Namaste and konnichiwa!

I hope you find yourself well after yesterday’s journey across Asia, dear reader.

It has been a true pleasure getting to know you this week. I can scarcely believe that our time will soon be at a close! I am led to understand that today’s missive will be my final one—at least, for the vast majority of you.

Now, if it were up to me? There is hardly any question of it: I would conduct each and every last one of you on Friday’s final set of peregrinations, ready to play your staunch Virgil as we penetrate into the innermost circle of this infernal Zone of Trivia. But alas, it is the iron law of my brother: no final passage ’til the Danegeld has been paid!

Yet let us speak no more of tomorrow: ay, tomorrow, that fickle notion, that inconstant wretch! Nay, we must live our lives today and no other day; it is today we must seize, as per the ancient dictum. And so we sally forth!

Trivia 1

Longtime acolytes of my brother’s newsletter will be familiar with a puckish weekly tradition of his, in which the answers to his Thursday interrogations share some kind of cryptic characteristic—be it phonological, semantic, or otherwise. Far be it from me to break with this pleasing diversion! And so I shall devise a theme ...

Aha! Yes, I have it!

Just this past week I was touring America, this vast upstart nation still in the callow vigour of its youth. As my Giulietta Tipo 750slashed across dust-laden motorways, I was seized by the mad desire to see firsthand one of the earnest little homesteads speckling the countryside. I resolved then and there to turn off at the next opportunity and prevail upon the inevitable good nature of whatever genial farmer I might find to give me a tour of their humble smallholding.

And so I marched (or, rather, my man Marrow carried me) to the home of the nearest burgher. I rapped my phalanges on the oaken door. And to my great fortune, a hardy guileless fellow named Jacobson answered my call. Our introductions proved somewhat awkward, but at length we reached a meeting of the minds.

Eventually, I enquired of Mr. Jacobson whether he felt his crop of lucerne was coming in well this year. This led to a minor confusion, as the good farmer could not deduce the meaning behind my question. I quickly realized my faux pas: I had forgotten the term “lucerne”, though popular across much of the Commonwealth, had not yet penetrated into the New World.

I was able to quickly resolve the minor contretemps by clarifying: what I termed “lucerne” was indeed the very flowering perennial crop of the family Fabaceae with which he was so professionally familiar, and which he would undoubtedly call ... what? I also supplied to Jacobson the additional “fun fact” that this word was in fact derived from an Arabic phrase meaning “fresh fodder”—quite apropos, considering the likely eventual use of his farmstead’s product.

Trivia 2

Goodness, but how I blather on! Rather than subject you to another of my minor Skeletoniads, let me cut right to the proverbial chase:

In what play does a lead character describe the unseen Rosaline thusly?

The all-seeing sun
ne'er saw her match since first the world begun