Humpty Dumpty and Other of Life's Surprises

In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight
When England suffered the pains of state
The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town
Where the King's men still fought for the crown
Then One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
A gunner of deadliest aim
The cannon he fired from the top of the tower
Humpty-Dumpty was its name...

Until 15 minutes ago, I had always believed that Humpty Dumpty was an egg; a large, anthromorphed egg with little legs, littler arms and a face. He also had a little hat.

In pictures I have seen in nursery rhyme books, he looks a lot like Jonathon Winters.

Now I learn that, not only was he not an egg but that he was either the sniper known as One-eyed Thompson or the canon he fired from the top of The St. Mary's at the Wall church in Colchester, England (There are two versions of the above poem. The other one identifies Humpty Dumpty as the canon).

in 1648 the Roundheads battled the royalists for 11 weeks at the church, before one of their portable canon scored a direct hit on both Thompson and his canon, causing them to tumble to the ground inside the stronghold. Naturally, all the king's horses (cavalry) and all the king's men (infantry) worked very hard at reassembling the big gun, but their efforts were in vain. After learning that their compadres in the north surrendered at the Battle of of Preston. After that Oliver Cromwell took charge and begin his tenure as Lord Protector of England and instituted the genocide of Irish Catholics, thus starting the trouble with the Irish that presisted for centuries.

Notwithstanding Mother Goose, Humpty Dumpty was not an egg.

So, yet again, life has thrown me a curve, low and inside that always results in a swing and most often, a miss, as it was this time. Strike One!

The Brook Trout is not a trout at all, but a member of the char family.

I didn't just learn this. In fact I don't remember when I learned this.

It's not all that bothersome a thing except it makes me one step further from my goal of catching at least one of every species of trout in North America. What I did learn recently is that there are three other species of "trout" that are not trout either; the lake trout, the bull trout and the Dolly Varden!

That means I scratch those three off my list of "caught" trout.

I thought there were 22 known species of North American trout and now I learn there are three fewer. So of the 19 that are left, I now have caught 6 rather than 9 (10 if you count the Brookies).

Strike Two

I have just learned that life is not fair.

Actually, I have suspected this for a long, long time but kept hoping things would improve as I got older.

Don't get me wrong, though. I am not all that bothered because it is not fair because it's not fair for anyone. We all get screwed from time to time, just as we all experience dumb luck, merited rewards and blessings we could have never imagined, much less earned.

Perhaps this really means that life wins the prize answer from the magic mirror... "Who or what is the fairest of them all?"

So on the fairness of life issue, I found my groove and smacked the ball over the Green Monster, driving in two runs with me.

How can anyone not like surprises?