Thank You For Being a Friend

The Now I Know Week in Review

Monday: The Golden Boxes of Cheerios. One of you wrote in to ask if someone could x-ray the Cheerios boxes to see what's inside. I don't know, but I had a similar thought when writing it. As a kid, Topps -- the baseball card company -- sold baseball stickers, and inserted into random packs were a prize ticket: collect five of them and they'd send you a complete set of that season's baseball cards. I got one, showed my dad, and he had an thought: the packs with the prize tickets were probably slightly thicker than a normal pack.

A day or so later, we went to the local newsstand, armed with a micrometer. (He had one laying around, which in retrospect, is pretty weird.) The very kind newsstand owner let us measure all the packs in a box or two of stickers, and we bought that ones that had some additional thickness -- ten, maybe 20 packs. Every single pack had either a foil sticker (which were thicker than normal ones) or a prize ticket, and I was able to collect enough tickets to get the baseball card set. 

So, yes, there may be a way to game the system and see inside these Cheerios boxes, and I can't help but wonder if the original owner of the ones for sale on eBay in this story took advantage of that.

Tuesday: The Man With Dolphin Karma: At the top of the emailed version, I said something like "all dolphin stories are good dolphin stories." A few people shared links to stories that are most definitely not good dolphin stories -- being wild animals, they can do bad things to unsuspecting victims. I'll not share those links, but yeah, dolphins can do bad things, too.

Wednesday: The Infrequent Flyer Meal Program: This is a re-run and I have no idea why I selected it for republication this week; I think I re-read it, laughed, and said "this'll do."

Thursday: The Not So Stupid History of Dunce Caps: Sometimes, I sit on story ideas for weeks or even months; I just can't seem to motivate myself to write it. And then, even when stil unmotivated to tackle it, I give it a go anyway. This is one of those stories. I found it very difficult to write and I'm glad it turned out OK, and that I got to share it, but it's not going to go down as one of my favorites.

And some other things you should check out:

For most people, prisons are a place of loss and heartache. But for Melinda [Brewer] they were a place to start over, to build a life outside the long shadow of her outlaw family. When she worked there, Huntsville had seven lockups in town, plus two more nearby. There were sprawling acres of prison farms, run-down factories powered by prison labor, and the network of administrative offices that formed the nerve center of the biggest state prison system in the country. Not to mention the prison museum, the criminal justice college, and the aging building that housed the state’s death chamber.

Just across the street was a two-story house, brick and white siding, so plain you knew the state had to own it. Traditionally, it was set aside for some of the top prison brass in town: the regional director and his wife. For a time, that was her — Huntsville royalty.