Top Ten Things You Didn't Know About 2007

I guarantee you were not aware of these developments that occurred in the outgoing year. That's OK: I live to inform.

1. The current gel-intensive men's hairstyle known as the "fauxhawk" was named for the Fauxhawk Indians of western Kentucky. They never wore their hair like that, though. They had far too much self-respect.


2. The year saw the invention of the Best Palindrome Evaaah: "A man, a plan, a canal, a small gravy-boat, Hugo Chavez!"
   


3. In a new biography, it was revealed this year that Franklin D. Roosevelt kept ferrets, which he used in bizarre Oval Office ceremonies to cast necromantic spells on small bits of ginger, the Montgomery Ward catalog, a tomato, Field Marshal Montgomery, other ferrets, Montgomery, Alabama, and Eleanor. This is how he got polio.


4. It was discovered that boars actually have tits, and that they find them quite useful in lawn care, car maintenance and home repair. Also sex.
   


5. Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics doesn't actually exist. You can look it up.


6. A Dremel rotary tool can be put to many other uses: surgery, break-dancing, prayer, numerology, divination, and the summoning of eldritch spirits from the Lost City of R'lyeh. The list is literally endless. What fun! (Summoning attachment extra.)
   


7. In a rare display of honesty, Indian gods revealed that they don't actually have all those extra arms. They use their powers of deception to cloud your mind into thinking they have them, and then steal your kidneys while you ponder, "Howcome all them arms?"


8. That last Sopranos episode? With the weird blackout? It was broadcast only to your house, in an (apparently quite successful) attempt to vex you. And only you. The rest of us saw Tony and family walk out of the restaurant, get in their car, and drive around aimlessly, asking each other, "Whaddya wanna do?" "I dunno, what do you wanna do?" It was monumentally dull. Oh -- and Meadow took off her top.
   


9. It was discovered that, contrary to popular belief, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny only in leap years.
   


10. There is, among the Khosa-speaking peoples of southwestern Africa, a legend that the world came into being when a snake and a badger conspired to fool a lion into thinking he was a different lion. The lion, hopelessly confused, ate the snake (but not the badger, for some weird reason) and fell into a slumber. In his dream, he was naked at a really important meeting of lions. The others laughed cruelly at his plight, and in his embarrassment, he spilled some goat-milk, which became the oceans, and some dirt he was carrying around for a rainy day, which became the Earth. An orange he dropped became the sun, and a calabash of honey the moon. Then he dropped a very large number of trillions of balls of flaming gas, in which hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees; these became the stars and galaxies. Which just goes to show you the Power of Myth.