It’s a fruit, not a vegetable. The botanists are clear on this, and so should you be. A fruit is a product of the seed-bearing structure of a flowering plant. A vegetable, on the other hand, is the edible portion of a plant, you know, like leaves, stems, roots,...
If you were to decide to build a railroad across a continent, would it have occurred to you to build TWO — one from the west heading back eastward, and one from the east, heading westward — and hope that when they met…they actually met?, and didn’t,...
Hop, as in beer, yes; essentially a boiled pine-cone-looking flower. The beer is hoppy if you can taste its hops. [Pellinore restrains himself making dreadfully unsatisfying puns about the Ephemeral Hoppiness derived from drinking beer. He contemplates a more...
Zhao Gao was a Chinese eunuch. Wait, stop — how many Chinese eunuchs can you name? I’ll wait while you think. [sound of Pellinore humming….] Time’s up, thought so. And yet, there were many many Chinese eunuchs. They were very powerful political...
True story: doctors once insisted that personality traits can be read by the bumps on your head. You read that correctly. “Phrenology” emerged some two hundred years ago and lasted an astonishing hundred years or so before someone said, “Really? Bumps on the...
