Tag: History

The Origin of Coffee and the Legend of Kaldi

Many legends describe the discovery of coffee. One of the most popular is of an Arab goatherder named Kaldi who lived in the middle of the 9th century. Kaldi noticed that when his goats ate the red berries from one particular bush, they acted oddly; they seemed more frisky and frolicsome. He then took a chance and chewed some of the berries himself. When the result was a feeling of friskiness in himself, he took the news of the wonders of the coffee berries to his fellow tribesmen. Over the next 400 years people consumed coffee just as Kaldi had: Arabs simply chewed the coffee berries in order to get the stimulating effect.

Sleep Thieves
Stanley Coren

The myth of Kaldi the Ethiopian goatherd and his dancing goats, the coffee origin story most frequently encountered in Western literature, embellishes the credible tradition that the Sufi encounter with coffee occurred in Ethiopia, which lies just across the narrow passage of the Red Sea from Arabia’s western coast.
…
In modern times, “Kaldi Coffee” or “Kaldi’s Coffee” and “Dancing Goat” or “Wandering Goat” are popular names for coffee shops and coffee roasting companies around the world. The biggest coffee chain in Ethiopia is called Kaldi’s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldi

How New York Became Gotham

But these results are nothing compared to Davies’s biggest discovery: inspired by the connection he made between Irish and Sikh put-downs, he started tracking similar examples of humor around the world—and uncovered a universal joke. He’s named this the stupidity joke, the sort of barbed zinger that makes fun of outsiders, simpletons, and others on the fringes of society. In America, the obvious version is the Polish joke, but that’s just the tip of the mean-spirited iceberg. Take the Philogelos, the oldest-known joke book in the world. Of the 265 zingers in the ancient Greek tome, nearly a quarter concern folks from cities renowned for their idiocy, like Cyme in modern-day Turkey and Abdera in Thrace. Later, in medieval England, cracks about the dunces who lived in the village of Gotham were all the rage. (New York’s nickname, “Gotham,” doesn’t sound so impressive once you learn that author Washington Irving coined it to suggest the place was a city of fools.)

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny
Peter McGrawm Joel Warner

Gotham – first used by Washington Irving in his satirical periodical Salmagundi in November 1807 as an allusion to the tale of the Wise Men of Gotham, and made popular as Gotham City, the location of Batman comics, first specified in December 1940’s Batman #4, written by Bill Finger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicknames_of_New_York_City

The village is most famed for the stories of the “Wise Men of Gotham”. These depict the people of the village as being stupid. However, the reason for the behaviour is believed to be that the villagers wished to feign madness to avoid a Royal Highway being built through the village, as they would then be expected to build and maintain this route. Madness was believed at the time to be highly contagious, and when King John’s knights saw the villagers behaving as if insane, the knights swiftly withdrew and the King’s road was re-routed to avoid the village.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham,_Nottinghamshire

Very Crowded Behind the Scenes – Civil Rights Era Memory

REMEMBRANCE OF MODERATES PAST 1977

“I keep hearing about white people who say they’ve been working behind the scenes,” a black lawyer in New Orleans told me during the desegregation of the public schools there, in 1960—a time when the business and professional leadership of New Orleans stood silent while the city seemed to be taken over by a bunch of women in hair curlers screaming obscenities at six-year-olds. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It must be getting mighty crowded back there, behind the scenes.” From then on, and whenever somebody mentioned working behind the scenes during a time of racial turmoil in the South, a picture planted by that black lawyer came into my mind: Onstage, little of interest is going on—just the usual succession of Southern pols, often in chorus, doing their “never-never” number and dancing off into the wings to great applause from the cheap seats. Every so often, that routine is broken by the appearance onstage of a solitary figure who presents a declamation about obeying the law of the land and is, predictably, pelted with rotten tomatoes or worse. Behind the scenes, hordes of community leaders—prominent businessmen and pillars of the local bar and charity-drive chairmen and country-club presidents—are silently moving scenery around and around and around.

