Things I didn't know that you probably did.

One reason I like being a librarian is that you learn something every day. Here is a sampling of the things I have learned recently.

- Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill are not the same person. Contemporaries and friends... but different people ("Well, of course they're different people," you might say, "They have different names!" Some of us ignore little details like that, friend).
- High school students are obsessed with murders (For example: seven people were murdered in Frank Lloyd Wright's house in Spring Green, including his mistress. Frank was in Chicago at the time. This is the least disgusting thing I learned helping with this subject).
- Philo Taylor Farnsworth invented the television as we know it when he was fourteen.
- Alice Walker believes that being a mother is a weak option for weak women, and (unsurprisingly) is estranged from her daughter.
- Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher, burned all her diaries when she got married because she was afraid of what her husband would think.
- Oskar Schindler is the only member of the Nazi party to be buried in Jerusalem.
- Nellie Bly helped invent undercover journalism by pretending to be insane and getting herself committed to an asylum to do an expose. Once inside she acted normally and they treated her like crap.
- People in the old west had much cooler names than we do today. Calamity Jane? Sundance Kid? Doc Holliday? Valentine McGillycuddy? California Joe? Brilliant. Makes me want to watch Tombstone. And Deadwood.
- John Dillinger wore Hanes underpants with blue stripes. And red sock garters.
- Joseph Pschorr "invented" brewing underground in cellars, thus allowing Germans to drink year-round as the beer was kept cool in the summer. Thanks, Herr Pschorr!

In unrelated news, I'm sick. In further unrelated news, the ol' wanderlust seems to have returned. Please remind me why I like living in Wisconsin? I mean, other than the fact that parts of it are insanely beautiful and awesome and it is near just about everyone I love. Find me a mountain in Wisconsin!

I want to see mountains again. Mountains, Gandalf!