Did you know that the guy who invented the Polaroid camera also invented 3-D glasses? (I "invented" the ones in the photo above :) American inventor Edwin Land founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937 and died in 1991 with more than 500 U.S. patents to his name (only Thomas Edison holds more!) —from Readymade ‡
My co-worker is always ordering a fattoush for lunch, but I didn't know what it is. "Fattoush is a Levantine salad made from several garden vegetables and toasted or fried pieces of pita bread. Fattoush salad allows cooks to use seasonal produce by mixing different vegetables and herbs according to taste, and also to make use of pitas that have gone stale. The vegetables are cut into relatively large pieces compared to Tabbouleh which requires ingredients to be finely chopped. Sumac is usually used to give Fattoush its sour taste."
What the hell is Sumac? It's any one of approximately 250 species of flowering plants in the genus Rhus and related genera, in the family Anacardiaceae. The dried berries of some species are ground to produce a tangy purple spice often used in juice. Sumacs grow in subtropical and warm temperate regions throughout the world, especially in North America. Sumacs propagate both by seed (spread by birds and other animals through their droppings), and by new sprouts from rhizomes (ginger is another fine rhizome), forming large clonal colonies. ‡
Did you know that the number of silk strings on an ear of corn correspond to the number of kernels? It's true. ‡
In the August 2008 issue of Nat'l Geographic, there's an article on a national park in Hokkaido called Daisetsuzan. In the article, they mistakenly assert that Mt. Fuji receives 100 million visitors a year. According to my research (i.e. Google) it's more like 250-300k annually. By Nat'l Geographic's erroneous estimate, Mt. Fuji would have 273,972 visitors per day.
It wasn't until 1872 that the official ban on women climbing Mt. Fuji ended. Also, the mountain is privately owned by a Buddhist monastery. More trivia re: Fuji on www.thethinkingblog.com. ‡