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America
Calvin Trillin

Reading War and Peace in Leningrad, 1942

Spring, Leningrad, 1942 – “though the word ‘spring,”‘ writes Russian literary critic Lidiya Ginsburg in her memoir, Blockade Diary, “had an odd ring to it. The bread ration had been increased, trams made their diffident way along frozen streets. The Germans had halted the bombing raids, but were shelling the city several times each day. The strongest and most vital people had already died – or had survived. The feeble went on belatedly dying. The word ‘spring’ had an odd ring to it.”

As she tells us in this slender but powerful volume, though “the thirst for information was fearful,” with people crowding around street-corner loudspeakers several times a day, the besieged Russians of Leningrad longed for other sorts of “information.” Ginsburg writes:

During the war years, people used to read War and Peace avidly, comparing their own behaviour with it (not the other way round – no one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoy’s response to life). The reader would say to himself… so then, this is how it should be. Whoever had the energy enough to read, used to read war and Peace avidly in besieged Leningrad….

Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war. He also spoke of how those caught up in this common round continued playing their part involuntarily, while ostensibly busy solving problems affecting their own lives. The people of besieged Leningrad worked (while they could) and saved (if they could) both themselves and their loved ones from dying of hunger.

And in the final reckoning that was also essential to the war effort, because a living city barred the path of an enemy who wanted to kill it.

April 1994 – Some Events of

Nelson Mandela casts his vote in the 1994 South African general election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994

The Poplar Field – William Cowper

The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.

The black-bird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charm’d me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.

’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can
To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a Being less durable even than he.

Like much of John Clare’s work, Cowper’s ‘The Poplar Field’ is a poem responding in part to the destruction of the English landscape caused by landowners using the Enclosure Acts to force the rural poor off their small holdings in order to farm more profitably by dividing the land into larger fields enclosed by fences, hedges and ditches, felling trees, damming rivers and destroying habitats of animals, birds and insects. The jaunty metre Cowper employs in ‘The Poplar Field’ seems ill-suited at first to a poem about lost years and environmental vandalism. Anapaestic tetrameter is more often used for comic effect (as in Dr Seuss’s poems), but where used irregularly — as it is here by Cowper — it becomes disconcerting, and can be employed for serious effect, as it is also in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ — as well as in Eminem’s song ‘The Way I Am’, apart from its chorus (most rap songs use irregular tetrameter).

The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me: 100 Classic Poems with Commentary
Brendan Kennelly, Neil Astley

NOTES:
1. William Cowper – 1731 – 1800. It’s pronounced Cooper.
2. The Inclosure Acts[a] created legal property rights to land previously held in common in England and Wales, particularly open fields and common land. Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 km2.
Wikipedia

Web Surfing – Early Days of the Internet

[deleted by user]
by inAskReddit

 

PALOmino1701
I used to keep a magazine beside the computer so I could read something while waiting for a web page to load.

chevymonza
Just the other day, I ran into a guy who said “I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a magazine.” I had to take a minute to digest this idea.

HiddenCity
“When I was your age, television was called books.” -grampa in the princess bride

“When I was your age, internet was called magazines” -chevymonza

throwawayayaycaramba
I was thinking about it just the other day… it’s crazy how centralized the internet has become, how everything now revolves around a handful of sites. Back in the day going online was basically like going on an adventure, there was no “hub”; how long it’s been since I was recommended a cool website! I remember I had a magazine from like 2000 something, where they had a list of “the 50 best websites on the web”; that whole idea feels so archaic nowadays.

kemushi_warui
That’s why it was called “surfing”. Because you’d go to a site, then catch a link to another, and then to another. It’s like you were riding from one to the next, and could end up at a totally unexpected place.

TheTardisPizza
It was like falling into a Wikipedia hole except it was everything.

Scarbane
StumbleUpon

SnooBananas915
And you had to type the website in exactly to get what you wanted. Which meant having 30 random, crumpled, torn pieces of paper with long URLs on them. In your pockets, your bags, your desk.

slashdave
Yahoo used to have what was intended as a top-down directory of the entire internet, created by hand. It was incredibly useful at the time.

