What Would Jimmy Do?

Yesterday we talked about the “invention” of the sandwich. What could make the sandwich even better? Sliced bread, of course.  
Bread has been being baked in some form for maybe 30,000 years — but sliced bread has only been around since the early 20th century. 

Around 1920 most bread was made in people’s kitchens — at home. But by about 1930, the majority of Americans were eating commercially made bread. Those factory produced loaves were designed to be softer than those made at home, because the bread-buying public had come to equate “squeezable softness” with freshness.
So the timing seemed right for an automatic bread slicing machine — the “softer” loaves had become almost impossible to slice neatly at home.

The first automatically sliced commercial loaves were produced in Chillicothe, Missouri. The machine was invented by Otto Rohwedder — an Iowa-born jeweler that lived in Chillicothe. His bread slicer was put into service at his friend Frank Bench’s Chillicothe Baking Company.

Rohwedder’s contraption received a warm welcome in Missouri — the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune ran an article that noted while some people might find sliced bread “startling,” the typical housewife could expect a thrill of pleasure when she first sees a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows. So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possible slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome. 
The article also recounted that “considerable research” had gone into determining the right thickness for each slice— slightly less than half an inch.

Sliced bread didn’t take long to become a hit around the United States, even though some bakers claimed it was just a fad.
One of the first major brands to distribute sliced bread was Wonder — it originally appeared in stores in Indianapolis, where it was manufactured by the Taggart Baking Company. (An executive for the company dreamed up the bread’s name after being “filled with wonder” while watching the International Balloon Race at the Indianapolis Speedway.) The Taggart Company was bought by the Continental Baking Company who sold Wonder bread nationwide.

A note of interest…. during World War II, factory-sliced bread, including Wonder, was briefly banned by the U.S. Government in an effort to conserve resources, such as the paper used to wrap each loaf to help maintain freshness.

We’ve all said, or heard someone say, “the best thing since slice bread.” I guess now would be a good time to explore the origin of that ….
The Chillicothe Baking Company, when advertising it’s sliced bread included the sentence: “The greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” Subsequent advertising in the baking industry compared their developments to the “invention” of sliced bread.
But some sources say the first use of the idiom was in 1952 when Red Skelton said in an interview, “Don’t worry about television. It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Anyhow, if you use that phrase today, you’re probably dating yourself…..
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Most trivia buffs know that the sandwich was invented by someone called the Earl of Sandwich. Who was this genius? And did he really invent the sandwich? And how do you become an Earl of something like a Club or BLT?

Well, as you might imagine, this is all complicated, but here goes….
Let’s get this our of the way right away — Do we call a sandwich a sandwich because of the 4th Earl of Sandwich? Yes. Was he the first person to come up with the idea? Not by a long shot. The truth is, we don’t know who invented the sandwich, but it has existed in various forms for thousands of years.
[One of the earliest known sandwich-eaters was Hillel the Elder, a rabbi and scholar who was born in Babylon and lived in Jerusalem during the first century B.C.]

Flatbreads have a long history in the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. In particular, the idea of rolling bread with a filling is very old in Turkish culture. During the mid-17th century, the 4th Earl of Sandwich traveled to Turkey and other regions in the Ottoman Empire, which may explain where he allegedly got the idea to ask a server to make him a sandwich back in England.

Sandwich is a borough in southeast England. In medieval times, and before, Sandwich was a main port in the county of Kent on the River Stour. Before the river dried up, it was wide and deep enough for big sailing ships. Today those ships have been replaced by smaller craft, but the ancient buildings make Sandwich one of the best preserved medieval towns in England. The name of the town is, most likely, Saxon in origin, and means something like sandy place or the place on the sand. 

But getting back sandwich — the kind we eat. It’s not totally clear why the English politician John Montague, a.k.a. the 4th Earl of Sandwich became the namesake of the food we call a sandwich. I should clarify that hereditary English titles can be confusing. The family of the Earls of Sandwich has no real connection to the town itself — it’s just their title. The 1st Earl, Edward Montagu, originally intended to take the title of the Earl of Portsmouth. So I suppose had he done that, we’d be eating a portsmouth.

Since the 1st Earl decided on the name sandwich, the 4th Earl of Sandwich carried it on — he became a member of the House of Lords, served as Britain’s first Lord of Admiralty (the department of British government that once administered the Royal Navy,) and enjoyed an active social lifestyle. When he wasn’t busy with the affairs of government or his mistress, he loved to spend his time gambling. The story goes that it was during a 24-hour marathon gambling session that the hunger pangs — and world-changing inspiration hit him. Rather than interrupt his gambling, he thought to put some kind of filling between two slices of bread, so he could hold the concoction in one hand and his cards in the other. Some speculate the story may have been a rumor or adverse propaganda put forth by his rivals. But people may have started ordering “the same as Sandwich,” and the name stuck.

