The New Leaf Journal launched exactly five years to the day on April 27, 2020. I knew that I needed to publish something to celebrate this humble perennially virid online magazine’s fifth birthday. In previous years I published a timeline of our first year online, a Justin and Justina birthday dialogue, a birthday reader featuring our most-visited posts, and absolutely nothing in 2024. I must confess I was at a loss until I came across an April 17, 2025 article by Brian Potter of Construction Physics titled 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics. Mr. Potter started Construction Physics in September 2020. In the linked post, he published a collection of some of the most interesting things he has learned about construction while researching and writing 186 essays since launching his online writing project. This blog post inspired in me a eureka moment not unlike the one I had when I was inspired by a different blog post to publish 54 Things I Learned in 2024 just a few months ago. I have learned many things while researching and writing articles for The New Leaf Journal, not to mention serving as site administrator. What better way to go through my writing than to collect things I have learned in five years of writing for and running The New Leaf Journal?
Invite Rules for the Birthday Party
I will list 50 things I learned while writing The New Leaf Journal, with each thing being tied to a New Leaf Journal article. In so doing, I will list only things I learned while putting together New Leaf Journal articles, not things I knew beforehand and wrote about. Moreover, I will not include things I noted in my 54 Things I Learned in 2024 article. For the purpose of this birthday party, I will include for consideration articles written by my friend and New Leaf Journal colleague, Victor V. Gurbo, since I edit and format every article on site.
Please note that this list is obviously non-exhaustive. This is our 1,152nd full article and we have a few hundred additional short posts. I exercised my discretion to put together a fun list of just 50 things I learned.
American History
Benjamin Harrison’s Memorable July 4, 1888 (By Nicholas A. Ferrell, July 2, 2020): The only thing I knew before working on this article was that Benjamin Harrison was the 1888 Republican nominee for president and the ultimate winner of the election. From my reading for the article, I learned that Harrison informally accepted the Republican nomination while receiving a delegation from the Republican National Committee at his home in Indianapolis. After receiving the Republican delegation, he welcomed the Tippecanoe Club, which was comprised of veterans who had supported the 1836 and 1840 presidential runs by Harrison’s grandfather, the ninth President of the United States, William Henry Harrison. I quote from my article:
Unsurprisingly for a political club based in part on having voted for a presidential candidate 48 and 52 years earlier, most of the members of the Tippecanoe Club were on the older side. The book reports that ‘[t]heir average age was seventy-five years…’ The oldest member of the Tippecanoe Club of Marion County, James Hubbard of Mapleton, Indiana, ‘was over one hundred years old.’ To put that in perspective, Mr. Mapleton, who was alive to celebrate a presidential nomination in 1888, had been born before George Washington became the first president of the United States.
Nicholas A. Ferrell
I thought it was neat to see how these partisans of William Henry Harrison were able to celebrate his grandson becoming president in his own right.
Anna Jarvis and the Origin of Mother’s Day in the United States (Nicholas A. Ferrell, May 9, 2021): I learned about the work of Anna Marie Jarvis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to see Mother’s Day become an official holiday. Jarvis held a memorial service for her own mother (who had also advocated for Mother’s Day) on May 10, 1908, but in so doing she honored all mothers. Jarvis’ home state of West Virginia officially recognized Mother’s Day in 1910. Within a few years, nearly every State had recognized Mother’s Day and, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued the first Mother’s Day Proclamation.
Introducing the 1922 Better Homes in America Demonstration Week (Nicholas A. Ferrell, October 9, 2021): President Warren G. Harding proclaimed October 9-14, 1922 to be Better Homes in America Demonstration Week. The White House collaborated with the Better Homes Campaign, which was headed by Marie Mattingly Meloney, to run the project. I also published articles on remarks delivered for the event by Vice President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who would go on to be the next two Presidents.
The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet Opossum (Nicholas A. Ferrell, November 30, 2021): While working on an article about President Calvin Coolidge’s pet raccoon, I learned that Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, also had an unusual White House pet: Billy Possum the opossum. Where did the name Billy Possum come from? Surprisingly — it was related to former President (and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States) William Howard Taft.
Masonic Portrait of George Washington (Nicholas A. Ferrell, February 22, 2022): On August 29, 1793, then-President George Washington sat for a Masonic portrait in full Masonic regalia.
