Oddities and Humor

You don’t get drum and base.

Traces of Texas
The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day:

On July 12, 1929, in the midst of Prohibition, a crowd gathered at the county courthouse in Dallas as Sheriff Hal Hood prepared to order the destruction of 5,000 gallons of forbidden whiskey that had been confiscated in raids on local moonshiners and distilleries. By noon, spectators covered the grounds of the courthouse. Ladies from the Women's Christian Temperance Union fanned themselves, watched, and prayed, some singing hymns and giving thanks to God for the glorious scene that was about to unfold.

Sheriff's deputies began tapping the barrels, turning the kegs upside down and tilting them at the curb so the whiskey could gurgle out into the gutter. It was a triumphant occasion for the sheriff ...... until somebody lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the gutter. First there came a giant "WHOOOSH" and then, in seconds, downtown Dallas had a river of fire rolling down Main Street. Folks screamed and scrambled to avoid it. The fire extended for several blocks and was "a long blue blaze of intense heat" according to one onlooker. By the time the fire department got there, more than twenty cars had been destroyed though, thankfully, injuries were minor. Sheriff Hood, embarrassed, vowed that the next time his man would pour enough water into the gutter alongside the whiskey that the spectacle would not be repeated.

That was a good story uncle edgar

He should have known smoking is bad.

Bees, like all insects, have six sections to their legs: the coxa, trochanter, femur, tibia, metatarsus and tarsus. Each is connected by a joint and the one most like a knee is between the femur and tibia. Bees have lots of other specialised structures on their legs to carry pollen, but the bee’s knee itself is no more remarkable than any of the other leg joints.

So with that in mind, what’s the origin of the phrase: “the bee’s knees”? Probably simply because “knees” rhymes with “bees”.

The phrase seems to have evolved in 1920s America, along with “the cat’s pyjamas”. Other seemingly arbitrary terms of distinction from that era that have since died out include “the snake’s hips”, “the kipper’s knickers” and “the sardine’s whiskers”. Of all of these, the only one actually found in nature is the bee’s knees, so perhaps that’s what’s so special.

(Oops. Lost the link.)

Dancing plague of 1518 - Wikipedia

Historical sources agree that there was an outbreak of dancing after a single woman started dancing, a group of mostly young women joined in, and the dancing did not seem to die down. It lasted for such a long time that it attracted the attention of the Strasbourg magistrate and bishop, and some number of doctors ultimately intervened, putting the afflicted in a hospital. Where the controversy arises is the matter of whether people ultimately danced to their deaths. The main source for this claim comes from John Waller, who has written several journal articles on the subject and the book "A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518". There do not appear to be any sources contemporaneous to the events that make note of any fatalities.[3] The sources cited by Waller that mention deaths were all from later retellings of the events. There is also uncertainty around the identity of the initial dancer (either an unnamed woman or "Frau Troffea") and the number of dancers involved (somewhere between 50 and 400).

Theories
Modern theories include food-poisoning caused by the toxic and psychoactive chemical products of ergot fungi, which grows commonly on grains in the wheat family (such as rye) that was used for baking bread. Ergotamine is the main psychoactive product of ergot fungi; it is structurally related to the drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), and is the substance from which LSD-25 was originally synthesized. The same fungus has also been implicated in other major historical anomalies, including the Salem witch trials. However, John Waller in The Lancet argues that "this theory does not seem tenable, since it is unlikely that those poisoned by ergot could have danced for days at a time. Nor would so many people have reacted to its psychotropic chemicals in the same way. The ergotism theory also fails to explain why virtually every outbreak occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle rivers, areas linked by water but with quite different climates and crops".[4] Waller speculates that the dancing was "stress-induced psychosis" on a mass level, since the region where the people danced was riddled with starvation and disease, and the inhabitants tended to be superstitious. Seven other cases of dancing plague were reported in the same region during the medieval era.[5]

