I take time, usually on a daily basis, to ask questions. I have this notion that the more questions I ask, the better I will get at it… The internet is a great receptacle for my queries, even though I rarely get the answers I want.
Case in point: I have a list of 8 answers which came from questions which mostly had little or no real connection to the answers. Question #1 was a search into how oblate the earth actually is, question #2 was an outgrowth of some research into Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, and question #3 was related to some research I had into the origins of alcoholic beverages commonly used in organized societies. I am still looking into fermented mares milk…
1. Lake Itasca in Minnesota (the source of the Mississippi River) is nearly three miles closer to the center of the Earth than the mouth of the Mississippi River (or New Orleans for that matter!).
2. The feared Roman legions averaged about 5’4” in height. The average height of an early American Colonist (17th century) was up to nearly 5’7”.
3. The ancient Egyptians had more than six distinct types of beer, and were brewing beer well before they built the Pyramids. On a related topic, Homer alludes to the Greeks having sausage (before 1,000 BCE). I guess the accompaniment of chips and hot wings came much later…
4. http://www.redorbit.com/news/oddities/70622/north_korean_leader_claims_he_invented_hamburgers/index.html enough said…
5. While on the topic of Korea (a country I really love…): http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/04/10/stuff-korean-people-like/?ref=2008.05-online-exclusive-ten-essential-korean-oddities&page=
6. This web article may be even too fey for Great Britain: http://standingstones.tv/news/builder-forced-to-design-estate-around-rock-because-locals-say-fairies-live-under-it/
7. This linked site is part of the Yale Map Collection (a part of the Yale University Library), and certainly contains some interesting cartographical oddities. http://www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/oldsite/map/curious.html
8. A Pole of inaccessibility is a location which is the hardest to reach or at least the furthest from any ocean. The pole in the continental US is in southwest South Dakota, in South America the pole is in Brazil. Kyrgyzstan is the champ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility
