Tycho Brahe's mustache: In "The Observatory" Howie wears a bushy flourish under his nose, as if to say "look down here, not up there" (p.6). By p.43 he sports an even more flamboyant mustache. When asked about it he says "I was thinking more Tycho Brahe." Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) invented scientific astronomy. But it's his mustache that interests us. Like Howie, he is balding, and his mustache sprouts profusely from his upper lip, extending in great brushlike bristles of hair well past the limits of his face. Tycho indeed wanted you to look down there, because his nose was a fake. He lost his nose at age 20 in a sword duel in the dark, fighting over who was the better mathematician. (Oh, those hot-headed Danes!) For the rest of his life he wore a prosthetic metal nose. And an absurdly big mustache.

You can't patent the shape of a hull ("The Better Boat" p.143): The Vessel Hull Design Protection Act of 1998 provides copyright protection for original designs of vessel hulls and decks. This very specific Act gives protection for an “original design of a useful article” (where “useful article” is limited to boat hulls). Stealing a boat design was a very real issue. Obviously, this law didn't exist at the time that "The Better Boat" takes place. Piracy did.

We sail in the ocean here. Says so on the license plates. "The Better Boat" (p.87): I couldn't resist this anachronism. Starting in 1972 and up to the present, RI plates have said "Ocean State." This was preceded by a brief two-year period when the tagline was "Discover," but I suspect that it was being read as discovering that the smallest state in the nation actually exists, not that it contains a wealth of things to be explored. The specific license plate that I was referring to shows a sailboat heeling in the wind, along with the words "Ocean State". It's been available since 1992 as a standard plate design. But you have to ask for it.

Non-fungible: "You can't interchange one painting for another because each one is unique. At least in theory." ("The Observatory" p.34): Founded in 2022, Lito Masters has partnered with several major museums to carry out detailed scans of paintings by artists including van Gogh, Matisse, and Kandinsky. It then uses 3D-printing technology to create textured stroke-for-stroke reproductions on canvas or paper, complete with the originals' cracks, ridges, and imperfections. I found out about this in December 2023. It's getting harder and harder to write anything that's actually fiction.

Pluto isn't even a planet anymore ("The Observatory" p.16): Everything was fine with Pluto until Eris showed up. Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord, which is why we argue about Pluto. Eris, the celestial object, has a diameter of 2,326 km., within a whisker of the size of Pluto (2,376 km), so when it was discovered in 2005, the choice was to either admit it as a tenth planet, or group it with Pluto as something else. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union dealt with Eris by demoting Pluto, classing both as “dwarf planets.” Rather than there being nine planets, there are now eight planets and nine (count ‘em) dwarf planets. Eight of them are way out there in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, one of them (Ceres) is much closer to home between Mars and Jupiter.
But hard times for Pluto started in 1978. Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto was universally considered to be larger than Mercury, so, despite its odd behavior, to doubt Pluto was a planet would be to doubt Mercury, and nobody’s gonna do that. But in 1978 Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered with half of the diameter of Pluto, so suddenly what was once one large object was resolved to be two smaller ones. Since it was now unquestionably the smallest planet, the other troubling things about it started to matter.
Interestingly, the IAU does not define a size requirement for a planet. Poor Pluto was demoted because it had not “cleared its neighborhood,” meaning that there are other objects cluttering its orbit uncaptured by its gravity. You can hardly blame little Pluto, since one of the things it hasn’t cleared out of its orbital neighborhood is the vastly larger planet Neptune, whose orbit Pluto crosses. To tell the truth, no planet has fully cleared its neighborhood, which is why we get meteor showers, but Pluto has done a particularly poor job of it. Pluto fulfills the two other IAU requirements for a planet: orbiting the sun, and having hydrostatic equilibrium (being round). Yes, but two accepted planets aren't round: that pesky Mercury, which now doesn’t qualify; and – hello – Earth. We’re an oblate spheroid. Wherever Eris shows up, there’s an argument.

Things Beloved

A small private college with a universe (p.67): I didn't know it at the time, but the Michigan State University Observatory went through a similar real-world saga. It was commissioned in 1969. In 1974, what was at the time a state-of-the-art Raytheon microcomputer was installed to function as a data gathering and control system. Photography using plates or film was the means of acquiring data. The observatory was closed from 1981 until 1986, at a time when the university was having financial difficulties. It was saved by the excitement generated by the return of Halley's Comet. The technology was updated and the obsolete Raytheon computer retired.

