Well, hell's bells, I shoulda knowed!

Having long been an astronomy/cosmology buff, I'm often amazed at how little most people know about the nature and structure of the universe. Even people who really should to know better. For example, on the sci-fi teevee show Battlestar Galactica (the one with Lorne Greene), I was forever snorting at the fact that the writers obviously didn't know the difference between a galaxy and a solar system and seemed to use the words interchangeably.

When I was in Denver in the middle Fifties, I met a doctor there—yes, a doctor!—who asked what the tallest building in Seattle was. I told him that (at the time), it was the Smith Tower (the L. C. Smith building) and it was 42 stories. He thought I was pulling his leg. He had thought that Seattle was a small clump of log cabins and igloos. One of his colleagues mumbled to me that the doctor in question was surprised when he arrived in Denver to find it was a sizable city. He was from New York City and his trip to Denver was the first time he'd ever been out of the Big Apple. He'd expected a Boonesborough-style fort complete with cowboys and Indians. Yes, he was a doctor.

Mexico has thirty-two states? Uh. . . .

Don Firth