THE LONGEST YEAR OF MY @!##$ING LIFE IS OVER YAY

[robling_t]

• New Thing Learned for 25 December: Some oysters practice a form of internal fertilization that can leave the unwary oyster-eater with a mouthful of gritty little baby oyster shells, and I'm going to stop here because I already lost myself at "oysters" in the first place. [Source: A geography of oysters : the connoisseur's guide to oyster eating in North America, Rowan Jacobsen]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 26 December: There are 18 football fields to a mile. Not that I can readily picture a mile in my head off-hand either, but you never know when you might need these conversion tables. [Source: "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 27 December: Chicago's Pakistani community is the second-largest in the country, behind only New York. [Source: local news coverage of Bhutto assassination.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 28 December: Elizabethan parents changed diapers when they damn well felt like it. Which I suppose is only fair considering the general attitudes of the period towards hygiene, but damn. [Source: Wikipedia.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 29 December: The deer in the North Park preserve now also have a Kinko's down the street to go to, although it's not 24-hours. Looks nice, though, and since it's next to the grocery store... [Source: "coming soon" finally came.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 30 December: There's a sound effect in The Age Of Steel that sounds exactly like our front doorbell. And yes, this does tend to disrupt one's suspension of disbelief. [Source: twigged during repeat viewing that it was actually on the soundtrack and not in the front hall.]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 31 December: "Hey, y'know, iCal is one of the things Emil syncs with, so if I tell him where I'm supposed to be going tonight, and then remember to take the iPod with me..." [Source: eventual adoption of available technology.]

So that's that, then, with 23 hours to spare, and I can go back to accumulating Facts on a much more leisurely schedule. Debating now whether this experience and its results would be worth trying to write up as a nonfiction book proposal, maybe with additional "behind the scenes of why I learned this then" material to make it fresh for a dead-tree audience...