- New Thing Learned for 2 September: 401 people died in elevator accidents in Chicago between 1904 and 1916. Bet you check that inspection certificate next time you board one... ;) [Source: Chicago Public Library website.]
- New Thing Learned for 3 September: Lord Byron started an early diet craze that involved drinking vinegar. Weirdness is obviously not a modern invention. [Source: Rethinking thin : the new science of weight loss--and the myths and realities of dieting, Gina Kolata.]
- New Thing Learned for 4 September: Robert DeNiro was originally considered for the title role in Big. Would have been a real different movie, is all I can say to that... [Source: Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies".]
- New Thing Learned for 5 September: And if you've got any vinegar left over from the Lord Byron Diet, you can use it to pre-treat your galvanized metal before painting. Is there nothing that this miracle substance can't do?? [Source: morning "news" show.]
- New Thing Learned for 6 September: King's College Chapel at Cambridge, England, has a stained-glass window depicting the Ascension as just Christ's feet sticking out of a cloud. (46:50 here) [Source: Atheism: a rough history of disbelief, "shadows of doubt".]
- New Thing Learned for 7 September: Hispanics, and for that matter whites, blacks, pacific islanders and eskimos, were invented in 1977 by the Office of Management and Budget. [Source: Once upon a quinceañera : coming of age in the USA, Julia Alvarez.]
- New Thing Learned for 8 September: The plug in a bathroom sink comes out by unscrewing a nut at the back of the pipe, not by main force like we'd always tried at previous apartments. Ownership has domesticated our violent urges. [Source: Home Despot.]
- New Thing Learned for 9 September: ...Also, there's a reason you don't see many busty plumbers out there, since getting the plug screwed back in properly involves having one hand under the sink and the other hand down in it. I suppose it's really a two-person job, but it was one in the morning and I was bored now. [Source: trying to implement the New Thing Learned for 8 September.]
- New Thing Learned for 10 September: The dazzle camouflage of World War I inspired a costume ball shortly after the war ended, with attendees dressed up in harlequin-checked outfits. [Source: Camouflage, Timothy Newark.]
- New Thing Learned for 11 September: The @ sign has clever descriptive names in various languages, for example the Czech meaning herring-pickle roll. [Source: Send : the essential guide to Email for office and home, David Shipley.]
- New Thing Learned for 12 September: Pete Gray was a one-armed baseball player who played one season in the majors during World War II, serving as an inspirational example to many returning servicemen with amputations of their own. [Source: History Detectives.]
- New Thing Learned for 13 September: The tu/vous distinction between second-person intimate and formal that many of us still have nightmares about from high-school French has its origins in the notion that kings, whom one would use the formal "vous" when addressing, were naturally plural because they embodied their nation. I'd start going on about Martin Buber here, but I've probably already lost whoever was still reading after the entry about James Garfield. [Source: Wikipedia.]
- New Thing Learned for 14 September: "Kurkku" is Finnish for both cucumber and throat. Not. Going. There. [Source: Spellbound : the surprising origins and astonishing secrets of English spelling, James Essinger.]
- New Thing Learned for 15 September: The "quads" that bodybuilders are always going on about bulking up are the big muscles on the top of the thighs, and it's just about impossible to sit down or get up again for days when you've mysteriously managed to pull them all. I'm almost afraid to go look up "lats" and "delts". [Source: photography-related accident made me look it up.]
- New Thing Learned for 16 September: Old-fashioned cylinder-blown window-glass gets smoothed out flat with a wooden paddle, which may catch on fire in the process. Actually, this is kind of cool to know, since one of my characters took up glassblowing on me... [Source: Worst Jobs in History, "Industrial".]
- New Thing Learned for 17 September: "By" is a Viking word for village or more roughly locality, hence "by-laws", the rules that us guys here agree to abide under but nobody else will care about. [Source: Spellbound : the surprising origins and astonishing secrets of English spelling, James Essinger.]
- New Thing Learned for 18 September: The characteristic waddling gait of achondroplasic dwarfism is caused by the fibula growing longer than the tibia, forcing the knees outward. [Source: "Science of Dwarfism", National Geographic channel.]
- New Thing Learned for 19 September: To set image transparency for use on CafePress "dark" shirts in GraphicConverterX, set to 16.7 million colors, "create alpha/mask channel from transparency", and save as .PNG with Adam-7 interlacement. Also, I am one fucking stubborn monkey when I really want something. [Source: That's my favourite; I've got that on a t-shirt!]
(Actually, I do have a different note from 8 September than the bit about the plug, but since I can't for the life of me remember what this word that looks like "naked" corresponded to anymore I decided to split studying the display of plugs in Home Despot on the Saturday, and trying to get it out and then back in by myself early the next morning, into two entries, which I don't think is bending the project's original mandate too much, assuming anyone's even still reading along at this point...)