Things I discovered yesterday:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was Dante's first American translator, and his version is gorgeous.

The historian Suetonius writes about Virgil's revision process: "it is said to have been his custom to dictate each day a large number of verses which he had composed in the morning and then to spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number, wittily remarking that he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape."

Middle school dances are hotbeds of unsubstantiated rumor and the rampant consumption of salty snacks. Also, one of the songs on the request list was Foreigner's "Hot Blooded." My son claims he did not request it just to drive me crazy. He claims to have had nothing at all to do with it because he was too busy strutting around beneath the strobe lights with a gold-painted box on his head.