The Desert Mermaid

• Clarence “Ducky” Nash not only voiced Donald Duck in English; he also did the voice on all the dubbed shorts Disney made so that the voice would remain consistently unintelligible across all languages.
• Before she became a TV cook show hostess, Julia Child INVENTED SHARK REPELLENT.
• Shakira sings very differently in English than she does in Spanish—to an amazing degree. In English, she sounds like so many other Madonna clones; in Spanish she’s got that rich and confident voice. I’d never listened to one of her songs’ English and Spanish versions back-to-back before, but it’s amazing how different it is.
• Drawing something that looks like text without being legible is called “Greeking”—the written equivalent of “rhubarb.”
• Generally speaking, the human brain can only really count up to 4 at a glance. Numbers beyond that slow us down.
• Cookie Monster’s name in Hindu Hindi is Biscuit Badsha.
• BONUS EDIT WITH NEW LEARNED THING: Hindi is the language; Hindu is the religion.  I never was really sure of the difference in the terms.  Thanks, sriti !
• It’s incredibly convenient to have a portable musical instrument to carry around and practice when you’ve got a few minutes, instead of having something too huge to lug around.
• There is an explanation for my complete inability to ever adhere to the crazy raw food diet so many of our library patrons seem to be interested in starting up: Oral Allergy Syndrome. (I’m sure those raw food books would assure me that I wouldn’t have this syndrome if I just ate enough raw food to detox, but fuck ’em.)
• You can get hives ON YOUR GOD DAMN EYEBALL.
• There are a few drawbacks to nuclear power. [/understatement]
• Mushrooms grow fast.
• Calendars generally follow three main types: lunar, solar, and lunisolar.  A great deal of work goes into keeping calendars on track, especially the lunisolar ones.  Some calendars also have a really complex way to make the weekdays dependent on the date and even more complex astrological positions.
• The term for the shaved head, or part of the head, of a monk is tonsure.
• It is possible for me to find stars in the sky if I concentrate!
• Also, Betelgeuse really does look orange.
• The effectiveness of toilet paper follows a bell curve along its price range. Too cheap and it’s painful and thin; too expensive and it’s so pumped with lotions, layers, and moisturizers that it forgets its function as, well, toilet paper, and winds up just waving at your butt as it goes by.
• There are Geno fans on the internet. I should have known.
• Pizza sauce is a lot simpler than I thought, but crust is still a bit tough to work out.

• The song played at Bilbo’s birthday in Fellowship of the Ring has a name: “Flaming Red Hair”
• The Sea Organ is a concrete construction on the beach in Zadar, Croatia, as a way to mitigate mess made on the coast during World War II. It’s got a resonance chamber under its marble steps and a Series Of Tubes. Thus, when the wind and the waves move through it, it makes music!
• While I kew about the tragic story of Judith Barsi, the voice of Duckie in The Land Before Time, I did not know she had a marker saying “Yep, Yep, Yep!” That makes me feel slightly better.
• There is a nifty food co-op in Salt Lake City!
• The best kind of pie is cheese-and-mushroom.
• Verjuice, an acidic juice made by pressing unripe green grapes, was a condiment widely used in the Middle Ages.
• You no longer need assistance for red paint at those pottery-painting studios.
• Anything is possible when you smell like a monster and know the word “on.”
• My synesthesia still applies to music notation. Not to musical notes themselves, but to reading music—the notes are the same colors as their corresponding letters.
• Wearing a wrist brace actually can make your whole arm feel better.
• The Na’vi language nerds are doing double-time to catch up to the Klingon language nerds. Paul Frommer has a blog and a posse!
• People have a tough time keeping promises when those promises go against obsessive thoughts.
• The Australian sleepy lizard is monogamous, and will return to its mate every year for 20+ years. It will also hold several-day vigils if their mate dies.
• When you drain blisters, you’re better off inserting the needle along the side.
• Satin is evil when you’re sewing. There’s a reason it’s only one letter away from “Satan.”
• Ringo Starr has a Christmas album!
• It takes a while for agents to respond when they’re reading a sample chapter of your novel.  And the suspense is No Fun At All.

Now, I know most of y’all usually find this obnoxious, but god damn I love me some Christmas music.  I like to sing them and I like the fact that there are so many versions of the same damn song and that the version can make or break it, and I like feeling like it’s THE HAP-HAPPIEST SEASON OF ALLLLL—er. Sorry.

Except.

Goddamn store I work at now has a looped CD going all damn day every day. This wouldn’t be so bad if they had good songs, but no, what they have seems to be mostly made up of select tracks from A Very Crooner Christmas, and the rest are—I am not making this up—beatmaster remixes of crooner Christmas songs. I did not even know they made those. I still do not know why.

So here’s what I’d do if I were in charge of the Christmas playlist: