Scrabble scramble

* It was W.C. Fields who made the following observation: "Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one."

* Those who play the word game Scrabble (and some others) may realize that the most frequently used letter in the English language is "e," and a few may even be aware that No. 2 and No. 3 are "t" and "a," respectively. Hardly anyone knows the full ranking, though. So, for your enlightenment, here is the entire alphabet in order of how often each letter is used in English: etadinshrdlucmpfywgbvkjxzq.

* Experts on feline anatomy say that a normal cat has 230 bones in its body, but it doesn't have a collarbone.

* The longest regularly scheduled, nonstop commercial airline flight in the world is 18 hours long, from Newark, N.J., to the island nation of Singapore in Southeast Asia.

* To date, no president of the United States has been an only child.

* Visiting the Grand Canyon is something every American should do at least once in his or her life, but there are a couple of things that should be kept in mind when making the trip. If you go hiking and get into dire straits, an emergency rescue will cost in the neighborhood of $2,000. Also, an average of five people fall to their deaths in the Grand Canyon every year.

* Pretty much everyone has wisdom teeth -- at least until some dentist removes them -- but they're not known as wisdom teeth everywhere. In Romania, they're called "mind teeth," in Turkey they're known as "20-year teeth," in Korea they're called "love teeth," and in Japan they're referred to as "unknown-to-parent teeth."

Thought for the Day: "The hardest thing to understand is why we can understand anything at all."

-- Albert Einstein