Word: trivia
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...Napoleonic wars invented hiking and the forest trail by painting blue arrows on strategically placed trees in the unmarked wilds of the Fontainebleau woods. For $200: this mountain in Middle Europe was long believed to house the tomb of Pontius Pilate. Finally, for $300: these obscure bits of ancient trivia, and hundreds more like them, can be found in this new book by a professor of history at Columbia University...
...through the book, you might see the section on the bizarre "Fruit Machine," a device used to detect homosexuality in Canadian civil servants during the 1950s by measuring the how wide a man's pupils dilated when he was shown a picture of a naked man. Such seemingly archaic trivia is engrossing, but most of the text focuses on major gay historical events such as the Oscar Wilde trial or the formation...
Appearances can be deceiving, for hunger and its particular dangers cannot always be seen from the outside. Rickets may seem like a quaint problem, or the answer to a trivia quiz, but school administrators still know firsthand what it is like to deal with a child who is not getting enough to eat. Linda Butcher, coordinator for health services in Oxnard elementary school district, a California agricultural community with about 14,000 students, says that before her schools applied for the School Breakfast Program, students would start feeling sick in the middle of the morning. Instead of playing during recess...
...about once every ten pages, between the beer going down and the macadamia nuts coming back up, emerges a voice worth listening to. Out of a mind cluttered with pop culture icons and high brow trivia--James Dean, Lucky Charms, Cezanne--come the big big modern philosophical questions, refurbished with Nelson's own pessimistic twang. "Who the fuck am I?" he asks...
Well, their friends got on a trivia list. But with Hoop Dreams-and another brilliant documentary, Crumb-missing, this Oscar category is like major league baseball. The heavy hitters aren't around, and replacement players have taken the field...