I knew an H Jay.

Your stylization is more correct than mine.

I’ve heard people pronounce it as “galli-PO-lease”

I submit: Gallipolis, Ohio.

The pronunciation of Lebanon you called out may sound like it came from a hayseed, but it’s closer to the way people in the country of Lebanon pronounce it than the mainstream American pronunciation.

You won’t believe where Kanorado is located.

That would be the laryngeal nerve. It’s been with us vertebrates for a long time.

I take your, “for zero reason,” to indicate that it’s silly that it’s so long in a giraffe. And it is, because it connects the larynx and the brain, two bits that aren’t very far apart. You’d never design it that way from scratch.

But the laryngeal nerve’s length has a reason: it loops around the heart and it developed in our fish-like ancestors. At that time, it wasn’t silly for the nerve to wrap around the heart, because fish don’t have necks and thus the nerve was about the same length whether it wrapped around the heart or not. As necks developed, evolution found it easier to lengthen the nerve than to reroute it. So here we and giraffes both exist, having much longer laryngeal nerves than you’d engineer if you were making us from scratch.

I’ve been using Instapaper for years. It does the job.

Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld series.

Absolutely. To have the chance at being the first to see and experience what’s out there? Oh yes.