The old saw “Don’t believe everything you read in the news” is obviously even more applicable to Wikipedia, but man, the incredible, arcane facts you can find there. Case in point, last night after watching The Princess Bride (for the first time ever, might I add), I had a hankering to find out more about Andre the Giant, so I looked him up on Wikipedia, where I discovered—get this—that as a child in France, because he was too large to fit in a regular school bus, he was driven to school every day by his neighbor, Samuel Beckett. Words cannot express how cool that is. The source is apparently Rob Reiner’s commentary on the DVD extras of The Princess Bride, which I didn’t watch, but I suppose that’s marginally credible… I used to be really fascinated with peculiar deaths—i.e. Roland Barthes, run over by a laundry truck, and Frank O’Hara, run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island—and this sort of information appeals to the same taste in pop culture esoterica. Someone should make a book of these. Me, maybe?