Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FRENCH ANIMAL DESCRIPTIVE NAMES

It’s sometimes said that everything sounds better in French, and animal names are no exception. From raccoon and starfish to moth and mayfly, these monikers have a certain je ne sais quoi that’s sure to make you prefer them over the English (or maybe even the Irish).

 

1. Un paresseux

English translation: “sloth”

The sloth has been unfairly maligned as lazy—it’s not their fault that they have to take it easy because they have a slow metabolic rate and need to conserve energy. Unfortunately for these cute animals, though, that trait has come through in its name: In English, sloth dates back to the 12th century and was first used to refer to the animal in the 17th century. In French, the word for sloth is also an adjective that can be translated as “lazy” or “sluggish.”

 

2. Un glouton

English translation: “wolverine”

In French, there are two words for wolverine: carcajou and glouton. The latter is also an adjective that can be translated as “gluttonous” or “greedy.” Although there’s no trace of its gluttony in its common English moniker, the wolverine’s scientific name is Gulo gulo, which translates to “glutton glutton” from Latin. According to National Geographic, the name likely derived from the fact that “wolverines live in vast territories where food is scarce. So, when one finds something edible, the wolverine will eat as much as possible, returning to a carcass many times until it’s been picked clean.” 

 

3. Une chauve-souris

English translation: “bat”
The French term for bat, une chauve-souris, literally translates to “bald mouse,” which makes no real sense—bats aren’t rodents, nor are they hairless. One proposed theory for the origin of the name is that it might be a mistranslation from the Roman era: The bat was called “cawa sorix” (“owl mouse”) in Vulgar Latin, but cawa turned into calva—which translates to “bald”—over time. It’s almost like a game of whisper down the lane gone wrong. 

 

4. Un raton laveur

English translation: “raccoon”

The French name for these trash pandas literally translates to “washing rat” due to the raccoon’s tendencies to wet its food before eating. (It’s worth noting, though, that they aren’t washing their food per se, just enhancing their tactile experience.) The English raccoon is derived from the Algonquian language of the Powhatan people: The words aroughcun and aroughcoune mean “one that rubs, scrubs, and scratches with its hands.”

 

5. Une chouette

English translation: “owl”
The French word chouette doesn’t just mean “owl”; it’s also an adjective that can be used as “brilliant” or “great”—and although the term doesn’t highlight any specific attribute of the owl, most people would probably agree that owls are pretty awesome. If you’re heading to France and plan to discuss owls, you should know that chouette isn’t the only term for the birds: It’s specifically used for owls without ear tufts, while hibou is used for owls that have them.

 

6. Une méduse

English translation: “jellyfish”

In French, Méduse is also the name for Medusa, the Gorgon from Greek mythology who had snakes instead of hair and the ability to turn anyone who looked into her eyes to stone. Jellyfish tentacles are said to resemble Medusa’s hair, hence their name.

 

7. Un papillon de nuit

English translation: “moth”
Moths can get a bad rap for being ugly pests—a reputation that is both unfair (not only are they an important part of the food chain, they’re also pollinators) and a far cry from how butterflies are viewed, despite the fact that they’re in the same order of insects. The literal translation of the French term for moth, un papillon de nuit, literally means “butterfly of the night,” which is both a very delightful way to view a moth and a name that helps correct that terrible reputation.

 

Click the link below  to read more of French descriptive animal names.

 

Source: French Animal Names

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - COUNTRIES THAT CHANGED CAPITALS

Did you know... A nation’s capital is more than just the seat of its government — it’s also a symbolic representation of the country itself. As such, capital cities are often the same for centuries: London, for example, has been the official capital of the United Kingdom since 1801, and has been considered the de facto capital since the Romans named Londinium the capital of Brittania in 43 CE.

 

Other national capitals are significantly newer. Countries choose to move the seat of the government to an entirely different city for a number of reasons — from requiring new infrastructure to needing a more centralized location. Underneath these reasons, however, the motives behind transitioning the capital are often political. Here’s an inside look at why five countries changed their capitals.

 

1. Brazil

As the cultural hub of Brazil, the city of Rio de Janeiro was the nation’s official capital for nearly 200 years. Unfortunately, it was also crowded, with congested roadways that made it difficult to travel to the administrative buildings spread across the city. This issue was fixed in 1960, when the country officially relocated the capital to Brasilia — a city that was designed specifically for its purpose as the governing seat. Engineers, architects, and city planners worked together to create a capital city that was beautiful to visit and effortless to navigate, with numbered blocks and divided sectors for hotels, embassies, and banks. The capital of Brasilia is such an achievement of modern architecture that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

 

2. Myanmar

Rangoon was the capital of Myanmar (also known as Burma) for over 50 years — from the time the independent country was established in 1948 until the mid-aughts. But on November 6, 2005, something strange happened. The country’s military rulers decided to switch the seat of the government with no explanation. Government employees and civil servants had to suddenly move 200 miles from Rangoon to Pyinmana, a town primarily known for its logging and sugarcane refinery. The town of Pyinmana was renamed Naypyidaw, which remains the capital to this day. Purportedly, nearly a million people live in the city’s capital, but with empty highways and city streets, some believe that number to be false.

 

3. Kazakhstan

From 1929 to 1991, Almaty was the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Once Kazakhstan gained independence from the Soviet Union, this southeastern city remained the capital for six more years. In 1997, the decision was made to move the capital elsewhere; Astana was unveiled as the new capital of Kazakhstan one year later. Officials revealed that they believed Almaty’s earthquake-prone location was too volatile for a capital city, although President Nursultan Nazarbayev also said that he hoped the move would stimulate the northern region’s economic wealth. “Astana” literally translates to the word “capital” — a fitting name, until it was changed to Nursultan in 2019, after Kazakhstan’s first president, who remained in office for 19 years.

 

4. Nigeria

Before 1991, the coastal metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, had long been the country’s capital. It was first declared the capital in 1914 when Nigeria was under British rule, and it remained so after Nigeria’s independence in 1960. Over time, however, government officials found it unsuitable as a capital, particularly because Lagos was hot, crowded, and prone to political upheaval. As a result, government officials began developing a new capital north of Lagos during the 1980s. This city was called Abuja, and in addition to being in a more centralized location, it was located in neutral territory in regards to the country’s various religious and ethnic groups. The open land also provided abundant room for expansion. Abuja was officially named the new capital of Nigeria on December 12, 1991, although a few government offices remain in the original capital city of Lagos.

 

5. Bolivia

When Bolivia became independent in 1825, Sucre was named the country’s official capital city. Named for the revolutionary leader Antonio José de Sucre, the city was chosen due to its proximity to silver mines, which was the country’s chief industry at the time. However, when the mines dried up in the late 1800s, all the workers moved to the city of La Paz, located 250 miles to the north. As it was closer to the tin mines, La Paz’s economic importance grew, and it eventually became the seat for the executive and legislative branches of the government. Despite this, Sucre remains the seat for the government’s judicial branch and the official capital, even though La Paz is the country’s de facto capital.

 

 

Source: Nations That Changed Their Capitals

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - "WE ARE THE WORLD" (song)

Did you know... In the ’80s, pop music decided to take on the world’s problems. There was Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, and of course, “We Are the World,” the massive 1985 charity single that brought together nearly 50 of America’s hottest musical superstars to raise money for African famine relief. At the recording session, producer Quincy Jones hung up a sign that read, “Check your ego at the door,” and for the most part, everyone did. 

 

“We Are the World” dominated radio, topped the charts, and raised tons of money for a very worthy cause. In honor of the song’s 40th anniversary—a milestone commemorated in the new Netflix documentary The Greatest Night In Pop—here are 10 fascinating facts about this singular moment in music history.

 

1. “We are the World” began with Harry Belafonte (and also Bob Geldof).

 

In late 1984, famed actor, singer, and activist Harry Belafonte saw a BBC report about the devastating famine in Ethiopia. Feeling compelled to help, he contacted music manager Ken Kragen and suggested a fundraising concert. Kragen proposed they instead record an all-star charity song, just as Bob Geldof had done in the UK with Band Aid’s humongous “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (Geldof had seen the same BBC report.) “Geldof has shown us the way,” Kragen told Belafonte, according to Esquire. “And we’ve got bigger stars here. Let’s go right from the Billboard charts. Who’s big? We want to sell records.”

 

2. Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson wrote the song with an ear for history.

One of Ken Kragen’s clients was Lionel Richie, who signed up for the project after speaking with Belafonte on the phone. (“Black folks dying, Lionel,” Belafonte told him. “I need some Black folks to save them.”) It transpired that Richie would write the song with Michael Jackson, and despite getting distracted by all the animals in Jackson’s house, they finished it within a two-week window. They were careful to avoid lyrics that would make the song sound dated. “As we were putting it together, we were also thinking about how the words would last over a period of time,” Richie told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s no words in there like, ‘Right on.’ Once you say ‘Right on,’ you’re locked into the ’60s. If you say, ‘Yo, dawg,’ you’re locked into the ’90s. So you can’t use anything hip or slick. It has to be really well thought-out.”

 

3. The recording of “We Are the World” could have only happened on one particular night.

 

How do you get dozens of America’s biggest musical stars in one recording studio at the same time? You hold the session on the night of a major awards show. The historic session that yielded “We Are the World” took place at A&M Recording Studios in Los Angeles on January 28, 1985, right after the American Music Awards, which were held the same evening at the nearby Shrine Auditorium. The apparently tireless Richie hosted the AMAs and then played “floor man,” or chief problem solver, for “We Are the World” producer Quincy Jones as the A-listers arrived to record their vocals.

 

4. Prince was notably absent from the proceedings. 

In 1985, there were few artists in America or anywhere else on the planet bigger than Prince, who was just coming off the gargantuan success of the previous year’s Purple Rain film-album combo. Prince picked up three trophies at the 1985 AMAs, but he was a no-show later that night at A&M Recording Studios. His absence likely had something to do with his rivalry with Michael Jackson. “Do you want to stop the rivalry and join a group of people singing a song, standing next to his rival?” Lionel Richie told The Hollywood Reporter. “No. I mean, from a strictly egotistical point of view, I could see it.” Richie also conceded that Prince “wasn’t a group person,” and that “We Are the World” wouldn’t have fit with his brand.  Instead, Prince spent the evening at the Mexican restaurant Carlos & Charlie’s, where his bodyguards allegedly roughed up a couple of photographers.

