I always enjoy compiling a list of things I’ve learned each month. (Thank you, Emily P. Freeman, for the idea!) Feel free to share the things you’ve learned in August in the comments — trivia or life lessons, funny or serious, I’d love to hear.
- Wales has more castles than any other country.
2. In New Zealand people often go barefoot in public, for instance to the grocery store. (Learn more here.)
3. You can turn off “picked for you” pins in Pinterest (under your account settings).
4. Young House Love has a colouring book coming out in October.
5. I thought the Pulitzer Prize was only for journalism, but it also has categories for literature and musical composition.
7. Agua frescas are “are a combination of fruits, cereals, flowers, or seeds blended with sugar and water to make light non-alcoholic beverages.” I made a recipe for watermelon-citrus agua fresca from a Williams-Sonoma cookbook. I thought it was tasty, but my husband greatly disliked it, probably because it wasn’t very sweet. If I ever see another flavour on a menu,
I think I’ll give it a try.
8. I learned a lot about the Olympics in August. For example, synchronized swimming dates back to Ancient Rome.
9. After Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest, he gave a 90-minute speech before receiving medical attention. The bullet remained lodged inside him until his death more than six years later.
10. Sensory information from smells goes straight to the hippocampus, where long-term memories are formed, but not to the language part of the brain, making smells easy to remember but hard to describe. (For a better explanation listen to this podcast episode!)
11. There are three species of puffins: the tufted puffin, the horned puffin, and the Atlantic puffin. Their bones are dense, which makes them good at diving and bad at flying.
Thanks for the Pinterest tip – off to do that now! I learned that about New Zealand when I was there esrlier this year – so strange but absolutely true! Another NZ fact: children are eligible to start school once they turn 5 so generally their first say of school is their 5th birthday!
Thanks for stopping by. I would love to visit New Zealand… if only it weren’t so far from Canada!
That’s funny about number 5, because I thought the Pulitzer Prize was only for literature. Didn’t you know To Kill a Mockingbird was awarded the Pulitzer? 🙂 (Side note: I marked an essay this afternoon where the student referred to Harper Lee as a man the whole time).
I guess I should have known that!