How much did the creators of Superman receive when they sold the character to DC Comics?

It’s summer!

The warmest season of the year begins this week. The summer solstice, when daylight is longest, arrived Tuesday. For those keeping score, we enjoy summer until September 22.

That’s the official tally, anyway.

Those who make their living at such things have already said summer began Memorial Day weekend, and it ends Labor Day weekend.

However you slice it, it’s summer!

It’s trivia, too … right now. Have at it …

Did you know …

…chocolate milk was originally sold as medicine? The mixing of chocolate with milk was discovered by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), an British-Irish physician. While in Jamaica, Sloane noticed locals drinking cocoa mixed with water. He tried it and found it “nauseating,” but when he mixed some with milk – which had apparently never occurred to the Jamaicans – it was much more palatable. Sloane brought the “recipe” back to England with him and initially sold it as an over-the-counter medicine. (And no, it doesn’t come from brown cows, either.)

…a Shakespearian play was banned in the Soviet Union? Under the rule of Josef Stalin (1878-1953), the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was banned. Stalin’s reasoning was that Hamlet’s indecisiveness and depression were incompatible with the Soviet Union’s spirit of “optimism, fortitude and clarity.” (Another case of the jokes just writing themselves sometimes.)

…Hershey’s™ chocolate bars can be frozen? Yeah, you probably already knew that. But to prove the point, I invite you to consider this: in 2001, researchers in Antarctica dug up a Hershey’s chocolate bar made in 1937 that was a part of a cache left behind by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd (1888-1957) during his 1939-1941 expedition. Even after being frozen for more than 60 years, the chocolate bar was still edible. (Once it was thawed out, anyway.)

…the patient in the game Operation™ has a name? Sure, you’ve played Operation, the game where you have to remove bones and other things from a poor cartoon guy lying on the operating table – but don’t touch the sides of the incision with your forceps, or his nose lights up and a buzzer sounds and you lose. That fellow has a name. He’s called Cavity Sam. (Quite the appropriate name, don’t you think?)

…the iconic character Superman was sold very cheaply? Originally created in 1933, Superman was the brainchild of two young men, Jerry Siegel (1914-1996) and Joe Shuster (1914-1992). The first “Superman” was a bald villain in a story written by the two in 1933. That story never sold and the character as created was never used again. Later that year, the two created the superhero we all know and love (and sometimes wish was real). Over the next five years Siegel and Shuster tried to find a publisher – Siegel wrote the story and Shuster drew the pictures. In 1938, the character landed at National Periodical Publications, which later became DC Comics. To get the first Superman comic book printed, Siegel and Shuster agreed to sell the character to the publishers for $130, along with a ten-year contract to produce Superman material. The two tried to regain the rights to their creation in 1946, after Superman had become a worldwide comic book phenomenon, but the New York Supreme Court ruled that the original sale was valid. As a result of the lawsuit, DC stopped running the credit line recognizing the two as having created the character. The two men, and their families, would try several times over the next few decades to regain the rights, but without success. It wasn’t until 1975, when Siegel started a publicity campaign protesting the treatment of him and Shuster by DC, that the negative publicity finally caused the comic book publisher to notice. DC’s parent company, Warner Communications, ordered the “Created By” credit returned to the comic – and required it to be in the opening credits of the blockbuster 1978 movie Superman, and all movie depictions of the character since then. (Super, man!)

…a sneeze covers a room is just five seconds? (We won’t discuss what it covers the room with, of course.)

…”doubleheader” was not originally a baseball term? The word came from railroads, and it referred to two engines in a switch yard that were hooked up back to back on a single train. The term was appropriated by baseball to mean two games being played back to back on the same day. (I thought it meant a fellow with two heads, but what do I know?)

…caffeine can both cause and cure headaches? If you’re a regular coffee drinker, for instance, and stop consuming the brew abruptly, your body goes into a kind of caffeine withdrawal, and headaches are common. Those headaches can be relieved by a dose of caffeine.

…more soldiers died during the Civil War from disease than anything else? The worst of the diseases that killed soldiers on both sides was dysentery, or what we would today call diarrhea. Death came from dehydration, exhaustion, or rupture of the intestinal wall. About 1 in 40 cases was fatal in the 1860s. (The other 39 cases weren’t all that much fun, either.)

…in a game of five-card poker, there are a total of 2,598,960 possible hands to play? (Most of them are losing hands, too.)

…chickens lay the most eggs when pop music is played? (I’m not sure how they can tell what kind of music it is, but there you are.)

Now… you know!

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