 

5. Madonna was also missing—though not by choice.

Hot on the heels of 1984’s Like a Virgin, Madonna was definitely Prince-level famous at the time of “We Are the World.” And yet, amazingly enough, she was not invited to sing on the recording. This didn’t sit well with Harriet Sternberg, who worked with Ken Kragen on organizing the project. “I wanted Madonna, but Ken wanted Cyndi [Lauper],” Sternberg says in the new doc. Why would the organizers not want Madonna? “Because they didn’t think she could sing,” said Like a Virgin producer and legendary Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers in a recent interview. “It broke her heart.” Madonna was still upset in July 1985, when she performed at Live Aid but opted not to join the “We Are the World” finale. 

 

6. Dan Aykroyd was there “totally by accident.”

When the “We Are the World” music video hit the airwaves, one question was on everyone’s mind: Why the heck was Dan Aykroyd—a comedian who’d only dabbled in music as one-half of the Blues Brothers—part of the chorus? Turns out it was a total fluke. In a 2010 interview with New Hampshire Magazine, Akroyd explained that he and his father were interviewing business managers on the day of the session. They somehow wound up in the office of a talent manager, which is not what Akroyd needed. But the guy invited Akroyd to come and join “We Are the World.” “I thought, ‘How do I fit in here?’” Akroyd said. “Well, we did sell a few million records with the Blues Brothers and in my other persona I am a musician, so I showed up and was a part of it but it was totally by accident.”

 

7. Bob Dylan had kind of a rough time.

 

In the “We Are the World” music video, everyone looks pretty calm and happy—except for maybe Bob Dylan. There’s an intensity to his performance, and behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage shows just how stressed Dylan was while figuring out his part. According to Richie, Dylan was having a “nervous breakdown” over how to handle his solo portion of the song. “He’s trying to sing it,” Richie told The Hollywood Reporter. And we said, "‘No, we don’t want you to sing it, just do it like Bob Dylan.’”  The idea, said Richie, was to give solos to people with super-distinct voices. “Now, Bob Dylan has an identifiable voice instantly,” Richie said. “But he was trying to sing it another way. We kept saying, ‘No, just sing it like Bob Dylan.’ But did you see that look on his face? He was like, ‘Well, what does that sound like?’”

 

8. Eddie Murphy missed his chance to be there.

On the day of the epic “We Are the World” recording, comedian and sometime singer Eddie Murphy was in Stevie Wonder’s studio, working on some music. “He was like, ‘Hey, come over. We’re doing this thing,’” Murphy recalled Wonder telling him in a 2019 interview with Jimmy Kimmel. “And I was like, ‘Hey man, I’m recording the song, ‘Party All the Time.’” Now, “Party All the Time” is a fun little pop song that made it all the way to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. (Perhaps fittingly, Richie’s “Say You, Say Me” kept it from notching the top slot.) But even Murphy admits he should have accepted Stevie’s invitation. “Then I realized afterwards what it was,” Murphy said of “We Are the World,” “and I felt like an idiot.”

 

9. Not everyone liked “We Are the World.”

Hours before the “We Are the World” session, Cyndi Lauper tried to wriggle out of the whole thing. “Cyndi came to me during the (AMAs) and said, ‘My boyfriend heard the song and he doesn’t think it will be a hit, so I can’t come,’” Richie says in The Greatest Night In Pop. “I said, ‘Cyndi, it’s pretty important for you to make the right decision.’” She wound up participating, though as she says in the doc, nobody knew the song would be such a smash.  “I don’t think anybody liked it,” Billy Joel told Esquire. “There was a lot of, like, side-eye. There was a lot of looking at the other person, and I remember Cyndi Lauper saying, ‘It sounds like a Pepsi commercial.’ There was a couple of chuckles and a few grunts. That was pretty much the consensus, I think. But nobody was gonna say, ‘I’m not doing that.’”

 

10. “We Are the World” was a resounding success.

Credited to USA for Africa, “We Are the World” spent four weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified quadruple platinum on April 1, 1985, less than a month after its release. Around the world, “We Are the World” sold more than 7 million units, and USA for Africa raised $63 million for the cause.  A sequel of sorts arrived In 2010, as a supergroup dubbed Artists for Haiti recorded “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” to raise money for victims of that year’s major earthquake in Haiti. Richie and Jones were once again at the helm, and the roster of 80-plus artists included Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus, Usher, and Tony Bennett. 

 

Source: Facts About the Making of “We Are the World”

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BLACK HOLLYWOOD GOLDEN AGE

Did you know.... While film historians differ on the exact years of Hollywood’s golden age (it may have stretched from the late 1920s to either the 1950s or ’60s), what is clear is that these years weren’t always so golden for Black actors, who often struggled to earn opportunities and recognition. But despite the tough environment of those times, some gifted artists still made a name for themselves with standout performances as singers, dancers, comedians, and more. Here’s an assortment of fascinating facts about nine Black stars from yesteryear who faced serious obstacles in their paths yet lived lives worthy of the Hollywood spotlight.

 

1. Hattie McDaniel Accepted Her Historic Oscar in a Segregated Nightclub

Two months after she was forced to miss the December 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind (no Black actors were allowed to enter the segregated venue), Hattie McDaniel became the first Black actor to claim an Academy Award with her acceptance of the Best Supporting Actress prize. But even that historic moment nearly failed to come to fruition, as producer David O. Selznick reportedly had to intervene to get the actress accepted into the segregated Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles, where the Oscars were held. These two events perfectly encapsulated McDaniel’s career — she made the best of the maid and mammy roles that came her way, but was constantly reminded of her second-class standing in a pre-civil rights America. Ignoring her critics in the Black press, McDaniel later made more history in 1947 by taking over the lead role of The Beulah Show to become the first Black star of a radio program.

 

2. Lincoln Perry, aka Stepin Fetchit, Was the First Black Actor to Become a Millionaire

With his appearance in the 1927 silent feature In Old Kentucky, Lincoln Perry delivered a performance as a comically sluggish character who was too clueless to handle even the simplest tasks. Later adopting the stage name Stepin Fetchit, Perry continued performing his "laziest man in the world" bit to great fanfare as Hollywood transitioned to talkies, his success making him the first Black actor to earn more than $1 million from his craft. Both the stardom and fortune were gone by World War II, and the Stepin Fetchit schtick today can seem an all-too-painful reminder of the degrading subservience forced on Black folks from an earlier time. Still, Perry has his defenders, who argue that his signature character was more of a trickster than a doormat, and a lengthy list of credits underscores that the man behind the inertia was a legitimate movie star.

 

3. Etta Moten Barnett Was One of the First Black Artists to Perform at the White Hous

While Etta Moten Barnett's windowsill performance of "My Forgotten Man" in Gold Diggers of 1933 spanned just 80 seconds, it was an eye-opening moment from an industry that rarely provided such a dignified platform for its Black contributors. It also earned her a formal invite to sing at President Franklin Roosevelt's birthday party in 1934, an event often erroneously reported as the first time a Black artist had been summoned to perform at the White House (though it may well have been the first such invitation since the 19th century). While her career in Hollywood was relatively brief, Barnett later shone on Broadway in what became her signature role in Porgy and Bess, before spending her later years as an unofficial ambassador to Africa and celebrated philanthropist.

 

4. The Nicholas Brothers Had No Formal Dance Training

If you're unfamiliar with the acrobatic theatrics of the Nicholas Brothers, take a few minutes to watch their famous number from Stormy Weather. Amazingly, this dazzling duo had no formal training as dancers. Fayard, the older of the two, studied the techniques of star performers during a childhood spent following his musician parents on the vaudeville circuit, and he later taught the younger Harold how to dance and sing. While the brothers' full array of talents never received a proper showcase on the big screen, their peerless moves ensured their visibility in high-profile vehicles for stars like Gene Kelly, and led to fulfilling careers that stretched well beyond Hollywood’s golden age.

 

5. Ethel Waters Was the First Black Performer to Star in a TV Show

In June 1939, executives at the National Broadcasting Company decided to test the public appetite for the fledgling medium of television with a variety special. The result, The Ethel Waters Show, made its 42-year-old headliner the first Black performer to star in a TV program. Waters, who had previously helped integrate Broadway in 1933 with Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer, went on to become the second Black woman to earn an Academy Award nomination following her performance in 1949’s Pinky. She then briefly starred in the TV adaptation of Beulah, before her guest role in a 1961 episode of Route 66 made her the first of her race and gender to snag a Primetime Emmy nomination.

 

6. Paul Robeson Sang in 25 Language

There were few things Paul Robeson couldn't do in the public sphere; a multisport star at Rutgers University and pioneering member of the National Football League, he eventually became an in-demand leading man in stage productions of The Emperor Jones, Show Boat, and Othello, along the way bringing his drawing power to Hollywood. Topping his list of talents may well have been his powerful baritone singing voice and linguistic capabilities, which enabled him to deliver a vast repertoire of songs in as many as 25 languages to audiences around the world. However, Robeson’s global voice was silenced when his passport was revoked in 1950 because of his barely disguised communist sympathies, and the aging performer never again reached the commanding heights of his younger years.

 

7. Lena Horne Was the First Black Actress to Sign a Long-Term Contract With a Major Hollywood Studio

Two years after McDaniel's historic walk from the back of the Cocoanut Grove, a signal that Hollywood's stiff codes of segregation were loosening came when Lena Horne became the first Black actress to sign a long-term contract with a major studio (MGM). Although she refused to play the stereotypical domestics and prostitutes, Horne still found most of her roles lacking. Except for some performances among all-Black casts in films like 1943's Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, the actress generally landed isolated parts that could easily be cut from airings in the Jim Crow South. Adding to her discontent was the strain of activism that led to her being blacklisted from film and television for much of the 1950s. But unlike her friend Robeson, Horne survived the lean years by keeping her recording career alive, and she returned to the public eye in the 1960s to chart her own distinct course as a singer, actress, and activist.

 

8. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's Final Film Was Loosely Based On His Life Story

Another sign of progress came when venerable song-and-dance star Bill "Bojangles" Robinson headlined Stormy Weather, a major studio production based on his life. Granted, the story was short on the specifics of a performing career that began in the 19th century, made him a vaudeville star by World War I, and thrust him into the Hollywood spotlight as Shirley Temple's sidekick by the mid-1930s. Regardless, the feature provided a showcase for his still-formidable dancing abilities, as well as the talents of other Black performers such as Horne, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and the Nicholas Brothers. It was a fitting final film for Robinson, a beloved entertainer who reportedly drew half a million visitors to witness his funeral parade after his death in 1949.