Rock and Roll Rasputin – Holocaust Survivor to Rolling Stones Insider

He was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1923. When he was 15 years old, Hitler’s forces came through his Jewish neighborhood, torching homes and shooting people in the street. Freddy, along with his entire family, was rounded up and sent to a nearby concentration camp.

He attempted an escape one night, and it worked. He left his family behind and made his way to Russia. But when the Communists got hold of him, they shipped him to Siberia. They then sent him to England during World War II, because the Allies needed translators in London. Freddy spoke English, Polish, Russian, German, and Yiddish.

When the war was over, he returned to Poland to search for his family, but learned they were dead. The house he grew up in was no longer standing.
Freddy had to start his life over.

…

The more I got to know Freddy on the Steel Wheels tour, the more I understood why he needed to be there. People labeled him a dope pusher, star-fucker, bullshit artist, and dirty old man, but he was a lot more complex than that.

“Hitler killed my family,” he reminded me one night. “My mudder, my fadder, viped out. But vot can I do about dat now? Sit in de house and cry? Vait for my blood clots to kill me? I gotta live, baby! I gotta prove dey couldn’t finish me off.”

The groupies, glamour, and fast pace offered Freddy a vibrancy he couldn’t find anywhere else. While folks his age were playing shuffleboard, Freddy was hangin’ with the Stones. Every line he snorted and every groupie he laid was an affirmation of life and a proclamation of survival. “Look vehr I am today, and look vehr you are, you Nazi cocksuckers!” Every time he danced at a Stones concert—and man, you should’ve seen him—it was like he was dancing on Hitler’s grave. “I’m gonna dance not just for me, but for all my relatives who can’t.”

Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It)
Bill German

Freddy = Freddy Sessler. From chapter 25 – rock and roll rasputin

Fossil Words

WTW for a word that is almost exclusively only used in a set phrase? For example, the word “figment” in the phrase “a figment of your imagination”.
byu/DracoOccisor inwhatstheword

Bayoris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word

DracoOccisor
Solved

aj-uk
I hope you feel gruntled.

Reapr
and whelmed

From wikipedia:

“Born fossils”
These words were formed from other languages, by elision, or by mincing of other fixed phrases.

caboodle, as in “kit and caboodle” (evolved from “kit and boodle”, itself a fixed phrase borrowed as a unit from Dutch kitte en boedel)
druthers, as in “if I had my druthers…” (formed by elision from “would rather”[11] and never occurring outside this phrase to begin with)
tarnation, as in “what in tarnation…?” (evolved in the context of fixed phrases formed by mincing of previously fixed phrases that include the term “damnation”)
nother, as in “a whole nother…” (fixed phrase formed by rebracketing another as a nother, then inserting whole for emphasis; almost never occurs outside this phrase)

Anna Deavere Smith – NPR Interview

Anna Deavere Smith plays real Americans on stage – and she shares her lessons
It’s Been a Minute

LUSE: Anna is a pioneer of what’s called verbatim theatre, where the characters’ lines come straight from interviews, transcripts or recordings. But what does that look like? Basically, Anna interviews real people, selects their most powerful moments, then studies their words, speech patterns, and body language so that she can sort of become them.

DEAVERE SMITH: My grandfather had said when I was a girl, if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. I decided to really study how the people around me spoke. I literally would walk up to people in the street of New York – this is in 1980 – and say, I know an actor who looks like you. If you give me an hour of your time, I’ll invite you to see yourself performed. The whole idea was to use this technique in a way to chase that which is not me.

…

DEAVERE SMITH: I became interested in how the rhythm of speech could inform an idea of who someone was. First of all, I don’t become anybody. People say that. I think of it as trying to make a jump. I call it the broad jump towards the other. You don’t make it, but you’re in this other place – colleague of mine, Richard Schechner at NYU, would talk about an idea of the not-not. So I can’t be you. So I’m not you. And I’m not me, but I’m in this other place. I’m in this effort.

