In Memoriam: Franklin Pierce Adams

Franklin Pierce Adams - by the middle of the 20th Century known to his friends as well as most of the English-speaking world as FPA - was a newspaper columnist, producing an influential column entitled The Conning Tower. He was also a noted wit; as a member of the Algonquin Round Table and as a panelist on the radio show Information Please he could entertain and enlighten with the best of them.

He was also one of the first proponents of trivia which, by breaking human knowledge into snippets, has provided some of us with a far superior method of learning. 'I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way,' he once said, which is as good a motto as any for me and this product of my fevered mind.
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