 

9. Sidney Poitier Was Kicked Out of His First Audition Because of a Heavy Bahamian Accent

Born in Miami but raised in the Bahamas, Sidney Poitier was sent packing from his first audition for New York City's American Negro Theater (ANT) in 1946 because of his inexperience and heavy accent. Fearful of being stuck in his dishwashing job, the teenager saved up to buy a radio, and spent his free time mimicking the voices he heard from news broadcasts and advertisements. Poitier eventually latched on with the ANT, his improved diction and natural charisma helping to override the missteps of his on-the-job training as an actor. By 1950, when he wowed national audiences with his film debut in No Way Out, the thick accent and deer-in-the-headlights expression had been replaced by the easy eloquence and steely presence that would make Poitier the first Black Best Actor Academy Award winner in 1964.

 

 

Source: Facts About Amazing Black Celebrities From Hollywood's Golden Age

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - PLAGIARISM

Did you know.... Norway’s minister for research and higher education resigned in January 2024 after a student discovered that parts of her master’s thesis had been taken from another author’s work without attribution—and she’s far from the only public figure who has faced accusations of plagiarism. Let’s revisit a few famous cases of word borrowing.

 

1. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

In 1955, Martin Luther King, Jr. received a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University on the strength of his dissertation comparing the theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman. In a review long after King’s assassination, though, the university discovered that King had plagiarized about a third of his thesis from another student’s dissertation. King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also echoed the work of a colleague. A leading Chicago minister and lawmaker named Archibald Carey, Jr. had given a speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention that ended on an inspiring note: 

 

“From every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and the White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Great Smokies of Tennessee and from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.”

 

King’s rousing finale in Washington—which was partly improvised on the spot—was noticeably similar, leading some to believe that he was inspired by Carey’s speech:

 

“And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

 

“And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

 

2. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (by way of William Lauder)

Was the poet behind Paradise Lost a plagiarist? Well, no, but William Lauder, a Scottish scholar and noted forger, sure wanted you to think so. In 1747, embittered by his professional failures, Lauder published several essays in the Gentlemen’s Magazine claiming to prove that Milton had stolen almost all of his 1667 epic poem from other authors. Lauder accused Milton—who was by then deceased—of lifting text from now-obscure works like Hugo Grotius’s Adamus Exul (1601) and Andrew Ramsay’s Poemata Sacra (1633).

 

There was just one problem: Lauder had forged the “evidence” by inserting lines from Paradise Lost into the other authors’ works. For a while, many scholars (including the great Samuel Johnson) supported Lauder. But skeptics studied extant copies of the older poems and it soon became obvious that Lauder, not Milton, was the cheat. And cheating, at least in this case, didn’t pay. Lauder fled to Barbados and died in obscurity.

 

3. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Journalist Alex Haley initially gained prominence for being the “as told to” co-author behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published less than a year after the civil rights leader’s assassination in 1965. Haley then went on to publish the epic Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, supposedly a true story in which he traced his own ancestry back to an African man, Kunta Kinte, who was enslaved and forcibly bought to the U.S. in the 18th century. Haley won a Pulitzer Prize the next year, and the book was made into a wildly popular miniseries.

 

After the book’s publication, however, several historians and authors challenged the truthfulness of the story. In one case, an author named Harold Courlander sued Haley for plagiarizing his 1967 novel, The African. Haley eventually admitted that three paragraphs in the earlier novel had found their way into Roots.

 

Courlander’s lawyer mentioned an example in court. In The African, enslaved people called to each other in the fields by saying: “well, yooo‐hooo‐ahhooo, don’t you hear me calling you?”

In Roots, the lawyer alleged, the phrase appears almost exactly: “the field hands heard a rising, lingering singsong. Yooo‐hooo‐ah‐hooo, don’t you hear me calling you?”

Haley and Courlander settled the dispute out of court.

 

4. Stendhal’s The Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio

During his life, French writer Stendhal (whose real name was Marie-Henri Beyle) was most famous not for his novels, but for his books about art and travel. Yet, in his published debut, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio (1814), he plagiarized extensively from at least one previous biography. In a review of a reissued edition in the journal Modern Language Review, a critic described Stendhal’s literary lift:

 

“[Stendhal] made up his mind to write ... a life of Haydn, about whose music and life he himself knew virtually nothing. This perilous, even ludicrous problem he solved by downright plagiarism ... in a tearing hurry he concocted (or rather brazenly translated) his amazing work, borrowing practically all of it (without a single word of acknowledgment) from a well-known if not remarkably discerning Italian biography of Haydn by Giuseppe Carpani, then a relatively prominent musicologist.”

 

When Stendhal was confronted with overwhelming evidence of the theft, he took it even further by manufacturing evidence to exonerate himself, the critic continued:

 

“The author had no qualms at all; he proceeded to invent a facetious brother with a similarly provocative pseudonym, merely to cock snooks at poor old Carpani, beside himself with righteous anger ... [Stendhal] was uncommonly lucky to live in a very easy-going century; otherwise; he might speedily have found himself in some court of bankruptcy.”

 

At the very least, he could have added forgery to his list of literary crimes.

 

This article was excerpted from the Mental Floss book Forbidden Knowledge. A version of this story was published in 2012; it has been updated for 2024.

 

 

Source: Famous Cases of Plagiarism

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - WEIRD WINTER WHITE STRIPES 

Did you know.... Have you ever noticed a mysterious streak of white lines on the road right before a winter storm is set to arrive and wondered how they got there? They are not figments of your imagination. In fact, they were purposely applied to the road for a very good reason: your safety.

 

It’s all part of a method known as anti-icing, which is intended to make roads safer to drive on during harsh winter weather. Typically with this technique, a liquid chemical such as magnesium chloride is used to lower the freezing point of water. (Salt brine solutions made of sodium chloride and water or calcium chloride and water are also popular.) Once the substance has been applied to a path or roadway, it helps prevent snow and ice from forming a strong bond to the pavement below, making it safer for drivers to navigate [PDF]. 

 

According to the Minnesota Stormwater Manual, anti-icing is “like frying eggs: grease the pan and the eggs come out easily with no mess to clean up. Like greasing the frying pan, the purpose of anti-icing is to keep snow from sticking to the pavement.”

 

That said, the key to any successful anti-icing regimen is to do it at the right time. Incidentally, that’s usually just before any type of rain, sleet, or snowflakes start to fall. It’s a sharp, proactive contrast to de-icing, which is like the inverse of anti-icing (even though the terms do sound similar).

 

When it comes to de-icing, it’s all about breaking down a bond after it's been formed between snow and/or ice and the pavement. This method is more reactive than proactive, and is a pretty common winter maintenance strategy. Usually it involves applying pre-wetted rock salt [PDF] to roadways after a storm to break down the bond between the snow and the pavement. When you spot snow plows barreling down some wintry terrain, chances are you might even get to see this de-icing technique in real life.

 

While de-icing is the more widespread method employed on our roads, experts claim it’s actually more expensive than anti-icing. Comparatively, anti-icing is seen as more affordable because it can be done during normal working hours and in non-inclement weather—reducing the need for staffers to work overtime. It also makes post-storm cleanups faster, as the treatment can last for several days at a time. Even if a blizzard doesn’t start right away, you will probably still be covered over the next few days. It also helps prevent snow and ice from sticking to streets to begin with.

 

Anti-icing advocates also claim that this method is safer for the environment, as fewer chemicals are used and there’s less of a buildup of silt, as well as less of a harmful runoff into stormwater systems and the like. However, the brine solutions used for anti-icing may not always be good news for your car, as those salt crystals often end up in a vehicle’s undercarriage, where they can be corrosive and lead to rust.

 

 

Source: What Are Those Weird White Stripes You See on the Road in Winter?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - NOSTALGIC FOODS

Did you know... Look at an old menu or family dinner photo and you’ll probably notice some ghosts of dinners past: food that used to be everywhere but that’s not at all common today. Some choices are obvious retro relics (you don’t see too many gelatin molds anymore), while others have slipped into obscurity relatively quietly. Of course, none of these foods have dropped off the face of the planet, and they’re all still enjoyed by some people — just fewer of them.  From highly controversial holiday sweets to the meat and potatoes of yesteryear, these 10 dishes aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be.

 

1. Sweetbreads

Sweetbreads sound like dessert, but they’re actually a kind of offal, or organ meat — specifically the thymus and pancreas glands, usually from a lamb or calf. The meat is soaked in milk, buttermilk, or water before cooking. Sweetbreads reduce waste from a butchered animal, and many still enjoy the dish, but it’s not as common as it used to be. (Consumption of organ meats in general declined in the U.S. after World War II, although they’re making a bit of a comeback.)

 

2. Ambrosia, or Five-Cup Salad
Named for the preferred food of the Greek gods, the most divisive dish of the holiday season used to be ambrosia, sometimes called five-cup salad or, simply, fruit salad with marshmallows. It’s a mixture of mini marshmallows, canned (sometimes fresh) fruit, mayonnaise or Cool Whip or sour cream, and coconut. It tastes about how you’d expect it to, for better or for worse.

 

3. Fruitcake

Another highly controversial holiday dish is the much-maligned fruitcake, a cake with candied fruits and nuts that’s usually soaked in a spirit like brandy. Fruitcake has ancient roots, but fell into deep disfavor in the U.S. around the 1980s and eventually became a sort of joke, emblematic of the worst holiday gift. Without any fans to give or receive it, the fruitcake has faded into relative obscurity stateside, though it’s still common in some other countries.

 

4. Fondue
Fondue, a shared, heated cheese dip served in a special warming pot, was all the rage at parties in the 1970s. While you can sometimes find fondue in restaurants, it’s a pretty niche item now — and since single-function items like fondue pots take up valuable cabinet space in one’s home, it’s an extremely rare sight at parties.

 

5. Savory Jell-O Salads

Nothing screams retro dinner party quite like a centerpiece savory gelatin salad, molded into an elaborate shape and often with showy colors. It wasn’t just sturdy vegetables that appeared in these concoctions — everything from lettuce to ham to ranch dressing could be made into jiggly edible art. Jell-O salads hit their peak in the 1950s and 1960s, although they stayed on the table in many households, especially in the South, for decades after.

