The expression "breed like flies" is quite apt. If all the descendants of a single pair of flies survived, they would number over 335 trillion at the end of one summer.
A Peasant a Day
Otto of Bavaria went to his grave firmly convinced he'd murdered hundreds of innocent peasants. In 1886, the line of succession to the Bavarian crown left Otto as the nominal king, but the Prince never assumed the throne.
He'd been declared insane and locked in a room by his family for the previous 14 years. There the Mad Prince carried on a spirited repartee with the ghosts that lived in his dresser drawer, and indulged a singularly gruesome belief:
The murder of a peasant a day would keep the doctor away.
Each day, one of Otto's guards would load the Prince's gun with blanks while another guard donned peasant garb and strolled in a field beside Otto's window. The Prince would appear in the window, take aim, and fire—and the "peasant" would obligingly fall dead at the sound of the shot.
A mathematician once computed the number of permutations possible with a standard 11-by-11-square crossword puzzle—that is, given 122 squares and a 26-letter alphabet, how many different puzzles could be constructed?
The answer was found to be 24,873 plus 222 zeroes. That's higher than the number of seconds that have elapsed since the beginning of the universe!
Lobsters were once so plentiful near Plymouth, Massachusetts, and other parts of New England that they were gathered for use as fertilizer when washed ashore during a storm.
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