Two things we learned on the internet today

Photo via The How Zone.

1) "In a situation in which part of the troposphere is very near or just above freezing, the snowflake will partially melt. This produces a liquid film on the snowflake. This makes it much easier for snowflakes to stick together. Thus, it is liquid water that is the "glue" to producing large snowflakes and snow that is easy to make snowballs with. While a dry heavy snow tends to have a huge amount of small snowflakes, a heavy wet snow tends to have a smaller number of snowflakes but the individual snowflakes are large." (The Weather Prediction)

2) The four founding Warner brothers (born Wanskolaser) are named Harry (born Hirsz), Albert (born Aaron), Sam (Szmul) and Jack (born Itzhak), Jews who emigrated from Poland, Russian Empire to Ontario, Canada. (Wikipedia)

Oh, the weather outside is frightful.

Toothpaste For Dinner rocks my proverbial socks.

Discovery of the day: Snapple.com unveils which facts on its caps are true. (The false ones never make it to the website.) My favorites:

ZIP in zip code stands for Zone Improvement Plan (424). A housefly hums in the key of F (372). You can tell what day a loaf of bread is baked by the color of the twist tag (480).

Mount Everest rises a few millimeters every year (438). In Monopoly, the properties are named after streets in Atlantic City (669). The Statue of Liberty wears a size 879 sandal (444). You breathe in about 13 pints of air every minute (446).

Lobsters can live up to 50 years (455). Fresh cranberries can be bounced like a rubber ball (455). To remove crayon marks from the walls, use a hairdryer to heat the wax (492). It is against the law to put pretzels in bags in Philadelphia (664).

A chalkboard eraser is one of the best ways to erase a foggy windshield (477). Candles will burn longer and drip less if they are placed in the freezer before burning (478). The pupils in goats’ eyes are rectangular (440).

The motto on the original penny was "Mind Your Own Business" (163).

Seeing the light after Blue Monday

Above is a photo I took of the tennis courts by my house. The light is striking against the snow. I'm trying to focus on the positive.

Here's a list of things I think are great:

1) "The Duck" by Luis Alberto Urrea, released now into the public domain (via The Syntax of Things). Not only does he do a good job of incorporating an animal sound into a poem, there are a few lines that are especially killer. My favorite, perhaps, is, "You have to remind the body it exists."

2) There are eighteen types of zoo creatures featured in animal crackers.

3) Clever but puerile humor. The "streaker" gets me every time.

It is miserable outside. A friend has just e-mailed me her playlist for an imaginary beach party on her roof in NYC. Perhaps the thing we lack most in January is not sunlight, but beach music.

Hit Me With Your Best, Schott

In case I haven't mentioned this, my pet project this year is trivia. Thus this man holds a great deal of my attention. Ben Schott knows an enormous amount of information: lowbrow, highbrow, or something in between. He says he doesn't remember it all, but he certainly records it.

I like this quotation from his latest interview with BoingBoing:

I tend to write it quite selfishly. I don't think you can write for a particular audience. I tend to look at any news story and say, Well, what do I need to know? Who are these people? Has this happened before? What's increasingly interesting about modern media is its filters: if you actually look at websites, technology from TiVo to iPods to blogs, it's all about filter. What we mean when we say we like a blog or we like a website is that we like somebody's filter. And we have several filters for different things. Of course our friends are filters. Word of mouth is the ultimate filter. So what I try to do is act as a personal filter. When I say personal, I don't mean political or partisan, I mean, What's the Schott's Almanac take on this? It's almost a sort of character.

Of course, through my own filter, I don't mean to make him out to be trivial. Especially after reading this interview with the Herald Tribune:

Schott does not consider this, or any other of his oddball facts, to be trivia. "I hate trivia," he said, "and I've never been interested in trivia books. Trivia is competitive; it's 'I know this and you don't.'

"I think what I'm doing is more inclusive. It's more about sharing information. So it's not so much about, say, who won the Super Bowl in such and such a year as what's engraved on the Super Bowl trophy. Trivia books are written by people who are obsessed, and I wouldn't want to read any of them."