Prelude
It’s been a little over two years since the first issue of Quotidian hit the virtual shelves, and since then I have been overwhelmed by the support of my readers. What began as a small-time hobby has come to consume more and more of my time as I strive to give you, my readers, an ever greater dose of senseless knowledge. Over the past 24 months, I have become increasingly interested in senseful knowledge, of the type that is more than mere trivia and enlightens us on more compelling subjects. It is this type of knowledge that I will impart to you in the next volume of Quotidian, and I hope, as always, that you will enjoy it.


Quotes of the Week

“Study the past, if you would divine the future.”
       —Confucius, from Analects

“Nothing is cheap which is superfluous,
for what one does not need, is dear at a penny.”
       —Plutarch, from Lives

“Better to be ignorant of a matter than to half know it.”
       —Publilius Syrus, from Moral Sayings

“To do two things at once is to do neither.”
       —Publilius Syrus, from Moral Sayings

“To show resentment at a reproach
is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.”
       —Tacitus, from Annals

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

JANUARY 23, 1957: The Wham-O toy company produces the first Frisbee discs. The popular plastic flying discs can trace the origin of their name (if not design) back to the 1870s, when William Russell Frisbie moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut to manage a new bakery. Within a few years, Mr. Frisbie bought the bakery and established the Frisbie Pie Company, which was soon selling pies all over New England. Frisbie pies were popular among Yale University students in the 1920s, and soon empty pie tins began accumulating around campus. College students, experts in the art of filling empty time with empty activities, discovered that the tins—when inverted and thrown—made for an entertaining game of catch.       —Continued on page 2, column 1—