Introduction to the Gnus
The Gnus is almanacish. It’s not quite an almanac but close to it as we’re not annual and an almanac is usually an annual. It’s more historical and perpetual but not quite encyclopedic. Its an Almanacencyclopedia. Ok, that works. The Gnus is a compendium of items of Science (quite a bit of science), History, Mathematics as well as Items of Interest in the Arts with our comments and elucidation, both factual and fictual that have occurred over the last 2000 years or so. Fictual is our word derived from fiction……… Fictual – if you believe that in our description of the discoveries and travels of Ponce de Leon he was also looking for a beach front condo with a pool, that’s Fictual and we can’t help you. We note and describe the items and events for each day of the year. The Editorial Board of the Gnus strives for accuracy in dates, quotations and facts and presumes that an educated reader can differentiate between factual and fictual.
A reminder that a gnu is a wildebeest. A wildebeest is a member of the antelope family. It has a large, box-like head with curving horns. The front end of the body is thick and sturdy while the hindquarters are slender with spindly legs. Sort of like nature forgot to complete the job. Hopefully avid researchers will not see Gnus Almanac and think it an expository work on antelopes.
A bit of history as the The Gnus began as a one-page science education news letter then called Science Gnus, of monthly science events. Years ago many grade K-6 teachers taught (and still do) science reluctantly, poorly, or not at all. Seems they are intimidated by science. The enormous power of a teacher to inspire and encourage can also kill interest in a subject (or in school) in a student. The Science Gnus was an attempt in Community School District 10, in The Bronx, for a newsletter to reach out to the teachers of the district on a monthly basis. I was the Science Coordinator at the time. It would contain ideas for teaching, for strategies, and for science information to encourage the teaching of science. Believe it or not, basic science knowledge was, shall we say, lacking for many pedagogues. This was probably due their own educations being science poor. Like the ancient Greek philosopher joke punch line, “it was turtles all the way down”. (actual joke – A traveler encountering an philosopher asks him to describe the nature of the world: “It is a great ball resting on the flat back of the world turtle.” “Ah yes, but what does the world turtle stand on?” “On the back of a still larger turtle.” “Yes, but what does he stand on?” “A very perceptive question. But it’s no use, sir; it’s turtles all the way down.”…….attributed to Joseph Bragg or Bertrand Russell). I also decided to include a witticism or amusing fact at the end. Theoretically this would encourage them to read the single page newsletter all the way to the bottom. It never occurred to me that they might just skip to the bottom. What to call it? I ran a few ideas past colleagues. Science Gnus resonated and here we are 35 or more years later and the Gnus has grown as we moved from district to district and into retirement. We comfort ourselves that the Renaissance Humanist, Erasmus, began his Adagia (annotated collection of Greek and Latin adages) in 1508 but continued to add to it for decades eventually totally more than 3,000 items
I started thinking of it as a book a while back but as we kept adding items it was turning into a rather lengthy tome. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as I was bemoaning this problem. one day to the late Dr. Lawrence Lowery of the Univerisity of California Berkeley, a brilliant scientist, a wonderfully gifted science educator and author, and a friend with a wonderful sense of humor. He suggested I make it 12 books, one for each month. Great idea. That was over 15 years ago and like the little creature that popped out of John Hurt’s stomach in Alien, the Gnus grows and multiplies. Somewhere along the line, we added history, mathematics, engineering, and the arts. In Pedagoguese it’s now called STEAM – Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics.
Like the content, the methodogy behind the Gnus has evolved. Basically, we have gone day by day through the year beginning with January 1. Insert January 1 in a search engine and one gets quite a few websites that list events that occurred on that day. But we usually start with holiday sites for our holidays of the month. The holidayscalendar.com is a comprehensive listing and gives us the holidays from important to bizarre celebrated each day. Then it’s on to general items. Accuracy is paramount. That leads us to a note about Wikipedia. We use if for our general items and that’s it. It is fairly, repeat, fairly reliable. It is not a source for item descriptions. We eventually found On This Day to be a more comprehensive source although it also, must be double checked. Aware of the infamous inaccuracies of the Internet, we double check almost every date. Sometimes we triple check and we still have discrepancies of a day or so. We’ll note that. The change to the Gregorian Calendar over the centuries meant different sometimes confusing dates. For example, Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, using the older style Julian calendar. The birthday has since shifted to January 4, 1643, on the new Gregorian calendar. All of our dates are Gregorian Calendar. We select items of interest or importance or funkiness. Wikipedia is also a good birthdays of notables site. Also investigated for each day are Any Day in History, Encyclopedia Britannica, (very accurate), The People’s History, Today in Science History (essential), ClassicBands.com, ThisDayinMusic and Songfacts– for our Rock and Roll(and there are a lot of them), items, cinefania.com/efemerides – it’s in Spanish but great for obscure movies and indispensable for our daily Western movie insertion. We use This Day in Oscar History for movies in general, and Playbill Vault for Broadway. These principle sources get us started and provide the outline for the day.
Then we go year by year for a particular day. First comes the day of the week that an event occurred. If there is any doubt, as can happen with centuries old information, we will, again, check multiple sources. A simple Google search, “What day of the week was March 2, 1947?” provides the day. It was a Sunday.