And psychologically, what that is about, I think, is how I’ve decided to deal with my own sense of nonbelongingness, having grown up in a segregated city. If you really look at the whole thing I’ve been doing, it’s to get close to my opposites and to get close to strangers as a way of dealing with the sense of estrangement. And technically, what I do is listen to speech the way that you might listen to music. So I don’t just learn words, I learn utterances, and I – so I become acquainted with the – what I say is the song someone’s singing. And a lot of my work has to do with disaster and catastrophe…

Tooth Problems and Early Death

Deaths from dental abscesses today are so rare, that it is difficult to fathom that only 200 years ago, this was a leading cause of death. When the London (England) Bills of Mortality began listing the causes of death in the early 1600’s, “teeth” were continually listed as the fifth or sixth leading cause of death. (This does not include the category of “Teething” which was probably erroneously blamed for many children’s deaths. As we examine several historic factors of this period, it is apparent that the number of deaths attributed to “teeth” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was probably fairly accurate, and it was not antibiotics, nor the discovery of asepsis, that brought about the dramatic reduction in these dental mortalities, but two much earlier dental innovations.

J H Clarke
NCBI
The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.

Juarez Burritos – New York Times on

No one questions that Juárez is the birthplace of burritos, though there are competing origin stories. Some attribute their creation to Juan Mendez, who sold guisados wrapped in flour tortillas from a donkey-pulled buggy — a burrito — during the Mexican Revolution. Others say they were born of the workers who took these wraps on the go and then called them burritos because they resembled the rolled blankets that sat atop donkeys in the fields. Some say they were named after children who helped women carry their shopping — endearingly nicknamed burritos — and paid with these wraps.
…
On both sides of the Rio Grande, the love for and dedication to the craft of making what they consider true burritos are perhaps what define the style most. Making them, Mr. Vasquez said, “has to come from the heart.”

Ms. Covarrubias echoed that sentiment. “The main ingredient is mucho amor.”

On the Border, the Perfect Burrito is a Thin, Foil-Wrapped Treasure
Despite a culinary rivalry, the sister cities El Paso and Ciudad Juárez can agree that a simple burrito is the best burrito.
Pati Jinich

What are some of Napoleon’s non military achievements? Ask ChatGPT

Napoleon Bonaparte, in addition to his military prowess, made several significant non-military achievements during his rule. Here are some notable examples:

Napoleonic Code: One of Napoleon’s most enduring legacies is the Napoleonic Code (Code Napoléon), also known as the Civil Code of 1804. It was a comprehensive legal code that brought together and codified many of the legal principles established during the French Revolution. The code influenced legal systems in many countries and is considered a foundation for modern civil law.

Education Reforms: Napoleon initiated various reforms in education with the aim of creating a more efficient and centralized system. The University of France was established, and primary and secondary education underwent changes to provide a standardized curriculum. These reforms aimed at ensuring a well-educated and skilled workforce.

Infrastructure Development: Napoleon contributed to significant infrastructure improvements in France. He supported the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, which not only facilitated military movements but also stimulated economic development and improved communication throughout the country.

Bank of France: In 1800, Napoleon established the Bank of France (Banque de France) as the central bank of the country. The bank played a crucial role in stabilizing the French economy and facilitating economic growth by issuing currency, managing government funds, and regulating credit.

Public Health Reforms: Napoleon implemented measures to improve public health. He established the concept of a central board of health, which was tasked with monitoring and controlling diseases. These efforts aimed at enhancing the overall well-being of the population.

Religious Concordat: Seeking to reconcile with the Catholic Church after the turbulence of the French Revolution, Napoleon signed the Concordat with the Pope in 1801. This agreement reestablished the Catholic Church in France, recognizing it as the majority religion while also ensuring religious freedom for other faiths.

Cultural Patronage: Napoleon was a patron of the arts and sciences. He supported the establishment of the Louvre Museum, which became a repository for many works of art collected during his military campaigns. He also encouraged scientific expeditions and research, contributing to the advancement of knowledge in various fields.

While Napoleon is often remembered for his military campaigns and conquests, these non-military achievements also played a significant role in shaping France and, to some extent, the broader European landscape during his rule.