Leslie and her son, Tyler (10)

MOTHER'S DAY BOOK CLUB: SCHOTT'S ORIGINAL MISCELLANY BY BEN SCHOTT

- Leslie McMorrow, Contributing Writer

You know how you purchase stuff while you are finishing up at the check-out stand? Stuff like a tin of the new flavor of Altoids, intricate miniature gadgets like tape measures, screwdrivers and colanders (for your mini problems and mini salads?) and even those shiny pewter-y stones in bowls called angel and fairy charms ... all sort of useless, but we've all bought em,' right?
Well, I am in the midst of reading one of the point-of-purchase books, the one you have seen at almost every book store counter and knick-knack store. Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott is a funny little book and one that every mother should read and have on hand. It is a quirky collection of trivia that may earn you the "Coolest Mom Around Award" with homework and class projects.
How else would you be able to recite 17 palindromes like "Madam, in Eden I'm Adam'" or 36 unusual nouns of assemblage such as "a barren of mules" or "a muster of peacocks?" Not to forget, pangrams a.k.a. holalphabetic sentences such as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy log," frequently misspelled words, scientific names of types of clouds and prime numbers up to 1,000. This may all seem trivial, but believe me, by the fourth grade, my son has come home inquiring about all these academic oddities.
Schott's Original Miscellany step-by-step instructions on how-to-tie-a-tie would have come in handy when I had to rush my son off to cotillion, a sort of finishing school, via a friend's house where a dad was at home to rescue all us helpless moms with their unfinished sons. In years prior, the list of Santa's reindeer and the names of the seven dwarves would have made singing and storytelling a breeze. Finding out if you are a diamond clad rat or a pisces who should be sporting aquamarine rings is made simple with a Chinese calendar, an astrological zodiac and a list of birthstones. I think you will find the trivia either very useful and interesting or extremely useless and interesting either way it's a win-win!
Who knows? Maybe someday soon I will have to know that the national anthem of Kiribati is Teirake Kain Kiribati or that the Statue of Liberty's nose is over four feet in length or the winning words of the National Spelling Bee. After all, fifth grade homework is not far away.