Occasional Notes

A brief historical note:

Matches were invented in 1827 by John Walker, a pharmacist. He called them "sulphuretted peroxide strikeables" and his version of them were a yard long. Not quite as helpful as they could be. Fortunately, his invention was very quickly stolen by Samuel Jones of the Strand, who first sold it as a "Lucifer" in 1829.

Lucifer matches stuck around for a while. There was a British song through both World Wars that went:

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.
While you've got a Lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that's the style.

Lucifer matches, however, contained poisonous phosphorus and a sugar preservative and several children died a year from sucking on them.

So now you know.

Last night, mcee and I joined my family in what was essentially Christmas Dinner Redux -- one of my mother's friends came over and, given that we had two guests for dinner, my mother felt that was reason enough to roast chickens and make stuffing and candied yams and beets and things. As well, much wine was consumed.

After kitchen cleanup, mcee and I retreated to my room where we gave our collective geek a good workout. We played internet for a while, then read up to "N" on the Wikipedia list of common latin phrases and their english translations. After that, we watched the Buffy musical episode.

Now there will be diner breakfast, King Kong, and laying in supplies for tonight. The supplies will consist of:
- wine
- bread
- cheese
- cake
- fresh ginger root
- movies

I wish everyone an enjoyable last day of 2005!

Also, although I never realised it before just now, I think that Liam Neeson has always been the voice of Aslan in my head.

In other news, I have a gym presentation today. My partner and I are organising the class to play a simple game involving beanbags and hula hoops. Of course, because both my partner and myself are the sort of people who like to take simple things and make them very, very, very complicated for ourselves, we decided to recast the game as a little bit The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and have made up signs (Whoville, population: 37) and cards with candycanes in them and a number of other crafty things that set the scene.

Also, I bought new sweatpants to wear to present in so that I will be pretty.

In other other news, the Oxford English Dictionary word of the day is "lob" -- generally, to toss something or something heavy, clumsy, or loosely pendulous, believed to perhaps be onomatopoeic in origin.

More history of little things:

The first English language dictionary was written in 1604 by Robert Cawdrey, who titled his book A Table Alphabeticall. The book was styled after the translation guides published for travellers, which translated English to French or Italian or Spanish or what have you. Cawdrey's book translated English into plain English and was intended to help people master the influx of fancy Latin, Greek, French, etc. words into the English language.

The Table Alphabeticall consisted of 2543 words. The first word of the table was Abandon, which Cawdrey defined as "cast away, or yeelde vp, to leaue or forsake." There were no entries for J, K, U, W, X, or Y.

I had always thought that whole "information superhighway" thing was probably just something that kids told their grandparents so that they never had to confess that the internet was really all porn and online shopping...for porn.

This evening, however, I needed to know the date of Whit Sunday and Monday in 1885. Stead, bless his heart, figured that saying "I commenced my investigation on the Saturday before Whit Sunday" was good enough.

So I opened up google.ca and punched in "Whit Sunday 1885," and lo and behold: In 1885, Whit Sunday fell on May 24th.

The Internet: Not Just Porn
(But Mostly)