You know the song “Nature Boy” – “there was a boy… a very strange enchanted boy…”? Nat King Cole made it is his own, but it was written by a bloke named eden abhez (he refused to capitalise his name), a Los Angeles bohemian who for a time lived underneath the first ‘L’ of the Hollywood sign – which until the 40s actually read “Hollywoodland”, the name of an early piece of property speculation in which Mack Sennett of Keystone Kops fame had some big money.

Anyway abhez wrote this song and spent years trying to sell it to someone before it became a standard. The urban myth is that it was the only song he ever wrote – in fact after its success he became a professional songwriter, supplying Cole with more compositions and getting a second hit with “Lonely Island”.

Anyway, the song was about a bloke – a proto-hippie like abhez – named Robert “Gypsy Boots” Bootzin, who pioneered the consumption of health foods in the US, his restaurant the “Health Hut” being the first of its kind in America in the 1940s.

Gypsy Boots was a celebrity, appearing on the Steve Allen show (the prototype of David Letterman’s off-the-wall comic style) often swinging in on a vine. Allen himself was a songwriter who once composed 50 songs in one day on a bet, but whose best work is probably “(this could be) the start of something big”. On the show, Gypsy Boots popularised a yoghurt-fruit drink he had invented that he called a “smoothie”.

Speaking of drinks, the old myth that Fanta was invented by the Nazis is half-true. When WW2 began, the German Coca-Cola company was cut off from supplies of “7x” the secret-formula syrup that made Coke Coke, and which was produced in Atlanta and shipped round the world.

In order to keep business going, the head of the German branch invented a drink made from the waste product of processed cheese, tasting much like the Scottish drink Irn Bru does. When the war was over – Coca Cola was also the official supplier of drinks to the US army, and the company didn’t want to be seen effectively sponsoring both sides with the same drink – the company took over the brand. The name allegedly came from an employee’s suggestion of “fantasie” though in Swedish it loosely means “f— you” (Fan ta) and is not sold here. A favourite with the troops, there was almost certainly Fanta at the battle of Stalingrad.

Magda Goebbels, before she married Josef and became a Nazi, had been an ardent Zionist, and prior to that a Social Democrat. She had no fixed values really, she just took an interest in her boyfriends hobbies.

Long after WW2 Gypsy Boots could still throw a football forty yards at the age of 80 and died ten years later in 2004. abhez who died ten years earlier had last worked in the music industry on the Beach Boys’ abandoned Smile album thirty years before that.

None of which adds up to much, and you may feel you’ve wasted the last five minutes reading this. But you’ve almost certainly learnt something, which is more than you did wasting half an hour reading today’s dead log flogging coverage of the opinion polls, which are exactly where they have been for most of the past six months.