The quotes……that’s the part that extended and expanded this series, always introduce the item and we research them after we have developed the item. We begin our internet search for elucidation which can take us from newspaper files to diaries, to obituaries, to blogs (with sources), to speeches, to almanacs to movies. See our Soursages (Bibliography). The Editorial Board finds IMDb to be essential for movie information. There are several sites for song lyrics. As for quotes? Depends on how we wish to fit the quote to the item. A song? poem?, quote by author? joke? eyewitness? Shakespeare is always dependable but then so is Steven Wright and we try not overuse a source of quotes for a particular day. Finding the right quote can take quite a bit of time . It has to connect in some way to the historical item. We think of much of the research as an Open Sesame world where you have to ask exactly the right question to find the information you seek. Otherwise one gets all sorts of blather.
As we know the internet and bookshelves are replete with daily “what happened today” type listings, many just copied and pasted. So, through the years we thought to differentiate ourselves and make the Gnus more informative and descriptive. As we write, we may (often) add our fictual insertions.
When questions arise in the mind of the Editorial Board of the Gnus and as we find answers the items get longer and longer and more detailed……… we call it “item riffing”. For example, in an item on the outlaw Jesse James we note all the actors who have played Jesse James. For the The Treaty of Paris in a certain year, we list all the Treaties of Paris. There are quite a few actors who have portrayed Jesse James and quite a few Treaties of Paris. You’ll find lots of riffs. We like them.
A typical item evolution/development would look like this:
Item – March 29, We find “1638 The first permanent European settlement was established in Delaware.” Sounds interesting so in it goes So, we look up the date and Delaware. First thing is it wasn’t Delaware. It was New Sweden. Then we discovered that it was purchased by Peter Minuit. Aha! The same Peter Minuit that purchased Manhattan? When did he purchase Manhattan? We research Peter Minuit. Then we need a quote. We decide on a real estate related quote. The final item in the book looks like this “ 1638 – Monday, Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.……….Mark Twain…….The first permanent European settlement in Delaware was established. Of course, back then it was named New Sweden and it encompassed parts of present-day Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Peter Minuit was the buyer. Remember him for purchasing Manhattan for $24? Well in 1637, a group of Swedish, Dutch, and German stockholders created the New Sweden Company to trade fur and tobacco in the New World. Later that year, Minuit , a Walloon from Belgium, sailed the company’s first ship to North America. In March 1638, they reached the Minquas Kill, the present-day Christina River near today’s Wilmington. Minuit met with the Lenape tribe and negotiated to buy land on the west riverbank of the Delaware River,, south of today’s Wilmington up to the Schuylkill River which is south of present-day Philadelphia. He had also purchased Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626. Clearly, he and the Lenape liked doing business together. Later in 1638, on a trading expedition to the Caribbean, Minuet was lost at sea during a hurricane. There you have it. Rinse and repeat a few thousand times.
Of course, as we engaged each day we came up with more ideas for the items and that meant more research and more editing and so here we are with 12 books. We eventually got to the point where we thought “that’s it” we’re done. It’s an almanacish compendium, and after we publish, we won’t update. ……well maybe.
As noted, we’ve tried to be as accurate as possible (aside from our Fictual inclusions). Sometimes it can take quite a while to ascertain the correct date, the correct item, or even if it occurred. We describe it as the Xeroxian World of the Internet. It can be like the Zombies from innumerable apocalyptic movies, multiplying and devouring the truth as folks cut and paste inaccurate information. There can be pages and pages of the same opening line. In fact, we’ve been at this so long that Xerox as a synonym for copying may have fallen out of the lexicon. Well we have the Xerox item right here for October 22 – 1938– Saturday Xerox is a copying device that can make rapid reproduction of human error possible ……Unknown……….The first xerographic copy was produced. Later that day the first line formed at the machine. Still later that day……. the machine broke down. Still later that day the repair technician explained that the warranty had expired. Really though, Chester Carlson, invented the xerographic process and launched what would become a multi-billion dollar industry. But for several years after patenting his process, Carlson could find no company interested in xerography. It was the invention that nobody wanted. Finally, in 1944, Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research organization, signed a royalty agreement with Carlson and began to develop the process. Three years later, he made an agreement with a small photo paper company called Haloid (later to be known as Xerox), giving Haloid the right to develop a xerographic machine and voila! You can have twenty five copies of the report that no one will read for your meeting. Xeroxing may fade away but paper jams will always be with us. So there.
We found that “official sites” are usually the most accurate but to quote Wilson Mizner: When you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research. The Gnus is research. It’s easy to get side tracked in research when there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff that happened through the years and one can spend a lot of time just exploring a subject that becomes fascinating, such as why did they make a movie called Billy the Kid Meets Dracula? Eventually, we get back to writing.
We’re no longer calling these books Science Gnus. There are two main reasons:
- People will see the word Science and go no further. Sad but true and we’ll lose dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? (millions?) of readers.
- It’s not just Science anymore but it is Gnus. That rhymes with news although through the years we’ve heard it pronounced “ga news”, “gee news” “gon us” and “geen us” among others. So here we are with The Gnus Almanac. It’s almanacish and as we said it’s not annual like an almanac but perpetual. Almanac is pretty close to what it is since it’s not quite encyclopedic either. Almanacencyclopedia, yeah, that works.
Please note that there are references in this Introduction to “I”, “We”, and the “Editorial Board of the Gnus”. All are John Cafarella as is the person referred to as Professor Sy Yentz throughout the books.
* Prolegomenon is a preliminary discussion inserted at the beginning of a book or treatise