News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Money doesn’t smell is a phrase with Roman roots namely the Latin Pecunia non olet.
Urine was valuable. It was collected from public toilets and sold to tanners. The sale was taxed.
The Emporer Vespasian’s son Titus expressed his disgusted at the concept. Vespasian had him smell a gold coin. “Does it smell?” Vespasian asked? Titus said no. “Yet it comes from urine,” Vespasian said.
And from that exchange comes the phrase.
Who was Frankie Baker and what did he do? Well, Frankie was a she and at 2 a.m., Oct. 15, 1899 she shot her lover Allen Britt who had just won a cakewalk dance contest with Nelly Bly. Allen’s name was changed to Johnny for the song. It should be noted that the Nelly Bly that Allen danced with was not Elizabeth Cochran Seaman the reporter from Chochran’s Mills Pa. who used that as her pen name.
Here’s Big Bill Broonzy’s version:
Was Winston Churchill saved from drowning while a youth by Scottish farmer whose own son would discover penicillin which would be used to save the the great leader’s life again?
Churchill, who grew up in Ireland, was never saved by a Scottish farmer. His life was, however, saved by an antibiotic during World War II. It was not penicillin, though, but a sulphonamide.
But it was reported as penicillin. Sulphonamides were a German discovery.
Yellow fever still kills 45,000 people a year.
Punic, the language of Carthage, survived until the time of St. Augustine in the 5th Century. It had a run of about 1300 years.
Commode in French means convenient. It originally described an ornate chest of drawers kept in formal reception rooms.
Genghis Khan was said to have red hair and green eyes. These features existed among Mongolians.
Spring fever is a real thing. Longer daylight really does cause most to be in a better mood and have more energy.
There are five basics tastes. Sweet, sour, salty and bitter are the ones easy to guess. The fifth? It’s umami. It’s a Japanese word and is used to describe the taste of glutamic acid which provides a pleasant “meaty” flavor to food.
So what does green have to do with Saint Patrick? It’s the color of the shamrock that he used to explain the Holy Trinity.
And of course spring, which is but three days away, this year.
A shamrock, by the way, is a sprig of clover.