Things I Learned

In no particular order, here are 8 things I learned* in 2024.

1) Gagauzia is a region of Moldova that is the homeland of an enclave of about 135,000 Turkic speaking Christians called Gagauzians.  (Another 30,000 live across the border in Ukraine.)  According to Wikipedia, it is presumed they were already in the Bulgarian Balkans and converted to Orthodox Christianity before the Ottoman conquest of the area in the late 1300's.  Following its defeat of the Ottomans in 1812, Russia relocated the Gagauzians to Bessarabia in the early part of the 19th century where they have lived ever since -- although they have switched countries several times due to the vagaries of history.  Their capital is Comrat.

2) [Earth shattering trigger warning]  Theodore Geisel pronounced his nom de plume Dr Seuss as Dr Zoyce (zɔɪs) to rhyme with 'Joyce'.  (It was his middle name and also his mother's maiden name.)  It became his penname in college at Dartmouth as a means of avoiding suspension for satirical cartooning.

3) There are seahorses in the western Atlantic from Nova Scotia to Venezuela.  I thought they were exclusively tropical and probably on the other side of the planet.  (I somehow already knew it's the male who carries the fertilized eggs in his pouch and gives birth to seahorse young, so-- I'm redeemed?)

4)  Scientific discovery of the year: Uranus smells like farts.  It's a fact you can spring on anyone at any opportune moment.   E.g.:

    Boss: Henderson, where's that report?
    Henderson: I don't know, but did you know that Uranus smells like farts?

Prediction for 2025: Next thing we'll discover is that Uranus sounds like farts.

5) Screenwriter Buck Henry envisioned the role of Benjamin Braddock in the Graduate for Robert Redford.  Redford wanted the role but Director Mike Nichols vetoed it on seeing the screen test figuring he would be unbelievable as an angst ridden lost soul unhappy with the default choices of young upper class men in the late 1960's.  In spite of his own California provenance, Dustin Hoffman's ethnic East Coast agita in the middle of all that  WASPy So Cal suburbia was just what the movie needed.  Runner up in the weird dodged bullet casting department: the role of Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining almost went to Robin Williams.  ("Too psychotic," Kubrick ultimately decided, before giving the role to Jack Nicholson.)

6) Learned from Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling (1987):  Apparently, I did not dream that when I was a kid in the late 60's and early 70's it was taught in school that even more than the Soviet Union was rumored to be, America was a "classless society."  According to Ehrenreich the point of this truism preached as a fact in that era was to make it common sense to minds at their formative stage that  America was a completely equal and free society in which some people simply chose to be the heads of corporations, some people chose to be janitors, some chose not to work-- it was all a matter of personal choice.  Our economy was not planned, unlike the Soviet Union's; it was chosen by each of us.  Social upheaval in those same years belied the propaganda, which fell out of vogue by the Reagan era.  No wonder I hadn't heard that bullshit factoid in years.

7) I am the age Karl Marx was when he died.

8) "Hearken (to)" is no longer a word.  And when it was it didn't mean what I thought it meant which was "be reminiscent of."  It meant "heed or pay attention to."  I wonder what word I thought I was using all these years.

~~~~~
* Alternatively, 8 things I managed to live this long without knowing.