Archive for the ‘nature’ Category
Here I sit sipping a glass of 160 proof Jack Daniels, and I really do mean just “Sipping”. I have to admit it’s really smooth for something that will numb your brain and kick your ass. It has convinced me to once again do a post on “Whiskey”. For most of my 20’s and into my 30’s I was a Cutty Sark lover. Working as a police officer in a department filled with scotch drinkers I fit right in. In my late thirties I began making my own wine and for the next fifteen years I drank my somewhat interesting homemade wines and occasionally would spring for a more expensive bottle or two. Then in my seventies I was diagnosed with colon cancer and for 7 months the chemotherapy turned me into a teetotaler. For some inexplicable reason it also made it impossible for me to drink wine of any kind. So, I was returned to the mothers milk of whiskey lovers, Jack Daniels. It was like coming home again. This whiskey lover will now lay a few bits of whiskey trivia on you. Pour a drink and enjoy.
- This excerpt was taken from a collection of medical recipes from the 15th century: For deafness . . . Take the bile of a hare with aqua vit and the milk of a woman’s breast in the same quantity and mix them well together and put them in the ear. This is a sure cure for deafness.
- According to the Guinness Book of World Records in 2018, the oldest bottle of whiskey still left unopened to the world is Baker’s Pure Rye Whiskey, distilled in 1847.
- There is a quote from Mr. Tommy Cooper: “I’m on a whiskey diet, I lost three days already.”
- Kentucky is home to more barrels of maturing bourbon than people. Kentucky’s population was approximately 4.5 million people while the barrels of whiskey totaled 91 million.
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Here is a quote from one of my favorites, Mark Twain:
“I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventative of toothache. I have never had the toothache, and what is more, I never intend to have it.”
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- In 2019, 1.3 billion bottles of Scotch whiskey were bottled. If you laid all these bottles end-to-end they would stretch 350,000 km or 217,000 miles, or 90% of the distance to the moon! Moonshine indeed.
- This last post is a quote by Joel Rosenberg and is one of my all-time favorites. If I wasn’t going to be cremated when I pass I would’ve have certainly requested this on my tombstone.
“I’m a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men,
enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four.”
CAN I GET A AMEN?
I’ve spent the last five and a half years being tended to by a score of doctors and nurses and it saved my life. It’s given me time to really examine their profession and the the abilities they have to save lives. Todays post will introduce odd facts and historical information where the roots of our current medical treatments began. Some of it is a little strange and also a little frightening but that’s how we’ve learned the skills being used today.
- The first image of the doctors stitching up a wound can be found on the Edwin Smith Papyrus (1600 B.C.).
- Ancient Egyptian medicine was considered so advanced that the rulers of neighboring kingdoms would often bribe, cajole, or even send someone to kidnap the Pharaoh’s best doctors.
- The 3000-year-old “Ebers Papyrus” was written on a 65 foot long scroll and describes treatments for the eyes, skin, extremities, and organs. It also lists medicinal plants such as mustard, saffron, onions, garlic, thyme, sesame, caraway, and poppy seed, and offers more than 800 recipes for their use.
- The Egyptians used opium as crude forms of anesthesia when operating on patients. They also created a milder painkiller by mixing water with vinegar and adding ground Memphite stone. The resulting “laughing gas” was inhaled.
- The first known surgery for cataracts was performed in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in about A.D. 100.
- A collection of 37 surgical instruments is engraved on the wall in the Egyptian Temple of Kom-Ombo (2d century B.C.). Some show amazing similarities to modern surgical instruments and includes scalpels, scissors, needles, forceps, lancets, hooks, and pincers.
- The original Hippocratic Oath was written by a school of philosophers known as the Pythagoreans and was actually a reaction against the writings of Hippocrates. The Pythagoreans were conservative and even backward looking in many ways forbidding many medical practices, including the surgery.
- The Romans considered cabbage to be a magically protective food. The philosopher Cato wrote that Romans should not only eat cabbage at every meal, but also drink the urine of someone who’d eaten cabbage two days before.
- In both ancient Greece and Rome, doctors didn’t need licenses or any formal training to practice. Anyone could call himself a doctor. If his methods worked, he attracted more patients, if not, he found himself another job.
- Most Roman surgical instruments were made of bronze, or occasionally of silver. Iron was considered taboo by both Greeks and Romans and was never used for surgical instruments on religious grounds.
I’M FEELING BETTER ALREADY . . . HOW ABOUT YOU.
I thought today I would offer up a short quiz on Food. I was motivated by spending a few hours yesterday with my better-half making some of our good old down-home hot salsa with many of the ingredients coming from our garden. I sliced and diced veggies until my hands cramped but as always it was well worth the effort. The end result was 21 pints and three quarts of killer hot salsa. We’ve spent years creating and adjusting the recipe and we make a batch every Fall for our own use and gifts for family and friends during the holidays. As always the answers to this quiz will be listed below. Let’s see how you do.
1. What breakfast food gets its name from the German word for “stirrup?”
2. What drink is named for the wormwood plant?
3. What two spices are derived from the fruit of the nutmeg tree?
4. What product was introduced in Japanese supermarkets after a survey showed half the country’s young people weren’t able to use chopsticks?
5. What flavor ice cream did Dolly Madison serve at the inaugural festivities in 1812?
6. What did the homesick alien get drunk on in Steven Spielberg’s hit film from 1982, E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial?
7. What popular treat did 11-year-old Frank Epperson accidentally invent in 1905 and then patent in 1924?
8. What favorite recipe of her and her husbands did First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy have taped to the wall in the White House kitchen?
9. What popular soft drink contained the drug lithium-now available only by prescription-when it will was introduced in 1929?
10. What food product is named after Hannibal’s brother Mago?
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Answers
Bagel, Vermouth, Nutmeg & Mace, Trainer Chopsticks, Strawberry, Coors Beer, The Popsicle, The Daiquiri, 7-Up, Mayonnaise.
I ONLY MANAGED FOUR CORRECT
I sat for a while this morning (Sunday) trying to decide what to post. With the NFL season “kicking off” I’m being constantly distracted by my football insane better-half. She’s wearing a different jersey for each of the games she intends to watch on three TV’s in three different rooms of the house. All the while giving me a steady stream of narrative on teams that I could care less about. So my solution is to calm down, put on my noise cancelling headset, and read some poems written by some young upcoming poets. Enjoy them and then you can return to all of the football insanity.
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By Jackson O’Donnell, Age 8
The clouds float by
with eaglets watching
by and by
Really watching.
They must think that they are kings
Those funny little bald things.
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By Mona Thomas, Age 11
A little white mouse
Playing upon a sun beam
Then sliding back down.
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By Philip McIntyre Junior, Age 12
I see a rabbit drinking at a stream,
I know it wants to run from me, tense
as it may seem,
But some unknown force makes it stay
right there and sit,
The same curiosity that makes me keep
watching it.
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By Maura Copeland, Age 10
The heat of yesterday transformed the city into
A kingdom of clouds.
The skyscraper pierced the fog
looking like temples of an ancient land.
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GO STEELERS & BUCS
Are there any wanna-be botanists out there? If so, todays post should really interest you. Finding interesting trivia about plants was a serious challenge but I’ve had some success. Here are twenty items you never knew about plants and botany. Here we go . . .
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- At 167 calories per 3.5 ounces, avocados have the highest number of calories of any fruit.
- The foxglove plant can help prevent congestive heart failure.
- The cellulose in celery (mostly in its stringy fibers) is impossible for humans to digest. Most of the celery passes right through your digestive tract.
- Juniper berries smell so strongly of evergreen trees that they have been chewed as a breath freshener.
- Orchids have the smallest seeds. It takes more than 1.25 million seeds to weigh one gram.
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- Oak trees do not have acorns until they are 50 years old or older.
- Pollen is considered the “male” part of a plants reproductive system.
- The greens, you see covering ponds might actually be a carpet of duckweed – the smallest plant with a complete root, stem, and leaf structure.
- Cayenne pepper stimulates the appetite, as do the herbs dill, celery, dandelion, caraway, anise, garlic, leek, mint, tarragon, saffron, and parsley.
- The word “herb” is from the old Sanskrit word bharb, meaning “to eat”.
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- A lemon will lose 20% of its vitamin C content after being left at room temperature for eight hours, or in the refrigerator for 24 hours.
- The eggplant is a member of the nightshade family, along with the potato and tomato.
- An uncooked apple is 84% water.
- If you wash an area of skin that has been exposed to poison ivy within 3 min. after exposure, the chemical urushhiol does not have time to penetrate the skin.
- The herb peony, when dried and chewed, can help heal a cold sore.
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- A banana is technically an herb because it grows on dense, waterfilled leaf stalks that die after the first fruit is produced. Botanists call the banana plant a herbaceous perennial.
- Bananas are one of the easiest fruits to digest and trigger very few allergies. This is why they are an ideal food for babies.
- It takes a coffee bean plant five years to yield consumable fruit.
- The most widely cultivated and extensively used nut in the world is the almond.
- Plant life in the oceans makes up 85% of all the greenery on earth.
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FOR ALL OF YOU GARDENERS OUT THERE
I’m what most of you crazy avid sports fans would call a “fair weather fan”. I confess to that description to a certain degree. Only one sport has ever been all-consuming for me and that is baseball. I spent the better part of my youth playing baseball in Little League, high school teams, American Legion teams, and one local semi-pro team. Playing baseball was my life. Being on the field and playing was heaven for me but it has made watching modern baseball absolute torture. I was never bored while I was playing but watching it now is painful.
Todays blog will return me to those early years of baseball and will test those of you super-fans who have knowledge of the history of the sport. Here are some nicknames of well-known players from the past. Lets see how you do! As always the answers will be listed below.
WHO?
High Pockets
The Iron Horse
Goose
Little Poison
Three Fingered
Gabby
Bucky
Rube
The Trojan
Lippy
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Answers
George Kelly, Lou Gehrig, Leon Goslin, Lloyd James Warner, Mordecai Peter Brown, Charles Leo Hartnett, Stanley Raymond Harris, George Edward Waddell, John Joseph Evers, and Leo Durocher.
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TOUGHER THAN I THOUGHT – I HAD 4 CORRECT
(GO PIRATES)
This blog is titled Every Useless Thing and I’m feeling today that you all must certainly need a huge dose of useless information. Just when I thought I’ve heard the weirdest s**t possible I just keep finding more and more and more. After all the years of my doing trivia it still amazes me how often I find things that boggle my mind. Let’s see if that will happen to you today.
- The waist produced by a single chicken in its lifetime could supply enough electricity to run a 100 watt bulb for five hours.
- The odds of being struck by lightning are one in 10 million.
- Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
- In 1992 convicted killer Robert Alton Harris stated just before entering the gas chamber: “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper.”
- The highest score ever achieved for one word in a Scrabble competition was 392 for the word caziques down two triple-word scores.
- Mike Love, Pancho Villa, and Zsa Zsa Gabor were each married nine times.
- Groucho Marx ate his first bagel at the age of 81..
- Harrison Ford’s first film role was as a bellboy and his only line was “Paging Mr. Ellis”. Ellis was played by James Coburn.
- Click Eastwood, Yasser Arafat, Elizabeth Taylor, Patrick Swayze, Sting, Luciana Pavarotti, Rowan Atkinson, and Ted Kennedy all survived plane crashes.
- The odds of being killed in a road accident are one in 15,800.
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One of My Favorite Bands
The rock group 3 Dog Night obtained their name from an old Australian saying. “On a freezing night in the outback, a man would need to sleep with one dog to keep warm on a cold night, two dogs on a very cold night and three dogs on the coldest night.”
NOW YOU KNOW
I really hate to admit this, I’ve turned into a raging paranoic. I’ve blogged many times about fake and biased news and while it’s being addressed nationally these days, a lot of everyday folks love believing everything they read or hear. Today’s blog is a list of random nonsense being spoken of by good old ordinary Americans who obviously don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. It scares me a little because the more you tell a lie the more likely it is that some of the boneheads you’re telling believe it without question. I can’t do anything to stop that but I’ll certainly point out some strange shit that I’ve been seeing and hearing recently.
- More than 1% of the US population is currently in jail. FALSE
- Aspirin was originally invented to treat erectile dysfunction. FALSE
- Left-handed people live an average of nine years longer than right-handed people. FALSE
- Legendary children’s show host Mr. Rogers was once a Marine sniper with thousands of killed under his belt. FALSE
- Despite being a common joke today, Robin never actually says Holy Cow (or Toledo)Batman during any episodes. FALSE
- The planet Mercury is the hottest planet in the solar system. FALSE
- If we removed every boat, ship, and submarine from the oceans, sea level would fall about 6 inches. FALSE
- The popular online rumor suggests that hippopotamus milk is pink. FALSE
- The word FUCK was once said over 1000 times in one movie. FALSE
- Humans are the only animals on earth to perform oral sex on each other. FALSE
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And my favorite FAKE news:
I’M CALLED BIG JOHN FOR ONLY ONE REASON!
(Figure it out . . .)
I thought today since its rather comfortable and cool I should leisurely look through my archives for a few dirty jokes to make you smile. We are expecting a rather nasty heat wave heading our way and I won’t be smiling much longer. Also, these are really just off-color jokes rather than the plain old filthy and dirty jokes I’ve posted previously.
A boy was walking down the street when he noticed his grandpa sitting on his porch in his favorite rocking chair with nothing on from the waist down. “Grandpa, what the hell are you doing?”, he asked. The old man looked off in the distance and didn’t answer him. “Grandpa, what are you doing sitting here naked below the waist?, he asked once again. The old man slowly looked at him and said, “Well, last week I sat out here with no shirt on, and I got a really stiff neck. This was your grandma’s idea.”
Q. What’s the difference between your wages and a penis?
A. You don’t have to beg your girlfriend to blow your wages.
A wife went to see her therapist and said, “I’ve got a big problem, Doctor.” Every time we’re in bed and my husband has an orgasm, he lets out an earsplitting yell.” My dear, the shrink said, “that’s completely natural. I don’t see what the problem is.” The problem is dammit, it keeps waking me up.”
There are three girls, and their boyfriends who all have the same name. So in order to keep them from getting confused, they decided to give their boyfriends nicknames. The first stated, “I call my man Seven Up.” They asked her, “Why do you call your man that?” She says, “Because he has 7 inches and it’s always up.” They then asked the second girl what she calls her man. She says, “I call my man Mountain Dew.” Why on earth do you call him that?” She says, Because he likes to mount and do me.” They then asked the third girl the same question and she replied, “I like to call my man Jack Daniels.” They look at her in a puzzled way, Why do you call your man that? Jack Daniels is a hard liquor!” She stated emphatically, “EXACTLY!”
THE WORD OF THE DAY IS LEGS
Spread the word!!
Why is it that most married men after a time pray for, “silence”. I can honesty say that I’ve never heard a woman demanding “silence” unless it’s to give them a way to interrupt my conversation. Standup comics have made it a part of their monologues on a number of occasions so maybe it’s just a male thing. I’ve always whined about my need for peace and quiet but never realized I was not alone in that. Today I offer up the thoughts of many so-called famous people on how they feel about “silence”.
- He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life: but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction. Proverbs 13:3
- Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. George Bernard Shaw
- Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt. Abraham Lincoln
- Speech is silver, silence is golden. French proverb
- If a word be worth one shekel, silence is worth two. Hebrew proverb
- Silence is also speech. Yiddish proverb
- Silence is the ultimate weapon of power. Charles de Gaulle
- Keep quiet and people will think you are a philosopher. Latin proverb
- He has the gift of quiet. John le Carre
- He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue. Abraham Lincoln
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WITH ALL DUE RESPECT
SHUT THE HELL UP
everyuselessthing.com 