Palm trees

Palm trees are a feature of pretty much every tropical vacation you can imagine, every wonder how they got there? Palm trees are particularly well adapted to where they live, the beach. Coconuts not only float they have their own internal water source. If you've ever had coconut water you are drinking baby coconut food. Through out history coconuts have been traveling hundreds of miles across oceans to be transplanted on various beaches. Where, if the climate is right, they sprout roots and voila, palm tree.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palm_trees.jpg

Curacao Liqueur

So you have sensed a theme with my last entry have you? I decided that while I'm on my articles will be themed, having to do with my vacation. So how did a liqueur get named after a place? In the late 1400's when the Spanish colonized Curacao one of their many plans for using the island was to grow their beautiful sweet oranges. Little did they know the oranges had another plan. The climate and soil were not good for the plant, the oranges that grew were evil tasting bitter tiny oranges and were abandoned. Not even the islands burgeoning goat population would touch them. At some point in the 1800's someone figured out that even though the oranges sucked the orange skins contained a lot of sweet oil and that when soaked in alcohol (because if it tastes good, lets face it, someone has soaked it in alcohol) thye made curacao liqueur. This alcohol is naturally clear but the company decided their product needed to look more tropical so it is often colored blue or orange.

Who started vacations?

I'm headed to Curacao for a week and so I decided to do some research on the history of vacation in the United States. Who was the brilliant person who came up with this concept of sunshine and laziness. Their isn't really an answer to this. The idea evolved over time and highly religious early america had a love hate relationship with the idea. Originally vacation meant the time where teachers and students were not at school. AKA vacating the school. People would take this time to do other things, often work. By the mid 1800's people start noticing that stress is doing bad things to business men. Doctors start proscribing vacations for peoples health, only people with money can really do this though. With the dawn of the automobile and trains people start thinking about taking farther trips for themselves. Trains companies realize that they can get more business by building hotels at one end of their line. Some religious people are still worried about the idleness of vacation at this time and so some christian groups run hotels offering far fewer temptations, no smoking or drinking and so on. As transportation improved and infrastructure arose vacationing evolved into what it is today.

Ridiculous yet dignified: Graduation regalia

Graduation regalia began in the 1100 and 1200's  when universitys began to form up across Europe. The only job at this time that required a degree was the Clergy. So the regalia was modeled after the typical robes of the clergy which made up a large section of scholars. From the mid 1300's onward colleges many colleges began regulating what their students could and could not wear, gowns became even more standardized. It was not until the late 1800's and only in the United States that specific cut, color, and details were standardized by most colleges to indicate very specific things such as area of study. The caps, also called mortarboards because they resemble the boards masons hold mortar on came into the picture in the 1400's. In many colleges it was against the rule to wear hats so instead students took up caps and mortarboards, originally mortarboards were only for doctorate students and signified their position as a teacher.

Your neighborhood beer drinking mamals

If any of you have ever left a beer outside and seen your neighborhood wild life lumber over and lap it up you probably know of skunks secret love for alcohol. But I'm lying, this is not a literal phrase. Though I have seen a cat lick up almost an entire bottle of wine and proceed to sort of role down the attic stairs.

Why do we say drunk as a skunk? Probably because drunk only rhymes with 16 other frequently used English words and the only other one that makes sense is monk, and that saying already exists. Also people don't like it when you make fun of religious figures. Another possible reason, it sounds better than stinking drunk and has the same connotation.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KOAK_Midsummer_2011_Le_Pew.JPG

How did Humpty Dumpty get on the wall anyways?

The nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty was first recorded by Lewis Caroll for his book "Alice Through The Looking Glass. In the 1500's Humpty Dumpty was a not very nice nick name used to refer to overweight people. It only makes sense that in his book for children a heavy person might be imagined as an egg. So who was Humpty Dumpty? Is this just nonsense? This is another one of those mysteries that is lost to history, but their are some fun theories.

Humpty Dumpty might be Charles I, calling him "large" could be a way of poking fun at an unpopular king. He was deposed by the Puritan, Oliver Cromwell and fell from power. Those still loyal to him could not restore his power and he was executed in 1649.

