Silk Parachute Book

This is the cool stuff that they don't teach in school.

-- Rattlesnakes, for all their evolutionary perfection, are not the brightest creatures. "If a line of people walks past a rattlesnake, it aims at the first person, strikes at the second, and hits the third."

-- In the way that a placer miner can look at a nugget and say what stream it came from, a lacrosse coach can watch an unknown player for a while and write down his home address.

-- The performance enhancing food for Olympic marathoners and such is Vespa mandarinia japonica, actually synthetic hornet juice, but what our author calls bee spit. The Japanese giant hornet "flies about a hundred kilometers a day ingesting but not digesting small insects, which it carries home in globular form to feed its larvae. The juice that goes for the gold is in the larvae. While the adult feeds the larvae, the larvae reciprocate with fresh juice, a blend of seventeen amino acids." If you're not a marathoner, or such, you can sit on the sofa, drink the bee spit, and are guaranteed to lose weight.

-- The worst checking error for a magazine fact checker is calling people dead who are not dead. "It really annoys them," McPhee quotes one fact checker. He tells the story of one reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was the the late reader in a nursing home. He called, demanding a correction. The magazine complied of course, in its next issue, "inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed."

-- Glaciation has replaced an asteroid or volcano as the leading theory for the cause of the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

You would have thought that McPhee's essay about the U.S. Open played at Oakmont Country Club would be my favorite, but I preferred reading about exotic foods, lacrosse, the tunnels in the Maastrichtian chalk where Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" sat out World War II. I liked reading about the fact checkers the most. This is something you either get or you don't. Like if an author writes the phrase "Penn's daughter Margaret", the fact checker's challenge becomes whether to put commas around Margaret or not put commas around Margaret. In other words, did William Penn have one or more daughters. Margaret, one of Penn's several daughters, went into the book without commas.

With every essay, I thought "He would like this" or "She has to read this." Let me scroll down my list of GR friends and look and see if there's anyone who would be as delighted as I was.....reading an essay about commas.