Amazing Things I Learned Today!

[Nate the Great]

I think the fact that Isaac Asimov was a fan of Tom Lehrer was something that I knew, albeit stuck way way back in the dustiest archive of my memory, but when I found a Lehrer song on YouTube that I'd never heard of before, and then discovery at Wikipedia that Asimov remembered Lehrer singing it, well, I thought it was time to shill Lehrer again. By the by, he's still with us at age 89, and the world will be a darker place when he's gone.

Now let's celebrate by poisoning the pigeons in the park...

PS. If you need some of his more obscure jokes explained, there's a site that has annotated his lyrics...

[Nate the Great]

As a Minnesotan I feel special that my people are the only ones to use "duck duck gray duck" instead of "duck duck goose". As an aside, we have it so much better because we can insert humor with "red duck", "orange duck", etc.

But why was it just us? The Straight Dope has the answer as usual. We say gray duck because the Swedish immigrants who came here said gray duck (or rather "anka, anka, gra anka."

Yes, the anka anka gra anka thing was on Wikipedia, but I found it today at The Straight Dope.

So now you know. And Knowing is Half the Battle!

[Nate the Great]

As a big fan of the Doctor Doolittle books I thought I knew about all of the stories (although I'm still looking for a couple of them to complete my collection), so imagine my surprise when I learned that Hugh Lofting wrote a short story featuring Doolittle for an anthology back in 1925.

Read Doctor Doolittle Meets a Londoner in Paris here.

[Nate the Great]

I've been a fan of both All Too Flat and Cockeyed (How Much Is Inside) ever since college, and I've shilled for both in the past. But today I've discovered that not only is Cockeyed even older than I thought, but in fact the All Too Flat guys are fans of it, and they did a spoof of the How Much Is Inside concept!

[Nate the Great]

The reason Riker propped a foot up on the furniture a lot and often sat down via swinging a leg over the chair back.

Maybe not "amazing", but certainly interesting.

[Nate the Great]

So today I learned of the existence of bimagic squares. That is, a magic square where, if you square all the entries, results in another magic square.

The smallest true bimagic square (the sum of all rows, columns, and both diagonals are the same) is 6X6. If you relax the requirement on the diagonal sums you can drop to 5X5.

[NAHTMMM]

Lorenzo Music, the voice of Garfield, also volunteered for suicide hotlines. Also from his page: imagine Garfield being voiced by the same person who voiced Winnie the Pooh. It could have happened.