I have this tendency to become interested in incredibly bizarre things. Usually these eccentricities wear off after a brief period in time but they leave me with a solid grounding on the topic (via reading the entire wikipedia entry several times) and about $20 less in my bank account.
Recently I have taken an interest in Mycology which, for all you normal people out there, is the study of fungi. I decided about a month ago that I desperately wanted to go mushroom hunting (no not those mushrooms, the legal ones), so I hit up Barnes & Nobel for a field guide to identify the various species of edible fungi (as well as the poisonous ones so as not to get them confused with each other) and set about reading it. After carefully perusing the pages of Simon and Schuster's Guide to Mushrooms I felt confident enough to set about on a foray into the woods behind my house in search of a feast of delicious fungus. I had a blast picking handfuls of what appeared to be a variety of edible mushrooms. After about an hour I returned to my house covered in mosquito bites to set about sorting my spoils and double checking with my handy book to see if they would kill me or not.
I may have read the identification key incorrectly but I could not find one of the fungi that I picked within the pages of the book. There were several that were very similar looking to the pictures in the book but, being afraid of accidently poisoning myself, I threw the whole lot out. There's really no conclusion to this story yet, someday I plan on going back out for round two but at the moment I'm too much of a wimp to eat my spoils, and that's probably best.
How was that for random and uninteresting? It's fungus for christsake.
-Kevin
i have these weird curiosities as well, and wikipedia usually answers most of my questions. a week or so ago, i learned about the life of Lord Byron. I don't remember much accept for that he was a great poet and apparently involved in some incest.
ReplyDeletehaha, I vaguely remember learning about him in lit last year.
ReplyDeleteI think thursdays can be designated as random stuff days on Heap from now on.
I too tend to do immerse myself in random and bizzare topics. This fact is probably an afteraffect of my previous life as a friendless bedroom librarian. I've spent hours reading up on numerous serial killers, the number of dogs killed in the Salem Witch Trials, and countless other useless tidbits of historical/cultural trivia. I guess if I get asked to appear on " Who Wants to be Millionaire?" America's tax dollars will be in somewhat capable hands.
ReplyDelete