Etc...

But, hey, who's counting?

There are people with incredible memories for facts and figures. And then there's Akira Haraguchi. Last weekend, the mental health counselor may have trumped a fellow Japanese at reciting correctly the digits in pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Concentrating deeply as he sat a desk in the city of Chiba - with tape recorders and cameras recording his effort - he droned on, stopping only after he got to 83,431 decimal places, or almost twice as many as the champion listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. Haraguchi might have finished earlier, but at noon Friday he lost his place at 16,000 and started over. As a mathematical value, pi has an infinite number of digits.

As he was growing up in Nebraska, Henry Fonda said he wanted to be a journalist. But eventually he took the advice of Dorothy Brando, a family friend (and the mother of Marlon), and pursued a theatrical career. Now, his achievements on Broadway and on the silver screen have earned him a place in the Postal Service's Legends of Hollywood commemorative stamp series. Fonda won a Tony Award in 1948 for the lead role in the stage version of "Mr. Roberts," a comedy about life in the Navy. He also appeared in almost 90 films, winning the Oscar and a Golden Globe in 1982 for best actor opposite Katharine Hepburn and his own daughter, Jane Fonda, in "On Golden Pond." The Hollywood legends honored thus far with their own stamps, and the year each stamp was released:

Marilyn Monroe 1995
James Dean 1996
Humphrey Bogart 1997
Alfred Hitchcock 1998
James Cagney 1999
Edward G. Robinson 2000
Lucille Ball 2001
Cary Grant 2002
Audrey Hepburn 2003
John Wayne 2004
Henry Fonda 2005
- PRNewswire