(I know, I know: two posts in the same week. Don't worry, I won't hurt myself.)

Wikipedia has fallen from grace in my eyes. Of course I know it's full of errors and half the pages are written by anime fanboys and you shouldn't ever believe what you read, but I never thought about all the people with good intentions and poor reading comprehension. It's about asparagus: We ate asparagus the other night and, as often happens after one eats asparagus, the topic of asparagus pee came up. I'd read somewhere that some scientists had discovered that everybody produces asparagus pee but only some people can smell it, or something like that--so I checked Wikipedia to verify that. The asparagus entry reported that, in fact, a study showed that some people produce it and others don't, and some people can smell it and others don't, and there's no correlation between the two. I read this out to Molly in my "isn't that interesting" voice and proudly filed away another piece of useless trivia I can blurt out at an inappropriate moment. Except I started to wonder about that--no correlation? That's certainly odd--and I did what I've never done before: I followed up on the reference. I read the article summarizing not a single study, but two: one examining production of the suspected agents in asparagus pee smell and another, completely different, study looking at detection. Both found variation, and neither had anything to do with the other. (At least, not that the article indicated.) Someone misread the article and added an incorrect summary to the Wikipedia page, leading the innocent reader to believe something totally false. If not for me--ME!--endless generations of mankind would labor under the mistaken impression that there's no correlation between asparagus pee-ers and asparagus pee smellers. The correlation is not known to be zero, it's simply not known.

For the record, I both produce and detect. Molly does not detect, but I know she produces.

With that out of the way, a dory update: I've faired the outside as much as I had the patience for, put a couple coats of primer on, and turned her upside down--er, right side up. Then I made a water level and levelled her out perfectly square and even. Cut and fit the ribs, then worked out a design for a removable center seat so that we can put in a sliding seat later if desired. Glued the ribs, and tonight I put fillets (glue along the seams) on the ribs and seat pieces. Today my package from Duckworks arrived, containing the oarlocks and sockets along with various sailmaking equipment that I won't be using any time soon. To do: bow and stern seats, fair the lumpy inside fillets, sand, sand, sand, rails outside (leaving inside until we know we've got the oarlocks in the right place), bow deck with a handle, cut a handle in the transom, primer, sand, primer, sand, paint all over, and she's ready to float! We might have her in the water weekend after next at this pace. Weather depending, as always.