Trivia

The casual student envisions the invasion of old Rome by northern hordes as a frenzied armed attack. Scholars say it wasn’t. They say the Romans didn’t even think of it as a threat. The invaders were blameless migrants who sought the good life on the Roman side of the river, and they seeped in, disorganized and desperate, but not wildly, in daylight and dark, year in and year out, to overrun the city, even as any next generation overruns the last.

Q. What’s the name of that small beard with rectangular tufts of hair drooping from a man’s lower lip and chin?

A. An imperial. An allusion to the beard style of Napoleon III.

You need 69,000 extractions from a coral snake to fill a pint jar.

Q. What do you call that little red dot Hindu women wear on the forehead?

A. A tilak.

A sheepskin is best cut for parchment in a rectangle the approximate size of two pages of an open book. That’s is what gave the traditional book its size and shape.

What G.K. Chesterton really said was “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”