Not as Stupid as I Sound

I'm concerned that my "Today I Learned" series is giving the impression I am a complete tard.

I didn't really think unfinished novels stopped in the middle of a word. But maybe at the end of a paragraph. When I was a kid and heard the phrase "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," I imagined an orchestra playing a movement and suddenly the wind section dropped out, and then the cellos, then the timpani, and after a while you just heard the oboe part doodling along, till that petered out too. It seemed like a cool idea, that you could hear the way the composer's inspiration had died, in each separate area. Just having a missing movement or chapter seems less fascinating.

I didn't not know Crete was part of Greece! I just said it for comic effect. I'd asked my father for an atlas and he mentioned he was going to Crete; I asked, "Is that near Greece?" to show I really needed the atlas.

I'm sure my father was just as disgusted as my readers at this display of ignorance.

I'm not as stupid as some of these posts suggest. But I am quite uninformed, that's true. I seem to live in a weird bubble, not knowing most of the things other people learn. Once in the Ontario countryside, some friends and I stopped for ice cream at a roadside cafe and there was a sign for a "three-legged chicken." Everyone was making a lot of fuss about it and I finally said, "What's the big deal? Couldn't one of the legs just have fallen off?" There was a pause; then someone asked me, "Kristy, how many legs do you think a chicken has?"

So these basic facts were never brought in to me.

I blame society.