Also, by a strange coincidence, that actress who played Andrea turns eighty today! Happy birthday Andrea!

This is not a cuddly object lesson from Bible camp. (“I’ve never seen the wind, but I know it exists…just like heaven!”) I mean actual physical objects that you just happen to have never seen, despite the universe and culture at large attesting to their existence.

Here’s mine: I have never seen a gorilla suit. I assume they exist, but they must appear ten time as often in movies and on TV as they do in real life, because my life up to this point has been 100% gorilla suit-free.

Which is a relief, actually. If pop culture has taught me anything, it’s this: when one guy shows up in a gorilla suit, first people are scared, then they find out it’s really Bob having a laugh, and then OMG A REAL GORILLA SHOWS UP AND EVERYONE TRIES TO KICK IT IN THE CROTCH OR SOMETHING BECAUSE THEY THINK IT’S BOB!!! Gorilla suits lead to gorillas, as surely as a picnic leads to ants.

What is your own personal “purple cow,” never glimpsed in real life? A sombrero? A wooden leg? A jukebox? Ken-Jennings.com wants to know!

Bonus! Wordplay Wednesday! I’m thinking of a word for a type of bird. Reverse each of its syllables in turn (turn “night-in-gale” into “thgin-ni-elag,” for example) and you’ll get…another word for a type of bird! A broader, more general word, but still a naturalist’s term. What are the words?

As a result, every other sentence out of his mouth these days begins with the four words, “Here’s the world famous.” He narrates his own life in Snoopy-style thought balloons. Some are taken directly from the strip: “Here’s the famous World War I flying ace climbing into his Sopwith Camel.” (This one is usually accompanied by “It’s a long way to Tipperary!” sung at the top of his lungs.)

Some are made up. “Here’s the world-famous taekwondo champion driving his solid silver Rolls-Royce!” he announced yesterday, after hopping behind the wheel of my car in the garage.

“Uh, Dylan, your taekwondo teacher is a former world champion, and he’s teaching seven-year-olds out of a strip mall. I don’t think he drives a solid silver Rolls-Royce.”

Here’s a list of words meaning “someone who really likes something sort of dumb,” along with the years of their first surviving appearance. Check out the surprisingly early debut of “fan” as a shortened form of “fanatic.”

• enthusiast (1520)
• devotee (1645)
• fan (1682)
• aficionado (1802)
• buff (1820)
• geek (1912)
• wonk (1954)

And Wordplay Wednesday. I’m thinking of a common English word that, if you spell it backwards, becomes its own plural…in French! (Both French and English versions should be familiar to monolingual but mildly educated English speakers.) What’s the word?

The clip of Man from U.N.C.L.E. that caused such a stir last night on Mad Men was this one: “The Hong Kong Shilling Affair” that originally aired on March 15, 1965. (Note that this helps date last night’s episode for hardcore Mad Men fans. Roger Sterling’s backstabbing at the Honda meeting could have been preceded by a “Beware the Ides of March!” prophecy.)

I’ve always been a big fan of David McCallum as Ilya Kuryakin (though evidently not as, uh, ardent a fan as ten-year-old Sally Draper revealed herself to be last night) but noticed right away that his partner-in-crime in the clip shown wasn’t Napoleon Solo, the show’s title character. Maybe Robert Vaughn didn’t give permission for his likeness to be used. Instead, I realized it was–well, I didn’t know his name, but “that guy who invented warp drive in the Star Trek episode and then falls in love with the shimmering energy cloud.”

A quick Google search told me that this was actor Glenn Corbett, and after that it was easy to find the Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode. You’re welcome! I predict that next season, Sally will become a Trekkie.

We’ve always been sticklers about making the kids return their 3D glasses to the recycle barrel after the flick…just one more piece of plastic crap I don’t want in the back seat of the car. But this time, when Caitlin begged to keep her glasses, I was so steamed about the $15 that I said okay. At those prices, you might as well get a free toy as well. I kept mine too.

What would Thoreau do? After a careful re-reading of Civil Disobedience, I am convinced that he would, were he a fan of the unaccountable 3-D revival, buy tickets to the cheaper 2-D movies from this point on, and then sneak into the 3-D ones with the glasses he and his daughter cleverly saved from Despicable Me. That’s what Thoreau would do. Then he would go back to his cabin and high-five a raccoon or something about how he stuck it to The Man. The Regal Theaters Man.

Not that I’m necessarily condoning such behavior. Oh, no. I’m just telling you what the Transcendentalists would think. This is a purely historical exercise.

