No, I Didn't. Nobody Did.

I do love Wikipedia generally, but I have a few minor quibbles, and one is with the "Did You Know" section on the home page of the English version. (In French it's "Le saviez-vous?" There was one today that said, "Did You Know...that Charles Taylor was the first of thirteen Welsh international rugby players to die in action during World War I?"

The feature almost always offers some incredibly obscure fact like that, something nobody would ever know, guess, or, frankly, care about, and I don't think things like that work so well. I've never previously thought about how many international rugby players were likely to have died in action during World War I. I had no preconceptions about the subject, and thus the fact offers me no opportunity to be surprised, to revise my thinking. I mean, if you drop a damn artillery shell on an international rubgy player, he's going to end up just as dead as anyone else. Why wouldn't he? I think a better "Did You Know" approach would be to marry an obscure fact to a very familiar one, like this: "Did you know...that Winston Churchill, before he became Prime Minister of Britain during the Second World War, spent several years as a professional teacher of cha-cha-cha dancing?" See what I mean?

The thing about Churchill and cha-cha-cha is little-known because it's not, in fact, true, but if it were it would totally rock as a DYK. I just looked up, without success, how many cells there are in a potato. That would be pretty cool too. You'd have this huge number, like the number of stars in a galaxy, juxtaposed with a potato, which is a commonplace thing if anything is. Get it? It's like a joke—you're playing off the incongruity of it.

And finally: Did you know...I've got to get some damn work done? Bye!