Paper View

Besides being the name of the second-most overused computer font in the world (running close behind the annoying Comic Sans), Papyrus was what they used in Egypt many years ago because they couldn't borrow notepaper from the people at the next desk.  There is a plant called Papyrus, and Egyptians extracted the pith from that plant and sliced it thin, let it dry, and they had something on which to write a grocery list.  You couldn't call it paper, per se, but it did well enough until someone invented paper as we know it today.

The first type of paper used in America was made of old cotton and linen rags, but you can see how that was not going to work for long, since most people wear their tee shirts until someone throws them out, or the dryer tears them to bits. We needed a more efficient source of paper for Ben Franklin to print his Almanack. People considered silk (too expensive) and bamboo (too heavy), but it wasn't until a Frenchman named René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur went for a nature walk one day, as Frenchmen will.

Standing out there in the woods, watching the wasps chew paper and mix it with saliva to produce a substance from which to build nests, old Ferchault de Réaumur was heard exclaiming to no one in particular, "¿ Où ai-je laissé mon déjeuner?" ("Where did I leave my lunch?")

And as he gnawed on his Pastrami on Rye, he said, "¡Ces guêpes ont la bonne idée!" ("These wasps have the right idea!")

But no one heard him. He was alone in that forest, in more ways than one.

Eventually, after several hundred thousand false attempts at getting enough wasps to make paper for us, we decided that getting stung a dozen times just to have enough paper to send a love note to the new girl in Geometry was not going to cut it, and we invented giant machines to chew trees and make paper for us.

You really can't blame wasps for being mad at people who swat at them with a rolled up newspaper. I mean, after all...

Speaking of paper, a designer and artist named Wolfram Kampffmeyer makes animals out of paper.  He calls it creative taxidermy, and no animals need lose their lives in the process!

This last one is for baseball fans in Detroit, and football fans in Cincinnati and Louisiana.