Who knew?

Every so often I find things that are completely missing from my knowledge base that seem to be common knowledge to the rest of the world and I wonder how that happened.  Most of the time it's things that people seem to have known for a long time (say since childhood) and that wouldn't normally be something you learn as an adult, but sometimes it's just interesting knowledge.  Recently, there have been two.  


The first is what the heck Flat Stanley is.  It's being passed from a friend to some of us others and there is an email going on in which they're all replying like they know what it is and what not an it makes sense to pass it on, as it's a kid's class project.  Meanwhile, being a slacker about looking it up, I keep just laughing at the emails because I have no idea what it is.  Finally, it was explained that it's a kid's book (a book? I missed a BOOK?) and you take pictures around the world at different locations with "Flat Stanley".  Similar to what Vincennes is doing with the Memorial, and loosely related to the traveling gnome prank (look it up...it's well known in travel land, and it's hilarious).


So then today, an email goes out to all teachers in my school system about a fellow member of the expat community being in a bad accident and needing a blood type that only foreigners have.  Specifically they're requesting B- and O-...ok, so I'm like what? Asians don't have B (and subsequently AB) blood??? WHAT? hahah.  Turns out that they do have B (and AB), just very very few of them are - (which is way less common as a whole).   As I am negative, but not O or B, I can't do much about this, but it's interesting to know.  


This is what the RedCross has to say on the breakdown in the States. I'll make the assumption it's a good representation of the world breakdown as well.
Red Cross- learn about Blood types 

And in other news, Brett and I used to do the trajectory competition in Science Olympiad every year back in junior high and high school... and this is just amazing physics in general. 
Amaaaazing

Yes, the Malaysia trip will get a shout out at some point.  Just not yet.