* Dr Pepper is a drug, too, of course. Caffeine and sugar are two of the defining chemical compounds of the Anthropocene. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, root beer, and most other flavored sodas were invented either by chemists or pharmacists, and in the nineteenth century, there was no bright line between medicinal cocktails and recreational ones.

* That bone, incidentally, was named Scrotum humanum, which is a reasonable description of its approximate shape.

* See Kentucky Bluegrass

* You may wonder, as I have, whether U.S. ornithologists assigned “Canada” to the goose’s name for the same reason the Italians called syphilis “the French disease,” while the Poles called it “the German disease” and the Russians called it “the Polish disease.” The answer is no. Taxonomists first observed the geese in Canada.

* We are all dwarfed by bacteria, though. According to one recent estimate, the biomass of bacteria is about thirty-five times larger than the combined biomass of all animals.

* We’re not a two-hundred-year-old nation; we’re an extension of the Greek Republic and therefore thousands of years old!

* I lost the story shortly after finishing it. In my memory, the story had real promise, and for many years I believed that if I could just find that story, I would discover that my next book was already half-written, and I’d only need to tighten up the plot a little and expand a few of the characters. Then a few years back, my dad found a copy of the story and sent it to me, and of course it is terrible and lacks a single redeeming quality.

* Warner is remembered for one other quote. He was the first person known to make a version of the joke, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” But of course, we are doing something about the weather.

* If you’re reading an e-book or listening to this book, the same is true, because in both cases, the book is likely stored in the cloud, or else was at one point, and the cloud is not really a cloud; it is a huge array of linked servers that almost never overheat or corrode, because they are kept artificially dry and cool via air-conditioning.

* That’s not the astonishing thing about the story, though. The astonishing thing is that after scraping off the mold that became the world’s penicillin supply, the researchers ATE THE CANTALOUPE.

* I lived this experience, actually. In the early nineties, I became entranced by something called the Phantom Time Hypothesis, which held that around three hundred years of time between the seventh and tenth centuries never actually happened and were instead invented by the Catholic Church. I was originally turned on to this idea by one of those memes that is itself not sure whether it’s ironic. The conspiracy theory, which was pretty widespread at the time, held that I was really living not in the year 1993 but instead around 1698, and that a bunch of years had been faked so that the Church could . . . maintain power? The details of it escape me, but it’s amazing what you can believe when you’re down the rabbit hole.