San Zanipolo: On the last page of "Navigation" (p.207) an enormous Venetian church is dedicated to a saint "that none of us had ever heard of: San Zanipolo. Our best guess was that he must have been Marco's uncle." Of course, this is a final mention of Marco Polo (explorer and swimming pool game); and Lewis' Italian is a little off: Ziani (not Zani) means "old geezer." But the real San Zanipolo is stranger than you think. Zanipolo isn't a saint, he's two saints. Somehow the Venetian dialect compressed Giovanni e Paolo down to Zanipolo. Furthermore, this huge church in which many of the doges are buried isn't dedicated to the apostles John (Giovanni) and Paul (Paolo). It is actually dedicated to two unknown (probably fictitious) saints with the same names.

Dark Matter, Indeed: In “Vacation” The theologian Thomas Kemp is giving a lecture to astronomers, one of whom challenges him with the topic of Dark Matter: “Thomas took some time to explain how he found immense comfort in knowing that something exists without anyone understanding it.” (p.38) I’m glad that Thomas is at peace with the unknowable, because Dark Matter is even more inscrutable than I knew when I wrote this, as summarized by Scientific American (August 20, 2024):
Most of the matter in our universe is invisible. We can measure the gravitational pull of this “dark matter” on the orbits of stars and galaxies. We can see the way it bends light around itself and can detect its effect on the light left over from the primordial plasma of the hot big bang. We have measured these signals with exquisite precision. We have every reason to believe dark matter is everywhere. Yet we still don’t know what it is. ….We are starting to grapple with the sobering idea that we may never nail down the nature of dark matter at all. In the early days of dark matter hunting, this notion seemed absurd. We had lots of good theories and plenty of experimental options for testing them. But the easy roads have mostly been traveled, and dark matter has proved more mysterious than we ever imagined. It’s entirely possible that dark matter behaves in a way that current experiments aren’t well-suited to detect—or even that it ignores regular matter completely… There is a chance that dark matter will prove so elusive we may never understand its true nature.
from “What If We Never Find Dark Matter?” by Tracy R. Slatyer & Tim M. P. Tait.

A Venetian Water View: "Navigation" (p.155): In the exact center of the piazza was a well. In Rome they would have built a fountain. In Florence they would have erected a statue. In salty Venice where fresh water was precious as gold, an old stone well, capped with an iron cover. A Venetian water view. While accurate, this hardly does justice to the several hundred elaborate rainwater cisterns of Venice. Surrounding that stone well there are four drains (gatoli) in the far corners of the piazza. The pavement is carefully sloped so rainwater runs into these drains, and then flows beneath the pavement through a clay-lined 16-foot deep crater filled with imported salt-free river sand. The sand filters the water and directs it to the well in the center. The barrel of the well is built of special water-permeable bricks that further purify the water. The surrounding salt water is carefully kept out and the rainwater kept in. And that iron cover isn't just for safety. Wells were locked at night to prevent water theft. The parish priest kept the key and rang the campana dei pozzi (the bell of the wells) every morning when the well was open for business. Until an aqueduct replaced them in 1884, this was why Venetians gazed with prideful admiration at their wells.

I've been on second and stolen first: In "Navigation" Lewis' directionally-impaired baseball career (p.116) references an era when this was completely legal. The culprit was Herman "Germany" Schaefer, who twice in 1911 deliberately stole first base from second. With a runner on third, Germany took off running backwards with as much hullabaloo as possible. His hope was to confuse the catcher to try to throw Schaefer out, allowing the man on third to steal home. In 1920, after Schaefer's death, a baseball rule (currently 5.09(b)(10)) was added that states that a player is out if "After he has acquired legal possession of a base, he runs the bases in reverse order for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game."

I Thought You Were the Police: In "Navigation" p.161 & 162 a suspicious policeman asks Lewis "The Carabinieri. Are they involved?" worrying that an official file might have been opened by the other guys.
In Italy there are several different branches of the police, ostensibly to prevent any single branch seizing power...The Carabinieri are dressed in military-style uniforms and white shoulder belts (they're part of the army) , and deal with general crime, public order and drugs control. The Polizia Statale, the other general crime-fighting branch, enjoy a fierce rivalry with the Carabinieri, and are the ones to whom you should report a theft...The Polizia Statale have a small police station on the Piazza San Marco, at no. 63."
from The Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto

A tourist map of Venice: "Navigation" (p.159) gives us this map as a waterlogged bit of litter, of no use whatsoever to Lewis. What goes unsaid here is that on one level all maps of Venice are useless to everybody, because the places on all of the maps are invariably named in Italian, whereas the white street signs on the walls (nizioleti, "little bedsheets") are invariably in Venetian. A few of hundreds of examples: Parrocchia (parish) on the map is Parochia on the wall; Sant' Angelo is identified by a sign for S. Anzolo; the Sottoportico dietro il Fornaio is economically marked as Sotoportego drio el Forner.

