{"id":198,"date":"2013-02-11T06:35:19","date_gmt":"2013-02-11T11:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/?p=198"},"modified":"2013-02-10T22:33:44","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T03:33:44","slug":"how-i-found-a-neat-story-about-an-island-nation-which-ran-out-of-bird-poop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/2013\/02\/11\/how-i-found-a-neat-story-about-an-island-nation-which-ran-out-of-bird-poop\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Found a Neat Story About an Island Nation Which Ran Out of Bird Poop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Now I Know<\/a> is about a tiny island in the Pacific called Nauru. You should read it,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of the questions I get most often about Now I Know is how I find all these stories. The answer is … long. I read a lot, people send me things, and I have a good eye for the obscure yet interesting things that I share (I hope), but that doesn’t really do the process — or lack thereof — justice. One story (this one<\/a>) I learned about because it was summarized on the side of a truck I happened to see one day. 1<\/sup><\/a> That’s an outlier, but you hopefully get the point.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this Nauru one has a kind of but not really interesting back story. I follow Jeopoardy! champ Ken Jennings on Twitter. A few days ago, he tweeted out this:<\/p>\n

The world’s only country without an official capital is sort of a bummer. cntraveler.com\/daily-traveler\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) February 5, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m going to click that nearly 100% of the time, assuming I notice it (i.e. am looking at Twitter). I clicked, and the country is Nauru. 2<\/sup><\/a> I skimmed the article (I even missed the part about the unemployment and obesity rates until now) but noticed the part about the bird guano. I went to Nauru’s Wikipedia entry, did some Googling for news articles, and came up with all the stuff you read about today.<\/p>\n

You’ll note that I didn’t put in the fact that Nauru doesn’t have a capital. I left it out because it wasn’t really relevant to the story I was telling, and while it would have made for a decent bonus fact, the other one was better. At times, I’ll drop a “double bonus” into an email, and I considered it for this one, but I wanted to make sure I credited Ken Jennings for the tip, and figured this would be a good way to do it.<\/p>\n

\n

Notes:<\/p>

  1. Literally, I walked into traffic to read it. Here’s a picture<\/a> which someone else took of a similar truck. ↩<\/a><\/li>
  2. There’s your bonus, bonus fact. Nauru has no official capital, and is the only country without one. That makes sense. It’s only 8 square miles, which is much less than Manhattan at 22 square miles. And Manhattan isn’t a country. It isn’t even a city! So how could it have a capital city? ↩<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Today’s Now I Know is about a tiny island in the Pacific called Nauru. You should read it,\u00a0here. One of the questions I get most often about Now I Know is how I find all these stories. The answer is … long. I read a lot, people send me things, and I have a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dlewis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}