 

6. Salisbury Steak
Salisbury steak — named for its inventor, 19th-century doctor James Henry Salisbury, who advocated a meat-heavy diet — is not so much a steak as a cross between a burger patty and a meatloaf. It eventually became a mainstay of cafeterias and TV dinners, which didn’t do it any favors, flavor-wise. You can still find it at a classic diner here and there, but it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as it once was. 

 

7. Liver and Onions

Liver and onions are a classic, hearty combination, pairing beef or veal liver with soft-cooked or caramelized onions, often with a side of mashed potatoes. It’s now considered a little old-school, and many people in younger generations associate it more with a Simpsons joke than their dinner tables.

 

8. Crescent Rings
Canned crescent rolls are super easy to throw in the oven for a quick dinner or side — but what if you made them more complicated? For a crescent ring, you lay out the raw triangles of dough in a sunburst shape, add savory or sweet fillings, and tuck in the edges so the fillings peek through on top. The tidy wreath shape made it ideal for parties and potlucks.

 

9. Chicken à la King

The history of this recipe and its name are a little murky, but this milky chicken dish with green bell peppers, pimento, and mushrooms was pretty popular in American kitchens for much of the 20th century. Its popularity started to wane in the 1980s, although some still consider it a comfort food (or just a good way to use up leftover chicken).

 

10. Chicken Cordon Bleu

Chicken Cordon Bleu — that’s “blue ribbon” in French — is an over-the-top Swiss dish with thinly pounded chicken, ham, and cheese rolled together, breaded, and deep fried, then often topped with a cream sauce. That extreme level of richness is perhaps one of the reasons it’s not so popular anymore.

 

 

Source: Nostalgic Dishes You Rarely See Anymore

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MOTORCYCLES

Did you know... More than just an automotive afterthought, motorcycles have a history and enthusiast culture as rich and diverse as that of their four-wheeled cousins. In the 150 or so years since they first hit the road, motorcycles have evolved into a fuel-efficient and convenient way to get from point A to point B for hundreds of millions of people. These eight facts explore the exciting, high-RPM world of the motorcycle, including its steam-powered past, its gas-guzzling present, and its electrified future.

 

1. The Very First Motorcycles Were Actually Steam-Powered

Although many credit German inventor Gottlieb Daimler as the mind behind the first motorcycle in 1885, his two-wheeled creation actually arrived more than 15 years after the oldest known motorcycle in the U.S. Built only four years after the Civil War ended, by Massachusetts machinist Sylvester Roper, this velocipede (as early bicycles were often called) had one distinct difference from its German descendant — it ran on steam. Under the seat of the Roper Steam Velocipede rested a small vertical boiler, which contained a water tank. This boiler supplied the power for two small pistons to turn a crank drive located on the rear wheel. Roper even installed a twisting handlebar to control the proto-bike’s throttle, something the Indian Motorcycle — the first American motorcycle company — included on their bikes 30 years later. Roper invented a number of similar steam-powered bikes throughout his life, but they never caught on.

 

2. The First Harley-Davidson’s Max Speed Was 25 MPH

The vehicular creations of William Harley and the Davidson brothers (there were three of them) still fill American roadways more than 120 years after the company’s founding, but their early motorbikes weren’t exactly the gas-chugging monsters you see on Sons of Anarchy. In fact, the first Harley-Davidson motorcycle was little more than a bicycle with a few piston-powered additions. As the chief engineer, Harley strapped on a single-cylinder motor on a reinforced bike frame, and according to one origin myth, even used a tomato can for a carburetor. Riders had to pedal the bike pretty fast to get the motor going, and even once it was finally putting out some power, it only reached a top speed of 25 mph. However, times have changed, and in 2023, Harley-Davidson’s most impressive v-twin engine, the Screamin’ Eagle 135ci Stage IV, can pump out an impressive 130 horsepower — way better than a tomato can.

 

3. T.E. Lawrence’s Death Improved Motorcycle Safety

On May 13, 1935, T.E. Lawrence, a former British army officer whose World War I exploits were eventually immortalized in the Academy Award-winning film Lawrence of Arabia, was riding his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle when two boys riding bicycles appeared out of an obscured dip in the road. Swerving to avoid a collision, Lawrence was thrown from his bike and suffered severe head trauma, eventually dying from his wounds. Although a tragic loss, Lawrence’s death, as well as the work of neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns, who performed his autopsy, likely prevented thousands of deaths ever since. Riding motorcycles bareheaded was the norm in the 1930s, and Lawrence was no exception. Inspired by his medical findings from the crash, Cairns gathered more data before publishing the article “Head Injuries in Motor-cyclists - the importance of the crash helmet” in The British Medical Journal in 1941. It’d be a few more decades before the House of Commons finally made helmets mandatory, but it was all thanks to Cairns and the very last moments of T.E. Lawrence’s life.

 

4. Honda Sells Nearly One-Third of All Motorcycles Worldwide

Although Harley-Davidson enjoys popularity in the U.S., when it comes to global motorcycle leaders, the top dog isn’t in dispute: Honda. Founded in 1948 in Hamamatsu, Japan, with only 34 employees, Honda originally began as a manufacturer of auxiliary engines for bicycles, but that humble beginning has grown into a massive corporation with factories around the world, including the U.S. According to 2022 motorcycle sales, Honda sells 30% of all motorcycles in the world, which is actually a decrease from previous years. Like the rest of the transportation market, Honda is also beginning a big transition: They announced in September 2023 that the company will introduce 10 new electric motorcycle models by 2025 with a plan to sell 3.5 million of them by 2030. In other words, the company’s dominance shows no signs of stopping.

 

5. The Longest Motorcycle Ride Ever Recorded Took Almost a Decade to Complete

In January 1985, Emilio Scotto began a journey unlike any other. With childhood dreams of traveling the world, Scotto climbed onto his Honda Gold Wing GL1100, nicknamed “Black Princess,” and began an adventure that lasted more than a decade. Driving nearly 457,000 miles, Scotto visited nearly every country as well as a variety of islands, colonies, and atolls — and he did it all on the back of the same motorcycle… sort of. By the time Scotto arrived in Japan, the Black Princess was in rough shape, so the Honda Racing Corporation gave the bike a new lease on life by refurbishing the cams, fork, brakes, and exhaust system, among other things. After 10 years, two months, and 19 days, Scotto arrived back in Argentina having completed the longest motorcycle journey ever recorded, and today the “Black Princess” resides in a car museum in Nevada.

 

6. The World’s Fastest Motorcycle Can (Theoretically) Travel 300 MPH

In 2003, at the North American International Auto Show, the American car manufacturer Dodge (which doesn’t actually make motorcycles) revealed the most souped-up bike in existence — the Tomahawk. Calling the Tomahawk a true “motorcycle” is stretching the definition a little bit. Although the vehicle's frame overall resembles a motorcycle and you sit on it like a motorcycle, it also weighs 1,500 pounds and has four wheels (albeit close together). But the star of the show is the bike’s 8.3-liter v10 engine, capable of producing 500 horsepower. Its top speed was rated by Dodge at around 420 miles per hour, though that is only theoretical, as no one in their right mind would actually try to reach that speed. (Dodge later amended the top speed to 300 mph after questioning from some motorcycle experts.) Although the bike isn’t street legal, Dodge did sell a limited run of them as “rolling sculptures” through the Neiman Marcus catalog — you only had to fork over $550,000. They sold nine.

 

7. The Word “Hog” Comes From an Early 20th-Century Racing Team

The most popular nickname for a Harley-Davidson motorcycle is a “hog,” but that’s not because its creators had a particular soft spot for swine. The name originated in 1920 when, following World War I, motorcycle racing became a popular sport throughout the U.S. Having won a dirt track race the year previously, Harley-Davidson wanted to keep the winning streak going and formed a racing team called the “wrecking crew.” One of the members of that team, Ray Weishaar, decided to adopt a pig from a local farmer to serve as its mascot. When the “Wrecking Crew” won the race, Weishaar rode with the pig (nicknamed “Johnny”) for a victory lap, and soon the media referred to the team as the Harley Hogs. Decades later, Harley-Davidson cemented the name into its own identity and founded the Harley Owners Group (HOG), and today the company trades on the stock market with the ticker symbol “HOG.”

 

8. Thailand Has the Highest Motorbike Ownership of Any Country in the World

Although there are certainly larger overall markets due to population size (e.g., India), Thailand has a higher percentage of motorbike ownership per capita than any other country. About 87% of households there own at least one — just edging out Vietnam with 86%. Motorbikes are particularly popular in Southeast Asian countries, as they’re fuel-efficient and can easily maneuver through increasingly crowded urban streets. The most popular motorbike in the country is the Honda Wave, likely for its small size, affordability, and durability, and the demand for electric bikes is expected to climb in the coming years.

 

 

Source: Speedy Facts About Motorcycles

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - NEW CAR SMELL

Did you know... To most people, the smell of a new car is strangely enticing. Though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes the aroma so distinct, plenty of air fresheners and sprays have tried to replicate it. But what exactly is that scent?

 

Despite its crispness, the smell of a brand-new car is far from natural. It’s actually the result of the release or “off-gassing” of numerous chemical compounds in the plastics, paint, lubricants, sealants, plasticizers, and various other materials that are used to manufacture an automobile’s interior and exterior.

 

Cars are made to last—enduring bumps and scratches while upholding a sleek appearance. To accomplish this, they’re constructed with materials that provide minimal corrosion, which usually means a variety of high-performance vinyls and plastics. These materials are highly effective in preserving the interiors of a car: polyurethane, for example, is a tough flexible material that is resistant to temperature and abrasion from weather, radiation, and most solvents, while polyethylene terephthalate (more commonly known as polyester) is used for wiper arms, engine covers, and connector housings. These materials, as well as many others, all contribute to that new car smell.

 

Although the scent smells heavenly to many, it can be as toxic as it is intoxicating. The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released from such materials have a high vapor pressure as well as low boiling points, which causes large numbers of molecules to evaporate into the air. In fact, scientific studies have been conducted to test whether or not these smells are concentrated enough to produce any health risks—either short- or long-term. Some of these volatile chemicals, the same ones that are commonly found in paints and glues, may lead to dizziness, allergic reactions, or headaches if you're exposed to large quantities for long enough periods of time.

 

Fortunately, most of the VOCs in a car’s interior dissipate over time and can be released from the car by simply rolling down a window and allowing fresh air to circulate.

