For we've slaved away four years of our life and earned about three pound ten

[sovay]

I have a sore throat and a steadily climbing fever and just discovered I missed a documentary on whaling tonight. It had better re-air. Preferably at some point when I can focus on the screen. Today: not success. Tell me something historically weird.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

wakanomori saw a fox tonight, in the moonlight. It must be good luck. We'll send that luck to you.

Hope the fever recedes soon.

Historically weird... well, in Pillars of Salt, among the criminals whom Cotton Mather describes is a man who engaged in bestiality with a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows. I mean ... wow, you know?

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I can do that. I've just been reading The Pirates Own Book for an assignment, and finding it fascinating. Here it is:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12216/12216-h/12216-h.htm

And I happened across this book because Lucy Larcom's brother was one of the crew robbed and almost killed by pirates. Look at "History and Execution of the Spanish Pirates" in the ebook, and also at this excerpt from Lucy Larcom's _A New England Girlhood_:

http://larcomfamilytree.com/documents/stories.html

...and then tell me that's not a weird trip.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Coelacanths were thought by Europeans to have been extinct for some 65 million years until one was caught off of South Africa in 1938. The native South African populations didn't know the fish was supposed to be extinct; they were aware of its presence in their waters and had at least two names for it.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Here's praying you rise above the weather again soon.

Jethro Tull did a thoughtful and achingly lovely song about whaling back in 1989, "The Whaler's Dues" (sound quality of the video is only mid-fi, but the posting includes the lyrics). No whale song recordings were used in the song, but the band mimics them beautifully with traditional instruments.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Moonshiners evolved into NASCAR racers.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The guy the French sent to bring metrication to the fledgling US state was captured by pirates three times on the way and the metre, kilogram and explanation never made it, and so the US remains mired to this day in undecimal measurements.

I blame luddite time travellers.

[whiskeychick.livejournal.com]

When I'm sick, one of my comforts is the time-loved Popsicle...

Frank Epperson, a then eleven-year-old, invented the Popsicle and the invention was accidental. One day Frank mixed some soda water powder and water, which was a popular drink in those days. He left the mixture on the back porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. The temperature dropped to a record low that night and the next day Frank had a stick of frozen soda water to show his friends at school.
Eighteen years later-in 1923- Frank Epperson remembered his frozen soda water mixture and began a business producing Epsicles in seven fruit flavors. The name was later changed to the Popsicle. One estimate says three million Popsicle frozen treats are sold each year.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Um, mind blank while zooming through f-list pages before running to work. Knitting needles were formerly "knitting pins," which makes perfect sense in its way but makes reading old patterns a bit odd at first.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

Feel better! Um, I'm on a bit of a downer today myself, so:

* The bit where General Bokasa proclaimed that the Central African Republic was now an empire, with himself (of course) as Emperor? That was pretty screwed-up. (And he wasn't even necessarily Africa's craziest dictator...)
* The fact that Mohamad Siad Barre of Somalia abruptly switched (officially) from being a socialist to being a staunch anti-Communist (and US ally) when he invaded socialist Ethiopia? There's some black humor in that.
* The fact that fighting in the Swabian War of 1499 was only touched off when somebody made a cow joke?

* More happily: that one of my more distant ancestors was a co-founder of the town of Holderness, which I drive through three times a week? (I still haven't told PSU's resident colonial historian...)

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you're feeling so poorly. Hope you're soon better.

It looks as if that documentary can be watched online--hopefully it will still be there when you're able to focus. I'm thinking that's the one for which a friend of mine played some of the music--I'd meant to watch it, myself.

My mind's a blank for weird history--I'll try to think of something soon.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I've still no interesting weird history, I'm afraid, but here are a couple of links that have long pleased me.

The Centaur of Volos
The Centaur Excavations at Volos

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

You probably know this, but ...

In the process of formulating the laws of planetary motion (and missing by inches the concept of universal gravitation), Johannes Kepler made a crushing elementary mathematical mistake, on the order of 2 + 2 = 2.

Then a bit later he made another one which was essentially 2 + 2 = 6 and perfectly offset the previous one.

You probably don't know all of this ...

The Boston Red Sox were the last team in baseball to employ a black player; when Pumpsie Green came in to pinch-run on July 21, 1959, it was more than twelve years after Jackie Robinson had integrated the Dodgers. Robinson was actually given a tryout at Fenway Park in 1945 and someone yelled "get that n***** off the field." In 1950, after teams had started signing the best young black talent, one of their scouts found a 19-year old who had just graduated from high school in Alabama; he was given a tryout and the team judged him unworthy of signing. That was Willie Mays, who hit twenty homers the next year for the New York Giants.

The Boston Celtics, OTOH, were the first NBA team to integrate, the first American professional sports team to feature an all-black starting lineup, and the first to hire a black head coach or manager (the great Bill Russell, as a player-coach). All of these decisions were made by Arnold "Red" Auerbach, who was Jewish.

Russell's teams won (in succession) NCAA titles his junior and senior years, an Olympic Gold medal, and NBA championships in eleven of his thirteen seasons with the Celtics (1957 to 1969, and in 1958 he was injured). Russell's record of team success has never been remotely approached. During his reign, numerous other Celtic immortals (such as Bob Cousy) retired, but the team kept on winning its annual championship; when Russell finally hung up the sneakers, the team finished last.

When it came time to name the new Third Harbor Tunnel after a living athlete, Red Sox great Ted Williams was chosen rather than Russell, who had once called the city a "flea market of racism." Williams never was part of any championship team -- but he was half Mexican and remained close to the Hispanic relatives on his mother's side (facts virtually never alluded by the local media -- I didn't learn them until after his death). In the meantime, the new bridge that accompanied the tunnel was named after Leonard P. Zakim, a Jew who led the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League.