Hiya Skeleton Crew,

Apologies in advance, this week’s issues’ll be runnin a bit on the late side. Travel, y’know?

Trivia 1

Didja know that the world’s got not just one, but TWO Museums of Salt and Pepper Shakers? It’s true! The story’s that a Belgian lady named Andrea Ludden had a collection of the things (salt & pepper shakers, I mean) & eventually opened a museum of ’em in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Then (’cause I guess it was just so dang successful?) some years later she opened ANOTHER museum in Alicante province in Spain.

Now, if ya can’t make it out to Gatlinburg or Castell de Guadalest to see either museum for yerself, no problem: they’ve actually got the TN museum walkthrough-able on Google Maps! Alternately, ya could find episode 1402 (titled “Shake It Up”) of what Food Network teevee show hosted by Marc Summers, which featured the Gatlinburg museum in one of its segments?

This show, which gets its title from how it exposes the origins of different famous foodstuffs, was revived in 2015 with a “2.0” version hosted by actor Alfonso Ribeiro.

Trivia 2

Salt shakers really only got to be a thing after folks figured out they could add stuff like magnesium carbonate to salt to keep it from gettin all clumpy in warm & humid weather. Before then, people mostly used what type of tableware for holdin salt? It’s basically a li’l bowl, maybe with a lid but maybe not, & it kinda looks like one of these:

The name makes it sound a bit like the bowl’s keepin the salt in some kinda cool damp place, which is kinda funny, because that’s exactly where ya DON’T want to store yer salt – at least, not if ya wanna keep it from clumpin!