Q: How do real-life Spider-Men give the fictional hero a "run" for his money?
A: These death-defying adventurers climb some of the world's tallest skyscrapers or other man-made structures, says Laura Hudson in Wired magazine.
When 49-year-old Frenchman Alain Robert was 19, he took a 50-foot fall while rock climbing, fractured his skull, and wound up in a coma for five days.
Nevertheless, he went on to become famous as climber of the Skyper in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the world's tallest building at 2,716 feet.
Robert has been arrested more than 100 times. While 20 stories from the top of Sears Tower in Chicago, he was covered in a thick fog that turned the building into a "vertical ice-rink" that nearly ended his adventures.
Another climbing career got off the ground in 1980 after 56-year-old American Dan Goodwin witnessed a hotel fire that claimed nearly 100 lives. When he suggested rescue techniques to the fire chief, "he was told that he had no business giving advice until he had climbed a high-rise building. Six months later, Goodwin scaled Sears Tower," Hudson wrote.
His other climbs include the World Trade Center and the CN Tower in Toronto. He has been arrested five times. In Chicago, a fire commissioner reportedly even threatened to "kill" him if he climbed another of the city's buildings. Goodwin claims he was "blasted with a fire hose on the 37th story of the John Hancock Center, until the police and mayor intervened."
Superheroes or crazy dudes? You judge.
Q: How deep is the bond between all of us and the dogs we love?
A: Any time your dog comes when you call or lies next to you simply to share your company, the bond deepens, says psychologist Stanley Coren in "What Do Dogs Know?"
Coren's favorite cultural story of how humans and dogs came to be together is from an American Plains Indian tribe. It tells of a time long ago when the Great Spirit had just created the world and sent out a call for all the living creatures to gather on a wide plain, then drew a line dividing humans from all the others. And while everyone watched, The line began to deepen and widen, becoming a great crack in the earth that opened into a bottomless chasm. At the last moment, just before the gap became unbridgeable, the dog leapt across to stand by man.
As Nobel Prize-winning author Maurice Maeterlinck said: "We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet, and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us."
Q: The iconic image of Popeye the Sailor is his gulping down an entire can of spinach to beef up those improbable forearms of his. But why spinach? Why not another vegetable?
A: "When Popeye was created, studio executives recommended he eat spinach for his strength, due to its vaunted health properties," says Samuel Arbesman in "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date."
Thus was born a generational wave of ads showing Popeye popping open cans of the vegetable, ads that apparently helped increase American consumption by a third. The half-truth of the matter went back more than 50 years earlier, to 1870, when German chemist Erich von Wolf examined the amount of iron in spinach and other green vegetables.
Alas, in recording his findings, He accidentally misplaced a decimal point, inflating the iron content of spinach from 3.5 milligrams in a 100-gram serving to 35 milligrams.
"To put this in perspective, if the calculation were correct each 100-gram serving would be like eating a small piece of a paper clip," Arbesman says.
The mistake became the new reality, and spinach's nutritional value became legendary. Though the error was corrected in 1937, not until 1981 did the British Medical Journal reveal the full truth of the spinach incident.
Brothers Bill and Rich Sones are Cuyahoga County residents who research and write Strange But True. Send questions to email@example.com.