Five Things I Know (But Have No Idea How I Learned Them)

This was a tough post to find a photo for

Time for a break from all this serious internet business. One of my real-life superpowers (I have many) is the inability to forget absolutely trivial minutia I’ve been exposed to – but frequently forget how I was exposed to it. This will serve me well should they ever finally produce “the most random gameshow in the world”.

Here are five facts I’ve trotted out this month that, while true, I have absolutely no idea how I came to be aware of them. I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader trying to figure out how each of these could have possibly come up in conversation in the past month. For bonus points deduce which one played a pivotal part at a Toronto International Film Festival lunch a few weeks back.

1. The mother in “The Family Circus” is named Thel
2. Lewis Carrol was the first person to use the word “portmanteau” in it’s current, English, idiomatic definition. Prior to that it was a French term for a two-chambered suitcase
3. The longest golf drive on Earth was on an airstrip in Fairmont, British Columbia. Prior to that it was on an ice field in the Arctic
4. Two of the four members of Boney-M just lip-synced to prerecorded vocals. Their producer used this trick again with his other manufactured super-group – Milli Vanilli
5. The combined sound energy from yelling for nine years straight would only be enough to re-heat one cup of coffee

There is absolutely no moral to this post. I just needed to recalibrate this blogs silliness quotient before it became “all net neutrality, all the time”.