Miscellaneous

I'm on a trip to Rome right now. Details to follow in a few days.

H.I.F. A few "[Crappy] Today I Learned from Reddit: When people say "break a leg" they're not actually telling you to break a leg. If you smoke enough weed, dynamiting a beached whale seems like a good idea. "Baby carrots" are

Never Knew That Writing about Mencken's column, "The Free Lance" in The Baltimore Sun (1911), Terry Teachout says "Mencken appears to have been one of the first modern American newspapermen to write a signed editorial-page column in which he commented regularly on major issues

An Ass Theodore Dreiser's The Genius (1915) was "a self-serving obviously autobiographical novel about an artist whose wife failed to understand his need to copulate at will with other women." Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (Harper Collins, 2002), p. 128.

H.I.F. For all you beer nerds out there: "Beer Studies: BJCP Classic Example Scoresheets with Audio [http://www.bjcp.org/course/ClassicStyles.php]." Pretty extensive effort.

H.I.F. A few more from Reddit's Today I Learned [http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/]: A black woman in 1828 won a lawsuit against a white man who sold her son into slavery. She was the first black woman to win a lawsuit against a white

Marvel Comics is introducing its first major superhero who is a female Muslim. The female Muslim superhero can fly, which comes in handy because she's not allowed to drive.

While preparing for a trip to Rome, I downloaded Rick Steves' Rome 2014 guide. In his (intentionally) comically short history of the Eternal City, he wrote the following: > Ancient Rome lasted a thousand years (500 B.C.-A.D. 500), half as an expanding republic, half as a

Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine [http://www.chesterton.org/explore-the-acs/gilbertmagazine/], I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a

H.I.F. A few "Today I Learned [http://en.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/]" entries from Reddit: The McRib is only "back" whenever pork prices are lowest. Link [http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage]. A trivia book author