Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BARBARIC BUTTER

Did you know... Our friends in ancient Rome indulged in a lot of activities that we would find unseemly today — including and especially gladiators fighting to the death — but they drew the line at eating butter. To do so was considered barbaric, with Pliny the Elder going so far as to call butter “the choicest food among barbarian tribes.” In addition to a general disdain for drinking too much milk, Romans took issue with butter specifically because they used it for treating burns and thus thought of it as a medicinal salve, not a food. 

 

They weren’t alone in their contempt. The Greeks also considered the dairy product uncivilized, and “butter eater” was among the most cutting insults of the day. In both cases, this can be partly explained by climate — butter didn’t keep as well in warm southern climates as it did in northern Europe, where groups such as the Celts gloried in their butter. Instead, the Greeks and Romans relied on olive oil, which served a similar purpose. To be fair, though, Romans considered anyone who lived beyond the Empire’s borders (read: most of the world) to be barbarians, so butter eaters were in good company.

 

Nero didn’t actually fiddle while Rome burned.
It would have been impossible for him to do so, as the fiddle didn’t exist yet. That’s not to say that Nero was a good emperor (or person), however. In addition to murdering his mother, first wife, and possibly his second wife as well, Nero may have even started the infamous fire that burned for six days in 64 CE and destroyed 70% of the city so that he could expand his Golden Palace and nearby gardens. (Or at least, that’s what some of the populace and some ancient writers suspected.) For all that, Rome’s fifth emperor wasn’t entirely reviled during his time — and it’s been suggested that his cruelty was at least somewhat exaggerated by later historians who were looking to smear his dynastic line, known as the Julio-Claudians. And he was a gifted musician who played the cithara, an ancient stringed instrument similar to a lyre — just not the fiddle.

 

 

Source: The ancient Romans thought eating butter was barbaric.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE TITANIC

Did you know... The ‘Titanic’ didn’t sink immediately on the early morning of April 15, 1912.

 

On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, kicking off one of the 20th century’s most devastating civilian catastrophes. But the date typically cited for the ship’s sinking is April 15. And that’s because, as anyone who’s seen James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) already knows, the vessel didn’t plunge immediately to its icy doom—the whole process took a good two hours and change.

 

Ship Meets Iceberg

The starboard side of the Titanic brushed up against the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. the night of April 14, causing enough damage that at least five watertight compartments in the hull began to fill with water. After a brief investigation, the ship’s chief designer Thomas Andrews determined that they wouldn’t be able to stay afloat, and by midnight, the crew had started preparing the lifeboats.

 

The scene over the next two hours gradually escalated into pandemonium as passengers were roused from their berths and loaded—women and children first—into a fleet of lifeboats that clearly couldn’t accommodate everyone. At about 2 a.m., the ship’s bow had tipped so far beneath the surface that its stern was partially above the water, and at 2:17 a.m., wireless operator Jack Phillips transmitted one last distress call.

 

Beneath the Surface

 

Over the next three or so minutes, the lights would shut off, and the bow’s downward trajectory would force the stern to break from the ship. It’s generally believed that the bow started to sink, and the stern moved into a vertical position before sinking, too.

 

By 2:20 a.m., the Titanic had vanished. As for how long it took for the ship to actually hit the ocean floor, it depends on whom you ask. In his book The Discovery of the Titanic, Robert Ballard—the oceanographer who discovered the wreck—estimated that the descent may have lasted just six minutes, though he made it clear that “there are simply too many variables involved” to be sure.

 

Where Did the Titanic Sink?
The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean about 370 miles southeast of Newfoundland. Its rough position wasn’t a mystery—after all, ships showed up to rescue survivors in the area. But technology to locate lost shipwrecks wasn’t very advanced in 1912, and it would be another 73 years before Ballard and his team found the vessel some 13,000 feet under the surface.

 

 

Source: How Long Did It Take for the ‘Titanic’ to Sink?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - PUBLIC CONTESTS

Did you know... Like many classic Hollywood stars, Joan Crawford was known by a stage name rather than her real name. Born Lucille Fay LeSueur, the future Oscar winner made her silver-screen debut in 1925’s Lady of the Night under her birth name. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had signed her to a $75-a-week contract, saw potential in the starlet but feared her name would be a hindrance; Pete Smith, the head of publicity at MGM, thought her surname sounded too much like the word “sewer.” 

 

So the upper brass at MGM landed on a novel solution: a contest run in the fan magazine Movie Weekly, which offered between $50 and $500 for coming up with a new name for “a beautiful young screen actress.” The perfect name, according to MGM, “must be moderately short and euphonious. It must not imitate the name of some already established artiste. It must be easy to spell, pronounce, and remember. It must be impressive and suitable to the bearer’s type.”

 

The winner, as fate would have it, wasn’t Joan Crawford; it was Joan Arden, which was already the name of an extra who threatened to sue MGM. And so the second-place winner was chosen instead, not that the new Joan Crawford was happy about it — she initially hated the name before making the most of it.

 

Crawford accepted her Oscar from bed.
After a string of hits in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Crawford’s luck so reversed itself that she was deemed “box-office poison” in TIME magazine by the end of the decade. Her comeback wasn’t fully solidified until she took the title role in 1945’s Mildred Pierce, which resulted in her sole Academy Award — not that she was expecting to win.

 

Believing Ingrid Bergman would take home the Oscar for The Bells of St. Mary’s, Crawford was disinclined to attend any ceremony where she wouldn’t be victorious and opted to feign illness. Upon learning she’d won, however, she put on her makeup, invited members of the press to her bedroom, and accepted the statuette from the comfort of her own bed.

 

Source: Joan Crawford’s stage name came from a public contest.