The Last Word On Nothing

This spring, after weeks of quarantine, my husband was probably already sick of me when I started reading about cicadas. As I ventured further into a Wikipedia wormhole, I shared with him the most interesting tidbits. “Did you know there are multiple broods?” I asked, as he played a game on his phone on the couch next to me. Thirty minutes later and 200 facts later, he’d moved into another room, but I was still shouting things like, “oh my god, there’s a guy who plays clarinet solos with cicadas as the accompaniment!” Finally, he came back into the living room to tell me: “I’m sorry, but I would like to unsubscribe from Cicada Facts.”

More recently, an editor of mine recalled at a meeting that when I was working on a story about COVID’s effect on lottery sales, I messaged her Lotto Facts on Slack. (According to a 2019 report from Oregon Lotto, over $7 million went unclaimed that fiscal year!) And while she didn’t seem to mind it (I’m sorry, Emily!), I felt a little mortified that this is apparently just what I do to the people in my life.

So, fine readers of LWON, you, too, will now be subjected to Jane Facts™, brought to you by looking through some of my recent Google searches. Some of these things you might already know; most are only mildly interesting, at best, but I hope there’s at least one new thing here that sparks excitement.

• Pitcher plants have evolved independently at least 6 times! Pitcher plants at lower altitudes apparently are good at catching ants, but pitcher plants in more mountainous areas have evolved away from that since ants are less plentiful at higher altitudes. And some pitcher plants are basically little toilets for shrews!
• After a lifetime of being asked to use a number 2 pencil, I never knew there was a whole grading scale for pencil graphite. There’s the number scale that runs from 2 through 9, which indicates the hardness of the writing core, but outside the U.S., pencil makers often use letters to designate qualities, like “H” for hard or “B” for black. This chart from pencils.com is wonderfully maddening and reminds me of British climbing grades, which also makes no sense.
• At the same time jazz was becoming popular in the U.S., Japanese musicians were developing their own version of jazz, as were Filipino musicians. Since transpacific luxury cruises often employed orchestras, there was a whole network of folks traveling between the continents and influencing one another. There’s a great NPR interview with historian E. Taylor Atkins on this, if you want to learn more, and here’s a fun YouTube playlist.
• Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, also had a visual impairment. Every time I’ve read anything about Sullivan, it’s been in the context of Keller, and that fact has somehow escaped me until now. Sullivan attended all of Keller’s courses at Radcliffe and helped her study, and as far as I can tell, Keller received a degree for her work there but Sullivan never did, which seems incredibly unfair.
• The one social media app I’ve enjoyed throughout the pandemic is TikTok. For some reason, it’s been showing me a lot of videos from Australia and I’ve only now just discovered that kangaroos are extremely jacked and kind of horrifying? By Googling something like “why are kangaroos so muscular” I came across a video of a kangaroo named Roger crushing metal. While reading his Wikipedia page, I was struck by how if you removed all mention of him being a kangaroo, it could be a believable entry about a human named Roger, especially these closing lines: Upon hearing of Roger’s death, Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia said “He always brought a smile to my face. Such a proud strong boy”, and Tourism Australia called him a “true icon”. The cause of death was reported as “old age”.
• My neighborhood’s Little Free Libraries have been a veritable treasure trove lately. Not only did I score an issue of Martha Stewart Living from 1994, but I also found an entire Centennial Spotlight issue dedicated to the Titanic. Did you know there was a handwritten manuscript from Joseph Conrad that went down with the ship? And that there were two kids who were on the ship because they were essentially kidnapped by their dad? And that the Titanic actually stopped in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, before beginning its voyage across the Atlantic? (According to this magazine, seven people got off in Ireland and I imagine they spent the rest of their lives telling stories about how they narrowly avoided disaster.)