What is Commonplace Fun Facts About?

Commonplace Fun Facts began as a father-and-sons project. My boys inherited my curiosity, my sense of humor, and my unfortunate inability to encounter an interesting fact without immediately feeling compelled to tell someone about it. Rather than subject innocent bystanders to an endless stream of unsolicited trivia, we decided to give all those facts a home.

The original inspiration came from L. M. Boyd, whose syndicated newspaper column I had enjoyed for years. Boyd had a remarkable talent for serving up small, self-contained morsels of information — strange statistics, bits of history, scientific curiosities, questions you never thought to ask, and answers you suddenly felt oddly pleased to know. It was the sort of material that made you stop halfway through the newspaper and say, “Huh. I did not know that.” That seemed like a worthy ambition.

So, in the beginning, Commonplace Fun Facts followed much the same philosophy. Here is an interesting fact. Enjoy it. Now here is another one. It was wonderfully efficient and perfectly suited to a father-and-sons project built around sharing the curious things we happened to discover.

The problem — if “problem” is the right word — was that I gradually became less satisfied with simply knowing that something happened. I wanted to know why it happened. If an invention was created by accident, what was the inventor actually trying to make? If everyone repeated the same astonishing historical anecdote, was it actually true? If some obscure person appeared in one sentence of the story and then disappeared, what happened to him? One interesting fact had an annoying tendency to produce six more questions.

That changed the writing philosophy of the site. The short trivia items gradually gave way to longer stories built around curiosity, research, skepticism, context, and a willingness to follow the occasional rabbit trail well beyond the point at which sensible people would have turned back. On the site’s twelfth anniversary, I tried to explain the resulting process in “How to Write the Commonplace Fun Facts Way: 12 Steps for 12 Years.” The condensed version is that an article often begins with “That’s interesting,” quickly progresses to “But why?”, and eventually reaches “Wait — is that even true?” Somewhere after that, all hope of a short article is usually lost.

As a result, Commonplace Fun Facts gradually became something different from the site we originally envisioned. The trivia never disappeared; it simply acquired context, footnotes, side stories, disputed legends, forgotten characters, and the occasional lawsuit that nobody saw coming. What began as a collection of bite-sized curiosities became something closer to a digital commonplace book: part history site, part curiosity cabinet, part research rabbit hole, and part justification for spending an entirely unreasonable amount of time investigating questions that no responsible adult had actually asked.

The name itself was inspired by Sherlock Holmes. In The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb, Dr. Watson wrote, “We both sat in silence for some little time after listening to this extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down from the shelf one of the ponderous commonplace books in which he placed his cuttings.”

That word — commonplace — caught my attention. I had always understood it to mean “ordinary” or even “boring,” neither of which seemed particularly compatible with Sherlock Holmes. Holmes rarely struck me as the sort of fellow who kept several ponderous volumes devoted to things he considered dull.

I soon learned that a “commonplace book” was something very different: a personal collection of quotations, observations, facts, ideas, clippings, and other bits of information that the owner considered useful or interesting. Once I understood that, everything clicked. I realized I had been keeping a commonplace book, in one form or another, for most of my life. Some of it was written down. Much of it was simply filed away in my memory, waiting for the moment when someone would foolishly give me an opening to say, “You know what’s interesting about that?”

The internet simply made it possible to turn that lifelong habit into a public one. Instead of keeping all those scraps of information in notebooks, files, books, bookmarks, and the increasingly overburdened storage facility between my ears, I could collect them here and share them with anyone else afflicted with the same kind of curiosity.

The logo represents that same idea. The stylized “C” stands for “Commonplace.” It also forms the shell of an astronaut’s helmet, representing space — about as large a subject as one can reasonably investigate. The electrons swirling around the helmet represent the subatomic realm at the opposite end of the scale. The different-sized diamonds represent bits of information in the digital world, the means by which all of this is collected and shared.

Taken together, the pieces reflect the idea behind the site: everything connects to something else. A story about an inventor can lead to politics; a scientific discovery can lead to a war; an obscure royal marriage can alter the genetic history of Europe; and a seemingly pointless bit of trivia can suddenly become useful years after you learned it. Knowledge has a habit of refusing to remain neatly in its assigned drawer.

That brings us to one of the beliefs that has driven me since I was a boy: there really is no such thing as “useless knowledge.” Some information may be more immediately useful than other information, certainly, but usefulness has a way of changing depending upon where you happen to be standing. The idea is expressed far more elegantly by Chuang Tzu:

Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu:
“All your teaching is centered on what has no use.”

Chuang Tzu replied:
“If you have no appreciation for what has no use,
You cannot begin to talk about what can be used.

The earth for example, is broad and vast,
But of all this expanse a man uses only a few inches
Upon which he happens to be standing.

Now suppose you suddenly take away
All that he actually is not using,
So that all around his feet a gulf
Yawns, and he stands in the Void
With nowhere solid except under each foot.
How long will he be able to use what he is using?

Hui Tzu said: “It would cease to serve any purpose.”

Chuang Tzu concluded:
“This shows the absolute necessity
Of what has ‘no use.’”
— Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

That is essentially the philosophy of Commonplace Fun Facts. Follow the interesting question. Learn the thing you do not need to know. Wander down the historical side road. Open the footnote. Look up the person mentioned in passing. There is no telling where any of it will lead.

And if, somewhere along the way, you acquire the perfect obscure fact with which to derail an otherwise perfectly normal dinner conversation, so much the better.