All posts by V.O.C.

Wishbone First Used to Make Wishes?

February 18, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

People have been making wishes on a wishbone (the furcula, the v-shaped clavicle of a bird) for at least 2,400 years.

The custom began with the Etruscans, people who lived in what is now Italy, between the Tiber and Arno Rivers. They believed that fowl could tell the future. They would draw a circle on the ground, divide it into 24 segments (for the letters of their alphabet), and scatter corn in the circle. The order of the letters selected by corn pecking would give them a message that was interpreted by the priests.

When one of the sacred birds died, it’s wishbone would be saved and dried. Wishes would be made while stroking the bone. The Romans adopted this superstition because there wasn’t anyone on tumblr back then to complain about cultural appropriation.

The Romans brought the tradition to Britain. At some point after stealing it from one culture and before imposing it on another, they began having two people each tug on a side to break the bone, with good luck (a granted wish) going to the one holding the larger part.

The wishbone, or merrythought, as it was also called, was a well-established ritual by the time the Pilgrims came to America. According to tradition, wishes were made on wishbones during the first Thanksgiving in 1621.

It has been speculated that the furcula was chosen as the bone that would carry the mystic powers of the bird because the forked shape reminded them of the human crotch. Or maybe the priests thought, one wishbone per bird = market scarcity = higher prices.

Technology

First Telephone Book?

February 17, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

The first publication of telephone numbers – it was hardly a book, it only contained 50 names and was a single cardboard page – was printed on February 21, 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut by the New Haven District Telephone Company. The page did not include telephone numbers, it was really just a list of who could be contacted by phone. This was just two years after Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone

Here’s the list of early technology adopters.

Although there were earlier lists that showed phone companies’ business subscribers, this is considered the first phone book because it also lists individuals who had phone service.

Later that year, the New Haven Connecticut phone company published another phone book. This time it was 20 pages and listed 391 telephone subscribers. It also provided information about how to make and receive calls. All calls were limited to 3 minutes were not private. There were still no phone numbers listed, all calls had to be connected through the operator.
There is one known copy of this second phone book It was put up for auction at Christie’s in 2008. They had anticipated a selling price of $30,000 to $40,000. It sold for $170,500.

Civil Rights, Politics

End of South African Apartheid?

February 11, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

Between 1948 and 1994, South Africa was governed by the National Party. The government used laws to maintain a segregation of the country’s black and white citizens. This allowed the minority whites to keep the majority blacks at a political, economical, and social disadvantage.

Inter-racial marriage between whites and other races was illegal. Black-owned businesses were restricted as to where they could operate. There were separate “black” and “white” buses. Even hospitals and ambulances were segregated. When non-whites went into white-controlled areas, they were required to carry papers with their fingerprints, photo, and identification information.

There were protests against apartheid throughout this time. Protesters could be locked up, whipped or fined. One of these activists, Nelson Mandela, was arrested in 1962 and was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor – he was forced to work in a limestone quarry. Inspite of having very limited contact with the outside world, he was only allowed one visitor every six months, he became the best known representative of the anti-apartheid movement. He ended up spending 27 years in prison before being released in 1990.

After his release, Mandela traveled and spoke in several countries, gaining international support for the end of apartheid. The final stop in his world tour was before the U.S. Congress. He was only the third private citizen to address Congress.

South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk and Mandela worked together to end apartheid. On April 27 and 28, 1994, black South Africans were allowed to vote in elections for the first time. They elected Nelson Mandela as the country’s first black president. He served from 1994 to 1999.

Nelson Mandela 1918 – 2013, skilled ballroom dancer, lawyer, prisoner, and South African president.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. – Nelson Mandela

Find More Information:
Biography of Nelson Mandela
End of Apartheid

Culture

Story of Winston the Christmas Whale Started?

February 8, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

The story of Winston the Whale dates back to the 1800’s, where young children would ask of the merfolk, who were once well acquainted with the land dwellers. The merfolk then told them what they tell their young: The story of Winston the Whale.

Winston’s story is a bit long, but the shortened version is that while the reindeer could fly, they could not swim, and Santa had no way to take the gifts to the merfolk. As he sat on the beach worried for those young mer-children and how sad they would be finding no presents left for them, a whale arose a short distance from the shore, asking what ailed Santa so. Once explained, Winston offered to help, but he could not hold his breath forever. Santa accepted, and with the help of magic, he was able to hold his breath twice as long! He would store the gifts, in his mouth as Santa, who could in fact breath underwater himself, rode him to deliver the mer-children’s gifts.