The sandwich isn’t the only thing that carried his name — Hawaii was originally knows as the Sandwich Islands. When Captain James Cook landed there, he named them after the 4th Earl, who was his financial sponsor.

Anyhow, after the word sandwich became popular, new words and phrases were needed to describe different types, like Sloppy Joes, Club and of course Peanut Butter and Jelly. The first known recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich appeared in 1901 in The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science & Domestic Economics.

So today the 4th Earl of Sandwich isn’t much remembered for his service in the House of Lords — but he’s certainly left his mark “in-deli-bly” at places like Subway.
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I’m not a particularly big basketball fan, but every year around this time I become more than just a casual spectator. The NCAA basketball tournament, called “March Madness” always gets my attention. 
The tournament that is in progress now originated in 1939, making it almost as old as I am. But the term didn’t become synonymous with the tournament until much later. 

March Madness was originally a high school basketball tournament in Illinois. The University of Illinois’ Huff Gymnasium drew sellout crowds to the high school tournament which started in 1908 and seemed to get bigger every year. 
The Illinois High School Association (IHSA) assistant executive secretary, wrote an essay titled “March Madness” in the Illinois Interscholastic in 1939 to commemorate the tournament. Other publications and news media embraced the term and the tournament continued to thrive in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1973, the IHSA officially started using “March Madness” in its programs and on merchandise. 

In 1982, Brent Musburger used the term “March Madness” when covering the NCAA Tournament for CBS, and it kind of “stuck.” People started using the term to refer to the NCAA Tournament. 
The term “March Madness” was trademarked in 1989 by Charles Besser who worked for Intersport, the company that produced March Madness for TV. For a few years, the NCAA and IHSA both used the phrase “March Madness.” But in 2010 the NCAA paid the IHSA $17.2 million for for exclusive use of the term. 

So every year March Madness pretty much always lives up to its name. If you lose one game then you’re out, so every game has high stakes. The tournament truly captures the spirit of competition, excitement and tradition….
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Today is the first day of spring — specifically, it starts at 5:24 p.m. EDT. That is the exact time for the arrival of the Vernal Equinox (I have a brother-in-law that possibly/probably refers to it as the “First Point of Aries.”) Traditionally, we celebrate the first day of spring on March 21, but astronomers and calendar manufacturers now say that the spring season starts on March 20th, in all time zones in North America. So no matter what the weather may be doing outside, the vernal equinox marks the official start of the spring season.

Vernal translates to “new and “fresh,” and equinox is derived from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night.) So what does that mean? The daylight hours have been getting longer since December — the vernal equinox marks the turning point when daylight begins to win out over darkness. I’ve always heard that on the first day of spring and autumn, the day and night are equal to exactly 12 hours all over the world. But — that’s not true. On the days of the spring and fall equinox, the daylight is actually longer than darkness by several minutes. 

As you probably know, there are a lot of myths and beliefs associated with the equinox….
Maybe the most famous myth is that you can stand a raw egg on end — supposedly due to the Sun’s position in the sky, and its gravitational pull on the Earth, you can stand an egg on end during the precise moment of the vernal equinox. But that’s something you can do any day — providing you have the patience. Equinoxes won’t make it any easier.

One of the more interesting beliefs is that you won’t have a noontime shadow on the day of the equinox. This is technically kind of true, but if you go outside at noon, you’ll see your shadow (assuming the sun is shining.) Since the Sun is always at an angle to you, you always cast a shadow. In order to not cast a shadow, the Sun must be directly overhead, and because the Sun is situated over the equator at the equinox, you’d have to be standing at the equator precisely at noon on the day of the equinox  to not have a shadow.

Some people believe the equinox is a day-long event. Again, not true — it doesn’t take all day, it’s only a moment in time. The true equinox is the exact moment in which the Sun passes over the equator. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it.

Some people believe that, just like a full Moon, the spring equinox can alter your mood. Again, not really true — the Sun moving across the equator has no real effect on emotions — but — seasonal changes can, and do, often play a big part in moods. Around this time of year, you may experience a little bit of “spring fever.”

So welcome to spring — I don’t often get a chance to quote my friend Sitting Bull, but here’s something he said at an Indian council in 1875, that seems appropriate for today…. “Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the Earth has gladly received the embraces of the Sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love.”
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Listening to the news the past few days, I kept hearing that Coronavirus is now believed to — possibly — have come from raccoon dogs. Now even though I’m a pretty worldly guy, I had never hear of a “raccoon dog.”
So I did what I must in situations like this — I did some extensive research.

