Did you know that when a baby kangaroo is born it is only 20 millimeters long. Helpless as it is, the baby is able to claw its way to mother’s pouch, where it will remain for some months, feeding on its mother’s milk. At six months age, the young kangaroo or joey is about the size of a small puppy. …

Some 56% of people interviewed by Transparency International said their country had become more corrupt. In Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and India more than 50% of people said they had paid a bribe in the past year – many of them paying off the police. Meanwhile, a BBC poll suggests that corruption is the world’s most talked about problem. About one …

No. Captain Blood is a fictional character, the hero of Rafael Sabatini’s novel of piracy on the high seas Captain Blood while Colonel Blood was the real-life rascal who stole the crown jewels from the Tower of London May 9, 1671. He was captured but later pardoned by King Charles II. Rafael Sabatini was born of Italian and English parentage …

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) wrote In a Glass Darkly in which appears the short story Carmilla, who is the vampire. It appeared 25 years before Dracula was published.

French leave primarily means taking leave without permission from work. Some believe it is meant to convey the act of leisurely desertion from a military unit. Being away on leave from one’s post or duties has its roots in the 17th century and does not so much have its origins in cowardice but in a French custom of leaving a …

The first word used to answer the phone was the nautical greeting “ahoy” because the first regular phone system was in the maritime state of Connecticut. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, answered with the Gaelic “hoy”. But it was Thomas Edison’s greeting of “hello,” an exclamation of surprise dating back to the Middle Ages, that caught on, and so we …

Jane Austen completed her first novel in 1797 when she was 22 years old. It was published 16 years later when it appeared as Pride and Prejudice. First Impressions was not her first book to be published for that was Sense and Sensibility, Published in 1811. Jane Austen was born December 15, 1775, at Steventon rectory in Hampshire, the seventh …

Yes, He was Robert MacGregor, the leader of a band of Scottish outlaws. Sir Walter Scott featured him in a heroic role in his popular novel Rob Roy. MacGregor called himself Rob Roy, roy meaning red. Rob Roy had red hair. He was born 1671, in Buchanan parish, Stirlingshire. As a cattle farmer at Balquhidder, he raised a band of …

Surprisingly, the answere is no. There is one breed of dog, the Basenji, which cannot bark. This strange little dog with wrinkles on its cheeks and forehead, perky ears, and a tightly curled tail can make other sounds common to dogs like whines or cries or growls, but it cannot bark. Instead, it can make a sound that other dogs …

The name under which the he wrote his many sea-faring novels was Joseph Conrad. He was born in the Ukraine in Russia on December 6, 1857. His boyhood was passed in Caracow in Poland. There he learned to speak and write French fluently and first began to take a great interest in the sea. At the age of 17 he …