The theory I like best is that Humpty Dumpty might be a cannon. During the second British Civil war Colchester was suring up its defenses. One of the churches referred to as "St. Mary's by the Wall" had a tower and was well placed for defense of said wall. Many cities at this time were walled against attack. So the men of the town managed to lug a gigantic cannon ( as all canons were at the time) to the top of the church tower. This is our mysterious Humpty Dumpty, the very chubby cannon. During the assault on Colchester the cannon was fired into the enemy's lines, naturally causing the enemy to fire back. The tower was very damaged causing the cannon to fall from the roof. The cannon was very damaged, as things are wont to be when they fall three stories and could not be returned to working order. Later Colcheseter was forced to surrender and open their gates

swimming in the buff

Until the mid 1800's men swum pretty much entirely in the buff. Their were a few countries such as japan where men wore bottoms to swim, but places like England men swam naked. In the mid 1800s swim trunks that looked similar to the ones worn today appeared, though slightly shorter. Despite the new swim clothes men bathed naked in London right into the beginning of the 1900s when swimming in coed  groups was popularized. Swimsuits were originally made out of stretched wool, because it absorbed less water than many other fabrics. For a short time some swimsuits were made out of rubber and then nylon took over in the late 1930s. In the early 1900s men wore swimsuits that went all the way from elbow to knee, these suits lost their arms first and then the top began to shrink back down, completely disappearing and leaving men with swim short that they started with. With the fabric shortage during WWI and II trunks got even shorter In the mid 1950's modern swimsuit fabrics were introduced to the market. In the 1960s the Australian company Speedo created the smallest of all, the brand became a synechdoche for all swim bottoms of this style. The hippies revived swim suits that had tops and tried pretty much everything. In the 1990's board shorts were popularized. Loose and long these are still the prefered style for men in the U.S.A

1860's painting of mens swimwear, Frédéric Bazille’s Summer Scene 1869, Oil on canvas Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

1880s swimwear

men in 1910

1920s

We all scream for waffles!

Many people claim to have invented the ice cream cone. The idea for an ice cream cone like food had been around since the 1700s but the form we know today was probably popularized at the 1904 worlds fair. At least five people at the St. Louis fair claim to have come up with the idea at the fair, many of them later became the heads of ice cream cone companies, and also reprted that the idea was shared among the vendors at the fair. Many of the men who claimed invention were from the middle east. The cone was made from zalabia, not waffles, in these stories, a pizzelle like wafer. An American man and his brother also claim to have begun the fad when they saw a lady wrap ice cream in a waffle so she could eat it in a more dainty way than licking it out of a glass. They then began molding waffles on cone shaped tool used with tent ropes.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eiswaffeln_2008_PD_1.JPG

The original sky door: Make the bad men fly

Defenestrate is a word I would like to use in my every day life. It is a verb meaning to throw out a window, most often referring to a person. I have only ever heard this word twice. Once when learning about the Defenestrations of Prague, and one in reference to a spell in dungeons and dragons. Of course if anyone is going to pick up on an amazing obscure vocabulary word it is going to be those guys. So how does a word like this come to exists? It appears to have been created specifically for the second Defenestration of Prague as a historic event. The Emperor had guaranteed the protestants of Bohemia freedom to practice their religion. When two protestant church constructions were shut down by Roman Catholic officials the people were upset. The men who were set by the Emperor to protect protestant rights called a meeting in Prague. The two men found responsible for stopping construction were tried and found guilty of defying the emperors law, and along with their secretary were ejected from the third story window of Hradčany castle where the meeting was held. After falling 70 feet all three men survived. The Catholics claimed the virgin Mary and the Angels rescued them and the Protestants claimed it was because they landed in a pile of horse poo. This took place in 1618 and was involved in the beginning of the 30 years war. The first know written account including this word is from 1620 in a collection of letter. The Latin routes make sense, conveying the words meaning perfectly, de-- down from, fenestra-- window.