In simple terms, raccoon dogs are wild dogs whose face looks like a raccoon’s. They are a member of the canid, or dog family with fur markings and head shapes similar to those of raccoons. They’re more closely related to foxes than to domesticated dogs. Their diets consist of both plants and animals and they are native to  East Asia — including parts of China, Korea and Japan. Their population exploded due to breeding from the fur farming industry and they are now a widespread “invasive species” throughout northern and western Europe.

Growing up in Maysville, Oklahoma, a popular dog was the coon dog — everyone called them coonhounds. They were nice dogs with long floppy ears and kind of sad eyes. They were popular hunting dogs. Those dogs are in no way related to raccoon dogs — they’re a completely different species.

But to get back to the day’s subject — raccoon dogs were (and probably still are) sold for food in live animal markets in China. They are wild animals, not domesticated pets. They need lots of space and are difficult to manage in enclosures or small spaces. They also have a strong odor because they use scent to communicate, so they wouldn’t a desirable animal to have indoors. If a raccoon dog escapes or is released into parts of the world it isn’t native to, it can threaten native wildlife. 
So — even though they’re kind of cute, you wouldn’t want one for a pet.
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I was just thinking about all the early scientists that we learned about when we were in school. Were these guys really “scientists” or did they just make some incredibly lucky guesses?

Legend has it that young Issac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling apple, and he suddenly came up with his law of gravity. 
Newton, the son of a farmer, was born in 1642 near Grantham, England, and entered Cambridge University in 1661. The school temporarily closed in 1665 due to an outbreak of the bubonic plague and Newton moved back to his childhood home — Woolssthorpe Manor. He spent two years there before he returned to Cambridge in 1667. It was during that period (at Woolsthorpe) that he was in the orchard and witnessed an apple drop from a tree. There’s no evidence that the apple landed on his head, but Newton’s observation caused him to ponder why apples always fall straight to the ground (rather than sideways) and inspired him to eventually develop his law of universal gravitation. 

In 1687, Newton published his principle, which states that every body in the universe is attracted to every other body with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. 
Later, Newton shared the apple anecdote with William Stukeley, who included it in a biography, “Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life” that was published in 1752.

Well, I kind of got off the subject, but it appears that the apple story is “kind of” true…. probably embellished a bit over the years, but at least has its roots in reality.
But I still wonder about all the other early “discoveries” and how much their stories have been embellished over time.
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Every year I feel compelled to write something on St. Patrick’s Day, and every year I struggle to find something different to say about St. Patrick. If you read the previous entry, you’ll notice it kind of repeats the “regular stuff” that most of us already know about St. Patrick. So I figured that I owed it to both my readers, and myself, to come up with some new material. Here’s what some serious extensive research has uncovered.

Saint Patrick is well known both in Ireland and throughout the world, but few know that he is believed to have transformed the Welsh King Vereticus into a wolf.

According to legend, St. Patrick once punished the Welsh King Vereticus by transforming him into a wolf. While St. Patrick was in Ireland he became so disgusted with the wickedness of certain tribes that would howl like wolves when he tried to preach Christianity to them, he cursed them and condemned them to become werewolves. The spell fell on the poor tribesmen and caused them to turn into werewolves every seven years. They would stay in wolf form for seven years, then once the years passed they would turn back into humans, but only for another seven years, then it was back to wolf all over again. It was a horrible vicious cycle. Seven years as a wolf, seven as a human, seven as a wolf, seven as a human… until they died.

But during their seven years as a werewolf they weren’t denied the sacraments of the Church. In 1191 a man named Giraidus Cambrensis recorded the testimony of a priest that swore he once gave Holy Communion to a werewolf. Throughout the years, travelers to Ireland insisted that they had met entire families of werewolves and that they had even seen some people transform into wolves. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland was known as Wolfland.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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This is one of those days I usually write about every year — and, there’s only so much you can say about a particular day/holiday… so I’ll probably repeat what I’ve written in past years, but the good thing about getting older is that I don’t remember what I wrote a year ago. Here we go — let’s talk about St. Patrick and his day….