 

 

Source: What Exactly Is "New Car Smell"?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - LAND A PLANE?

Did you know... Some people are born great, and others have greatness thrust upon them. And there are few thrustings-upon more dramatic than the disaster-movie scenario of an airliner’s flight crew being stricken and a non-pilot having to take the wheel and land the plane. It's typically depicted as being as simple as getting some instructions from the tower and setting the plane down on the runway—but is that how it would really go down?

 

How Airlines Prepare for a Pilot Emergency

Fortunately, it’s never happened in real life, thanks to built-in redundancy: Commercial planes have a pilot and co-pilot and, on long-haul flights, sometimes a relief crew in part to ensure there will always be more capable pilots than necessary. (Co-pilot is an occasionally misunderstood term—a co-pilot, also known as a first officer, is a fully trained pilot entirely capable of performing all the duties of a captain.) For instance, in 2009, when the pilot of a 777 died midflight over the Atlantic, the safe landing of the flight was never in question due to the presence of an extremely experienced first officer and international relief officer.

 

Beyond making sure that there's more than one pilot on board, according to Dan Binstead, flight instructor for FTA Global, a pilot's health is rigorously checked by different agencies around the world (the FAA oversees medical certificates in the U.S., for example). There are even protocols in place at certain airlines that prevent the pilot and co-pilot from eating the same dinner in case of contamination.

 

A Non-Pilot's Chances
Thanks to the redundancy and rules in place, a pilotless cockpit is “extremely unlikely to ever happen,” Binstead tells Mental Floss. “But in the unlikely event it did, you’d want someone with flying experience if possible, even in small planes.”

 

There have been a few notable events in which a passenger with flight experience has been called on to help. In 2014, the pilot of a United Airlines flight suffered a heart attack, and the co-pilot landed the plane with help from a passenger who, as luck would have it, was an off-duty USAF pilot.

 

But not all planes are lucky enough to have a passenger who just so happens to be a pilot sitting in business class. And if that's the case—which, again, would likely never happen—then you might have something to worry about.

 

“A non-pilot wouldn’t have the slightest idea even how to work the communications radios, let alone fly and land the jet,” Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and author, tells Mental Floss via email. “There is a zero-percent chance of a successful outcome in this scenario.”

 

Planes Really Can't Fly Themselves
Yes, there is an autopilot function on planes that could take some of the work out of the petrified passenger's hands, but what about an autoland function? The tech company Garmin recently developed autoland technology for smaller planes—generally owner-flown—that is supposed to take complete control of the plane if they detect the pilot is unable to fly. In that scenario, the system will choose the best airport and runway to land at based on its current location, fuel state, weather, and so on, then navigate a route to that runway and land on it while avoiding terrain and obstacles and communicating with other pilots and air traffic control.

 

That’s all pretty incredible, but it's only suitable for certain plane models and comes with its own set of limitations. Plus, there’s a world of difference between a small owner-flown plane and an enormous commercial airliner.

 

“People’s presumptions about how modern planes are flown, and what airline pilots actually do, has long frustrated me,” Smith says. “People have a vastly—vastly!—exaggerated idea of what cockpit automation actually does, and how pilots interact with that automation, and assume this would be a lot easier than it actually would be.”

 

Smith expanded on this subject in 2019 for an article on The Points Guy, writing, “This person would have to be talked from 35,000 feet all the way to the point where an automatic approach could commence, complete with any number of turns, descents, decelerations, and configuration changes (appropriately setting the flaps, slats, and landing gear) ... I reckon it would be about as easy as dictating brain surgery over the telephone to somebody who has never held a scalpel.”

 

If there’s one takeaway from this piece, it should be that nobody has ever reluctantly had to land a plane they were meant to be a passenger on, and there are sensible, effective systems in place to ensure that will continue to be the case. And it’s just as well, because a pilotless flight in the real world probably wouldn't have a Hollywood ending.

 

 

 

Source: Can an Average Passenger Actually Be Talked Through Landing a Plane in an Emergency?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - "Feeling One's Oats"

Did you know... When someone wanders outside the boundaries of maturity, we tend to say that they’re “feeling their oats.” Feeling frisky? Out overnight and until the wee hours of the morning? Avoiding responsibility? Embracing newfound authority? You’re simply feeling those oats.

The First Uses of Feeling One’s Oats
The Oxford English Dictionary defines to feel one’s oats as meaning “to be lively; to feel self-important.” Though it’s not known how long ago the term was being bandied about, it appears that it first began turning up in print in the 1800s. Here’s an example from 1848, which ran in newspapers around the country (emphasis in the original): “The high sheriff of an almighty small settlement in Indiana, who had arose to that tall niche in official dignity, from them ere lees of pettifogging, knowing the law, and feeling his oats, determined to do his duty up to the handle ...”

 

The term remains popular today; recently, it’s been used to describe the attitude of a football player and in a review of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in 2023 (spoilers): “Feeling his oats, Ken thinks he can take this mindset back to Barbieland—which quickly becomes ‘Kendom.’”

 

But how did fondling grains become an idiom for uninhibited behavior? The phrase is not really intended to refer to the tactile act of rubbing oats, but experiencing the effects of ingesting them. As a horse.

 

Horsing Around
When a horse is fed oats instead of the hay or grass it’s accustomed to, they tend to get a burst of energy. Galloping around, the horses seem to be imbued with a new drive. They stride with confidence and purpose. They seem to stand a little taller. They’re feeling those oats. “Whether the pony felt his oats ... He took a frightful canter,” says an 1831 source noted in the OED.

 

Horses typically get oats when they need some quick energy from starches and sugars, though there’s a good amount of protein and B vitamins in there, too. Unlike other starches, horses can munch on oats raw. Then, presumably, they tear it up. This is especially true of racehorses, who might consume up to 35,000 calories a day, some of it in the form of oats or processed feed with more fats and fiber.

 

 

Not all horses do well with oats, however. Some may not produce enough of the amylase enzyme needed to break them down properly, or the horse might have a gluten allergy. In those cases, you wouldn’t want a horse to be feeling his oats.

 

Other Oats-Related Phrases
Feeling one’s oats is far from the only oats-related phrase out there. The phrase sow your wild oats also stems from carbohydrates. In this case, wild oats don’t really need to be sown, as they grow easily. To sow wild oats is to exhibit some needless frenzy of activity.

 

Off one’s oats, per the OED, is a 19th-century phrase someone might use when they have no appetite. And to get one’s oats is a British slang term meaning “to achieve sexual gratification” that dates back to the 1920s. And users of Cockney rhyming slang might be familiar with the phrase oats and chaff, meaning “footpath.”

 

So go ahead and feel those oats, sow them, or do whatever else you’re inclined to do.

 

Source: Where Does the Phrase ‘Feeling One’s Oats’ Come From?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - "BIGFOOT" WORD ORIGIN HOAX?

Did you know.... On the morning of August 27, 1958, Jerry Crew, a catskinner for a northern California logging company, noticed a few abnormally large footprints in the dirt around his bulldozer. He didn’t think much of them at first. Thirty other men worked alongside him on Bluff Creek Road, a timber access route being cleaved through virgin stands of Douglas fir in the Six Rivers National Forest. Black bears abounded. And there was an occasional mountain lion. All likely culprits.

 

But when Crew climbed into his tractor and looked down, he thought twice. The prints were enormous—almost 16-inches long and seven-inches wide—and set deeply into the graded dirt road, suggesting something heavier than a lumberjack or a bear had made them.

 

Crew told his foreman, Wilbur “Shorty” Wallace, what he’d seen. Wallace wondered if the trackmaker was responsible for a series of odd occurrences elsewhere on Bluff Creek Road: a missing 50-gallon oil drum, a 700-pound spare tire lobbed into a gully. Workmen gathered around and began sharing their own stories about human-like footprints found at other Wallace worksites. Their tools had vanished overnight; 100-pound steel cables were dragged uphill and abandoned. The men referred to the responsible party as “Big Foot.”

 

Crew’s story eventually caught the attention of Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli, who, in an October 6 front-page article, shortened the sobriquet to one-word: Bigfoot. After the piece was picked up by the wire services—making both The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times—Bigfoot entered the lexicon. (Sasquatch, another term for the creature, is a bastardized form of the Salish word Sesquac or se’sxac, meaning “wild men.” It was coined in 1929 by a white teacher in British Columbia.) A few short weeks later, Bigfoot was mentioned on the NBC quiz show “Truth or Consequences” (then hosted by Bob Barker), which ponied up $1000 to anyone who could explain how the Bluff Creek tracks had been made.

 

Throughout the fall of ‘58, the people of Humboldt County puzzled over the same question. A logger suggested the tracks had been left by a “big-footed Swede”—because many lumberjacks were of Swedish descent—while other folks pegged them on “Omah,” a giant forest monster of local Hoopa Indian legend. Native American lore, being rife with similar creatures, added fuel to the Bigfoot fire. The idea stuck and contributed to the image of Bigfoot we have today.

 

Another prime suspect was a man named Ray Wallace, brother of Shorty and co-owner of Wallace Construction. Wallace was a locally famous prankster and yarn-spinner—polite terms, perhaps, for a con man. Writer Robert Michael Pyle, who knew Wallace late in life, remembered him more charitably in an interview for my book The Secret History of Bigfoot, calling him “a canny, smart man, but a bullshitter. He loved being the joker and fooling people.” When news of the Bluff Creek tracks hit, many locals assumed Wallace was behind it.

 

He denied the charges, even telling the Humboldt Times he’d sue his accusers for slander. The tracks, as anyone could see, were bear prints, Wallace said. Bigfoot? Pshaw! But a couple years later he claimed to have captured a young Bigfoot and was feeding it Frosted Flakes. He aimed to sell the creature for $1,000,000, but then failed to produce it when a lower offer was made. (Wallace was also rumored to have played a part in Bigfoot’s filmic debut—the infamous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film [PDF], which purported to show a burly and dark-haired Bigfoot striding across Bluff Creek).

 

 

The hubbub eventually died down as Bigfoot’s fame expanded beyond Bluff Creek to the rest of the country. That is until 2002, when Wallace, age 84, passed away from heart failure and his family announced that it had indeed been Wallace all along.

 

“Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot,” his son Michael told the Seattle Times. “The reality is, Bigfoot just died.”

