Hookin' up words and phrases and clauses (and weird numbers)

We got the Schoolhouse Rock DVD! It's so fun. Parts of speech, multiplication tables, history, science, politics, and economics, all set to catchy music! I remember watching some of these as a child. ("Elbow Room" was one that had always stuck with me, for some reason.) There were some that were completely new to me and some that I recognized when I saw them. One of my new favorites is "Rufus Xavier Sasparilla." I love the piano part. There's a "shuffle all songs" feature that we have been making good use of. Kate seems to enjoy it, too. Maybe she'll even learn something.

I had an odd thought while watching the multiplication videos. There's the nine song, which mentions that you can add together the digits in any product of nine and get nine. And then there's the twelve song (which is kind of trippy) that starts out with a bit about how if man had been born with six digits on each hand and foot, we would do our math in base twelve. So I started wondering if that particular quality of nine is a function of the base. I asked on Two Peas and someone referred me to this base conversion table. Yes, it turns out that in base twelve, eleven behaves like nine in base ten (that is, the digits in any product of eleven will add up to eleven), and in base five, four works that way, and so on. Pretty cool.