I know it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when all the pubs in Ireland were closed on Saint Patrick’s Day — by law. That unfortunate circumstance can be blamed on James O’Mara, the same politician that introduced the Bank Holiday Act in Ireland in 1903 — that made St. Patrick’s Day a national holiday in Ireland. The closings were originally meant as a mark of religious respect, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that revelers could (legally) raise a glass to Saint Patrick.
It turns out that Saint Patrick’s Day parades are about as Irish as Saint Patrick himself (not at all.)
The first Saint patrick’s Day parade allegedly took place in New Your City — not Ireland.
Saint Patrick’s Day is of course celebrated in countries across the world — but it’s also celebrated in low-Earth orbit, in the International Space Station.
The first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the United States was held in Boston in 1737.
Shamrocks are the national flower/emblem of Ireland.
Legend says that each leaf of a four-leaf clover has a meaning — Hope, Faith, Love and Luck.
Chicago has a tradition of dying their river green for St. Patrick’s Day — that tradition started in 1962.
There are 34.7 million U.S. residents that at least claim Irish ancestry. That number is more than seven times the population of Ireland itself.
The odds of you finding a four-leaf clover is about 1 in 10,000.
The world’s shortest St. Patrick’s Day parade is held in an Irish village. The route is only 100 yards — between the village’s two pubs.
St. Patrick never got canonized by a pope, making his saintly status a bit questionable.
And of course I guess it’s my duty to clear up all the confusion about whether the day is referred to as “Patty’s Day” or “”Paddy’s Day.” As far as I can tell, a lot (most?) people in the U.S. call it Pattie’s Day. A word of advice — never do that in Ireland — it’s Paddy’s Day! The Irish have very strong opinions about this…..

They say everyone’s Irish, or wish they were today, and being Irish is lucky enough. But if you’re not taking any chances by carrying a four-leaf clover, don’t iron it — you don’t want to press your luck.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. 
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St. Nicholas, on whom the figure of Santa Claus was based, was born on the Ides of March in 270, making March 15 a day that will live in infamy….. no, that’s not right .

I’m sure other bad things have happened in March besides the murder of Julius Caesar, but they haven’t cursed the day like Julius’s murder. But nonetheless, “Beware the Ides of March” stuck and the words branded the phrase, and the date, March 15, with a dark and gloomy connotation. Most of the time the way the phrase is used today makes it seem like the day itself is cursed.

Way back when, the Roman year began in March and originally the Ides were the day of the first full moon each year.
The Romans didn’t number days of the month but counted back from the Nones (5th or 7th,) Ides (13th or 15th) and kalends (1st of the next month.) In March, July, October and May the Ides fall on the “15th day.”
So the Ides of March is the 74th day in the ancient Roman calendar, corresponding to March 15 — nothing more.

The popular story is a soothsayer told Caesar to “beware the Ides of March,” but historians think that Caesar was warned that his life was in danger by a haruspex called Spurinna. A haruspex was a religious official that based his predictions on the entrails of sacrificed animals. Because of Spurinna’s high status, he would’ve known about the anti-Caesar sentiment at the time since the ruler had transformed the society into a dictatorship. So the prediction was probably a calculated judgement rather than a prophecy. 

I’m sure you’ll probably be ok this Ides of March, but look both ways before you cross the street, just to be on the safe side….
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Pi is the most studied number in mathematics, and for good reason. The number Pi is integral to our understanding of geometry. It is used in physics, astronomy and, of course, mathematics as well as being used in architecture and construction. It’s been a vital part of everything from arches and bridges to the Pyramids of Giza.

So it’s only fitting that it should have its own day. Today, March 14th (3/14 – Get it?) is officially Pi Day. The exact correct time for the celebration of Pi Day is at 1:59 pm. At 3/14 1:59 pm the numbers are the first six digits of Pi.
In case you need even more evidence of the importance of Pi Day, it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday.
The value of Pi was first calculated by Archimedes.
The Pi symbol was introduced by William Jones, a Welsh mathematician, in 1706.

There is an entire language made from the number Pi. How can than be? Well, some people loved Pi enough to invent a dialect based on it. In “Pi-ish” the number of letters in each word match the corresponding digit  of pi. The first word has three letters, the second has one letter, the third has four letters, and so on. The language is more popular than you might think. Software engineer Michael Keith wrote an entire book, called Not a Wake in that language.

The first 36 digits of Pi is called the Ludolphine Number. It’s named after the 16th century Dutch-German mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen who spent most of his life calculating the those first 36 digits. It’s said that the first 36 numbers were engraved on his tombstone.

Chinese people were far ahead of the West in finding the digits of pi — primarily due to two reasons. They had decimal notations and they had a symbol for the number zero. It wasn’t until the late middle ages that European mathematicians started using the number zero. At that time, European mathematicians partnered with Arab and Indian minds to bring the symbol of zero into their system.

Of course, like most things, not everyone is a devoted fan of Pi. Some math enthusiasts argue that “tau,” the number equivalent to twice Pi, also deserves the same notable place in mathematics as Pi. Tau’s approximate value is 6.28, and it refers to the relationship between a circle’s circumference and radius. So, many believe that the one that has a more inherent mathematical value between the two is tau. We’ll discuss this in more depth on June 28th.

But today we’re celebrating Pi….. there’s an old saying that men may come and men may go, but Pi goes on forever.
Or — as my mathematically inclined friends would say, “Have an irrational day.”
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