On an average day, my daughter’s question-to-declarative sentence ratio clocks in at a healthy 5:1. In this section of the blog, I explore what happens when instead of saying “I don’t know,” I say “Let’s find out!”
One of the minor social benefits of being married to an ICU doctor is that it is really easy to explain to people what my husband does. But since my husband started at Google it’s been a bit trickier. “What’s a doctor doing at Google?”
Sometimes when you go out and into nature, nature does something so interesting that you want to stop and watch it for a while. Case in point: while on a hike last week, my husband and I came across a colony of acorn woodpeckers stashing nuts for the winter. After watching for awhile, we found ourselves wondering: “Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?”
Happy Holidays, y’all! Thank you for spending another year reading Caterpickles.
Like really hot. Stay safe out there, folks.
News broke this week of particular interest to us here at Caterpickles Central because it touches on a 10-year-old question of ours: Did dinosaurs have belly buttons? Y’all, I think we may finally have our answer.
A Jonathan Swift poem? Norse mythology? A mistranslation from the Greek? Shoddy thatched roof craftsmanship? Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway? (Part 2 of our 2-post investigation)
Thatched roofs? Unsavory Elizabethan street sanitation practices? A 1652 Richard Brome play? Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway?
While I was busy not blogging this month, it came to my attention that this blog is ten years old. Goodness. I thought it would be fun to mark its decade-aversary by revisiting a question post from the early days of the blog to see how well my answer has held up. Spoiler alert: Not well.
I grew up watching the Muppets. For years I wandered through life, filled with the happy conviction that I knew everything I needed to know about Sam the Eagle. This happy state continued until I saw a video of the African shoebill stork on Twitter. It bore a disconcerting resemblance to old Sam. To make matters worse, while researching shoebills, I discovered that some think that the harpy eagle is actually the model for Sam the Eagle. There’s only one thing to do when your world has been rocked by this sort of question: compare and contrast.
About 20 years ago, my grandparents gave me a set of old family journals from 1871-1952. Mixed in with all sheep, pig, apple, and pork accounts are surprisingly interesting narratives of daily life in upstate New York in the late 1800s. This week, my great-great-grandfather goes to Rochester for a second mortgage, and comes away feeling a bit… swindled.
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