The Life Masks of John Henri Isaac Browere (Nicholas A. Ferrell, July 5, 2022): While writing an article about the July 4, 1831 death of James Monroe, I learned about a death mask of Monroe made by John Henri Isaab Browere. I researched Browere and learned that he was far more famous for his life masks than death masks. His life mask subjects included (but were very much not limited to) Marquis de Lafayette, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
Lincoln spares Frank R. Judd in 1864-65 (Nicholas A. Ferrell, December 29, 2022): I dug into the story of Abraham Lincoln’s pardon of Frank R. Judd, who was set to be executed for desertion from the Union Army. Frank R. Judd was the son of Norman B. Judd, a long-time political associate of Lincoln who served as Minister to Prussia in the Lincoln Administration. I learned about several efforts of Lincoln to help Frank Judd as a favor to Norman Judd.
South Dakota’s Senate Leader Succession (Nicholas A. Ferrell, November 29, 2024): John Thune, the current Senate Majority Leader, is the only Senate Majority Leader to have entered office by defeating someone who had served as Senate Majority Leader.
Anime
Additional Thoughts on A Sign of Affection (Nicholas A. Ferrell, May 26, 2024): Youko Yonaiyama, the head writer of the 2024 anime adaptation of A Sign of Affection, which features a deaf character in the starring role, offers services as a sign language instructor and interpreter.
Living for the Day After Tomorrow – Anime Review (Nicholas A. Ferrell, October 11, 2024): I wrote a full review of Living for the Day After Tomorrow, a 2006 anime that I first watched in June 2010. I had known that the anime was based on a manga and that the anime had an entirely original ending. What I had not known, however, was that the manga is significantly darker in tone and deed than my favorite estival anime production.
Birds
The Maybe-Albino Sparrow in the Heights (Nicholas A. Ferrell, August 12, 2020): This article is my recollection of having seen what I believed to be an albino sparrow in Brooklyn Heights on August 6, 2018. I looked up albino sparrows while writing the article and found a Daily Mail piece on the subject. According to the Mail, “[a]lbino[] [house sparrows] are one of the rarest birds in the world” and “albino birds rarely reach adulthood as they are easy targets for predators and they have poor eyesight to spot danger.” Learning this made me sad that I was unable to take a photo of the maybe albino sparrow before it flew away.
The Arrival of Sparrows in the United States (Nicholas A. Ferrell, February 3, 2021): The house sparrow was first introduced in New York City in either 1851 or 1852. They were introduced to “deal” with inchworms and geometer moths. The plan initially ran into a snag when the adult house sparrows were content to eat bread crumbs and seeds instead of bugs. However, because baby sparrows can only eat bugs, the adult house sparrows were eventually compelled to fulfill the purpose for which they were imported.
Bird in Review 〜 The Red Bird of Paradise (Nicholas A. Ferrell, February 10, 2021): I learned much about the red bird of paradise while writing this article, which was in turn based on an 1897 article about the bird. But instead of telling you bird facts, I will share a pretty quote from the 1897 article which I also re-printed in my own article. This quote was attributed to an unnamed traveler:
As we were drawing near a small grove of teak-trees, our eyes were dazzled with a sight more beautiful than any I had yet beheld. It was that of a Bird of Paradise moving through the bright light of the morning sun. I now saw that the birds must be seen alive in their native forests, in order to fully comprehend the poetic beauty of the words Birds of Paradise. They seem the inhabitants of a fairer world than ours, things that have wandered in some way from their home and found the earth to show us something of the beauty of worlds beyond.
Unnamed traveler
The red bird of paradise won one big fan.
The 1895 Homing Pigeon Experiment On the Manoubia (Nicholas A. Ferrell, September 20, 2021): In 1895, 5,200 homing pigeons were released from a French ship called the Manoubia from varying distances from shore of France as part of an experiment. I quote from my article:
“Then-French President Félix Faure offered a first-place prize to one of the pigeons. The winning pigeon was among the last group of birds released at 312 miles from the shore. It made a 465-mile journey home, with 312 of those miles coming over water, in 15 hours and 12 minutes. The article notes that this pigeon made the trip from the Manoubia to its cote traveling at approximately 30 and 1/2 miles per hour.”
Nicholas A. Ferrell
There were many worthy pigeons, but only one MVP.
Boats and Trains
Reverend Warneford’s 1890s Miniature Model Railroad System in Windsor (Nicholas A. Ferrell, June 5, 2021): Thanks to an 1895 issue of Harper’s Round Table, I learned about the miniature backyard railroad system of Reverend H.L. Warneford of Windsor, England. It is very cool so you should read my article and the original Harper’s article to learn about it too.
Governor Alfred E. Smith Boat in Brooklyn Bridge Park (Nicholas A. Ferrell, December 5, 2024): I saw a fire boat named the Alfred E. Smith docked in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I learned that it was built in 1961 and worked as a fire boat for the New York City Fire Department until it was placed on reserve in 2005.
