Funny You Should Ask

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Why do people carve crescent moons on outhouse doors? What was a pocket
full of posies supposed to do while you were ringing ’round the rosie?
Where, in Canada, did people drive on the left-hand side of the road
until after World War II? What does someone do after eight years of
answering funny questions?

The answer to that last question is that she writes a book. To millions
of Canadians, Marg Meikle was The Answer Lady, a CBC Radio personality
whose schtick was to answer strange questions sent in by listeners.
Meikle claims to answer only 115Ѕ questions in this book, but once she
gets on a roll, she buries the reader with an avalanche of related
answers. For example, for the question “Did Sir Isaac Newton really
get hit on the head with an apple?,” Meikle responds that the
Egyptians first cultivated apples in 1300 BC, that Newton postulated the
Law of Gravity after seeing an apple fall from a tree, that the tree in
question was of the Flower of Kent species (and not a Newton, which is
from New Town, USA), that after Newton’s tree died in 1814 it was
turned into chairs, and that grafts from tree have been planted in front
of physics labs all over the world. A terrific book for trivia hounds of
every age. Highly recommended.