Before the age of google, some of my friends and I had a thing called History Club. History Club, often accompanied by cocktails, was basically four or five people sitting around who would pick a random historical event or figure and then discuss the things we knew about it or them. Someone would say “Napoleon” and someone might add “he was the guy who began the tradition of putting ornamental buttons on dress jackets to keep his soldiers from wiping their noses on their sleeves”. History Club was a fascinating and often hysterical glimpse into the collective knowledge of a group. We would pick a mixture of things that were well known and obscure and the night often ended with outright fabrication and twisted history similar to those fractured fairy tales on the Bullwinkle show.

One thing I liked about History club was that the well from which to draw was deep. Bullwinkle could just as easily have been the topic of conversation as Tiananmen Square and we encouraged one another to be as forthcoming as possible with what we thought we knew. Sometimes, saying that stuff out loud would encourage me to think about where I came by some of my information and this is what my post is really about.

I think the mind is an amazing hunter/gatherer. It is always on the lookout for information, weighing the legitimacy of sources and trying to determine if the information obtained is worth storing away and repeating to others. As an example, I once heard that firefighters really hate metal joist hangers because they have a very low melting point and can fail easily in a fire endangering them. I do not know for sure it is true but I feel like the now forgotten source was credible. And I feel like I may have heard it from more than one credible source. Here’s the rub, after having worked with metal joist hangers a good bit and spending some time amongst working blacksmiths, I cannot be sure that the second credible source was not me. By that I mean that I may have taken in this information at one point, deemed it legitimate based on what I know and then embellished the story to bolster my belief. It is possible.

Is what we really know is all mixed up with what we think we know? More than once I have heard something come out of my mouth that I had to question. I mean, how do I really know that lichen is a sign of good air quality? I am not a lichen specialist but I read it online in an article that seemed pretty authoritative. Was it written by a lichen specialist? I don’t know.

Today, I stopped for a Gatorade and noticed I was parked in front of a bunch of cattails. Did you know, if you dry a cattail, you can light it with a match, it will smolder and the smoke will keep away mosquitoes? No kidding, someone told me so when I was little.