Japan
The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (Nicholas A. Ferrell, March 14, 2021): We could hardly have a birthday celebration without what has been the most consistently impressive performing (in terms of visitor interest) New Leaf Journal article. I knew a good amount of the tsuki ga kirei story before writing this article, including that Natsume Sōseki almost certainly never translated I love you as tsuki ga kirei (the Moon is beautiful). But one thing I did not know is that an alternative version of the story had Sōseki translating I love you into Japanese as Tsuki ga tottemo aoi naa (the Moon is so blue tonight).
April Fools not big in Japan (Nicholas A. Ferrell, March 31, 2023): Some Western holidays and occasions such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween have become big business in Japan. I learned however that, while April Fools is known in Japan, it never really took off.
Languages and Definitions
How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name (Nicholas A. Ferrell, March 11, 2021): I learned that the name of the forget-me-not flower derives from old French, and that the old French was a translation from German. The German name came from an old legend involving the flower, a drowning knight, and a fair lady.
Similarities between Moldovan and Romanian (Nicholas A. Ferrell, June 5, 2023): Moldova changed its official state language from Moldovan to Romanian in 2023. This sounded interesting, so I read a little bit further for a short post. The languages are apparently similar in most respects, but the key difference is that Moldovan is written in Cyrillic while Romanian uses the Latin alphabet.
Music and Folklore
The Quarantine Sessions: “Love Henry” (By Victor V. Gurbo, May 6, 2020): While editing and formatting Victor’s article about Love Henry, I learned about Francis James Child. Child was a 19th century American folklorist who collected English and Scottish folk songs into five volumes of The English and Scottis Popular Ballads. Child’s work is available for free on Project Gutenberg.
Why Vintage Guitars Sound Better (Victor V. Gurbo, January 4, 2021): I learned that one point in favor of vintage guitars over the new ones is that “[s]ome vintage guitars are made out of woods that are uncoming, or in other cases, unavailable today.” Victor explained that one such example is Brazilian rosewood.
New York City
A Trip Across Brooklyn’s Summit Street Bridge (Nicholas A. Ferrell, June 20, 2021): The Summit Street Bridge, which is a pedestrian path connecting the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens and Columbia Street Waterfront District over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, was completed in 1952.
Bush Clinton Playground in Red Hook (Nicholas A. Ferrell, December 3, 2023): I wrote an article about Bush Clinton Playground in Red Hook because the name amuses me. I of course knew that neither Bush nor Clinton Street were named after former Presidents Bush or President Clinton. I knew that Clinton Street is named after DeWitt Clinton. But who is Bush Street named after? To my surprise, I learned that the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation is not entirely sure.
Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn (Nicholas A. Ferrell, April 9, 2025): On March 27, 2024, New York City promulgated regulations authorizing the use of “e-cargo bikes” on City streets.
Poetry
“The Dancing Goat” – A Children’s Poem by Maria Oakey Dewing (Nicholas A. Ferrell, August 29, 2021): I re-printed an 1882 children’s poem by a certain Mrs. T.W. Dewing. I looked up the poet and discovered that she was almost certainly Maria Oakley Dewing, the wife of Thomas Dewing. Both Dewings were renowned painters, with Thomas ultimately being the more famous of the two. I was unable to find anything about Maria Oakley Dewing being a writer or a poet other than the one poem she apparently submitted to a children’s magazine. Go figure.
“Casey’s Revenge” – Grantland Rice’s 1896 Reply Poem to “Casey at Bat” (Nicholas A. Ferrell, August 26, 2021): I knew about the iconic poem Casey at Bat. I did not however know that the famous sportswriter, Grantland Rice, had writen a reply poem of sorts in 1896. I re-printed Casey’s Revenge, and in so doing learned that Rice had written two other poems about Casey.
Roman History
Constantine and the Last Vespers at Hagia Sophia (Nicholas A. Ferrell, May 30, 2020): The last vespers at the Hagia Sophia occurred on May 28, 1453, one day before the fall of Constantinople to the invading Ottoman Empire.
Apollodorus and the Gourds of Hadrian (Nicholas A. Ferrell, December 8, 2020): I learned that Hadrian, who ruled as Roman Emperor from 117-138 AD, (allegedly) enjoyed painting gourds.
Site Administration and WordPress
NLJ Week in Review 8 (June 27, 2020) (By Nicholas A. Ferrell): I changed our WordPress theme from BunnyPress Lite to BunnyPress in early June 2020. To my dismay, I discovered that an old version of our home page from before the switch was appearing to visitors. The problem was, as it always is, caching. I spent more than a week trying to fix the issue. As I explained in my eighth week in review post: “Our webhost confirmed that the problem was on their end and cleared the dastard cache file in question on Wednesday afternoon.” Our webhost at the time was Bluehost, but we moved from Bluehost in 2022.
