Hiya Skeleton Crew,
No excitin’ drama today—no urgent messages from my brother, no schemein’ plots from Captain Nemo Toad, no nothin’ like that. Just a regular Wednesday, thank goodness!
Answers to Last Time
The chemical reaction that causes lightnin’ bugs to glow is when luciferase breaks down luciferin. But since I asked ya for the Paradise Lost character, ya got credit for answerin’ any a’ the common names given to Lucifer. (Y’know, like Satan or the Devil or what have ya.)
Jeff Bezos’s spacefarin’ side-project where Neal Stephenson worked for a li’l while is called Blue Origin.
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
Neal Stephenson’s big breakthrough book was Snow Crash, which is where he coined the word “metaverse”. But he wrote a couple a’ books before that one! Like there was The Big U, a satire a’ college campus life based on his time at Boston University. (Big U, B.U., get it?)
Now, I can’t say I ever read The Big U1 ... but I DID read a li’l about it on Wikipedia! So I know enough to know how the plot features a big neon sign called “the Big Wheel” that a bunch a’ frat bros pretend to worship.
The only reason I’m mentionin’ any a’ this is that the Big Wheel sign’s almost certainly based on a real-life humongous sign that towers above Boston’s Fenway Park. What company, nowadays majority-owned by the Venezuelan government, does this real-life sign advertise?
Trivia 2
UK trademark number UK00000000001 is for what brewery founded in 1777 in Burton-on-Trent?
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
An’ based on this self-critique Mr. Stephenson wrote on his website, I’m, uh ... not rushin’ out to get a copy, if ya catch my drift:
The fact that virtually all of the first edition ended up getting pulped created an unnatural scarcity of the printed book, which is only now being alleviated by a new edition from HarperCollins. This scarcity caused the price of the first edition to become ridiculously high, and led to bootleg editions being posted on the Web. If the book were judged on its own intrinisic merits, it would not attract such a high price or engender such curiosity. The Big U is what it is: a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago.