My New Toilet Arrived!

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In a previous post I blogged about having won an Ebay auction for an “old oak antique potty chair chamber pot commode with drawer.” Well, it arrived yesterday. It has surpassed all my expectations. The thing is beautiful, and sturdy–you can totally sit down on it.

My youngest son’s jaw dropped when he walked in and saw it (in the, ahem, eating area of the kitchen). His quote: “I’m not going to pretend that’s not cool. That is really cool.”

And my mother-in-law came over for dinner last night. Her response? “What an interesting piece.” (To get this reference, you have to click on that previous blog.)

A few readers helped me speculate about what the very narrow drawer at the bottom is for. I am almost positive it would have been used to store torn-out pages from catalogues and whatnot, to be used < shudder > as toilet paper.

 

Beware of Dogs

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The Canary Islands were named by the ancient Romans for the wild dogs that roamed there. (Canis is Latin for dog.) It was only later that they named the native songbirds “canaries.”

Reel Bugs: Insecticidal

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I managed to make it all the way through Insecticidal (2005), which is saying something, because it’s an abominably awful movie and not even in a fun way. The plot, such as it is, vaguely hinges on the usual experiment-gone-wrong. In this iteration, we meet Cami, a geeky sorority sister (you know she’s the geek because she wears glasses) who loves insects and is frustrated that her professors don’t take seriously her claim that “insects used to be the dominant species.” No duh. Cami wants to harness the “dormant genes” she is sure her pet bugs harbor and which could allow them to grow huge and gain intelligence.

Mostly what it’s about, though, is watching girls take showers and then get gored and slurped up by giant insects. Despite the fact that the doors get sealed shut by indeterminate bug excretions, and people keep stepping in unexplained slime puddles, and finding huge insect body parts here and there, it isn’t until about halfway through the movie that anyone in the house realizes something is amiss. Even Cami doesn’t get it. When she actually sees a giant bug scuttle by, she rubs her eyes, acknowledges that her sisters are right and that “I guess I really must be crazy,” even though half a dozen of her sorority sisters have already met a gory end and no one appears to miss them.

The abysmal special effects and CG-insects include lots of green gooey bug guts draped artfully on bare-breasted co-eds, and spider web that I swear is silly string.

There is so much entomologically wrong with the movie that it doesn’t merit mentioning in detail.

In the end, most (though not all) of the slutty girls die, following tried-and-true B-movie protocol, and the mean girl gets her comeuppance (she turns into a zombie-like host to a nest of maggots, which she keeps spitting out, although we don’t quite see how it happened and none of the giant insects resembles anything like a parasitic wasp or phorid fly). The remaining sorority sisters finally kill the bugs with  a combination of electrocution and household appliances.

There, I’ve told you how it ends, so now you don’t have to rent it.

No Fists, Hands, or Butts

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According to the rules of a ninth-century Maya game called pok-a-tok, you could touch the ball only with your fists, elbows, or butt. Members of the losing team were often sacrificed.

 

Source: Reader’s Digest: Everyday Life through the Ages

Cheese it, Ludwig

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One of Beethoven’s favorite meals was macaroni and cheese.

The Ants Crawled In

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ant-proof armor?

In the early sixteenth century, shortly after Columbus had arrived in Hispaniola and Spanish settlers had established huge plantain, banana, and (a bit later) sugar cane plantations on the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a plague of fire ants swept across the island. It’s hard to overstate how dramatic this invasion was; people’s homes were teeming with stinging ants.

In an article in Nature magazine, biologist E.O. Wilson postulates that the Spaniards’ introduction of banana plants also introduced a type of insect that feeds on the roots of the plants, namely, sap-sucking coccids, mealy bugs, and other insects of the Homoptera group. The presence of these insects led to a huge increase in the population of fire ants (Solenopsis geminata). The fire ants protect these insects because the ants love to eat the sap-suckers’ sugary excrement, which is full of amino acids.

The Spaniards knew nothing about the homopterous sap-suckers, but they were suddenly engulfed by masses of fire ants that multiplied so heavily that people slept on their roofs, or were driven off the island entirely. Entire plantations were wiped out “as though fire had fallen from the sky and scorched them,” records a first-hand witness, B. de Las Casas.

 

Photos: Francisco de Montejo, el mozo (1502 – 1565) Wikimedia Commons/ Solenopsis geminata Pest and Diseases Image Library, Australia

Soup’s On

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According to Roman writer Suetonius, a rival of Nero’s was served untainted soup, but his poison taster deemed it too hot for his master. Cold water laced with arsenic was then added to cool it down, and the rival fell ill and died.

Woad is Me

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For centuries, dyers created blue hues from woad. The fermenting process created such a disgusting stench that Queen Elizabeth banned woad production within five miles of any royal residence.

Scarlet Fever

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Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, 1665-7 (wikimediacommons)

For centuries, painters and textile dyers sought all sorts of ways to create a brilliant red. It’s a really hard color to make, as anyone can tell you who has tried to dye Easter eggs the natural way. (OK, I’ll tell you: for years, we’ve dyed Easter eggs the Martha Stewart way. Usually my kids lose interest after about fifteen minutes, so I’m left in the kitchen with boiling pots and smelly potions, finishing the job. Anyway, what I’ve discovered is that turmeric tints them a beautiful yellow ocher, coffee a lovely brown, and red cabbage plus turmeric makes green. But nothing I’ve tried produces a satisfying pink, let alone red. I’ve used cranberries, pomegranates, everything that happily stains your clothes, but nothing produces that elusive red. And I’m just talking eggs here, not paints or fabrics.)

But back to the historical attempts to derive red. In ancient times, painters and textile dyers found that cinnabar worked pretty well, as did mercuric sulfide—these substances were used to make the reds in ancient Chinese scrolls and in ancient Roman frescoes. The problem was, they were expensive and poisonous, and faded in the light.

Dyers and painters tried leaves, bark, blood, dirt, and cow poop, but nothing quite worked. Madder (from plants) made a pretty good russet and orange-red, as did lac, and kermes (insect-based tints). But when Spain’s conquistadors learned (and subsequently stole) the secret of cochineal red from the Aztecs, artists were finally able to produce those elusive and brilliant shades of flaming scarlet and deep crimson. Cochineal insects, harvested, dried, and ground to a powder, were the Aztecs’ secret. Spain built an empire by strictly controlling access to this highly-valuable, persnickety scale insect.

Leaving aside the difficulties workers faced harvesting the cochineal insects (which you can read about in my forthcoming book), making the red paint from the resulting insect powder was extremely time-consuming and expensive. According to Amy Butler Greenfield’s fascinating book, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, an early art manual advised painters to grind half an ounce of cochineal insect into a fine powder, add tartar lye, water, and alum, and then scrape it into the tincture. The resulting red tint then had to be strained into a clean pot and used quickly.

All red dyes had a tendency to fade over time, but painters who could afford high-quality cochineal tints had more success preventing fading. Rembrandt used a very high-quality cochineal red in this painting, The Jewish Bride, which has lasted over three hundred years–so far.

Rubbish!

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Benjamin Franklin implemented the first streetcleaning service in Philadelphia, in 1757. For the first time, American household garbage was thrown into refuse pits, rather than out the window.