 

Wallace’s family showed off 16-inch carved wooden feet they claimed he’d used to make the tracks that Jerry Crew found on Bluff Creek Road. As they told it, Wallace liked to clomp around in the woods with fake feet strapped to his work boots, purely for shits and giggles.

 

“He did it just for the joke and then he was afraid to tell anybody because they’d be so mad at him,” his nephew Dale Lee Wallace said.

 

Logger John Auman, a former employee of Wallace’s, had another take. “If your rig was parked overnight, you might as well figure it would have no tires in the morning,” said Auman, asserting that his boss planted the tracks around equipment to scare off worksite thieves. “That’s why this all started.”

 

Bigfooters, it should be noted, have never bought that Wallace was behind the tracks. “Ray heard about [Crew’s tracks] and then went to make some of his own,” says Pyle, author of Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. Pyle was once much more skeptical about Bigfoot, but that has softened over the years; he’s now more open-minded about the creature’s existence. “Ray manufactured some of the [Bluff Creek] evidence, though not all of it by any means. He pulled everybody’s leg and I kind of respected him for it. The unfortunate thing was when he died there was a lot of press about his son saying, ‘My dad was the one who invented the whole Bigfoot story.’ AP replayed that, and various respected media reprinted it. People don’t question hoaxes as carefully as they question claims. This happens over and over.”

 

Jeff Meldrum, a professor at Idaho State University who studies foot morphology, claimed that Wallace’s crudely made wooden feet didn’t match the plaster casts made of Crew’s footprints or any other Bluff Creek tracks. “To suggest all these are explained by simple carved feet strapped to boots just doesn’t wash,” Meldrum has said. No doubt the man was a gifted practical joker, Meldrum conceded in his book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. But Wallace’s best practical joke by far, in Meldrum’s eyes, came after his death: “He posthumously hoaxed virtually the entire media into believing that he was solely responsible for Bigfoot.”

 

 

John O’Connor teaches journalism at Boston College and lives with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His book, The Secret History of Bigfoot, is out now.

 

 

Source: The Hoax That Led to the Word ‘Bigfoot’

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - PINK (color)

Did you know... Pink is arguably one of the most popular tints in existence, and its warm tone is full of meaning both historical and cultural. Its importance shows up in the clothes we wear, the rooms we paint, and in some cultures, the accessories we use for our babies (though which ones depends on the time and place). These seven facts about the color pink may have you rethinking your relationship with this hugely popular hue.

 

1. Pink Is Named After a Type of Flower

Although the word “pink” is most often associated with the light-hued tint of the color red, the word actually originated with a specific genus of flower: Dianthus. While flowers in this genus (there are more than 300 species) are often pink, the term for the flower may have originally referred to the perforated or frayed edges of the blossoms — at the time, the verb “to pink” meant to decorate with a perforated pattern. (Think “pinking shears.”) Over time, the meaning shifted from the pattern to the color. This isn’t the only “chicken before the egg” moment on the color wheel — “orange” was originally a reference to the fruit, and then became entwined with the color itself.

 

2. There Are Many Pink Lakes Around the World

According to at least one estimate, 117 million lakes exist on Earth, covering roughly 4% of its surface. Among these millions of lakes, most sport the bluish and brown hues commonly associated with landlocked bodies of water. However, there are a few lakes that stand out from the crowd, including more than two dozen or so pink lakes spread across the world.

Although pink lakes can be found on every continent except Antarctica, Australia has the lion’s share. One of its most pristine examples is Lake Hillier on Middle Island. While many lakes may be pink only a few months out of the year (during the warm, dry season), Lake Hillier has been permanently pink for centuries. This hue is caused by a salt-loving algae called Dunaliella salina, as well as a bacteria named Salinibacter ruber, which both produce pinkish pigments. Although it looks like a tasty bubblegum soda, it’s best not to take a sip — the lake is 10 times saltier than the ocean.

 

3. Pink Is an Nonspectral Color

There have been some heated debates online about whether pink is a true color. The argument may seem strange at first, but technically the color pink doesn’t exist without a little help from our eyes. That’s because pink is a nonspectral color, meaning it isn’t represented by a specific wavelength of light in the electromagnetic spectrum. In other words, in order to get pink, you need to combine spectral colors — in this case, red and white — which makes pink a construction of our minds. Yet many colors we know and love are similarly nonspectral. Purple is a big one: It’s close to indigo and violet but technically isn’t found in that 380 to 740 nanometer sweet spot. Brown is similarly a nonspectral color. So cut pink some slack: While it may not technically exist, it’s certainly easy on the eyes.

 

4. Pink Was Once Considered a Masculine Color

These days, a baby’s biological sex is often denoted using blue for a boy and pink for a girl. However, this is a relatively recent development. Back in the 18th century, boys wore blue and pink in equal measure, and as late as 1918, an article in the trade journal Earnshaw's Infants' Department described pink as a “stronger color [that] is more suitable for the boy.” By the 1940s, the U.S. marketing machine established the current color/gender rules, and remnants of this idea are still with us today. However, younger men are more comfortable with wearing pink, so it’s likely this arbitrary distinction will likely fade away, and color styles will return to their 18th-century roots.

 

5. Some People Listen to Pink Noise To Fall Asleep

Similar to the electromagnetic spectrum and light, there is also a spectrum for sound that’s described using color. Most of us are familiar with “white noise,” which contains all the frequencies humans can hear in equal parts. (Its name comes from the visible light spectrum: Just as white light is made up of all the colors, white noise combines all the frequencies of sound.) Pink noise contains all sounds in this same spectrum, but emphasizes lower frequencies. Some things naturally create white noise, including waves crashing on the beach or rain falling, which are often soundscapes people turn to when in need of a good night’s sleep. But if that white noise machine maybe sounds a bit too grating, give pink noise a shot.

 

6. One of India’s State Capitals Is Named “The Pink City”

Originally founded in 1727, Jaipur is now the capital of the state of Rajasthan in northwestern India. While Jaipur is the region’s largest city, it’s also known for another startling characteristic — many of its buildings are painted in rosy hues. To understand this unexpected architectural choice requires a look back in history. In 1876, Maharaja Ram Singh, who ruled Jaipur from 1835 to 1880, painted the city’s buildings pink in preparation for a visit from Prince Albert Edward, Queen Victoria’s eldest son. The maharaja chose this specific hue because pink is traditionally associated with welcome and hospitality throughout India. Fast-forward nearly 150 years, and Jaipur is now one of the most Instagrammable cities in the world.

 

7. Scientists Discovered a Pink Exoplanet in 2013

Our solar system is filled with eye-popping color. Of course, there’s the “pale blue dot” known as Earth, but there’s also our next-door neighbor the red planet, as well as the calming, icy blues of Neptune, the tempestuous browns of Jupiter, and the butterscotch otherworldliness of Saturn. Our cosmic neighborhood doesn’t sport any pink planets — but the same cannot be said for the rest of our galaxy. In 2013, NASA spotted a peculiar gas giant circling the star GJ 504 (faintly visible by the unaided eye in the constellation Virgo) some 57 light-years from Earth. This gas giant, simply called GJ 504b, is about the size of Jupiter — and it’s bright pink. NASA describes the color as a “dark cherry blossom,” and the shade is due to the planet “still glowing from the heat of its formation.” So while seeing this pink world would be quite the sight, best to scratch it off your bucket list unless your idea of a tropical getaway includes 460-degree Fahrenheit temperatures.

 

 

Source: Sweet Facts About the Color Pink

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SLANG FOR KIDS

Did you know... Whether you have children or just were one once, it never hurts to have more words to describe tykes. Most of us spend at least some of our breath talking about young’uns, whether to say the children are the future or the rug rats are a pest—so you may want to consider adding these slang terms for children to your vocabulary for the next time you need to discuss wee ones.

 

1. Ankle-biter
Many slang terms for kids, like rug rat, involve the short height of children. That’s true of the term ankle-biter, which has been around since at least this 1840 reference in William Howitt’s book Heads of People Vol. 1: “And how are ye, John? and how’s Molly, and all the little ankle-biters?” The term was so successful that it spawned a secondary meaning later in the 1800s, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “A person regarded as relatively unimportant but nevertheless irritating or annoying.” A use from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1872 shows that sense in action: “He believed that all private companies and undertakings could be worked more economically than limited companies or Corporation works, as there were not so many ‘ankle biters’.” The common denominator of those meanings is nuisance.

 

2. Saucepan Lid

In rhyming slang, this term can refer to either a quid or a kid. An advertisement from 2000 shows the second meaning in use: “Congratulations on the birth of your first saucepan lid.” Another rhyming term for kid is gawd-forbid.

 

3. and 4. Breadsnapper and Breadsnatcher
In slang and in reality, children cannot live on ankles alone, as attested by the existence of these related terms that have a Scottish and Irish background. Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines these terms as meaning, “a child who can eat their weight in groceries” and provides an example from the 1935 book No Mean City: “There’ll be nae more bread-snappers if I can help it,’ he resolved grimly. ‘Kids are all very well for a woman, but they’re a bliddy nuisance to a man.’”

 

5. and 6. Crumb-catcher and Crumb-snatcher

Similarly, crumb-catcher and crumb-snatcher were slang terms for a baby—according to Green’s, “[usually] one that is just beginning to eat solids”—that originated with Black Americans in the late 1950s. They can also be used as slang for something children lack: a mustache.

 

7. Half-pint

Since at least the 1870s, half-pint has referred to either a child or a short person. The term appeared in Joaquin Miller’s 1876 book First Fam’lies in the Sierras: “Here’s to it! Here’s to the Little Half-a-pint [...] they did not know the baby’s name.”

 

8. and 9. Quinquennarian and Sexennarian

Quinquennarian is an amusingly literal word for a 5-year-old child. It appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1821 along with a similar term, describing a group of “mostly quinquennarians, or at most sexennarians.” That’s a cute way to refer to the kindergarten crowd.

 

10. Hasty Pudding

Since slang generally deals with the racier or taboo sides of life, illegitimate parentage informs quite a few child-centric terms, including hasty pudding (which may be related to the British euphemism for pregnancy, in the pudding club). A 1617 use from John Fletcher’s play The Chances employs the term in this sense: “Your Brats got out of Alligant and broken Oaths? Your Linsey Woolsey work, your Hasty Puddings?”

 

 

Want more slang? Click below 

 

Source: Funny Slang Terms for Children

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - CONVERSATION HEART (Candy Hearts)

Did you know... Valentine’s Day means chalky candy hearts with a lot to say. But what’s behind these very loud little candies?

