I sure do love a bunch of quirky facts.
I love those strange bits of information that lurk around in our midst. Somehow, they are oddly satisfying. Especially when someone asks us an obscure question, and we know the answer.
Like this. Penny Licks. Do you know a penny lick? You’d probably have to be pretty old to have had one. People used to go to soda shops a long time ago. And before ice cream cones existed, people lined up to eat ice cream from reusable glass cups.
Grossly, the cups were never washed between customers. Of course, those little glasses passed along a lot of germs, right in the midst of that good vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Treats and disease, side by side.
Here’s another quirky tidbit. We turn to the testing of Kevlar bulletproof vests. They didn’t put them on human dummies. No. They put them on goats. How terrible this must have been for the goats. Goats were fitted with prototype vests, and then they were shot with controlled ammunition. Sadly, veterinarians and doctors then assessed their injuries. Sometimes via autopsy. Many animals did not survive, and the practice later became a major ethical controversy. They stopped doing this in the late 1970s.
And this.
Bananas are berries, but strawberries aren’t.
Humans share about 60% of their DNA with bananas.
You’re slightly taller in the morning than at night.
Wombat poop is cube-shaped.
Your stomach gets a new lining every few days, so it doesn’t digest itself.
Butterflies remember being caterpillars.
You share your home with millions of dust mites.
Sloths can hold their breath longer than dolphins.
We don’t need to remember these for any reason at all. And they certainly don’t change our lives. But they do something else, entirely. They help to wake us up. They remind us that the world is weird. They tell us that our world is infinite. And time is full of stories in every minute.
Curiosity doesn’t always bring us the answers we were looking for. But every once in a while, it leads to more questions. Maybe better questions. And more knowledge therein.
And honestly, that might be the point.
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“Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.” — William Arthur Ward
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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” — Carl Sagan
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“Reality is strange, stranger than fiction.” — Mark Twain
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“Stay curious. It keeps the mind alive.” — Stephen Lang
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