Darnel (Lolium temulentum) is a common garden weed known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who thought it was poisonous, causing stupefication and “drunkenness.” It’s mentioned in the Bible, too (in the parable of the Tares, tares probably being another name for darnel—in Matthew 13:24-30) Nowadays scientists are pretty sure the poisonous properties are caused by a fungus similar to ergot (which I’ve blogged about here). Symptoms may include drowsiness, slurred speech, difficulty walking, vomiting, and hypnotic episodes.
I recently finished a really cool book called A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities, by J.C. McKeown, a professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He cites a passage from Pliny’s Natural History (18.156) where bath managers in the provinces of Greece and Asia get rid of a crowd of bathers by throwing some darnel seeds onto the coals.
I guess that’s like the waiters who put the chairs on top of tables around customers who linger too late.
In the heydey of men’s facial hair, the nineteenth century, barbers offered all kinds of ways to grease, pomade, and wax one’s hair, whiskers, moustaches, and sideburns.
Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) painted several versions of this now-famous painting, parodied zillions of times, called The Scream, including the one above, done in 1893. I stumbled across 
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737-1813) was an early promoter of the potato in France, at a time when potatoes were looked on with deep suspicion. Potatoes had been slow to take hold in Europe in the seventeenth century, and outside of Ireland, were used primarily as hog food. But after a series of crop failures and famines, the Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great, determined to get Prussian peasants to grow them, distributed free potato seeds to all the farmers in his realm. Faced with their continued recalcitrance, the Emperor announced that farmers that didn’t grow potatoes would have their nose and ears cut off. That seemed to work. (252).
Parmentier finally got his lucky break when, on Louis XVI’s thirty-fifth birthday (August 23, 1785), Parmentier presented the king with a bouquet of potato flowers. The king tucked one in his lapel, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, stuck a flower into her hair. Suddenly potatoes became all the rage at court, and Parmentier oversaw a series of all-potato banquets. By the end of the century, the potato was a firmly established and popular part of French cuisine.
Recently, I was reading the 
“No tanner, refiner, or manufacturer of gas, starch, leather, chemicals, fertilizers…shall throw, deposit, or allow to run, or to be thrown into any public waters.”