Mr. Write's Page

The Questions…

1. Candy corn was first marketed in the 1880s under a different name. What was it?

2. How big and how heavy, exactly, are cumulus clouds (the fluffy white ones you see on a pretty day)?

3. The first food eaten in space was squeezed from an aluminum tube by astronaut John Glenn aboard Friendship 7 in February 1962. It was an experiment to see if humans could swallow and digest food in a weightless environment. What was in the tube?

4. A blacksmith is a craftsman with a general knowledge of forging metal, usually iron and steel. How did the term blacksmith originate?

5. What is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia?

The Answers…

1. “Chicken Feed.” The logo was a rooster, the tag line “Something worth crowing for.”

2. On average, cumulus clouds are roughly half a mile in width, length, and height. The water in the cloud weighs about one million pounds. Or 500 tons. Or 100 elephants.

3. Applesauce.

4. A “smith” is a craftsman skilled in a particular specialty — gunsmith, locksmith, coppersmith — and in the old days, iron was known as “black metal.”

5. That’s the scientific name for an ice-cream headache, aka brain freeze. The literal meaning of the term is pain in the ganglia (nerve cell clusters) in your palate.