Cubits and Shrooms and Rain, Oh My!

All the rain we've had recently in Central Kansas has the rich prairie soil sprouting mushrooms everywhere, and it has ProfessorRoush "diving down a rabbit hole" regarding the exact dimensions of a "cubit".  I've lost track of the total, but over 2 weeks, I emptied my gauges of over 12" of rain.  The official total for the year is around 38" depending on where "spotty rains" fell, where we normally have only 27" by October.  Whatever the exact total, I've never seen the roadside ditch this full! 

You all remember "cubits", right?  As in Genesis 6:15, "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits"?  Well, it turns out that each Middle-Eastern culture, whether Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, or Hebrew, had a different "cubit" defined.  There were Common Cubits, Standard Cubits, Royal Cubits, Long Cubits, Assyrian Cubits, Biblical Cubits, Black Cubits, Cloth Cubits, Hashemite Cubits, Legal Cubits and the Cubit of the King, to name only a few.  All are supposedly (but not supposeably) based on the length of the forearm to the tip of the middle finger.  Don't even get me started on the divisions of the cubit into palms and fingers!  The Wikipedia page about cubits is beyond bewildering.

Anyway, what I've learned is that someone other than me should be the one to attempt an Ark.  Regardless of the temporary panic that brought on the thoughts about The Ark, the rains have since stopped, and fall has arrived with cool nights and sunny days.  And a bumper crop of mushrooms is growing.

Normally, our mushrooms are the grey-white-turning-to-brown monstrous foot-wide toadstools pictured above left, which begin growing as the nice neat puffballs seen here to the right.  But these rains have also stimulated these smaller, frilly brown fungi (pictured below), that can be found everywhere the grass gets mowed.  I don't know if they also grow between clumps of the taller unmowed prairie grasses because I'm not curious enough to wade into the wet, tall grasses to find out.

Needless to say, I don't trust my fungal identification skills enough to harvest or consume any of these wonderful gifts from the prairie.  And in the meantime, please take the painfully-won wise advice of ProfessorRoush and don't ever Google or otherwise exhibit the slightest curiosity about cubits!