 

The story of conversation hearts, also known as Sweethearts, began in 1847, when a Boston pharmacist named Oliver Chase longed for a way to get in on the apothecary lozenge craze. Lozenges were quickly gaining steam as the medicine conveyance of choice, and were also popular remedies for sore throats and bad breath. But making them was complicated and time-consuming—the process involved a mortar and pestle, kneading dough, rolling it out, and cutting it into discs that would eventually become lozenges.

 

There had to be a better way, and Oliver came up with it. Inspired by the new wave of gadgets and tools that hit America as it industrialized, he invented a machine that rolled lozenge dough and pressed wafers into perfect discs. Oliver had inadvertently created America’s first candy-making machine, and before long, he had abandoned his pharmacy business to crank out miles of what would become New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) wafers.

 

 

Legend has it that Oliver’s NECCO wafers were carried by Civil War soldiers, and some speculate that the tradition of sending loving greetings to the troops morphed into the conversation heart, but those claims are hard to verify. What is clear is that as Oliver built his candy empire, his brother Daniel decided he wanted a piece of the action. 

 

 

Inspired by the growing market for Valentine’s cards (which were popularized in the United States by Esther Howland, also a resident of Boston at the time), Daniel wondered if it would be possible to print sentimental messages on candy. In 1866, he figured out a way to print words on candy with vegetable dye during the cutting process.

 

People loved conversation candies (they weren’t available in heart shapes until 1902) and their witty messages, which could stoke the flames of love or warn off flaky suitors. Daniel’s candies were bigger than today’s version and had phrases like “MARRIED IN WHITE YOU HAVE CHOSEN RIGHT” and “HOW LONG SHALL I HAVE TO WAIT? PLEASE BE CONSIDERATE” emblazoned on a pastel, scalloped wafer. 

 

By the turn of the century, the conversation heart was a Valentine’s cliché. Here’s how they were used at a Boston party in 1911:

 

Partners for the evening were found by means of candy “motto” hearts. These were broken in two, and each young lady was given a piece, but the men were obliged to hunt for theirs. As they were carefully hidden, this took some length of time and proved an excellent ‘ice breaker.’ The silly mottoes were read with laughter as the couples chose their tables.

 

Over the years, conversation hearts lost size, but gained many more phrases. In 2016, NECCO estimated it made 8 billion conversation hearts a year. Now, the Spangler Candy Company produces the cheeky confections. In 2023, the company included animal-themed phrases like “Love Birds,” “Purr Fect,” and “Big Dog” on the hearts; for 2024; it released “situationship” boxes, complete with messages that were as blurry and hard to read as an undefined romantic relationship.

 

 

Source: A Brief History of the Conversation Heart

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - CITRUS FRUIT

Did you know... A little sweet, a little sour — citrus fruits brighten up any meal, from breakfast to happy hour cocktails. Evolving over the course of 25 million years from just a few citrus species, today’s selection of grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and more has been eons in the making. These eight juicy facts about citrus may just give you a deeper appreciation for these pulp-packed fruits.

 

1. Many Citrus Fruits Are Sold in Red Bags For a Reason

Citrus growers often bundle together bunches of oranges in mesh bags, which you may have noticed are made from red plastic. It’s no coincidence; red bags against orange peels create an optical illusion that makes the fruit appear more vibrantly hued and enticing. The trick works for other citrus — like mandarins, clementines, tangerines, and even some grapefruit — though not all. Yellow citrus, like lemons, are often sold in yellow or green bags to create a similar color-popping effect.

 

2. Most Citrus Fruits Are Hybrids

Many researchers believe that all citrus fruit can be traced back to just three species: pomelos, citrons, and mandarins. Citrus trees of different species are reproductively compatible with one another; over time, cross-breeding between these “ancestor fruits” created the hybrids known as grapefruits, oranges, lemons, limes, and other citrus varieties enjoyed today.

 

3. Orange Peels Are Packed With Vitamin C

Oranges are a go-to food for many when battling a cold, thanks to the fact that they’re packed with vitamin C — though some research suggests that the nutrient doesn’t actually prevent colds, and may only slightly cut short how long a cold lasts. Another hitch in eating oranges to help illnesses is that much of the fruit’s vitamin C is found in its peel. Just one tablespoon of the outer rind contains 14% of the recommended daily dose of vitamin C, which is about three times more than what’s found in the inner flesh.

 

4. British Sailors Got Their Nickname From Limes

Regardless of the flag they were working under, nearly all sailors of the past shared a common enemy: scurvy. The disease, caused by a vitamin C deficiency, plagued sailors who were unable to regularly consume fresh fruits and vegetables while out at sea. The British Royal Navy began supplying its sailors with lemons and lime juice in 1795, though not all countries picked up on the practice. During the War of 1812, skeptical American sailors nicknamed their British counterparts “limeys” to mock the practice — though the U.S. Navy eventually started doing it too.

 

5. The Largest Citrus Fruit Can Reach Basketball Size

Pomelos are grapefruit-like citrus native to Southeast Asia, known for their yellow rinds and pink inner flesh — not to mention their size. The jumbo citrus fruits can grow up to the size of a basketball and weigh as much as 22 pounds. In comparison, kumquats are the smallest known citrus, maturing at a max length of around 2 inches. (Kumquats are also the only citrus fruit you can easily eat without peeling.)

 

6. Clementines and Mandarins Are Technically Different Fruits

What’s small, orange, and easy to peel? Both clementines and mandarins, which explains why these two nearly identical citrus fruits are often confused. However, botanists say there is a difference. Clementines are an offshoot variety of mandarins, created by crossing mandarins and sweet oranges. That means all clementines are technically a type of mandarin, though all mandarins are not clementines.

 

7. Grapefruit Can Interfere With Some Medications

Grapefruits are packed with vitamins and fiber that support heart and gut health, though people who rely on some medications are often warned away from consuming the fruits. That’s because grapefruit juice can affect how medications work. Some drugs, like those for cholesterol and high blood pressure, are metabolized in the body by the CYP3A4 enzyme found in the small intestine. Grapefruit juice can block that enzyme, which stops the medication from breaking down and causes too much to enter the bloodstream. Other drugs, like fexofenadine (Allegra) for allergies, use proteins called transporters to enter cells in the body; grapefruit juice can block this process and cause too little of the drug to circulate, rendering it ineffective.

 

8. Oranges Were Once A Luxurious Christmas Gift

Oranges are relatively inexpensive today, though 19th-century Europeans who woke to find them in their stockings on Christmas morning considered the fruits a grand gift. The tradition of receiving an orange as a holiday present dates to the 1800s, when Christmas revelers widely began hanging stockings on the mantle, and is commonly linked to the tale of St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century bishop who reportedly tossed bags of gold into the drying stockings of poor maidens. Oranges — which were generally a rare and expensive fruit in Victorian times — represented St. Nicholas’ gifted gold, and became linked with the holiday.

 

 

Source: Bright Facts About Citrus Fruits

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BLUEBERRIES

Did you know... The nutritional advice to “eat the rainbow” gets hard to follow once you reach the bottom half of the light spectrum. While red, yellow, and green foods are abundant in nature, blue ingredients are much harder to come by. Even the most famously “blue” fruit in the produce aisle has a misleading name. As new research shared in the journal Science Advances explains, blueberries contain no blue pigments, which means they’re not blue in the true sense of the word.

 

For their study, which was published on February 7, 2024, a team of scientists from Germany and the UK investigated the adaptations blueberries use to achieve their colorful appearance without pigmentation. The pigments of most fruits come through in their juices (anyone who has ever stained their cutting board slicing cherries for a pie knows this). That isn’t the case with blueberries, which suggested to the researchers that there was a rarer mechanism at play. 

 

They searched for the answer in the berry’s waxy coating. In addition to keeping it clean and protected, this outer layer is responsible for the fruit’s unique coloring. After studying the wax through an electron microscope, the scientists discovered nanostructures that scatter blue and ultraviolet light while absorbing all other wavelengths on the light spectrum. This produces something called “structural color,” and it’s also behind the blue and indigo hues you see in plums and juniper berries. The iridescent greenish-blue in peacock feathers is another example of a color in nature that comes from physical structures rather than pigmentation. 

 

The team was also able to recreate the structures in a lab. After sampling the wax from the outside of the blueberry, they successfully recrystallized it and isolated the blue-scattering colorant, which is only two microns wide. The findings suggest that the colorant could be used to make new types of blue paints and dyes in the future. 

 

“It was really interesting to find that there was an unknown coloration mechanism right under our noses, on popular fruits that we grow and eat all the time,” study co-author Rox Middleton, research fellow at the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, said in a press release.

 

The color blue is scarce in the plant kingdom. It sits at the high-energy end of the light spectrum, so plants that rely on sunlight for nourishment can’t afford to reflect it away from them. They absorb the blue light instead while reflecting lower-energy wavelengths like reds and greens. This explains why there’s no true blue pigment in nature. Fruits and flowers that appear blue use various tricks, like mixing non-blue pigments, or in the blueberry’s case, relying on a special colorant in their coating.

 

And if you’ve ever wondered why you’ve never seen a blue raspberry in nature, it’s because they don’t exist. Red is so abundant in fruit that ice pop manufacturers needed a way to distinguish the different flavors. Their solution was to rebrand the raspberry as being blue, as they had a ton of artificial blue dye on hand and no fruit flavors to pair it with.

 

 

Source: Are Blueberries Blue? The Answer Is Surprisingly Complicated

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SCHOOL SUBJECTS

Did you know..... Think back to your school days: Are you nostalgic for flipping through a dusty library card catalog or clacking away on a typewriter? Some subjects you remember from those days are probably things of the past, although the finer points of how schools have changed might surprise you. These six subjects are either fading from U.S. high school curriculums or fundamentally changing.

 

1. Shorthand

Shorthand alphabets help people write things down more quickly by hand, making them valuable for recording court testimony, legislative proceedings, or interviews — not to mention reading those notes after they were taken. By the early 20th century, shorthand was taught in public schools. Yet in the ensuing decades, more efficient ways to take notes dominated, like audio recording and typing. Shorthand was mostly phased out of schools by the 1990s.

