✉️ Frank's Five — Issue No. 6
Friday, July 10, 2026 • This week's theme: Around the World in Five Facts
Morning, friend. Last of the posted sample issues — after this one, the almanac travels by email only. So this week we go out the way any decent almanac should: all the way around the globe without leaving the porch.
🥇 The Headliner
When Gustave Eiffel's tower went up for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, it came with an expiration date: the permit ran twenty years, after which the city could have it dismantled. Plenty of prominent Parisians were counting the days. A group of artists and writers had published a formal protest against the "useless and monstrous" tower before it was even finished — the novelist Guy de Maupassant was among the signers, and the story goes that he liked to eat lunch in the tower's restaurant because it was the one place in Paris where he didn't have to look at the thing. (Frank files that last bit under "too good to check, so consider it seasoning, not fact.")
Eiffel, no fool, spent those twenty years making his tower indispensable. He installed meteorological instruments, ran experiments from the top, and — decisively — promoted it as a giant antenna. By the time the permit question came due, the tower was carrying radiotelegraphy, and the French military found it far too useful to lose. During the First World War it intercepted enemy transmissions. The demolition talk quietly died.
It has since become the symbol of the country that once itched to tear it down — and, as the Fact of the Week box on the left notes, it's about 15 centimeters taller on a hot summer day. Not bad for temporary.
🔢 Four More Beauties
- No. 2 France's longest land border is with Brazil. Not Spain, not Belgium — Brazil, thanks to French Guiana in South America, which is fully part of France. About 730 kilometers of Amazonian border, all of it légalement français. — History Facts
- No. 3 Alaska is both the westernmost AND the easternmost U.S. state. The Aleutian Islands stretch across the 180th meridian, so part of the chain sits in the Eastern Hemisphere. One state, both ends of the map. — Number Facts
- No. 4 The Moon is drifting away from Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year — NASA knows because Apollo astronauts left reflectors on the surface, and we've been bouncing lasers off them ever since. — Space Facts
- No. 5 According to the U.S. National Weather Service, a lightning bolt heats the air around it to roughly 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit — about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. — Science Facts
🚫 The Weekly Debunk
"You only use 10 percent of your brain." FALSE — Frank checked
A flattering myth — imagine the untapped 90 percent! — and completely false. Brain imaging shows that virtually every region of the brain has a known function and sees use, and over the course of a day essentially all of it gets to work: moving, seeing, remembering where the keys are, regretting the haircut of 1987. Even while you sleep, the lights are very much on.
Neurologists have been swatting this one for decades, and it keeps coming back because it sells seminars. Think of it this way: the brain is about 2 percent of your body weight and burns roughly 20 percent of your energy. Evolution does not keep a furnace that expensive running to heat one room. You're using the whole building, friend — some floors are just quieter than others before coffee.
❓ Frank's Stumper
First, the answer to last week's Stumper (which country has the most time zones?): France, with twelve — more than Russia's eleven and the United States' eleven (counting territories). The secret is the same as the Brazil border above: France's overseas territories are scattered from the Pacific to the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, and every one of them needs a clock.
This week's Stumper: One planet in our solar system rotates tipped over on its side, rolling around the Sun like a barrel instead of spinning like a top. Which planet?
The answer will be revealed in next Friday's email — and here's the catch, friend: next Friday's issue goes out by email only. The archive stops here. The sign-up box is directly above, and Frank will see you on Friday.
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