I know I may never get into Mensa, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying my nerdiness. I love to go into a store and see Mental Floss on the shelf. I have random issues laying about my house. I picked one up today and was reading the old column 'Know-It-All' by A.J. Jacobs who wrote a book by the same name. He spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (For those too young to remember that, it was what was standard in research prior to Wikipedia.)
ANYWAY... Mr Jacobs would write a column in the magazine with random knowledge from one letter or volume. I was reading on Q. Here is a few things I read that I wanted to share with you...
Qa - An ancient Babylonian unit of liquid measurement. It might just be the best SCRABBLE word in the encyclopedia, but it's also incredibly helpful when measuring out mead.
Quark - The most literary subatomic particle in the universe. The word actually comes from the crazy talk passage in James Joyce's famously impenetrable novel, Finnegans Wake. ("Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he hasn't got too much of a bark.") In the passage, "quark" means something along the lines of cawing like a bird. The physicist who named it was a Joyce fan - and a total show-off.
Quill - Using a feather as a pen seems like a simple enough idea. It's not. To make a good quill pen, you need to pluck the second or third feather on the outer wing. Pluck only from a living bird, and do it during their new growth period in the spring. The left wing is better for right-handed writers, and the right wing is better for lefties. Swan quills are good and goose quills will do, but crow quills - crow quills are where it's at.
Lesson done for the day. What random facts did you learn today?
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