Useless Trivia

“At what point did you decide you wanted to know things nobody cares about?”
- that guy from The Colbert Report, to Jeopardy wiz Ken Jennings

. . . 122 days ‘till Disney . . .

Nothing noteworthy happened in Disney History today. Disney stock is at 32, though! It had the most difficult struggle cracking 30, and now we’re cruising comfortably in the 2’s. How exciting!

New Gilmore Girls tonight! Yahoo! I’m excited because Lorelai is back with Christopher, who is the father of Rory (the kid she had when she was 16 that started the whole shebang) instead of dating the diner owner Luke, who annoys the heck out of me. Hopefully it’ll be good! Although, as long as Paris and Sookie and Michel are in it, you can’t really go wrong...

It is so frippin’ cold in the building today! Trying to move my fingers over the keys is like trying to wriggle them through jell-o. Hopefully my next classroom will be a decent temperature. I’d even take the good-old balmy temperatures we endured over the summer.

I really wanted to see Flicka, but after two weeks in release it’s pretty much gone from theatres anywhere. It’s not playing at home or here (I thought we’d have a better chance in the middle of cow-country), even at the megatheater right up from my house, which has twenty screens. Do you have any idea how abysmally that movie must have performed to be entirely and systematically punted from theaters within two weeks? It’s almost incomprehensible. I hate to even guess how much money the movie proponents lost. I suppose with a twenty-seven year old playing a seventeen-year old and stone-faced Tim McGraw as the emotional backbone of the movie, it didn’t really have much of a chance to begin with. Horse movies are such a niche market.

A Starbucks just opened by my house. I hate the place in theory, but it will certainly facilitate emergency coffee runs, and if Borders is ever full, I can swing over to Starbucks for some internet-accessible study space.

The holidays are always fun because the Travel Channel, National Geographic and the Food Network always run all sorts of behind-the-holiday-trivia programs. For instance, did you know that the first pumpkin pie was made by filling a hollowed-out pumpkin with butter and roasting it over a fire? Or that potatoes were never eaten at the first Thanksgivings because they hadn’t made their way up from South America yet? Or that Lincoln was the one to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday? Or that the difference between apple juice and apple cider is that the latter consists of whole apples crushed into liquid (skin, pits and all), whereas the juice is just the filtered part? I love learning useless trivia. Plus, all those programs make me want to go watch Pocahontas for the umpteenth time. Maybe something about the corn.