November 07, 2016 at 03:54AM

Today I Learned: 1) Don't eat raw yucca. It leeches cyanide in the digestive tract unless you cook it properly, especially from the skin. 2) There are those who say that World War I was inevitable. Others claim that it could have easily been avoided if a few people had just gone to the table and talked. Well, today I learned that only a few days before the German invasion of Belgion that kicked off open hostilities in the war, Russia's Tsar Nicholas II and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II were telegramming each other promising that they were doing everything possible to keep their respective countries out of the war and urging each other to do the same. Alas, the military leadership in both countries managed to overrule their civilian leaders. So if the Kaiser and the Tsar couldn't stop the war, who could? 3) Also in World War I news, today I learned that there was widespread public support for war in France before the German invasion. There was widespread desire for revenge against the Germans for the last war the two had been in. One example of simmering public sentiment: less than two weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the French Socialist leader Jean Juarès was publically assassinated in a restaurant. Juarès had been one of the most prominent anti-war voices in France, and his death may have actually been more widely-noted than Ferdinand's at the time. These last two facts courtesy of the "The Great War" channel on Youtube. I've just started watching their series on the Great War, produced weekly, going over the events of each week as they happened 100 years before. The series started in August of 2014, and is scheduled to end in late 2018. I intend to stay about two years behind, though I may try to catch up to keep the dates straight.