire engines - and stabled on the ground floor - kept figuring out how to walk up regular staircases.

A duck's quack doesn't echo - and nobody knows why.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 123,456,789,987,654,321

The term "the whole nine yards" comes from World War II fighter pilots in the Pacific. Ammunition belts for the .50 calibre machine guns in their planes measured twenty-seven feet long when unrolled on the ground for fitting with bullets. If a pilot fired all his ammo on the run, an enemy got "the whole nine yards."

The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English alphabet.

The position of the legs on a memorial park statue tells you how the person died. If the horse has both front legs in the air, its rider died in battle; if one front leg is in the air, the person died from wounds received in battle; if all four legs are in contact with the ground, the person honoured by the statue died of natural causes.

Friend, I certainly hope you find this information interesting. Did you learn anything new? Perhaps you know someone you can impress with one or more of these facts? However, before you get too excited, let me give you the collective term for such facts of information. The word is "trivia."

I suspect that a lot of us are frittering away our lives with the moral and spiritual equivalent of trivia. He's not really a bad person. He's made several million dollars with his drive to succeed - though he has divorced three wives. She's not a criminal. But nobody can work with her on company projects - in spite of the fact that everybody knows she's the brightest person there.

Perhaps, if we find ourselves in such circumstances, we're too much into trivia - success, quotas, money, and awards. And too little into what really matters - people and the God whose image they are created. Who wants this epitaph: "He put in more overtime than anybody"?

Friend, as you go through life try to enjoy your achievements and their rewards. But don't major in trivia! Because the real stuff of living is people - and learning to love them.

Today we want to encourage you to make some positive plans for joy and laughter, love and family, growing older and retirement, so that you might accomplish your life objectives. To help you achieve this, we'd like to offer you a FREE pamphlet that provides you with eight important decisions which will help you experience real success. To receive your copy, just write to A BETTER LIFE and ask for "THE SUCCESS PLAN." Our address is: P.O. Box 1540, Albany WA 6331 or Email: abl-alb@omninet.net.au