Editor Ruby here this week to round up some stray facts we’ve discovered while writing trivia questions. Here we go!

Editor Ira says, “As the internet deteriorates apace, Encyclopedia Britannica is increasingly becoming my rock.” Here to prove it is in this list of lesser-known early musical instruments. Where else will you get to enjoy such sentences as “The shawm was a significant precursor to the hautboy”? Mid-FKIA trivia question! Which of these did I make up: Sackbut, Crumhorn, Theorbo, or Rackett? Click through, or scroll to the end for the answer.

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While reading this Wikipedia page for the early 20th-century “War of the Naturalists,” I was put in mind of this Ralph Wiggum quote, and this canonical Tweet. If people had never seen certain animals, you really could just say whatever! There’s lots of stuff in general I believe because someone told me, and not because I saw it. (A friend of mine told me they fooled their partner into believing Australians call Rice Krispie treats “rimbo krimbo” — which they don’t, by the way — by being very confident about it. What do I know? I’ve never been to Australia. They have parking lot barbecues where everyone gets a sausage for voting; they could call Rice Krispie treats anything.) (Shout-out to our Australian readers. I’m given to understand you call them “rice bubble slice,” which is somehow worse.)

We’re getting far afield. By the end of the 19th century, we’re getting to a place in the U.S. where there’s an audience for fiction who have never interacted with, say, a wolf. At this time, you have the growing conservationist movement (a complicated group of people, at best) and the animal welfare movement, which got a genuine boost from “Black Beauty,” an 1890 book written from the perspective of a horse. In this context, you get books that were incredibly popular at the time like “Wild Animals I Have Known” by Ernest Thompson Seton, which is where we get to our Wiggum-esque “I saw one of the wolves and it looked at me” storytelling. Hey, have you ever met a wolf? Maybe it did, nobly, in a startlingly human way, look at that guy.

In 1903, Naturalist John Burroughs hit ‘em with the tweet and said, “No, they don’t. That’s not true.” He published an essay that lit up Seton and his peers. I’m pulling this whole quote from Wikipedia because it’s so good:

“Mr. Thompson Seton says in capital letters that his stories are true, and it is this emphatic assertion that makes the judicious grieve. True as romance, true in their artistic effects, true in their power to entertain the young reader, they certainly are but true as natural history they as certainly are not ... There are no stories of animal intelligence and cunning on record, that I am aware of, that match his.”

A lot of back and forth went on for the next several years, until 1907 when then-president Teddy Roosevelt got so mad he was interviewed, and then wrote his own essay, about so-called “Nature Fakers,” a category in which he included Jack London. Reverend William J. Long, one of the top authors attacked by TR, wrote to the president to tell him he was wrong and would regret this. Presidents famously love to hear that. He attacked Teddy for being a hunter (or “gamekiller” in his words). Roosevelt said he was “too small of game to shoot twice,” which: 1. Ouch; and 2. Yeah, you’re the president and he’s some guy. Jack London struck back against Roosevelt in 1908, but Teddy was busy leaving office and never responded.

In many ways the controversy has never ended — how do we understand the inner lives of animals? What is the best relationship between humans and other animals? How can we validate the things we believe? When does fiction become misinformation? Is being catty and self-righteous in the largest platform afforded to you simply the human condition? In other ways, you could say it was cooked when Seton buckled down and wrote an actually rigorous book called “The Lives of Game Animals,” which was awarded a Burroughs Medal in 1927, bringing him back on the same side as his former adversary John Burroughs.

But really, go read the whole page! It’s very interesting and there’s lots of great insults.

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Sweden and Norway used to be one country from 1814 to 1905, called the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. They stopped when the Norwegian Storting (which is their Parliament, and which literally means “The Great Thing,” because the original meaning of “thing” in English is “meeting”) all submitted resignations over Norway’s right to have its own foreign policy. When the king of the United Kingdoms (that’s what they called themselves; good thing they stopped before we got to the whole mishegas going on with the names of the British Isles and its polities) rejected their resignations, they declared he was no longer fulfilling his duties as king of Norway. He and the rest of the Swedish government agreed to let Norway do their own thing, as long as they held a referendum of the Norwegian people to make sure it was cool with everyone. In 1905, Norway held an election in which 99.95% of voters agreed they were done with Sweden. To put that in perspective, blank and fouled ballots outnumbered “no” voters by a ratio of 19:1. Only 184 people wanted to remain unified with Sweden. That’s with over 85% turnout among registered voters! Women weren’t allowed to vote at the time, but women’s suffrage organizations collected almost 250,000 signatures from women who supported the resolution.

You ever think about how big countries like China or Brazil, or the United States for that matter, are and how many different groups of people live there? And they all have one government together? Meanwhile a number of Norwegians that’s a rounding error away from 100% said “absolutely no more of this” to the Swedes. Hats off to them, may we all be permitted to make geopolitical decisions via ballots.

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And that’s all there is to know this week, except the answer to that mid-FKIA trivia question. The answer is: Those are all real. – Editor Ruby