Because decent sanitation was virtually nonexistent during the Civil War, scouts could generally find out the location of the enemy by smelling them. One Union scout remarked that “the smell simply indicated the presence of the rebel army in the neighborhood.”
In medieval England, long before refrigeration, butchers slaughtered only as many animals as they could sell in a day. Guts, offal, and blood were tossed into an open-air gutter (called a runnel), that was generally running down the middle of the street.
All the stuff they chucked out–unsold meat, as well as the inedible bits and pieces of slaughtered animals–were called “shambles.” Hard to imagine what it must have smelled like at the end of a hot summer day.
Nowadays, the word “shambles” means a state of complete disorganization.
In 1439, the parliament of King Henry VI proclaimed that kissing was banned in England, out of concern for “helth and welfare” during an epidemic of plague.
source: Leprosy in Medieval England by Carole Rawcliffe (277)
Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, who wrote Doctor Faustus (1588), was killed in a tavern brawl in 1593 after arguing about who was going to pay for dinner. He was stabbed over his right eye and died instantly.
At my writing retreat last week, which was in upstate New York on the shores of beautiful Lake Champlain, a number of us observed a certain insect that seemed to be everywhere. Some of us were more enraptured than others to see these unusual looking winged creatures. They’re mayflies.
Mayflies belong to the order Ephemeroptera, which means “lasting a day.” They’re related to dragonflies and damselflies. The immature nymph phase of their life cycle lasts about a year, in fresh water, but the adult phase is terribly brief—generally a day.
They also tend to congregate in large numbers.
Mayfly carcasses have been known to pile up on bridges like a snowfall. In July, 2006, a huge cloud of mayflies that had hatched from the Mississippi River showed up on weather radar. A few hours later, bridges had to be closed while dead mayflies were removed with snowplows.
In October, 2007 a Major League baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians was swarmed by clouds of mayflies in the 8th inning. Coughing and spitting out bugs, the Yankee pitcher, Joba Chamberlain, threw two wild pitches and walked a batter, which probably cost the Yankees the game.
I spent a lot of my childhood listening to Italian opera on Saturday afternoons, because my Italian mother loved it, and now I love it, passionately. I’m a sucker for La Traviata, but the aria everyone in the world knows is from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, which premiered in 1851 in Venice.
Verdi knew that la donna è mobile, composed for the beginning of Act 3, was catchy. The opera was rehearsed under tight secrecy, and the tenor wasn’t shown that aria until two days before the premiere, because Verdi didn’t want it to be overheard and sung by the gondoliers.*
Here’s tenor Enrico Caruso singing that aria, in a restored version of his 1909 performance. I have listened to this a lot. (Sorry about the ad you have to slog through first.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvV5go3kSSw
For the record—every kid in my carpool knows every line of the quartet from Act Three. It features 1) Rigoletto, 2) his beloved daughter Gilda, who loves the slime-ball duke despite overwhelming evidence that he’s a slimeball, 3) the slimeball duke, and 4) Maddalena, a canny female who knows the duke is trying to seduce her.
You can hear Gilda’s broken sobs high above, the duke doing his oily best to seduce Maddalena, Maddalena’s “ha! ha! you don’t fool me!” and Rigoletto down low, singing I told you so’s about the wicked, unfaithful man to his heartbroken but defiant daughter.
Here’s Pavarotti as the duke, Isola Jones as Maddalena, Joan Sutherland as Gilda, and Leo Nucci as Rigoletto. Isola Jones is rather distractingly spilling out of the top of her bodice, but . . . her voice! And you kind of have to close your eyes to imagine Joan Sutherland is a teenaged naïf, but . . . her voice!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4UdG9CXz1I
Humor me and listen to it if you don’t know it. My carpool was converted, and it was a bunch of middle school boys. It’s worth waiting for Joan’s high C#.
*Opera News http://tinyurl.com/n6xpc2s
In 1493, Christopher Columbus was the first European to record seeing manatees. He mistook them for mermaids.
President James Garfield (1831 – 1881) was ambidextrous and multilingual. He could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other.
In 1903, French chemist Edouard Benedictus accidentally dropped a glass container that had been holding cellulose nitrate, a form of liquid plastic. To his surprise, the shattered glass pieces retained the shape of the container. The pieces of glass were held together by the traces of plastic film that remained in the flask. Safety glass was born.
source: Mistakes that Worked (45-6)
In medieval times, many household containers were made of an orange clay called pygg. When housewives had spare coins, they collected them in their pygg banks. Around the end of the 18th century, an unknown ceramist formed a pygg bank into a pig shape.
source: Mistakes that Worked (36-7)