A-Z

I’m on a mission. I just noticed I’m a few posts away from the big 2-0-0 so you should be hearing from me a bit more frequently in the next couple of weeks so I can time the milestone for the big new year.



I had another one of those mornings. No, not one of those kind of mornings. Although, come to think of it, my train ran out of energy and petered to a stop at Park Street and they kicked us out. And it was wicked cold this morning. Wicked wicked cold. Yesterday was ridiculous. And I’m the type to embrace the cold. Especially at the beginning of winter. There must have been a bit of wind, as it just cut through all your layers and made me realize that I really need to go out and buy some new pants – that aren’t skin tight. I didn’t initially buy them that way but they must have shrunk recently. That must have been it. I was happy that I’m local enough now to know how to get from the Park Street Station to the Downtown Crossing exit completely underground through the maze of old tunnels.



So my bus comes and it is one of those beautiful sunny, crisp mornings. And I’m in the middle of a good book. It’s perfect reading for the commute as it’s broken up into lots of little bite size readings really. It’s called “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World” by A.J. Jacobs. He’s reading the encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover and writes about the journey interspersed with funny memoir moments. My two favorite things – funny memoir and random funny facts. Of course I can’t remember any of them, don’t know how well he’s retained all the information either. So I’ve used a pencil as my bookmark so I can mark the little quirky things I want to remember, like:

- Berserk is from the savage Norse soldiers of the middle ages, the Berserkers who went into battle naked.

- Dr. Condom invented the form of birth control in response to Charles II’s growing flock of illegitimate offspring.

- Or my favorite, a book is defined as a text with at least 49 pages long. There’s no mention to the word count on each page though, which makes you wonder.

- Casanova was a librarian later in life.

- Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes.

- Stinking smut is an official disease.

- Ten-pin bowling came about when authorities outlawed nine-pin bowling in colonial America.

- John Adams enjoyed his tankard of hard cider each morning before breakfast during his retirement years.

- No more pole jokes – they broke the Enigma code.

- Etruscans wrote boustrophedon style – direction of writing alternates with each line. Very efficient!

- First image ever broadcast on TV: the dollar sign. A bit foretelling.

- Fellini’s 8 ½ comes from the number of films he had directed up to that time: 7 features and 3 shorts.

- Fondue originated from a Swiss truce in the 16th century – the Protestants brought the bread, the Catholics brought the cheese.

- Duck technically refers only to the female.

- Arthur Conan Doyle had a venomous feud with Harry Houdini.



And then, there it was, something that jolted me out of my passive reading this morning:



“(By the way, the first true frat was Kappa Alpha, begun at Union College in 1825.)”



Yes, it was in parenthesis, but I was there, in that little tid-bit of fact that lies in the tombs of the encyclopedia. I had drunk beer in that frat house. I think. I’m a bit hazy of which frat house is which these days but like to think it was the one at the end of frat row, with the big colonnade porch and wonderful woodwork inside. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the building dates back to before 1825. A little bit of history, and I was there.



Now I’m up to the Hs and learned that technically John Hanson was the first president of the US, being the president of the Continental Congress. And that Hollywood was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, “a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles.” Funny stuff!