Things I learned while looking up other things, 2023.08.11
Dear friends,
I was lucky enough to see The Mountain Goats the other day here in Portland (and doubly-lucky to be able to do so with my kid). We got there early to get a seat on the steps, and while waiting for the show to start we invented a new concert game!
It works like this: first, you create a new playlist on your preferred music playlist site. Then you watch the crowd, and every time you see a t-shirt for a band that is NOT the band you're there to see, you add the first song that comes up for that band to the playlist. Here's just a sample of the one we made:
The whole playlist turned out over two hours long; for the dataheads among you, the only band/performers we saw more than one t-shirt for were David Bowie (understandable; the GOAT) and The Front Bottoms (who had just played a show in Portland a few days earlier). There were a couple of false alarms when t-shirts we thought were for unknown jam bands turned out to be for microbreweries, and deciphering the sunn O))) t-shirt took some squinting, but otherwise it absolutely was a better use of our phone batteries than the alternatives. It's kind of like an extremely manual recommendation engine ("people who like The Mountain Goats ALSO listen to ...").
I was looking up names of heresies (long story) and found this absolute banger of a belief system: "it is a mortal sin to read a book to console one's soul". (I never thought I would sympathize with the Inquisition, but I would have persecuted the heck out of that nonsense.)
The Perfect Sentences newsletter from Ingrid Burrington is definitely worth a follow (and kick in a few bucks if you can). I think the sentence "He procured almost all the beavers from Gerhard Schwab, a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.”" is almost up to Ingrid's standard. It's definitely an entry for the (sadly, no longer updated) Rosa Parks of Blogs.
A highly necessary word that we should borrow into English immediately: "Another ubiquitous ritual is lördagsgodis, which foreigners in Sweden eventually decipher as: “an assortment of lollies collected from the supermarket pick-n-mix stand specifically on a Saturday”."
"One popular remedy for toothache and cavities, recorded around 48 CE by Roman physician Scribonius Largus in his De compositione medicamentorum liber, was fumigation of the mouth with smoked henbane seeds." The rest of that article is EXTREMELY disturbing/disgusting, so please be warned. (From the henbane Wikipedia page: "The origins of the word are unclear, but "hen" probably originally meant death rather than referring to chickens.")
Here's wishing that all your 'hen' references be to chickens.
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin