Every once in a while it's fun to be amused, bemused, astounded or confounded for no good reason other than to entertain oneself for a few minutes. To that end, here's some time trivia.
* Isolation can make time seem to pass more quickly. An experiment was performed in which a man was sequestered alone underground with no timekeeping devices. He estimated he spent 33 days in this time limbo. He actually stayed there 58 days.
* Two men set up housekeeping -- of sorts -- in a Kentucky cave for more than a month to see if they could alter their biological clocks. The goal was to live on a 28-hour cycle, 19 hours awake and nine hours asleep. The younger man was able to reprogram himself, but the older man, set in his ways, was unable to make the adjustment.
* The good news for those approaching senior status is that age increases the ability to estimate accurately the passage of time.
* Most Americans report that they sleep longer than they work each day. Respondents to a study in the October 1990 Journal of Political Economy recorded they slept 3,266 minutes a day and worked 2,122.
* Not one but two couples hold the Guinness world record for longest marriages. Sir Temulji Bhicaji Nariman and Lady Nariman of Bombay, India, were married at age 5 and stayed that way for 86 years -- until Sir Temulji died in 1940 just shy of his 92nd birthday. In the United States, Lazarus Rowe and Molly Webber were married in 1743. Mr. Rowe died in 1829, leaving his wife of 86 years to carry on family business.
* One of the great tales of survival at sea is recounted in "Sole Survivor," by Ruthanne Lum McCunn. She tells the story of Hong Kong-born Poon Lim, a steward whose British merchant ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Atlantic on Nov. 23, 1942. Of the 55 men aboard, only he lived to tell the story. He did so by floating on a raft that eventually drifted into the mouth of the Amazon River in South America, where a family on a ragtag working sailboat took him ashore. After battling the sun and storms of the Atlantic, eating raw fish and sea birds, and drinking fetid rainwater for 133 days, Poon Lim walked ashore unassisted. He still holds the world record for survival at sea alone on a raft.
* Dame Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" is the longest continuously running theater show in the world. It opened Nov. 25, 1952, in London.
* In 78 years, Pablo Picasso produced about 13,500 paintings or designs, 100,000 prints or engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures or ceramics. The value of his body of work has been estimated at $800 million.
* The average redwood tree lives 1,100 years.
* If you counted to 1 million at the rate of a number per second, the task would take 11.9 days.
* Sunlight reaches the earth in eight minutes.
* The sound of thunder travels one mile in five seconds.