 Hradčany castle in Prague, site of second Defenestration of Prague
 DigitalExtropyCreative Commons Attribution 3.0

Peeing on Plants

Ancient Egyptians in the 1350s were the first to record a pregnancy test that had a basis in science. A papyrus from the time describes how an expectant woman could pee on a barley and wheat seed over a series of days and if it grew then the woman was pregnant. It is possible that higher levels of estrogen in the urine of pregnant women encouraged plant growth. In 1963, a study was done to test this method. the study found that about 70 percent of the time pregnant women's urine caused plants to show growth while men's and non pregnant women's urine did not. If you are interested in the study you can find it here.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034829/?page=2

Cheerleading practice: no girls allowed!

Cheer leading began in the late 1800s as a males only activity. The young men attending sports games yelled organized cheers from the bleachers. A few years later a Princeton graduate moved to the university of Minnesota and started organized cheering there. Princeton announced three official cheer leaders in 1987, they were all men. Eventually an area of the bleachers was designated for cheer leaders. Women began joining cheer leading in the 1920s. During World War I and II, when large numbers of men were away at war, women became the primary cheer leaders. When men returned from war, their was a push to ban women from cheer leading at many schools. People argues that it was too masculine of a sport for women and promoted male qualities such as a loud voice and harsh language. The women were not daunted and continued to participate in cheer leading. Because of the feminine stereotype cheer leading had been changed from masculine and gallant to cute and feminine so many men left the sport. Throughout the rest of the 20th century cheer leading became progressively more dance oriented and in the 1980s ever more dangerous elements of gymnastics were incorporated.

How macho are your high heels?

I have met very few men who would be caught dead wearing heels, even if they are willing many profess the improbability of being able to walk in them at all without practice. Heel's started off with functionality in mind, but they weren't for walking. Small heels on the back of one's shoe were perfect for staying steady in stirrups. These heels made it much easier to stand and shoot a bow from horseback. European men and a few women adopted these heels for multiple reasons, they made one taller, they were a fad, but most of all they were not functional. The ability to wear frivolous footwear conveyed  status. In fact one of the men most well known for his stylish high heels was King Louis XIV. He was so obsessed with the shoes as a status symbol that he made it a law that only nobility could wear red heeled high heels. The shoes were completely impractical in the muddy streets of the time period. Women adopted high heels more popularly in the 1630s when they began adding masculine elements to their clothing.

What was an explosion?

The word explosion comes from the Latin explosio— the act of driving off by clapping. (this only makes me think that Monty Python must have known this) The first recorded use of the word in English takes place in the Glossographia in 1665; the word is defined as meaning “ a casting off or rejecting, a hissing a thing out.” The definitions of scorn or driving away with a loud noise are the only usages until the mid 1700s. The first time explosion is used to refer to something blowing up is in 1762 when the definition changed to,  “The action of ‘going off’ with a loud noise under the influence of suddenly developed internal energy; an instance of this; also used of electric discharges. Of a boiler, bomb, gun, etc.: The action of suddenly bursting or flying in pieces from a similar cause.” Oxford English Dictionary and Miriam Webster

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AIM-9_explodes_F-89_ground_target_1979.jpeg

Where did Memorial Day come from?

The origins of Memorial Day are a little hazy, more than 20 places claim the original Memorial Day occurred in their area. They all agree that is was to honor the fallen from the civil war. In 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress declared Waterloo, New York, held the original Memorial Day on May 5^th 1866. (Notice that would have made it the centennial)  Originally called Decoration Day, Memorial Day was to honor Civil War soldiers by decorating their graves. Some places in the South used the day to honor confederate soldiers specifically, or held a separate day just for them, but it was more widely used to honor soldiers from both sides. Virginia still calls the last Monday in May “Confederate Memorial Day”. Some time after World War I the day was extended to honor soldiers from all wars. In 1971, the day was declared as a national holiday. Why the last Monday in May? Many people suspect this date was chosen because flowers would be blooming all over the United States. In 2000, congress created an act encouraging all Americans “to pause at 3:00 pm on Memorial Day and hold a minute of silence to remember and honor those who have died in service to the nation.”

http://www.va.gov/opa/speceven/memday/history.asp?utm_source=3birds&utm_medium=Web&utm_campaign=AUBURNVW_Fun+Facts+About+Memorial+Day