Factomyopia

Last night I was driving home from puppy school with Biscuit. She's finished her six sessions and now has a certificate of completion. The certificate is not an acknowledgement of skills, it's an acknowledgement of showing up. We did show up. Honey and I started calling her "completer" last night.

I was listening to "Says You" on NPR on the way home from puppy school and they were doing lists of "what does it have in common?" "Pea, Walnut, Golf ball, Grapefruit, Softball" was one of the lists. The answer, in case you care, is that the are U.S. Weather Service sizes of hail. I found myself trying to make sure I remembered them correctly. I then had to look up hail sizes on the web. According to the NOAA.GOV web site (that would be the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the uber-agency to the National Weather Service), there are the following hail sizes. Are you ready? You sure?

0.25 inch Pea Size
0.50 inch Mothball Size
0.75 inch (Severe Criteria) Penny Size
0.88 inch Nickel Size
1.00 inch Quarter Size
1.25 inch Half Dollar Size
1.50 inch Walnut or Ping Pong Ball Size
1.75 inch Golf Ball Size
2.00 inch Hen Egg Size
2.50 inch Tennis Ball Size
2.75 inch Baseball Size
3.00 inch Teacup Size
4.00 inch Grapefruit Size
4.50 inch Softball Size

I was relieved to see this chart and its specificity, because I had been worrying about the relative lack of difference between the size of a softball and a grapefruit and the relatively large size difference between a pea and a walnut. It helps me to know that there is a complete list and standards to go along with it.

Of course, then I worry about people being killed by grapefruit sized hail. Sure enough, someone was killed in 2000 by a grapefruit sized piece of hail in Forth Worth, TX. Probably a Republican, but still.

I worry about these kinds of things too much. Give me a topic, prompt an interest and I'll find out everything I can about it. I file the little factoids away, trot them out at random times, and admire them like pretty little nuggets or hen egg sized pieces of hail.

My mother says that there are two kinds of people in the world: those that tell you everything they know, and those that know way more than they will ever tell you. She is definitely in the former category and my dad in the latter. I like to think I am more like my dad in this way, but suspect the opposite is true.

Lately, I'm trying not to be the busybody know-it-all that I have a tendency to be. Because I'm not teaching now, I don't have a captive audience for random fact of the day. Therefore, I want to spout them out when I can.

Murphy Brown had a great scene about this whole thing. One of the characters is telling the bartender something (it's been a long time since I've seen it, ok? Don't expect really great scene recreation). The bartender replies, "If I remember that, I'm going to have to let go of Truman's hat size." Please don't remember the hail sizes unless you have room.

I know that facts don't do you much good unless you have the analytical tools to connect them. I was at a meeting yesterday where a faculty member went on a rant about the chancellor of our system. I know facts about him (the chancellor) and I've heard opinions. I was impressed by the provost's response. He talked for a while and then said, "if the problems we have were really the result of one person, the solution would be fairly simple." It was as clever and thoughtful a bit of reasoning as I've heard in a while. And he's right, of course.

I'll probably hold on to the hail sizes for a while. But I'm going to try to figure out how to think about them (and all the other random things) in a more complex way.

I don't, by the way, know Truman's hat size and I'm not going to look it up.