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For many years, The Athens NEWS ran the feature, “Wise Up!,” in every Monday issue. The author, now retired OU English instructor David Bruce,…

Editor’s note: This is a special Christmas edition of “WiseUp!”, a column that ran in The Athens NEWS for many years. Thanks, David!

• Mark Evanier, a blogger at newsfromme.com, ate frequently at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles. One day near Christmas, as a group of four y…

• A woman was walking down a street when a man working on a roof began to catcall her. She told him to stop, but he escalated the catcalling. …

• This is Wise Up! column number 1,000!

• In December 2013, Redditor goulaWhat learned that her Secret Santa was billionaire Bill Gates, who overnighted her a seven-pound package. Th…

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© 2015, David Bruce, All Rights Reserved

• The statue of Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. depicts Lincoln sitting. That is the result of a conscious dec…

• Jane Seymour is best known for starring in TV’s “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” a series that fell to her by luck – bad luck. She was going thr…

© 2015, David Bruce, All Rights Reserved

• An appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson could lead to fame and fortune and great success, and so of course many guests were u…

• In November of 1778, John Henderson (1747-1785) was playing Falstaff in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1.” The previous Wednesday, a nobleman…

• Two abilities led to Corey Glover becoming the singer of funk-metal band Living Colour: the ability to sing “Happy Birthday” and the ability…

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• Mark Twain retained his sense of humor in his old age. When his wife, Livy, worried that his spending lots of time in bed reading and writin…

• For a while, Allen Pinkerton and his wife, Joan, lived in Montreal, Canada, but soon Mr. Pinkerton had earned enough money to buy them passa…

• The most famous pharaoh of ancient Egypt is King Tutankhamon, who died at age 18 after ruling for nine years. Although most Egyptologists re…

• As you may expect, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, loved nature. As a boy, he and other boys engag…

© 2015, David Bruce, All Rights Reserved

• Lise Meitner, a pioneer of nuclear fission who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1878, had to overcome prejudice to get an education and to wo…

• Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine have performed all over the world. In El Salvador, civil war wracked the country, and three bodyg…

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City collected three magnificent examples of Etruscan sculpture in the early 20th century: two fu…

© 2015, David Bruce, All Rights Reserved 

• Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert became famous after they started to review movies on television (which is also when they became friends), and pe…

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of “The Scarlet Letter,” is not usually thought of as being funny, but he had his moments. When he finally felt …

© 2015, David Bruce, All Rights Reserved 

© 2015, David Bruce, All Rights Reserved 

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