Today, Winston is still a well known figure for Christmas, bringing ocean themed gifts to the children of the land every year.

Also to good little piglets, because let’s face it, they’re all way cuter than most human children.

Culture, Nature

House Cat Domesticated?

February 5, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

Have they been domesticated? I’ve had several cats during my life (I now live with three) and they all varied in the amount of what I would consider domestication. They all have seemed quite happy to have us around while still maintaining an air of being willing to do without us if we lost our usefulness.

Scientists from archaeologists to geneticists are looking for information that will help give us a better idea of when was the time that cats decided we were worth keeping around. They think that cats have been living with us for at least 9,000 or 10,000 years. Until recently there wasn’t much known about how cats went from kind of, sort of, living with us to cult worship status in Egypt 4,000 years ago.

A 9,500 year old co-burial site with a person and a wild cat was found in Cyprus. In the same area they have also found a sculpted head of what looks like a part cat/part human creature.

Results of a study was published in 2013 that showed that, more recently, cats were living with people in a Neolithic farming village of Quanhucun, China (about 5,300 years ago). If cats weren’t domesticated at that point, at least they were living in a symbiotic relationship with us – eating the vermin that were eating the grain stored by the farmers.

Within the next thousand years they definitely became pets – there’s a picture of a cat with a collar in an Egyptian tomb from around 2500-2350 BC and by 1976-1793 BC they were showing up frequently in Egyptian art.

Read or listen to a fictional story about how cats came to live with people, “The Cat Who Walked by Himself” by Rudyard Kipling.

Find out about different cat breeds.

Thinking about adopting a pet? Search for U.S. animal shelter pets to adopt.

Nature

Last Ice Age?

January 28, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

Ice Age: Continental Drift was released July 13, 2012, but Ice Age 5 is expect out in 2016.

If you’re asking about the geological period called an “ice age”, the most recent one is going on now, but there’s no need to run out and find a tauntaun to climb into. The term “ice age” refers to a period when there are polar ice caps. The current one began about 110,000 years ago and for the past 11,000 years we have been in an interglacial period.

The Last Glacial Maximum was about 20,000 years ago when ice covered around 10 million square miles of the Earth. Glaciers covered all of Canada and parts of the U.S. In Europe ice came down as far as the British Isles.

There have been at least five major ice ages but for most of Earth’s history, the poles have not been covered in ice, and glaciers were only at high altitudes (alpine glaciers).

There was a period from the late 1300s until around 1850 that is known as the “Little Ice Age”. It brought colder winters and cooler, wetter summers. It has been blamed for famines, plagues, and general human stupidity (witch hunts, war, riots, and the French Revolution).

The interglacial period is usually about 10,000 and it’s been longer than that, does that mean Winter Is Coming? Yes, but we have thousands, even tens of thousands, of years to prepare for it.
Find more about the Little Ice Age from History.com.

Politics, Religion

Riot Act?

January 27, 2015 V.O.C. Leave a comment

What is the riot act? Did your mother ever say, “If you come home past curfew, your father is going to read you the riot act!”? Or a friend said, “Remember that time we sneaked a goat into the teachers lounge? The principal sure read us the riot act.”?

Now it usually is used to mean a harsh scolding that enumerates all your current misdeeds. If you also get a list of everything you’ve done wrong in forever, that means you’ve married a wife with an excellent memory.

Where did this come from? Well, in 1714 the British Parliament passed a law that would allow the local constabulary to disperse a crowd of 12 or more people in order to prevent “tumults and riotous assemblies”. First they would be read a proclamation that they must break up the group, within an hour, on pain of death.

Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!

The riots were serious business. It was a clash of politics and religion – the Whigs vs. the Tories. At that time, the Whigs were Scottish Presbyterians and the Tories were Irish Catholics. The Whigs were wanted primacy of Parliament over the King and the Tories said, “That will only happen on opposite day, and that’s not today!” (That quotation of the Tories may not be exactly, completely, historically accurate. Feel free to disregard that and just assume they said something boring about wanting the King to be over Parliament.)

Have you noticed that the difference between Riot Act and Patriot Act is just one little “pat”? Probably the one they give you going through airport security.

If you want to read the text of the Riot Act, you may do so on Project Gutenberg. If that’s too tl;dr for you, you can listen to it on LibriVox.

You can find a lot more about Whigs and Tories on this George Mason University page, Historical Outline of Restoration and 18th Century British Literature.

Instead of posting a picture of a riot, I posted a field of flowers. You’re welcome.