History of New York’s Evacuation Day (Nicholas A. Ferrell, November 25, 2023): I learned much about New York’s Evacuation Day holiday (it ceased being a major occasion in the late 19th century) while putting together a comprehensive research project. I could tell you what I learned, but I invite you to read my article instead. Here I will note I learned that working with WordPress’ native footnotes in the block editor is a nightmare and had it not been for WordPress’ versioning, which I had never needed to avail myself to before, I would not have been able to publish this article on time.
Moving a WordPress Site With UpdraftPlus Free (Nicholas A. Ferrell, March 8, 2022): I moved The New Leaf Journal from Bluehost to a VPS running Cloudron on February 5, 2022. In so doing, I needed to migrate the entire site from one server to another. I learned that in my case, the simplest solution was to use the backup solution I had been running since the summer of 2020, the free version of UpdraftPlus.
Sports
Grace Coolidge on Intentional Walks (Nicholas A. Ferrell, September 17, 2023): While I was researching an article about Barry Bonds’ unfathomable intentional walk numbers in the early 2000s, I learned that Grace Coolidge, the First Lady during the administration of President Calvin Coolidge, had called for the abolition of the intentional walk.
“Best” NBA Playoff Teams With Losing Records (Nicholas A. Ferrell, April 22, 2025): Since the NBA Playoffs expanded to 16 teams in 1983-84, 48 teams have made the NBA Playoffs with losing records. Only one of those teams, the 1986-87 Seattle SuperSonics (39-43), won a playoff series (the 2024-25 Heat trail who?? 0-3 in their first round series as of the publication date of this article). Those Sonics did one better, actually winning two playoff series before being swept by the eventual NBA Champion Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference Finals.
Sonic and Knuckles
April Fools, Sonic and Tails in SSB Melee (Nicholas A. Ferrell, April 1, 2023): Yuji Naka, the original creator of Sonic, had apparently wanted Sonic to appear to Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube. However, the idea was abandoned due to time constraints. Sonic would of course appear in all subsequent Super Smash Brothers entries.
The Knuckle Method for Days in the Month (Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 7, 2022): I wrote an article about a short 19th century poem called The Days of the Month. A reader by the name of Merle Hall sent me an email noting that the poem was similar to a knuckle method for remembering how many days are in each month. I had never heard of the knuckle method, but I learned all about it and different variations while researching my article.
Tech
Trying Open Camera on BlackBerry Classic (Nicholas A. Ferrell, October 25, 2020): I was still using a BlackBerry Classic as my primary phone in 2020. Thanks to having recently procured my first mainline Android device (a cheap tablet), I learned that I could install many Android apps from the free and open source F-Droid app repository. The first one I tried was Open Camera. In January 2022, I took advantage of my F-Droid/BlackBerry Classic knowledge to install KDE Connect on my BlackBerry Classic and use that to transfer my photos to my computer.
A Writer’s Case For Markdown (Nicholas A. Ferrell, May 15, 2022): This is a round-about thing I learned. I was using a Windows 10 machine for the first few months of The New Leaf Journal (through mid-August 2020). On that I drafted articles in an old version of Microsoft Word. After switching to Linux, I initially drafted articles in Libre Office Writer. In early 2021, I began using Buttondown to send newsletters. Buttondown required me to use markdown (it subsequently added a rich text editor). I learned markdown and ended up preferring it, and I quickly began using it to draft all of my work. In the end, I learned about markdown because of The New Leaf Journal.
Cốc Cốc Search In Logs (Nicholas A. Ferrell, June 4, 2022): Thanks to our privacy-friendly analytics logs, I learned about the existence of Cốc Cốc, a Vietnam-focused generalist search engine with its own crawler and index. (It looks promising.)
An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (Nicholas A. Ferrell, October 18, 2022): I learned that Norton Safe Search sources search results from Ask.com. Ask in turn uses Google’s index.
On whitelisting independent search crawlers (Nicholas A. Ferrell, April 6, 2023): Running The New Leaf Journal and monitoring our search engine status has taught me a good amount about internet search. One thing I have come to understand is that there are very few search engines which use their own indexes. For example, when we were blacklisted by Bing for much of 2023, we also disappeared from the results of search engines which use Bing’s index such as DuckDuckGo. One reason independent indexes have a hard time is because some webmasters block all search crawlers save for Google and Bing. In this article, I made the case for whitelisting well-behaved independent search engine crawlers to help ensure search diversity.
