✉️ Frank's Five — Issue No. 1
Friday, June 5, 2026 • This week's theme: The Deep End
Morning, friend. First issue of the summer run, and we're starting where the almanac always starts when it wants to show off: the animal drawers. Pour the coffee — this one has a creature in it that laughs at calendars.
🥇 The Headliner
Here's the story. Most jellyfish live the way the rest of us do: born, grow up, wear out. Turritopsis dohrnii — a creature about the size of your pinky nail — found a loophole. When times get hard, the adult sinks down, folds in on itself, and its cells transform back into the colonial polyp stage it grew from, the biological equivalent of a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. From that polyp, new jellyfish bud off and start the whole ride again.
The trick was noticed in the 1980s, when a German biology student named Christian Sommer was keeping these hydrozoans in jars in Rapallo, Italy, and realized his specimens kept refusing to die on schedule. Scientists have since watched lab colonies pull the reversal over and over. Marine biologists call it "biological immortality" — with a big asterisk, because in the open sea most of these jellyfish still get eaten long before eternity comes up.
So: not invincible, just unwilling. Frank has known a few people like that, and he married one of them.
🔢 Four More Beauties
- No. 2 Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings — the only animal known to do so. Researchers who studied how the wombat's gut pulls this off won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019 for figuring it out. — Animal Facts
- No. 3 An octopus tastes with its arms: the suckers are packed with chemical receptors, so touching its dinner and tasting its dinner are the same event. — Animal Facts
- No. 4 Botanically speaking, bananas are berries and strawberries are not. The strawberry's seeds sit on the outside, which disqualifies it on a technicality. Botanists are ruthless. — Food Facts
- No. 5 The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn — it has appeared on Scottish royal heraldry since the Middle Ages. — History Facts
🚫 The Weekly Debunk
"A goldfish's memory only lasts three seconds." FALSE — Frank checked
Regular readers of the almanac know this one is personal (the full story of the Trivia Night Incident is on the Who Is Frank? page). The truth: goldfish are perfectly competent students. Researchers have trained goldfish to press levers for food, to respond to particular sounds and colors, and to remember what they learned for weeks and months — not seconds. In one well-known line of experiments, fish trained to feed at a certain signal still remembered the drill when tested long after the training stopped.
Three seconds. The fish has been slandered for decades and never once complained, which is more than Frank can say for himself.
❓ Frank's Stumper
The very first stumper in the series — try it on the household at dinner tonight:
Which letter of the alphabet appears in the name of no U.S. state at all?
Hint: it's not J (New Jersey) and it's not Z (Arizona). Answer revealed in next Friday's email — no search engines, that's cheating of the highest order.
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