This could have been a florid example of psychogenic movement disorder happening in mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, which involves many individuals—small groups to almost 1,000 people—suddenly exhibiting the same bizarre behavior. The behavior spreads rapidly and broadly in an epidemic pattern.[6] This kind of comportment could have been caused by the elevated levels of psychological stress, i.e. the despair caused by the ruthless years (even by the rough standards of the Middle Ages) the people of Alsace were suffering.[2]

This psychogenic illness could have created a chorea (Greek khoreia or "to dance"), a situation comprising random and intricate unintentional movements that flit from body part to body part. Diverse choreas (St. Vitus' dance, St. John's dance, tarantism) were labeled in the Middle Ages referring to the independent epidemics of "dancing mania" that happened in central Europe, particularly at the time of the plague.[7][8][9]

It was grindcore.

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/august/wild-ride-of-benny-binion/

It is a slow day in the small Saskatchewan town of Pumphandle, and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.

A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op.

The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything...

However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

That $100 generated $500 Gross Product. Zero net, but $500 Gross.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a Stimulus package works.

However, some gun aficionados wrote a couple of polite letters informing us that silver bullets were not the easy solution they first appeared to be. It may not be impossible to make a working silver bullet, but it's far from an easy task. Since it's nice to have the books make sense, I figured I'd just go build some silver bullets and silence the critics -- after all, how hard can it be? The Lone Ranger did it, right? However, before we continue with my efforts to produce a usable silver bullet, let me briefly discuss the history of silver, and how silver bullets came to be the de facto standard for werewolf extermination

http://www.patriciabriggs.com/articles/silver/silverbullets.shtml

Americans have feelings about ketchup. Lots and lots of feelings. Feeling about why ketchup on a hot dog is stupid, and why fancy ketchup is stupid, and why any ketchup at all is stupid. Prepare to have a lot more ketchup-related feelings because you know what? Ketchup, the all-American condiment, is actually Asian.

The word "ketchup" is the Anglicized form of "ke-tsiap," an old Hokkien word for fish sauce. Yes, that fish sauce, the pungent brown liquid used liberally in Southeast Asian cooking. It goes by different names in different countries -- nam pla in Thailand, nuoc nam in Vietnam -- but the Chinese sailors who helped spread it across the region called it ke-tsiap. So when European traders started visiting in the 17th century, that's what they called it too.

The Brits in particular took a liking to early ketchup, which was made the same way fish sauce is made today: by salting and fermenting anchovies. They brought it back to the motherland and started experimenting with it by adding beer, mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, and various other umami-rich ingredients. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, every cook in Britain (and quite a few in America) had their own ketchup or catsup recipe. Tomatoes made an occasional appearance -- in 1812 horticulturalist James Mease published a recipe that called for tomato pulp, spices, and brandy -- but ketchup as we know it today was yet to be invented.

Looking back, omitting tomatoes seems like a weird blind spot. They're high in glutamate (i.e., umami flavor) so you'd think they’d be an obvious partner to anchovies or mushrooms. And if some people were already putting tomatoes in ketchup, why didn't it catch on straight away? One factor that might have slowed it down was the European misconception that tomatoes were related to poisonous nightshade berries. Another could be that people were happy with their mushroom ketchup, which is still a thing in the UK (Heston Blumenthal, the guy behind three-Michelin-star restaurant the Fat Duck, serves it at one of his London restaurants).

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/original-ketchup-recipe-history-china

What about catsup edgar?

It's good with fries and other high quality foods.

In Indonesia they have Kecap Manis (Kecap is pronounce 'ketchup')

Kecap literally translates to soy sauce. (Manis is 'sweet'). Always have a bottle of it in our house

In Canadia, you can buy ketchup-flavored potato chips. (That's crisps for the vocabulary-challenged members here.)

Used to be able get them in Oz too - but these days we have super wanky flavours like:

I've never yet tasted a flavored chip I actually like. Plain lightly salted is all I want.

Get me some a them, too.

I like Gramma Utz chips, FRIED IN LARD. WHere can ya find that kinda greasy crispy chip
anymore?

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