Power Macintosh G3 in Nana Anime (Nicholas A. Ferrell, March 22, 2024): The blue and white tower edition of the Power Macintosh G3 was first released on January 5, 1999. A new model was released on June 1, 1999. It was discontinued on August 31, 1999, in favor of the G4 model. The G3 was released with a price range of $1599 to $2999. For that price, you could get something along the lines of 6 GB storage and 64 MB of memory.
Amazon Appstore and Android (Nicholas A. Ferrell, February 22, 2025): I learned that Amazon is discontinuing its Appstore for regular Android devices, thus limiting it to the Android-derived Fire OS. But more interestingly, I learned for the first time that Amazon launched its Appstore in 2011, several months before the release of the first Kindle Fire tablet. While my own Amazon Appstore experience is very limited, my first of many New Leaf Journal visual novels reviews was of a game I purchased from the Amazon Appstore on my old Kindle Fire HDX.
Video Games and Visual Novels
Japanese Environment in PoL, Lutris, and Bottles (Nicholas A. Ferrell, June 16, 2022): Some of the visual novels I reviewed for my al|together project required me to set up a Japanese run-time environment. Because I use Linux, I had to learn how to do this for running Windows games on top of WINE. In this article, I detailed the steps in three WINE front-ends: PlayOnLinux, Lutris, and Bottles (I subsequently wrote about doing the same thing in Steam).
History of the Mario Party Gloves (Nicholas A. Ferrell, November 6, 2022): I vaguely remembered having known about Nintendo offering free gloves to owners of Mario Party in 2000. But I never investigated the issue until I was reminded of it while writing a different article about the joy-stick destroying rotation games in the original Mario Party. My research took me many places including to finding a photo of the gloves Nintendo sent out.
Going From ONScripter Visual Novel .exe to Native Linux (Nicholas A. Ferrell, November 14, 2022): All of the al|together visual novels I reviewed had Windows versions. In the case of the ones which used ONScripter-EN, the Windows versions were installers. I learned that I could extract the contents of the installer .exe and then run the game naively on Linux by executing the Linux build of ONScripter-EN in the extracted directory (it works well for most but not all of the novels). This was also the first time I learned one could extract the contents of an .exe in this way.
Original LOH: Trails in the Sky GIF ad (Nicholas A. Ferrell, February 17, 2023): I was searching early-to-mid-2000s Wayback Machine captures of Vector, a Japanese software download site, for a very niche article project. I noticed something familiar in a June 5, 2004 capture: A Japanese GIF ad for the then-upcoming June 24, 2004 release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. This is one of my favorite games, although it did not make it to the United States for several years and I played it just over a decade after its original release in Japan.
Running Yuuki!Novel Ver of Tegami on Linux (Nicholas A. Ferrell, June 23, 2023): The Letter was one of my al|together visual novel reviews (and one of the better al|together visual novels). While researching the background of the piece, I learned that the version of the Japanese novel (Tegami) which became The Letter was the second version of the Japanese game. The English The Letter is based on the 2007 NScripter version of Tegami. The first release of Tegami came in 2005 and was written in Yuuki!Novel. I discovered that the original Yuuki!Novel Tegami was still online. Naturally, I wondered whether I could run it on top of WINE on Linux. The answer? Yes!
Finding Manatsu no Kagerou (Nicholas A. Ferrell, August 28, 2023): Two of the al|together visual novel localizations are English patches, meaning they require the original Japanese novel to work. In the case of Midsummer Haze, which is a patch for Manatsu no Kagerou, I had a serious problem: Manatsu no Kagerou, which was first released in 2004, is no longer officially available for download. Did it still exist at all? There were forum posts as far back as 2010 unable to find it. Surely I could not find it in 2023 while being limited to only English-language searches. Thanks to an old torrent, I was able to prove the imaginary naysayers wrong and ultimately make a small contribution to game preservation.
Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow (Nicholas A. Ferrell, October 5, 2023): Back in 2019, I went through a strange amount of trouble to catch a Dragonair in the Pokémon Yellow Safari Zone. Four years later, I researched the issue and learned that Dragonair was one of the few Pokémon which had a different (unsurprisingly, lower) catch rate in Pokémon Yellow than in any other Pokémon game. I have a follow-up article planned with more information about this point.
Conclusion
Putting together that list turned out to be more challenging than I expected. I thought I would struggle to limit myself to 50 things I learned while working on New Leaf Journal articles, but I ended up culling the initial list so much that I needed to go back through my articles to make it to 50. In the end, I think I came up with a good list of facts to celebrate The New Leaf Journal’s fifth birthday, and I even came up with a similar idea for our sixth birthday celebration one year from today.