The most expensive cup of coffee in Europe "Navigation" (p.163): An honored tradition throughout Italy is to charge dramatically more for a cup of coffee when seated at a table than the same cup of coffee standing at the bar. At Caffè Florian coffee standing is 3 Euros ($3.25). Coffee seated is 6.50 Euros ($7.00). Oh, and if the orchestra is playing, there's a 6 Euro surcharge per person because you are, no doubt, listening. Florian is arguably the oldest (1720) and the most elegantly beautiful cafe in Europe, so for most people it is probably worth it. Lewis, at this moment in the story, is not most people.

Eppur... In the story "Vacation" (p.36) Thomas Kemp tells of galaxies that shouldn't exist, but do. In 2025, the James Webb Space Telescope discovered galaxy MoM-z14 that existed a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang (that's only 2% of the current age of the Universe). This is the latest of several galaxies observed which theoretically should not exist. Furthermore, MoM-z14 contains a large amount of nitrogen (an essential building block of all life), though by all accounts there absolutely wasn't enough time to create all that nitrogen.
BBC Sky at Night Magazine, January 29, 2026.

Vacation and Other Tales of Enduring Love

Lighting is Everything

We have a place to stay. In our own home: On p.31 Franny decides to live in their house while a movie is being filmed there. I didn't know it at the time, but this really happened during the making of a film that is mentioned multiple times in the novel.
The Home Alone house, at 671 Lincoln Ave. in the Chicago suburbs, was the real location for many of the scenes in that movie. The Abendshiens, who lived there, happily agreed to allow the film-makers use of their house for six weeks. Filming of the movie extended over the predicted time, and the crew ended up working at the house for around four months.
During filming, slight modifications to the home were made, such as new festive wallpaper, a treehouse rigged to a zipline, and an exterior stairway to the basement that robber Marv (played by Daniel Stern) slides down in the movie.
For the duration of the film’s shooting, production rented an apartment for the Abendshiens to stay in. The family only spent a few nights in that apartment before returning to their home and turned their second-floor bedroom suite into a temporary living space.

To keep people from associating our house with this awful movie (p.145). While Halloween is set in the fictional town of Haddonville Illinois, the locations are mostly in South Pasadena. The abandoned childhood house of the psychopath Michael Myers was so frequented by seekers of real-world shivers that it was jacked up and moved around the corner from its original address, and every attempt was made to render it unidentifiable. To no avail.

The identification of Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger is never open to question (p.26). Clayton Moore went through many tribulations in his self-identification as The Lone Ranger, including a court order barring him from appearing as the fictional character in public, five years of legal wrangling that culminating in a counter-lawsuit. Which Moore won.
The identification of the man and the movie role are so strong that of the over 2,800 stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame his is the only one that immortalizes more than the actor's name. It says: "Clayton Moore - The Lone Ranger."
Subsequent attempts to film The Lone Ranger without Clayton Moore have been huge box office bombs.
The first one (1981) sparked the court order against Moore to prevent confusion with its star, Klinton Spilsbury. You've never heard of Klinton Spilsbury? That's because this movie, his first major role, was such a bomb it earned him a Golden Raspberry and completely ended his acting career. It didn't help that in post-production all of his dialog was overdubbed by an actor with a more commanding voice. Directed by William Fraker, a highly-respected cinematographer, in his 3rd (and final) attempt at directing.
The second one (2013) had everything going for it, major stars (Johnny Depp as Tonto, Armie Hammer as The Lone Ranger), a top-notch director, brilliant producer, and a studio with deep pockets. It nevertheless was a commercial and critical bomb that left a crater that will probably never be filled.

C-47s (p.68): no one truly knows why clothespins are called C-47s but there are multiple theories. The specific name is probably because they are useful for all sorts of things, much like the World War II C-47 transport plane. But why give a simple clothespin such an obscure name at all? My favorite theory is that back in the early days of Hollywood, studio heads auditing equipment requests from lighting departments would go crazy over the idea of spending good money for something as simple and mundane as clothespins. Hence, “clothespin” was quietly changed to the far more impressive-sounding C-47, and all requests were immediately approved.
And, by the way, what we're talking about are wooden clothespins. One of the many things they're used for on the set is clipping to the hot barn door flaps on the business end of a klieg light; plastic clothespins would melt.

“He’s the director’s kid.” “He’s in the movie?” “Starring. Far as I know, this is his debut.” (p.101): Anjelica Huston’s acting debut was in 1969's A Walk With Love and Death, which her father John Huston directed. She was cast as the romantic lead in this costume drama set during the Hundred Years War with the tag line: Maybe they need to make war as much as we need to make love.
It was not a good experience for her.
"I was 15 and going through all sorts of adolescent problems. It's really hard to make a movie on another person's territory, especially when that person is your own father, therefore too close to the situation.”
Anjelica wrote about this film that her father was often not active in her life, and that he wanted to do this film to sort of make things up to her. To allow her to star in something he was doing.