 

2. Latin

Today, around 8% of U.S. high schools have some sort of Latin language class, but it used to be standard practice, especially when many colleges required it for admission. High school Latin education took a hit during World War II, when liberal arts education became less popular. It continued to decline slowly in the 1960s and 1970s in favor of more immediately practical languages, such as French and Spanish.

 

3. Shop

Shop class usually refers to hands-on education in building and fixing — as in a woodshop, metalwork, or automotive repair. Now, these classes would fall under the umbrella of career technical education, or CTE. CTE credits took a nosedive between 1990 and 2009, with manufacturing being among the hardest hit. Many blame the focus on standardized tests for the decline (since resources are directed to academic subjects like reading and math rather than vocational classes). There is now a renewed interest in CTE classes, but that includes vocational training in fields like health care and communications, not just traditional “shop” classes.

 

4. Home Economics

Home ec developed a reputation for taking in high school girls and making them into perfect homemakers, but it was originally designed to demonstrate the science behind domestic skills and elevate what was considered “women’s work.” Over the years, the topics were increasingly devalued, and some unfortunate teaching tools emerged — like using real human “practice babies.” In schools that still have classes on domestic skills, they’re usually rebranded as family and consumer sciences. Even those are on the decline; enrollment dropped 38% between 2002 and 2012.

 

5. The Food Pyramid and the Food Wheel

Depending on when you attended school — and what the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) was recommending at the time — you may have learned about nutrition with a cleanly divided triangle or circle, each outlining several food groups. The food wheel, with differently sized wedges to recommend how much to eat from each food group, came out in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, it was replaced by the food pyramid, showing food with a higher recommended intake at the bottom and lower recommended intake at the top. It was briefly replaced by MyPyramid, a triangle with vertical bands and a staircase running up one side to represent physical activity, in the mid-2000s. Since 2011, the go-to infographic is MyPlate, which shows a place setting with simplified food categories.

 

6. Cursive (Kind Of)

Writing in cursive used to be a standard part of school curriculums, but it started fading from classrooms in the early 2010s when states began adopting the federal Common Core State Standards, which didn’t require cursive. A pro-cursive backlash came soon after; in 2016, 14 states required that schools teach cursive. That number is now more than 20. While you probably don’t see cursive in as many classrooms as you did a couple of decades ago, the reports of cursive’s death are greatly exaggerated.

 

 

Source: Subjects That Are No Longer Taught in Schools

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FULL MOON

Did you know... Along with Mercury in retrograde, a full moon is a pretty popular scapegoat for bad luck and bizarre behavior. Encounter someone acting strangely? Blame it on the lunar phases.

 

It’s often been reported that crime rates increase and emergency rooms are much busier during the full moon (though a 2004 study debunked this latter claim). Plus, there’s that whole werewolf thing. Why would this be? The reasoning is that the moon, which affects the ocean’s tides, probably exerts a similar effect on us, because the human body is made mostly of water.

 

This belief that the moon influences behavior is so widely held—reportedly, even 80 percent of nurses and 64 percent of doctors think it’s true, according to a 1987 paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine—that in 2012 a team of researchers at Université Laval’s School of Psychology in Canada decided to find out if mental illness and the phases of the moon are linked [PDF].

 

To test the theory, the researchers evaluated 771 patients who visited emergency rooms at two hospitals in Montreal between March 2005 and April 2008. The patients chosen complained of chest pains, though doctors could not determine a medical cause for the pains. Many of the patients suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and mood disorders, or suicidal thoughts.

 

When the researchers compared the time of the visits to the phases of the moon, they found that there was no link between the incidence of psychological problems and the four lunar phases, with one exception: in the last lunar quarter, anxiety disorders were 32 percent less frequent. “This may be coincidental or due to factors we did not take into account,” Dr. Geneviève Belleville, who directed the team of researchers, said. “But one thing is certain: we observed no full-moon or new-moon effect on psychological problems.”

 

So rest easy (or maybe not): If people seem to act weird during the full moon, their behavior is likely pretty similar during the rest of the lunar cycle as well.

 

 

Source: Does the Full Moon Really Make People Act Strangely?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - WAS THE COW TO BLAME?

Did you know... For decades, many believed the origin of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was an ill-tempered cow kicking over a lantern. An insurance map of the fire’s path suggested otherwise.
 

Around 9 p.m. on Sunday, October 8, 1871, a fire started in a barn in the alley behind 137 DeKoven Street in Chicago. Two days later the blaze died out, after burning nearly 3.3 square miles of the city. The Great Chicago Fire killed 300 people, left some 100,000 residents without homes, and destroyed $200 million in property.

 

In all of American history, no bovine is more infamous than the cow belonging to Patrick and Catherine O’Leary accused of starting what fire marshal Robert A. Williams called a “hurricane of fire and cinders.” Even as the fire cut a swath through the city, neighbors and newspaper reporters quickly placed the blame on the O’Learys and their cow. In the early hours of October 9, newspapers first reported that the blaze started when the cow kicked over a kerosene lantern while Catherine was milking the animal.

 

After the fire was put out, the story evolved and more blame fell on the O’Learys. Some papers reported that Mrs. O’Leary had been selling the cow’s milk illegally, and when city officials discovered her side hustle, they cut her off. The fire, it was implied, was an act of revenge.

 

Other newspapers maintained that the fire was an accident, and that a lantern had simply been knocked over, either by the cow or by Mrs. O’Leary.

 

 

That November, the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners started an inquiry into the fire’s cause and the city’s response. In interviews with the board, Mrs. O’Leary testified that she never milked the cows in the evening and that she was asleep when the fire started, having gone to bed early complaining of a sore foot. Daniel “Pegleg” Sullivan, a neighbor who was the first person to raise the alarm about the fire, also testified and confirmed Catherine’s alibi. After two months and 1100 pages of handwritten testimony, the board members couldn’t say much about the origin of the fire, except that it started in the barn. “Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night or was set on fire by human agency,” they wrote, “we are unable to determine."

 

 

But the damage to Catherine O’Leary and her cow was done. The story of the cow and the lantern circulated quickly and widely and took hold in the public imagination. Mrs. O'Leary lived out the rest of her life as a recluse, reportedly only leaving her home to attend mass. Every October, reporters came to her looking for a quote for their fire anniversary stories and she shooed them away, invoking the name of her son James, who grew up to be a gambling boss known as “Big Jim” O'Leary.

 

“I know bad people,” she’d say, as she showed the men the door. She died in 1895. Her obituary and death certificate listed the cause as acute pneumonia, but neighbors and friends said the real cause was a “broken heart” from the unfounded blame she received.

 

Then, a century after her death, Catherine O’Leary and her cow were cleared of any wrongdoing—and another suspect was discovered.

 

A Map of the Great Chicago Fire Offers Clues
Richard Bales, an assistant regional counsel with the Chicago Title Insurance Company, became interested in the Great Chicago Fire when he wrote a paper about it for a college course. His company maintains the only set of land records that survived the Great Fire of 1871, and he used them to dig further into the legend of the O’Learys’ cow and the origin of the fire. In 1997, he published an article, and later a book, on his research.

 

Bales discovered that the fire probably wasn’t intentionally set. The O’Learys’ barn was full of animals, some of which belonged to neighbors and some that were used for Catherine’s milk business. There were five cows, a calf, and a horse. There was also a new wagon nearby in the alley, and none of the property or real estate was insured. “Had [Catherine] been in the barn when the fire broke out, it seems unlikely that she would have run back into her home and allowed her property to both literally and figuratively go up in smoke,” Bales wrote. “Instead, she would have cried for help and attempted to extinguish what was then just a minor barn fire and save the building and its contents.”

 

As for the cow, several reporters came forward decades after the Great Chicago Fire to admit that the story of the cow kicking the lantern was a fabrication, or at least came from unreliable sources. Reporter Michael Ahern, who was working for the Chicago Republican in 1871, admitted in a Chicago Tribune column in 1921 that he and two colleagues made up the cow story to add color to their copy. After that, another reporter, John Kelley, wrote to the O’Learys’ grandson saying that he had written the first iteration of the cow story under Ahern’s byline, since his colleague was too drunk to file the piece.

 

Meanwhile, the Chicago Daily Journal explained that on the night of the fire, one of its reporters had gone to the O’Learys' neighborhood and heard the cow story from residents there, and the paper ran with it without further confirmation. Recollections of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 published by one of the O’Learys’ neighbors alleged that some neighborhood kids who hadn’t been anywhere near the barn spent the night telling anyone who would listen about a cow kicking a lantern.

 

The Real Origin of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871
Bales suspected that the fire was started by “Pegleg” Sullivan, the man who first noticed it. When he testified before the investigative board, Sullivan said that he visited the O’Leary house around 8 p.m. and found Catherine in bed and Patrick ready to join her. He headed home, but then kept going past his house and stopped in front of a neighbor’s house to smoke a pipe. He looked up and saw fire coming from the O’Learys' barn and ran into it to try to extinguish the flames and free the animals before seeking help.

 

After mapping the various homes and properties, Bales doubted Sullivan’s version of the events. The buildings were arranged in such a way that, from where he stood to smoke his pipe, Sullivan would not have been able to see the barn because another home would have blocked his view. What’s more, Bales wrote, Sullivan had a wooden leg—as one might guess from his nickname—and couldn’t move very fast. Yet, Sullivan claimed that he ran from his smoking spot to the barn, a distance about half the length of a football field; escaped the barn before the fire consumed it, and then ran to alert the O’Learys and the authorities. Given his mobility issue, the distances involved, and the speed with which the fire spread, Bales argued that Sullivan could not have done these acts without being injured by the fire.

 

 

There’s also the question of why Sullivan walked past his own house to smoke his pipe in front of his neighbor’s house. Bales suggested that was part of Sullivan’s alibi. Claiming to smoke his pipe where he did put him outside and close enough to the barn that he could claim to have seen the fire, but out of view of his neighbors, the McLaughlins, who were having a party that night and would have been able to see him if he was standing in front of his own house.

 

Bales argued that Sullivan was in or around the barn that night—his mother kept one of her cows there and he may have gone to feed it. By accident, with a careless flick of a match or a stray ember from his pipe or by bumping a lantern, Sullivan started the fire. And when he realized he couldn’t put the fire out on his own, he ran for help and came up with a cover story to escape blame.

 

In 1997, convinced by Bales’s argument and the evidence, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance exonerating Mrs. O’Leary and her cow.

 

Source: Did a Cow Really Cause the Great Chicago Fire of 1871?