things we learned while writing this book

One of the real gifts of writing a book is that you learn lots of strange things you did not know before. Sometimes, you start looking for a random bit of information to put in a footnote, and the next thing you know, you’ve gotten lost in a Google rabbit hole, and the only thing that comes of it is a text message to your co-author that begins, “This isn’t useful, but you are not gonna believe this . . .” Sometimes you find out that things you have believed most of your life are wrong, but you try to play it off in the book as if you were enlightened all along. And still other times, you find out that you were just plain stupid about something (okay, this was mostly just Chad).
            So here is a very incomplete list of things we learned, with minimal annotation.

• Elizabeth and Mary may not be cousins, specifically. This, despite what all the sermons say.
• The adjectival form of “gyrate” is “gyrate” (you’ll have to buy the book to figure out how in the world that word made it into our book about sweet baby Jesus)
• Matt Bryant Cheney is fluent in Gaither (as we all should be, right @Brent Metcalf??)
• Joe Friday never said “Just the Facts, Ma’am” (We deal with a lot of pop culture; brace yourselves)
• Jim Carrey ruined a lot of movies; one movie he didn’t ruin was Dumb and Dumber. Wanna know his name in that movie? Lloyd . . . Lloyd Christmas. I kid you not. No way we could be expected to leave that alone.
• Jesus spent more time in Egypt than in Jerusalem. (The Bangles were pleased to learn this. Also, this book is full of 80s references. Wanna guess how old the authors are?)
• The patron saint of bullfighters is the Virgin of Hope of Macarena (“Hey! Macarena!” This was a Google rabbit hole that produced a really cool but exegetically insignificant footnote, but we still love it.)
• Chad had no idea that the expression was “bury the lede” rather than “lead.” (They gave him a Ph.D.? Sad.) Heck, he didn’t even know that “lede” was a word, and Microsoft Word keeps underlining “lede” in red, so Word doesn’t know this word, either.
• The best title on any of the (many? Let’s say “many”; it makes us look smart) scholarly articles we read was by David Balch—“Mary’s Magnificat and the Price of Corn in Mexico.” That man can write a title! (In hindsight, we should have consulted him for some of our chapter headings.)

 
And remember that you, too, can learn lots of cool things like this, and for the low price of $14.99! Coming in November! Tell your friends! Avoid other things happening in November! Hand them out as Christmas presents! And watch the world change for the better.