Chai Tea to Tai Chi

Don’t call it “chai tea” if you’re ordering the trendy aromatic brew in its native India—“chai” is just the Hindi word for “tea,” so you’d be asking for “tea tea.” Tea vendors called “chai-wallahs” are ubiquitous on the streets of South Asia, and in the days before paper cups, they’d sell their drinks in little clay pots called kullarh, which drinkers could just shatter on the ground when their tea was gone. The title character in the movie Slumdog Millionaire was a lowly chai-wallah before his big game show break.

In the ten-year history of the American Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, only one contestant has ever missed the million-dollar question. In 2009, Harvard law grad Ken Basin wasn’t sure of his “final answer,” but but he wasn’t about to let that stop him! He decided to risk $475,000 on a hunch that Lyndon Johnson’s favorite soft drink was Yoo-Hoo. “Give me a million dollars!” he confidently told host Regis Philbin. Sadly, Regis couldn’t oblige, because LBJ actually preferred Fresca.

The strategy board game Risk was originally called “The Conquest of the World” when it was invented by France’s Albert Lamorisse in 1957. But Lamorisse was a lover of more peaceful pursuits as well: the year before Risk was released, he won both an Oscar and a Palme d’Or at Cannes for his classic children’s short film The Red Balloon, which starred his own five-year-old son Pascal as a balloon-loving Parisian boy.

In 1959, Air Force captain Joseph Kittinger volunteered for Project: Excelsior, a series of parachute test jumps from a helium balloon at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. In the third and final test, he jumped from a height of almost twenty miles, enjoying four and a half minutes of free-fall before pulling his chute. And that isn’t even the scary part yet! During the jump, the right glove on his pressurized suit failed, and for three hours his hand swelled up to twice its normal size—giving us our first ever look at what might happen to an unprotected human in the vacuum of space.

At the Mexico City Olympics, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos decided to follow their medal-winning performances in the 200m by supporting the civil rights movement with a black power salute on the medal stand. But their protest was almost derailed when Carlos realized he’d forgotten the black gloves he’d planned to wear. Australian Peter Norman, the silver medalist, suggested a solution: each man could wear one of Smith’s gloves. Smith took the right glove, Carlos the left—which is why, in the famous photo of the controversial protest, Carlos is giving a black power salute with the wrong fist.

The Mandarin words for “supreme ultimate fist” are t’ai chi ch’uan, the name of the Chinese martial art that the West calls tai chi. Last year, Purdue University professor Henry Zhang invented the “tai chi scooter,” a sort of hand-free Segway that you steer by striking tai chi poses on the platform. If your yin and yang are out of whack, you’ll fall flat on your face, so you might want to try a soothing glass of chai tea before you climb on.

Here’s something I thought you could help me with. A few weeks ago, I remember hearing an interesting factoid–something about how the only two animals on Earth with no ecological niche, the ones that could go extinct tomorrow without leaving a ripple, were dogs and wasps. Dogs and wasps.

I can’t remember where I read/heard this, but I’m pretty sure it was someplace non-trustworthy: an overheard conversation, or a sitcom, or a comic book. (I think the sentiment was meant to be anti-dog and possibly pro-cat; I apologize to any wasp fans who were offended incidentally.)

A little online research makes it look like wasps actually do help keep down certain pest insects and clean animal carcasses in a timely manner, and maybe provide a pollination vector for some plant species as well. Dogs…not sure, but I assume that, say, the African wild dog has more of a place in the Circle of Life than a domesticated French poodle on the Upper West Side.

Anyone know more? What are the species we can safely gun down without collapsing Nature? If we bomb the giant panda back to the Bamboo Age, for example, the world would lose a lot of net cuteness, but do they fill any vital environmental niche or not?

Edited to add: Credit for the waspish wit in the title goes to reader naurae29, who suggested it.

This pre-supposes I will actually finish the book by that time, of course! You don’t want to get to chapter 11 only to see a page that reads, “This chapter only available on scribners.com! Your password is D7CVB85!” In the future, I will be able to press a button on my laptop and the next chapter will be immediately published to your iPad…which will be awesome, but I try not to mention it much to my editor, since for some reason publishing houses are not in love with this Utopian vision of the future.

Oh, I just realized I haven’t written this week’s Tuesday Trivia quiz either. (See sidebar to subscribe!) Look forward to seven questions about America’s deepest lake, volcanic calderas, etc.