And speaking of cooking (see previous blog), did you know that the Table Queen squash was introduced in 1913 by the Iowa Seed Company of Des Moines? Yep, that’s right. And folks around those parts also refer to it as a Des Moines squash.
Me, I just call them Acorn squash. It must be a regional thing, cause Acorn squash, a.k.a. Table Queen, are also referred to as Danish squash in other areas. Seriously! Who knew?!
Hey! I heard that! I distinctly heard some of you say, “And who cares?”
Well I care, for one. And since I’ve spent my life educating others with bits and pieces of random trivia for all these many decades, I’m not about to stop now. With the advent of Google, and other such Internet search engines, a world of information is literally at my fingertips. So of course, I want to share it.
When I was a teenager, our home set of Compton’s Encyclopedias were often indispensable for the completion of homework assignments. Teenagers today grew up Googling. And who thought a word like Google would ever become a household word? Well, maybe Billy DeBeck did when he created the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic strip in 1919, but, as usual, I digress.
The word Google actually comes from the word googol, which means 10 to the 100th power, or a one with one hundred zeros after it. And yes, I found this information by Googling. The word was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t know the proper spelling of the word, so they’ve used Google to illustrate the huge quantity of information available, but not yet searchable.
But back to the squash. A simple question like “What’s the difference between Acorn squash and Danish squash?” suddenly becomes a rally point for an Internet search and dinnertime conversation with your children. Who knew?!
And if you say, “Who cares?” to that one, you definitely do not have kids.