Dichroic Reflections

the Scarecrow's Brains

Sometimes I think my head's just a radian or so out of phase with the rest of the world. The things I know that delight me most are mostly not the things anyone else wants to know. I wonder if the converse is true and other people have little bits of knowledge they treasure that no one else knows about. I suspect it is for some values of "other people". So here's my proposal for a non-sheep-like meme: Answer the questions below. (I will be shocked if anyone gets more than one, unless you go look things up - ref. not the things anyone wants to know, above.) Then in my comments or your own journal, pose questions about the bits of information or trivia that delight you. I'll post my answers in a day or two, if anyone wants to play.

• What character appears in the works of both John Myers Myers and Susan Cooper?
• Name one book written by the man whose own personal library has been transplanted to the top floor of the Philadelphia Public Library's main building.
• When I was in college two of my favorite Japanese restaurants were named respectively Hikaru and Genji. For what literary reason is this amusing?
• Cite internal proof (in his songs or on his CDs) that Stan Rogers read Robert A. Heinlein.
• In what way is John Adam's daughter Nabby's name the opposite of the word "apron"?

The other symptom of out-of-phase-ness is that my head is full of all these old catchphrases, only there's no one else around who knows them. I don't mean the ones that everyone everywhere said and then forgot, like "Where's the Beef?" I mean more specific things like "Keh" and "What a ripoff!" from my fifth-grade class, or "Doy!" (similar to Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" only not) from fourth grade, or "They've gone to Betson's!" which was from an old furniture store commercial, and used to be quoted during Philadelphgia showings of Rocky Horror. And there are all the songs some of my friends wrote in late grade school / early junior high, usually making fun of someone - I still know all the words. There just has to be a more productive use of neurons than that. Only I suspect this happens to enough of the rest of you that I'm not really out of phase, just full of a lot of odd bits of sawdust, tacks, and bran, like the Scarecrow's Brains that the Wizard gave him.