The Best Of One World

No, no, I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one.

Ozymandias in his interview with Doug Roth of “Nova Express”, the meta-fictional work (a work of fiction within a work of fiction) between chapters eleven and twelve of the graphic novel Watchmen

It's worth it: After a three-week vacation, your IQ can drop by as much as 20%.

By now I have been cured of the hubris I had in elementary school that I had to be the smartest person there. Seriously, I felt in darker moments (and I had a lot of them) that the only thing that would impress people and attract them to seek me out would be to know more. I (still) wonder whether that surgery I had to remove a benign tumor when I was five triggered something … but I'm getting too electrochemical with that.

Canada has more doughnut shops per capita than any other country.

So when nurses ask me as part of their routine questionnaires “have you ever been depressed or thought of suicide” I respond NO for while of course I have had such thoughts, I don't dwell on them. By keeping busy – I want to say productive, but if I were as much as that you'd be hearing whispers of my being nominated for the Nobel Prize – I don't have time to worry. Or shouldn't. The fact my car isn't starting and I don't know why will not make me a worse person.

Rabbits can't walk. They always hop or leap.

Today's title comes from one of the Hannah Montana episodes we watched with the kids at dinner last night. Hannah being the teenage pop star singing sensation and Miley being the real person who goes through the teenage life, one night she's so frustrated that she has to keep these lives separate that she wishes on a star that “there is no secret” (that is, that she's Hannah Montana all the time), which in true Disney fashion changes her life pretty dramatically.

Partly foggy? The first TV weather chart was broadcast in Britain on November 11, 1936.

Instead of her best friends at school, Hannah's homeschooled, her brother Jackson's so frustrated with everyone wanting to be his friend to get close to his sister that he's left home, her dad Robby married a gold digger (her previous homeschool teacher), and her friends have totally different personalities. It doesn't take long – hey, this is a half-hour show – for Miley … I mean Hannah … I mean Miley to learn that when you get what you want it's sometimes just not worth it.

Origin of the term bridal shower: English brides used to but “bride ale” for wedding guests.

And Hannah's theme song in this other world (“The Best of Both Worlds”) plays as “The Best of One World” because, of course, there's only Hannah. Back in our world and not the shared Disneyverse though – haven't written about that in a while, but I really don't keep up with the shows either since we disconnected DirecTV – I got through two more books in leaps and bounds, and I've been excerpting from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader. (ISBN 1571458735)

Coincidence? The average single man is one inch shorter than the average married man.

(And YES, you can read that elsewhere besides the bathroom when you go!) Parts funny, parts tragic, parts wow I didn't realize I wanted to know that, it's well worth your time, that or any of the other Bathroom Readers for that matter. And for my Year of Biography – seriously, I think this is the fourth one this year – I finished Susan Bivin Aller's J.M. Barrie (ISBN 0822549182) about the creator of Peter Pan and so much more. First knew of the playwright himself in high school, and Pan long before.

South-pollywog: According to Sesame Street, Kermit the Frog is left-handed.

Again, the Disney version. (You MUST read the original book – haven't seen the play it's based on – to get more out of the story, and that Pan can be and often is a jerk; witness the Once Upon A Time version of him, and Hook's the hero or at least he's nobler than the boy who never grew up.) My first connection of Barrie with anything he wrote was “The Admirable Crichton” in high school, which was a lot of fun.

And I'm gonna have more today, I really am! David