Typical Male?

"Time named Albert Einstein 'Man of the Century,'" Jay Leno reported one day in December 1999. "It turns out his wife caught him cheating and divorced him. Even Einstein couldn't pull it off..."

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris led a double life, and still today he is the number one mystery man of the Nazi regime. He had files full of damaging evidence against the leading Nazis, among them Heydrich and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. For years Himmler went on protecting Canaris.

The Admiral held Hitler in utter contempt. One of the world's leading authorities on the Nazi period, Joachim Fest, tells in his book Plotting Hitler's Death about one of Canaris's trips to Spain. Canaris would spring to attention in his open car and raise his arm in the Hitler salute every time he drove past a herd of sheep. You never know, Canaris said, whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd.

Every kind action has a not-so-kind reaction.

When Mark Twain read that his own obituary had been published he cabled the newspapers to assure them that he was still in fact alive, famously remarking that "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated".

Sir Isaac Newton owned a pet dog named Diamond, which one day knocked over the candle on the scientist's desk and started a blaze that destroyed records of many years' research. Newton, viewing the destruction, said only, "O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the damage thou hast done."