Stuff You Should Know

the Enquirer staff was aghast. It was like asking an experienced team of grave robbers to take up gardening.

Another good example of it being tongue in cheek is there's this great article from Alex Meyasi on Priceonomics where they were talking about how very frequently on like forums and just basically hangouts for rock, paper, scissors aficionados, they'll mention the book The Trio of Hands by Voyek Smoltsova. And that it's basically like the Bible about rock, paper, scissors and wisdom about rock, paper, scissors.

And that he was just this great rock, paper, scissors kind of champion, I guess. Savant. This person is totally made up. The book is made up. None of it exists. But yet you'll find it everywhere.

And there's a few other firsts listed in that book which are kind of interesting.

They apparently were inspired or the Sr. Daniel was inspired by a Samuel Beckett play called Crap's Last Tape where the protagonist in the movie or I'm sorry in the play tapes himself speaking at different points in his life and so the O'Keefe family used a tape recorder to record their Festivus and some of these tapes still exist apparently from little Dan's life which is great.

He said that after some work he brought away the affected tooth together with a piece of jaw bone as big as a walnut and three neighboring molars.

Then in 1895, there was a cough syrup company in New York called Pearl B. Wait. Is that what it's called? Pearl Wait. W A I T. Right. But they weren't selling much cough syrup.

And then in 1895, Rose Knox, which was that his wife, I guess? Yes. Published a book called Dainty Desserts, which is a book of recipes. And things were kind of moving along a little bit.

And actually a woman named, what was her name? Mabel? Yeah, Mabel Hoffman. Mabel Hoffman stepped into the fray and said, peace, peace children. I've got this covered. Listen up.

Yeah, she wrote a book called The Crockery Cookery or Crockery Cookery, no the. And it was a huge, huge hit. It was a New York Times bestseller.

And it was a huge, huge hit. It was a New York Times bestseller. I believe she went on to sell about six million copies of this thing.

And then this book came out. So things are starting to build here for Oprah. And this book came out called The Eight Week Cholesterol Cure by a guy named Robert E. Kowalski.

And it chronicled his the decline of his LDL, the bad cholesterol, just from eating an Oat Bran diet. And that book became extraordinarily popular.

It is recorded of Simon Magus that he was able to fly on the air to become invisible or to assume any form he pleased by the agency of the soul of a boy whom, to use the libelous phrase employed by the author of the Clementine recognitions, he had murdered.

And they wrote a book that wasn't too far off that pamphlet called Consumer Engineering, colon, or at least of a colon and a title, a new technique for prosperity.

And they called it creative waste and just basically flat out said, we should make things that are less durable because, you know, people are going to buy more stuff.

There's this kind of moniker for, um, uh, hookworm infection along with certain other infections. They're lumped together under the umbrella of neglected tropical diseases.

And the reason they're called that is because this is stuff that like you can easily get rid of if you alleviate poverty in the developing world. But we're not doing that. And it's out of neglect, basically.

he says that up to something like 740 million people around the world are thought to have hookworm infections, right?

I always associate trepanation with this little second - one second long snippet from those Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown book ads from like 1990.

There's like one moment where they like show somebody like doing a trepanation surgery on somebody else's head in like a cave by torchlight.

I think the first time the rhyme itself was in a book, it was in 1797 in Juvenile Amusement by Samuel Arnold and the third line instead of all the king's horses and all the king's men, it said four score men and four score more.

Here's a knock knock joke book.

The book was called Book of Vendor Good and the language was Vendor Good.

Yeah, not like just some gibberish or whatever. He took from like Latin and Greek and some of the Romance languages and figured out different ways to conjugate words based on this language and he created his own language.

It wasn't just some lame thing where words were replaced with words.

Yeah, I think there were like 8 cases or something, grammatical cases.

It was really impressive stuff and it was the kind of thing I saw somebody put it like a linguistics professor would have been well received for having written a book where they debuted their own language and this kid was doing it before he was 10.

And if you're interested in that kind of thing, also go back and read Dr. Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, which talks a lot about this transition and basically argues that we were all better off as hunter-gatherers.