One of my birthday presents was a handy dandy paperback book by the name of Fab Fun Facts, which isn’t really a book in the sense that somebody wrote something original and put some thought into it, or anything like that.
I get the feeling that it was more a question of the editor looking at one of his staff writers, and saying ‘we need a meaningless book, put together a list of interesting trivia points, 2 sentences or less and less is better. And then the writer went to google and put together such a list.
Also, it was written in Danish and then translated into English, so put all this together and you’ve got lots of typos, which I noticed before I’d even opened the book because there was one right there on the cover Women’s hearts beats faster than men’s.
Typos grammar mistakes, and I caught at least two factual errors. “1776 was the last year in which none of the world’s nations were at war,” and “Before carrots were orange, they were purple” which is a gross oversimplification from the version I’d heard, which is that they used to exist in many colors, and that makes sense because you have to have something to cross-breed the purple carrots WITH before you get the magic orange. Also, there was pretty definitely a war going on and one of the sides (hint: Britain) was among the world’s nations in 1776.
Still, it was good enough to use with my gymnasium students, and I learned that 40% of those who died on the Titanic were crew, 90% of babies prefer the right breast, Rene Descartes had a thing for cross-eyed women, and Nicole Kidman is afraid of butterflies.
It’s like “learn something new every day” on steroids.
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