Does the St. Bernard dog carry brandy to lost travelers?
Ancestors of modern St. Bernards were originally used by monks from the 1700s through the 1800s to find lost, freezing travelers at Great St. Bernard Pass between Italy and Switzerland. The large dogs also served the monks as guards and carriers. The legendary barrel of brandy strapped beneath the neck, however, seems to have been invented in 1816 by an Alps mountain climber named Meissner. A barrel isn’t mentioned in any chronicles about the monks. (www-nmbe.unibe.ch/deutsch/531_5_1.html, www.akc.org/breeds/saint_bernard) Q: How was the letter distribution in Scrabble determined? A: During the Great Depression, an out-of-work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts set out to invent a board game combining the vocabulary skills of anagrams and crossword puzzles with the element of chance. The game was originally named Lexico, then Criss-Cross Words. Butts studied the New York Times front page to calculate how often each of the 26 letters in the English language is used (with “E” used most
