- New Thing Learned for 15 June: Paris Hilton is related by marriage to both Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor. But then, who isn't. [Source: Wikipedia.]
- New Thing Learned for 16 June: Cicadas, at least of the 17-year variety, are docile enough to allow a person to grasp them by the wings when resting on a surface, but strong enough to resist being picked up, unlike the dumbass fishfly, which apparently relies on its sheer numbers to make up for whatever stragglers may get captured by passing bored apes. I'll take the cicadas any day. [Source: helpful experimental subject in suburban parking lot.]
- New Thing Learned for 17 June: My camera takes much better pictures in full sunlight, which means I'm probably going to be doing most of my eBay photo shoots outside from now on when I can manage it. [Source: many, many experiments.]
- New Thing Learned for 18 June: Aware that seismic waves travel diagonally through the earth, canny Roman masons in first-century Naples laid the stone walls for Nero's theater in a diamond-pattern, the better to resist and move with the shifting earth, and these walls still stand today below the modern city. [Source: Cities Of The Underworld: Beneath Vesuvius.]
- New Thing Learned for 19 June: The "dogcart" one occasionally reads about in Victorian novels is not a cart pulled by dogs, but a cart with built-in accommodations for dogs, much like a pickup with a kennel-cage in the back. Glad we've got that cleared up before something embarrassing -- Um. [Source: What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens knew : from fox hunting to whist : the facts of daily life in nineteenth-century England, Daniel Pool.]
- New Thing Learned for 20 June: An artist in Birmingham, England, creates sculptures so small they can fit inside the eye of a needle. One imagines he's quite sick of the camel joke. [Source: ABC evening news.]
- New Thing Learned for 21 June: Bob Evans, founder of the eponymous restaurant chain and not yet another imaginary corporate shill, died today at the age of 89. Unless, of course, They made this all up in accordance with the Orwellian dictum that you can invent people as long as they're dead. [Source: evening news.]
- New Thing Learned for 22 June: A bushel of wheat weighs 60 pounds, whereas a bushel of corn (kernels) weighs only 56. News You Can Use, people!! [Source: WGN news at noon trivia answer.]
As last Saturday's New Thing suggests, I've finally seen these elusive "cicadas" with my own eyes, although I had to travel well out of the city to do it, and I suppose I can sympathize with those of you who've been having dreams that you're being pursued by triffids or martians -- it's odd how different the sound is from the annual cicadas, and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of sound-effects guys on those 50's sci-fi flicks were deeply traumatized by the 17-year variety as children. I'm still amazed at how my leafy neighborhood has managed to escape this plague entirely.
Other notes from the unblogged interval... um, well, I finally got around to getting new shoes, since the orange ones were pretty well wrecked before they got soaked at GA, and while I was out Shopping I gave in and purchased a new bra as well, since the elastic on the one I've been wearing gave out at least a year ago. Which serves to illustrate, I suppose, that the most effective means of torture one could devise to break my will is to make me go bra shopping on a regular basis, or, indeed, shopping for any kind of clothes, which I tend to do only when forced to by the threatened disintegration of those bits of my wardrobe that Society deems necessary to wear to keep one from getting locked up. (I also need new jeans, since I discovered, ten minutes before I had to walk out of the door to go to the dentist, that I'd forgotten to start the washer after coming in from GA smelling like stale water-ride and throwing everything on my body into it, and pressed my last pair into service as cutoffs in place of the shorts that I no longer had time to wash... Bother, more shopping.)
Also Neat and Worth Remarking: my nice leafy neighborhood is far enough away from downtown that I was able to see the station go over on Tuesday. And we're spending money on a war instead of space exploration... why? {harrumph}