Here's a short quiz to test your brainpower. You'll find the answers below.

1. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn't been cut in a any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?
2. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters"dw". They are all common. Name two of them.
3. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar, Can you name half of them?
4. Where are the lakes that are referred to in the "Los Angeles Lakers"?
5. It's the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked or in any other form but fresh. What is it?

Answers
1. The pear grew inside the bottle. The bottles are placed over pear buds when they are small, and are wired in place on the tree. The bottle is left in place for the whole growing season. When the pears are ripe, they are snipped off at the stems.
2. Dwarf, dwell, and dwindle.
3. Period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, quotation mark, brackets, parenthesis, braces, ellipses.
4. In Minnesota. The team was originally known as the Minneapolis Lakers and kept the name when they moved west.
5. Lettuce.

Virus Medicine

Last spring, Melissa and her friends showed us how disruptive computer viruses can be. To keep you computer safe from such invitations, follow these helpful tips:

• Don't take e-mail from strangers. Although viruses can't invade your computer just by opening an attachment. Unless you know where the attachment came from, don't open it.
• Be careful when downloading flies from the Internet. Most reliable sites will inform you that the files have been checked for viruses. If you don't see such an assurance, download the file onto a floppy disk and then check the disk for signs of virus.
• Make sure everyone in your office or family follows the same safety precautions.
• Scan all floppies for viruses. You're liable to infect your home computer if you take an infected disk home from the office -or vice versa.
• Back up your files regularly.
• Keep your anti-virus software updated. New viruses are constantly created, so your software needs to stay abreast.

Time Wasters

In the age of time management, it's almost bizarre that we could still waste time and resources. Here are ways we do:

• Executives waste the equivalent of approximately six weeks a year trying to find things.
• Business people have up to 170 interactions each day, through phone calls, e-mail or hallway conversations,.
• Even though the '90s was to mark the arrival of the paperless workplace, office paper use has risen by 66%.

--Women Today magazine

Bumper Snickers...

Here a few we have recently seen around town:

• CAUTION: I drive just like you!
• If you lived in your car,you'd be home by now.
• I'm an imbecile and I vote.
• All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.
• Help stamp out and eradicate superfluous redundancy.
• I used to be indecisive, now I'm not sure.
• What if there were no hypothetical questions?

If there are only two persons on the elevator, they usually lean against the walls of the elevator. If four persons board the elevator, the four corners are usually occupied. However, when the population reaches five or six persons everyone begin to obey more complex rules of elevator etiquette. It is almost like a ritualistic dance: They all turn to face the door. "They get taller and thinner," as psychologist Layne Longfellow describes it.

"Arms and handbags and briefcases hang down in front of the body. By the way, that called the The Fig Leaf Position. They never stand so close that their bodies touch in any way unless the elevator is crowded, and then they touch only at the shoulder or lightly against the upper arm. Also, there is a tendency to look upward at the illuminated door indicator. If anyone speaks, it is definitely sotto Voce."

If you doubt this is standard (almost sacred) elevator behavior, then try this: Next time you walk into a crowded elevator, don't turn around and face the door. Instead just stand there facing the others. If you want to create even more tension, grin. Very likely the other passengers will glare back, and look frightened. One person who tried this experiment actually heard someone in the back of the elevator whisper "Call 911, We've got a real weirdo Here."

-from Gestures
by Roger El Axtell

Can You Top This?

A few of the amazing feats listed in the Guinness Book of World Records:

• Largest Hamburger- On August 5, 1089, attendees of the Outagamie County Fairgrounds in Seymour, Wis., made a 5,520 pound hamburger that was 21 feet in diameter.
• Bubble Blowing - Alan Mackay of Wellington, New Zealand created the largest recorded soap bubble on August 9 1996. It was 105-feet long.
• Biggest Milk Shake - A 4, 333-gallon strawberry milk shake was created on August 18, 1996 by the Age Concern East Cheshire and Lancashire Dairies in Macclesfield, England.
• Largest Crepe - Cooks in Rochdale, England, made and flipped a crepe measuring 49 feet, 3 inches in diameter. It was one-inch deep and weighed 6,614 pounds.
• Frisbee Throwing - Amy Bekken of the United States holds the women's record for maximum flying disc time aloft. On August 1, 1991, she threw a frisbee that stayed in the air for 11.81 seconds.

"Make your commitments to enduring value and institutions-honesty, integrity, trust, confidence, family and other matters of the heart. Go ahead and challenge the status quo, but you must also decide what last--what really counts--what no one can take away from you. These are your values, and -they will accompany you wherever you work and wherever you live."

--Jack De Rehm