In my crossword this morning, one of the clues was "Glacial deposit." I skipped over this one for a while, but once I got the first letter (M) and the last two letters (N, E), I said to myself, "Ah, moraine!" and filled it in. And then got to wondering how I knew that word. I know nothing about glaciers and am not very well read at all when it comes to anything other than fiction. But I feel like knowing things you didn't know you knew is something that increases with age. We're exposed to so much information, everywhere, all the time. I guess what we're actively thinking about represents giant chunks of what goes into our minds, but how much of the ambient noise drifts into the spaces between the giant chunks? Do we know much more than we think we do? How much is "intuition" simply putting together all the things we don't realize we know?
It also makes you wonder, nostalgically, what it must feel like to be a child young enough not to have odd bits of information crammed into the nooks and crannies of your brain, and to know what you know. Like the difference between living in your first out-of-college apartment with all of your worldly goods in plain sight, versus having a house you'd lived in for, say, 35 years, and finding a soup ladle you can't even remember buying in a box in the basement.
Also, did you know that some people eat slime eel slime? Wikipedia says that in some cultures, people keep slime eels in containers which they then beat with a stick so that the eels continuously produce slime. The slime is used in a manner similar to egg whites.
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