Every kid in Delaware knows the story of the state's most-famous patriot Caesar Rodney. Instead of getting an excuse note from his doctor, Rodney decided to ride eighty miles, with a fever, through a vicious thunderstorm, to cast a vote in Philadelphia. It turns out that Rodney was the tie-breaker, and ultimately the deciding vote that Delaware should join the other colonies in declaring independence from the crown. For his effort, he's now on the back of the state quarter.
When Neil Young fell ill in 1969, he kept strumming his guitar. To write one classic song with a fever would be amazing. Instead, Young wrote three --"Cinnamon Girl," "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River" -- all while nursing a 103 degree temperature!
This weekend, when I caught an awful flu, I tried to determine how to channel my sickness into greatness. Should I pour all of my energy into national politics or rock music? In the end, I decided to use my few hours of coherence to edit Chapter 6 of our upcoming The Mental Floss History of the United States. Will my line edits and grammatical changes to Chapter 6 get me on the back of Delaware's quarter? Probably not. But the section did turn out pretty great. You'll have to wait till October to read the full thing. In the meantime, here are some facts that might interest you:
-To allow his brother to urinate while suffering from kidney stones, Ben Franklin invented the first flexible urinary catheter used in North America.
-During the Civil War, the citizens of Winston County, Alabama, refused to join up with the Confederacy. Instead, they declared themselves the Republic of Winston and defied Confederate authority to the end!
-Nathan Forrest, who's mainly known today as the first Grand Wizard of the Klan, was a complicated character. Towards the end of his life, he was invited to speak to an African-American civil group, where he accepted a bouquet of flowers and talked passionately in favor of civil equality and against African-American job discrimination.
Here's hoping you have a wonderful week ahead. | Best wishes, Mangesh E-mail Jason and Mangesh, here. ------------- PS: Before I sign off, I want to wish a slightly belated Happy Birthday to our incredible research editor Sandy Wood. If it weren't for Sandy, our magazine would be both less interesting and less factually accurate. Here's hoping this year is even better than the last. ------------ | 
"As seen in the NY Times: RUNNUR is Made for Movement. If you love the functionality of a 'Fanny Pack,' but dread it's fashion stigma, RUNNUR is for you!" |  | Our weekly attempt to stock our newsletter readers' closets (and bookshelves) with mental_floss paraphernalia!
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| THIS WEEK's THEME:
Cars
Our insanely interesting fact:
The funky looking Smart Car was partially designed by the Swatch company. In fact, Smart was short for Swatch Mercedes Art.
 Can you out-trivia us? | Don't forget to visit our Amazing Fact Generator.
| Last Issue's Theme was "Motherhood." The winners (and their facts) are:
| 1) The female European cuckoo lays her eggs in another bird's nest so she doesn't have to take care of them.
-Raydra Hall | 2) The General MacArthur's mother rented a hotel room across the street from her son's dorm room at West Point so she could keep tabs on his study habits. If she didn't see him in his room studying in the evenings she would call the Resident Assistant and demand to know his whereabouts.
-Mike Milford
| 2) Beulah Bondi played Jimmy Stewart's mother 5 times. (4 times in film and then again on his TV show!)
-Karen Lopez
| Congratulations to all of you... you should be receiving your prize instructions any day now!
| | 4 Serious Things that happened on April Fool's Day
By Stacy Conradt
| 1. Let this be a lesson to us all: If you want people to take your death seriously, don't die on April Fool's Day (to be safe, the days leading up to April 1 should also be avoided). When the media reported the death of King George II of Greece on April 1, 1947, the public largely thought it was fake. But he had really died of arteriosclerosis.
2. What started out as a joke actually hurt the Korean stock market in 2003. A bunch of Chinese and South Korean websites picked up on the joke that Bill Gates had been assassinated and reported the news, whether they had been suckered in or were just playing along. People believed it was true and reacted - the result? The Korean stock market dropped 1.5%.
3. Back in the day when Sega and Nintendo were bitter rivals, no one would have thought that their hit characters Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario would team up in a game. But that's exactly what happened when "Sonic and Mario at the Olympics" was announced in 2007. Sega and Nintendo announced it via a joint press release a couple of days prior to April 1, but fans just assumed there was no way it could be true. But it was, and it was so successful that a sequel is planned to honor the 2010 Winter Olympics.
4. While Google's known for its April Fool's gags, this incident was no prank: in 2007, the company sent an e-mail out to its employees at a NYC office warning that a python was loose in the facilities. Definitely sounds like a prank, I know, but it was true: an engineer kept a ball python named Kaiser in his cube and Kaiser escaped. The e-mail to employees apologized for the awkward timing and assured them that this was no April Fool stunt.
To read Stacy's full list, click here. And for amazing facts, 140-characters at a time, follow us on Twitter.
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