One of the more common questions about Now I Know is simply, where do I find all of this stuff?  There’s really no good answer, but this story, which lead to this morning’s issue, is a good example of how things just seem to come together.

I saw the poster above on the way home from work yesterday.

During the walk — maybe ten minutes, tops, before I got on the subway — I was thinking about what to write about for today’s Now I Know.  I didn’t have a topic in mind yet, so in my head, I went over a few that I have been mulling over.  None jumped out at me.  And then I saw the poster.

I remembered, vaguely, a story about how The Smurfs ended up getting on TV.  My memory’s (incorrect) version: A daughter of a TV exec had a Smurf doll and had been reading a Smurf comic and kept nagging her dad to make it into a TV show.  Over time, he begrudgingly capitulated.  She turned out to be right.

But my memory isn’t an adequate proxy for reality, so I turned to Wikipedia to see just how faulty my memory was.  Turns out that the real story isn’t as awesome, but still good enough for a bonus fact.  

Wikipedia saved the day, though.  The Smurfs entry in the encyclopedia begins with the excellent story about Peyo requesting the salt, but failing, which was pretty easy for me to flesh out.   And there you have it — an issue of Now I Know.

Thanks for the well placed ad, Papa Smurf.