It’s time once again for Six Degrees of Wikipedia! I do declare, Barbers and Barberettes, we have got one sweet waste of time in store for you.

Today’s installment of Six Degrees of Wikipedia will take us — via streetcar (*elaborate wink*) — from The Letter People of your youth to an explosive mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate! I know you’re eager to get started, so I’ll begin wasting your time immediately.

If you went to public school or watched PBS or had a soul in the 1980s, you know the Letter People. Specifically, you know Mr. M. and his trademark Munching Mouth. Yes you do. You know the song. But did you know the Letter People got their big break in St. Louis, Missouri?

Yes, picturesque St. Louis. Long before it got the best of Tom Waits, the city broadcast the Letter People television series on local PBS station KETC. Unfortunately, the Letter People are basically the only good things ever to come out of St. Louis (my great auntie M. and uncle H. emphatically excluded, of course). Nobody cares about the Gateway Arch, and even fewer people care about the subject of our next page: St. Louis native Tennessee Williams.

Tennessee is best known for writing excruciating plays. I wish I could say the connection to our fourth stop on today’s route (lobotomy) was a rogue editor’s suggestion for how best to enjoy Tennessee Williams plays, but the real connection is not nearly as satisfying. Apparently Tennessee’s sister Rose had an ill-advised lobotomy to treat her schizophrenia and it did not go well.

In fact, I bet Rose would happily have traded lives with psych-111 susperstar Phineas Gage, who was linked from the lobotomy page for obvious reasons. He’s the guy who lived for many years with a three-foot tamping iron stuck right the fuck through the front of his head. It’s just a hop, skip, and a click from there to our last bangin’ stop, without which Gage’s tragic accident would never have been possible.

That’s right: gunpowder. As I’m sure you know, the chemical equation for the combustion of gunpowder is 10 KNO₃ + 3 S + 8 C → 2 K₂CO₃ + 3 K₂SO₄ + 6 CO₂ + 5 N₂.

Thanks for riding, kid Barbers. Watch your step.

This is a new feature. If you can’t figure out how it works just by reading the title, you should probably kill yourself. Let’s get started.

Today, we get from ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus to the release date of Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” by way of kidney stones and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Learning is fun!

Epicurus was way ahead of his time. He thought the superstitious fearmongers in his midst ought to settle the fuck down and just try to live a decent, happy life, preferably by talking philosophy with friends (which, for him, included the women and slaves he admitted to his school). That’s right: This dude admitted women and slaves to his fancy school hundreds of years before people would fawn all over that guy Jesus for merely convincing a group of law-abiding citizens not to stone a woman to death.

Speaking of stones, it’s worth noting that our man Epicurus was this unrelentingly pleasant despite suffering from kidney stones — conveniently the next step on our journey through the intertubes. I cannot bring myself to discuss the particulars of kidney stones in this space, but do click the link if for some reason you want to learn more. All you really need to know is that sometimes medical professionals zap kidney stones with lasers, and that’s the page we’re headed to next.

Lasers kick ass. They can kill you or draw your attention to something. This is where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office comes in.

Apparently the USP&TO told the physicist who first tried to patent the laser in 1959 to fuck off, but they were very happy to grant patent No. 5,443,036 — for a totally unheard-of, laser-pointer-utilizing “method of exercising a cat” — on August 22, 1995. This method now has its very own Wikipedia page, and it’s our last stop before the grand finale: August 22.

A great many things have happened on August 22, but historians agree that the most important was the 1989 release of Janet Jackson’s chart-topping single, “Miss You Much,” in which the singer demonstrates her love for an unnamed boy through dance and spelling.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this installment. If you have suggestions for the starting point of a future SDoW, post them in comments. I might take them if they’re any good.