I went to a classy university—one so classy that they could (and did) boast about the vegetation that climbed their walls. There you could learn all kinds of useful stuff, such as how to be an engineer, a business maven, or a lawyer. So naturally, I went there to study poetry.

My education wasn’t wasted, however. I learned things that the university didn’t advertise as being part of the curriculum. Here are just a few of them.

Naughty Poetry

One of the more interesting poems I encountered was one by e. e. cummings (the poet who lost his Shift key). He wrote a poem that was considered so filthy that his publisher would only include it in his collected works on an onionskin paper insert in nine copies, handwritten by the author (and cummings had terrible handwriting). But that was in 1935. (The title is “the boys i mean are not refined,” and now you can find it on the internet (if you’re not easily offended, that is). (You just looked it up, didn’t you?) But I digress.)

Bad Wine

I took a class in my junior year called Wine Tasting for Non-Majors. The class met on Wednesday afternoons in an auditorium, and we sampled various wines. We passed bottles of wine and small plastic cups down the row like we were in church, only without the collection baskets. There was a spit bucket at the end of each row for those who didn’t drink (very few) or those who hated a particular wine.

There was lots to hate. We sampled the candy wines. (I was actually fond of Pear Ripple, which I don’t think you can get nowadays. But I digress some more.) We sampled wines that had gone bad in various ways so that we knew what to say to snooty wine stewards: “This wine is foxy,” for example, or “musty” or “oxidized.” That was where the spit bucket came into play.

(The university had, in addition to the usual schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Agriculture, and the like, a Hotel School. Hotel majors had a very different wine class, the sort in which you took a sip and had to identify the country, the variety, and the name of the woman who stomped the grapes. It was not a jolly passing of bottles. It did not enliven Wednesday afternoons. But I digress even more.)

Smelly Animals

Carl Sagan taught us to avoid cow farts. (Yes, that Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, also noted for appearing on the Johnny Carson show and the catchy phrase “billyuns and billyuns.” But I digress still more.)

So, how did cow farts get into Astronomy 102? Sagan, like me, was fond of digressions. He occasionally got onto topics such as greenhouse gases, which is where the cow farts (and burps) come in (or go out, really). He told us that greenhouse gases were produced in large quantities by “the rumen of ungulates,” which is delicate science-speak for cow farts.

How does that work, exactly? It all goes back to methane, a notoriously stinky gas. Human farts are largely nitrogen with just a soupçon of methane. Cow farts, on the other hand, produce enough methane per year to do the same greenhouse damage as four tons of carbon dioxide. We first-year students thought this was hilarious. That’s one hell of a lot of cow farts.

There were other things to learn at the university, only some of which I got around to sampling: sheep wrestling, bee dissection, and archery. (I took that twice, wearing a forest green cape and hat, because I was fixated on Robin Hood, setting me up for a later fixation on Katniss Everdeen. But I digress yet again.)

I could have spent far more than four years there, sampling the good and the bad. Sometimes, I wish I had. Not that I’m in shape to wrestle sheep these days.