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her.
    Fox Television forbids actor Dan Castellaneta from doing his Homer Simpson voice in public.
    Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor had to spend several months under house arrest in 2009. Why? His contract stipulated that he couldn’t go out in public and reveal his “tough-guy” look for a movie he was filming.
    In 1987, Charlie Kerfeld signed a contract to pitch for the Houston Astros…with two stipulations: he wanted to be paid a salary of $110,037.37 (to honor his #37 jersey), and he wanted 37 boxes of orange Jell-O.

Pollution
    The average car releases one pound of pollutants for every 25 miles it drives. But…
    …A midsize car in the 1960s emitted 20 times more pollution than a brand-new midsize car emits today.
    Colorado has traffic cones with sensors that can measure the amount of air pollution cars give off.
    It takes just one gallon of used motor oil to pollute a million gallons of fresh water—an entire year’s supply of drinking water for 50 people.
    A house produces twice as many polluting greenhouse gases as the average car.
    The Amazon rain forest produces more than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen.
    Tasmania, an island state off the coast of Australia, has the world’s cleanest air.
    Bad news: indoor pollution can be 25 times more toxic than outdoor pollution. Worse news: most people spend nearly 90 percent of their time inside.
    In just one Coastal Cleanup Day, beach lovers collected 338,876 cigarette butts from California beaches.
    According to the World Health Organization, the air in Cairo, Egypt, is so polluted that breathing it is like smoking 20 cigarettes a day.
    Every month, Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild every commercial airplane in the country.
    Disposable diapers take up about 1 percent of the space in U.S. landfills, and require at least 250 years to decompose.
    Americans use more than 2 million plastic bottles an hour.

Canadian Firsts
    First person to walk across Canada: John Hugh Gillis, in 1906. It took him nine months to walk from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Vancouver, British Columbia.
    Martin Frobisher, an English explorer, held Canada’s first Thanksgiving in 1578 to celebrate surviving the long trip from England to Newfoundland.
    Canada received the world’s first transatlantic wireless message. In 1901, using a kite as an antenna, an operator in Cornwall, England, sent a message to inventor Guglielmo Marconi in Newfoundland.
    In 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson of Toronto was the first person to be treated successfully for diabetes. His doctors, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, invented insulin the year before.
    Auyuittuq National Park in Nunavut is the oldest park in the world to lie inside the Arctic Circle.
    First city in North America to be put on the UNESCO World Heritage list: Quebec City.
    World’s first surviving (and only identical female) quintuplets: Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie, and Yvonne Dionne, born in Ontario in 1934.

Patron Saint Of…
    Mad Dogs…Domingo of Silos
    Dumbness…Drogo
    Editors…John Bosco
    Blackbirds…Kevin of Glendalough
    Country girls…Germaine Cousin
    Air crews…Joseph of Cupertino
    Arm pain…Amalburga
    Eczema…Anthony the Abbot
    Holy wafer bakers…Honorius of Amiens
    Button makers…Louis IX
    Children learning to talk…Zeno of Verona
    Disappointing children…Louise de Marillac
    Dentists…Apollonia
    Murderers…Caedwalla
    Relief from pestilence…Roch
    Grave diggers…Barbara
    Wandering musicians…Julian the Hospitaller
    Hairdressers…Cosmas
    Race relations…Martin de Porres
    Lions…Mark the Apostle
    Old maids…Catherine of Alexandria
    School principals…John Baptist de La Salle
    Rope braiders…Paul the Apostle
    Unjustly lost lawsuits…Nicholas of Myra
    Actresses…Pelagia the Penitent (The Beardless Hermit)

Welcome to California
    California boasts the highest (Mount Whitney) and lowest (Death Valley) points in the contiguous United States.
    The state’s vineyards produce more than 17 million