Heads up–daylight savings time starts this Sunday, and this is the potentially embarrassing one. I'll miss getting up at sunrise.

There was a full eclipse of the moon yesterday morning. If it makes you feel any better, I missed it too.

Modern maladies.

I write most of these posts on an old-school iPad, the kind with the touch id button. Works fine.

Yesterday, though, I somehow managed to hurt the tip of my right index finger, aka my 'typing' finger, under the nail. Don't know how, but there it is. I put antiseptic on it, and tried to work. But this morning, it began to hurt when I pressed the screen.

No problem. I'll just put a bandage on it to cushion it.

Well, turns out that is a problem. The bandage hides my fingerprint, so I have to type in the password. No problemo. But... the regular typing is, since the ipad something that responds to my finger does not respond to the plastic bandage. My middle finger works, but not 100%. Awk-ward.

Fortunately, I have one of those stylus-thingies so I can continue to bring you these pearls of wisdom.

Things I did not know.

And who would have thought that one headline would lead so quickly to a rabbit hole?

(New info marked with *)

The headline in BBC News seemed innocuous enough: Bourbon maker Jim Beam halts production at main distillery for a year.

That sounds ominous, I thought.

Well, it turns out that they're closing to renovate the main distillery. All other operations, like bottling, will be unaffected. So not so bad, probably.

However, there's a *backlog of bourbon–some 16 million barrels or 848 million gallons in storage in Kentucky alone–in part because of retaliation against American tariffs. One of the Canadian provinces that pulled American liquor from its shelves is Ontario, which has an eye-popping $57.7million worth of US booze stockpiled, *some of which will soon expire.

*Suntory, a Japanese company, owns Jim Beam.

Bourbon is my least favorite of all the brown liquors, including Irish, Scotch, Canadian, and American blend. No *, because I knew that.

More booze.

One more shot for the road.

An ad for a Discovery program declares if you truly love your country, you must love moonshine.

Not only do I not know this, but actually know something contradictory.

Just a historical reminder: the first uprising against the federal government was led by moonshiners. Patriotism at its finest.

Me, Teacher! Call on me!

USA Today poses a problem and asks a question: A historic sewage spill is flowing in the Potomac. Where is it headed?

Downstream.

When meteorology meets astrology,

you get headlines like this one in The Washington Post: A powerful storm will hit some cities with a foot of snow.

Artificial Stupidity couldn't phrase it any better.

In other news, 'you may come into a sum of money,' 'an old friend will reach out,' and 'travel plans may go awry as Mercury enters retrograde.'

Sometimes I do read the article.

BBC offered up this headline: Mercury: The planet that shouldn't exist.

Hm, I thought. I had guessed Pluto. So I read on, and found out Mercury has long baffled astronomers because it defies much of what we know about planet formation. Finally, I thought, somebody has the courage to acknowledge astronomers, and by extension scientists in general, are sitting on their brains and don't know what they're talking about.

But here's the dilemma. Do I want to continue to read the article and be subject to doing more thinking, or is my brain already overheated and encouraging me to lie down and get back to what passes for normal around here?

Surprised you have to ask.

Today's earworm.

Even though my original experience of this earworm is contemporaneous with songs like Help! and Satisfaction, it feels like a blast from a very distant past.

Swing to the left!
Swing to the right!
Stand up! Sit down!
Fight! Fight! Fight!

Forget the rare earth crisis!

Frankincense is apparently in short supply to the point of being unavailable. In another *t.I.d.n.k., frankincense begins as a tree sap. It is becoming rarer because the seeds from active source trees germinate at less than 20%, while seeds from untapped trees germinate at over 80%. It also doesn't help that *most frankincense trees are grown in Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. The forests are in decline because of deforestation and conversion of land to agricultural use. I'm sure continuing conflicts in the area don't help, either.

Be afraid. Be very afraid! (#3926)

The water providers for our city sent us a lovely letter a while back, pointing out that we have very clean drinking water, among the purest in the country, when it leaves the treatment plant. After that, all bets are off, as the city then provides a long list of hazardous materials and other things that can go wrong that could be in water as it passes through all sorts of pipes made of potentially hazardous and cancer-causing materials like lead and corroded metal. So if you're not well, do 't blame us! Our water is pristine!

But why? And how?

I didn't watch Bat Masterson as a child, for no particular reason. Now, reruns occupy one of those 'nothing to watch' deserts, the infuriatingly memorable theme playing at least four times an hour, with the line

He wore a cane and derby hat
They called him Bat... Bat Masterson.

Beyond the cheap and too easy rhyme: just how do you wear a cane?

Today's head popper.

Oddly, this thought/question did not pop into my head at 4:30 am. Maybe Gabriel, my muse, slept in too.

Anyway, I was looking at the keyboard, and wondered, 'we know who designed the second most popular English keyboard (the Dvorack [August D.]) but who invented the dominant keyboard form factor, known as the QWERTY?

Turns out maybe nobody, or we may never know. Wikipedia is coy on the topic, saying only that it was based on a layout included on the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold by E. Remington and Sons from 1874.

So are Sholes and Glidden the guilty parties, or was somebody else responsible for the design of the 'speedy typing' keyboard?

And if speed was the goal, why didn't whomever set it up so that when you pressed 'q,' a 'u' was automatically added? If nothing else, that would eliminate English aberrations like 'Qantas' and impossible to pronounce drug names like 'Qbntalonq' from the list of curiosities that confront us weekly (estimated):.

Now that the mind-gates are open, I wonder if the typing Glidden is related to the paint-people Gliddens, or if there even was a typewriter Glidden.

The Remington typewriter people were not responsible for the Winchester rifle (they had their own rifle), which led (we are told) to the construction of the Winchester Mystery House, although I think a case could be made for someone feeling responsible for the pain and suffering of thousands of typists using QWERTY keyboards being driven over the edge and building of a Remington Mystery House.

And while we're at it,

Who was the first guy who looked at coal and thought, 'I bet you could dig that out of the ground and burn it?