I was excited to see that my mail yesterday included a manila envelope with a Mississippi postmark, which always means the same thing: Trent Lott wanting me to blurb his memoirs. (“So good you’ll finally get over Strom losing in ‘48!” –Ken Jennings.”) No, sorry. A Mississippi postmark always means the same thing: my five comp copies of the new issue of mental_floss are here.

mental_floss may insist on punctuating/capitalizing/typefacing its title oddly, but it more than makes for up it with the irresistibility of the trivia content inside. Its quick-factoid format and punchy layouts make it impossible to put down. I’ve never given away an comp copy without the recipient wanting to subscribe. Just last week, a financial advisor called me in to sign some papers, and he–a golf-playing corporate type who shows no external evidence of being a trivia nerd of any kind–admred my mental_floss t-shirt (as seen above). “You read mental_floss?” I asked, surprised. “Oh yeah. I’m a Flosser,” he immediately replied. To the best of my knowledge, this is a neologism of his own invention.

Or take my arty, poetry-reading friend Tim. Tim’s indie-cred is pretty solid; the last time I was in a Barnes and Noble with him, for example, he insisted on buying me a copy of Sherman Alexie’s first short story collection. But he also had to check the magazine racks to see if a new mental_floss was in. Everybody’s doin’ it. Even Monica from Friends read mental_floss.

Full disclosure: I write a regular column in mental_floss, called “Six Degrees of Ken Jennings,” in which I use six trivia factoids to connect two seemingly unrelated concepts. In the new issue, for example, Silly String is finally, at long last, tied into string theory.

Writing one of these things is usually a pretty fun afternoon of Googling. Readers suggest topics for each new “challenge,” so editor Neely Harris will occasionally email me with a few new suggestions. I’ll pick the one that made me laugh hardest, with little regard for its trivia-friendliness. Then I draw a series of branching possibliities outward from the first element (Silly String, in this case), using trivia either off the top of my head or from the Internet, until I have maybe a dozen potential three-fact combinations. Then I’ll do the same thing working backward from the “destination” element and hope that I find some overlap somewhere. If not, I keep hammering away at the third and fourth steps until I find a pair that meets somewhere in the middle.

In this case, it took a couple days’ thought–and even then, I had to fall back on a geographic link. I always feel vaguely guilty about using geographic locations as links, since they seem so easy that they’re almost cop-outs. “3. Two strikers were killed in Chicago’s bloody 1886 Haymarket Riot. 4. You know who else is from Chicago? Billy Zane!” At least in this case I linked Georgia, USA to Georgia, USSR, so that seemed a little more clever.

Then I send a short rundown of the links back to Neely. Problems often crop up at this stage, usually because mental_floss prints hundreds of trivia facts per issue, and has done for the past five years. Which means any factoid that leapt easily to my mind has probably already been in the magazine. And if they’ve used it prominently or recently, as you might expect, they don’t want to repeat.

In this case, Neely warned me that my story about the origin of the phrase “Geronimo!” for skydivers had been told in the mag before, as had the life of Leon Theremin. Since one bad link obviously topples the whole house of cards and means the entire piece will need to be written from scratch, I dread these e-mails. In this case I spent a couple more hours working out an alternate way to get from Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (step 2) to “Good Vibrations” (step 5). This version went like this: Forrest Carter’s The Outlaw Josey Wales -> A whale that exploded on-camera in Florence, Oregon in 1970 -> Florence, Italy, where the Mona Lisa was painted -> the Beach Boys’ Smile album. I actually liked this version okay, but it was doomed from the start: mental_floss had delved into exploding whales not long before. Plus, as I suspected, they didn’t like the Wales/whales pun. I love the punny links, but mental_floss seems to find them unfunny and tenuous, so they often get tweaked.

So I fleshed out the old outline, but tried to keep away from specific facts about Geronimo and Dr. Theremin that had been used before. The piece is typically accepted then, and undergoes a slight rewrite into what seems to be the mental_floss “house style.” Sometimes Neely asks fact-checking questions at this point, so I take care to back up all my Wikipedia-gleaned facts with real books (thanks, Google book search!) In this case, there was a panicky last-minute back-and-forth on whether or not a theremin was actually used on “Good Vibrations.” (Turns out it’s a very similar instrument, then called an “electro-theremin,” so the link between steps 5 and 6 still works.) And then a month later I have a new mental_floss to read in the hammock.

Just like when I wrote about the magazine in Brainiac, I am now exhausted from all the bold and italics required to write about mental_floss. At some_point, it’s going to give me carpal_tunnel.