Birds
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We eat dinner at a restaurant decorated with dozens of ornate bird cages
hanging from the cathedral ceiling. The cages are empty and illuminated from
ins...
2 hours ago
March 31, 2009
A Thing for Which There is No Term
A thing which was once pretty common, but for which I do not believe there is a term, is when older trucks (and it's always trucks) have the name and location of the dealership etched into the metal of the rear bumper, usually in a tall sanserif font. It's always the same font, too, no matter which dealership or which model of truck. Like this, see.
March 30, 2009
On Generic Products
Generic brands used to be pretty common.
Generic brands imitate more expensive brands, but forego the packaging and marketing costs incurred with maintaining a brand identity.
Generic products had no names or pictures on the packaging.
They had the UPC, contents, and the required product information.
Some generics cut out other frills, like flip tops on soda cans.
I don’t remember them except from TV ads that I saw when I was really young.
They were popular because they were cheap. The price to the producer was low. The price to the consumer was low.
Once unpackaged, it was sometimes hard to distinguish a branded product from a generic product. Because the suppliers for the tuff inside the can varied, the quality sometimes varied.Generally, though, generic products were often of similar quality as the branded product they were competing with.
This wasn’t always true, though, particularly when the formula for the branded equivalent is a closely kept secret.
You can still find generic products today, but they’re a little more hidden.
Generic drugs are a real moneysaver. Once the patent on a drug expires, generic medications become available. The consumer saves a percentage of the price commensurate to the cost of patent royalties and marketing expenses.Beauty stores sell lots of “generic equivalents.”
Similarity to a specialty item is sometimes the sole selling point of a generic product. I imagine the chemists responsible for making knock-off beauty products have a pretty fun and challenging job.
Private labels cut costs in areas besides marketing. Kirkland brand ibuprofen doesn’t taste quite the same as Advil. Advil has a slightly sweet coating on it.
March 29, 2009
March 28, 2009
Haverstraw, New York, 1966, and Oregon, 1997
The things I like most about Lee Friedlander are his photographs and his face. Fortunately, he takes lots of self-portraits.
March 27, 2009
The God-damned Rabbit Problem.
Soldiers are sometimes given the following story problem during basic training.
This is a morally difficult question, but it’s also a theoretically simple question if you can separate yourself from the situation enough to weigh the options (please note: if you can do this without guilt or ambivalence, you are a sociopath):
Today, we’re going to apply the same moral difficulty to a different situation:
The problem: You like the rabbit, but you also like your cookies. Who gets the cookies? This isn’t fucking funny. This is a morally difficult question.
We can weigh the options here, too:
I want the cookies. But you can always make the cookies.
If I give the rabbit the cookies now, he’ll expect the cookies in the future. That’s a bad habit. But just this once couldn’t hurt.
Eating cookies will make me happy. But I want the rabbit to be happy too.
Cookies are bad for rabbits. Cookies aren’t exactly good for you, either.
See the problem? "Morality is absolute," my ass.
You’re driving a truck carrying yourself and seven others soldiers down a long, narrow mountain road. There are deep crevasses to the left and right of the road. You turn a corner and see that a little girl is playing in the middle of the road.You can either save one life by sacrificing yourself and other, or you can save your life and the lives of those whom you are responsible for by killing another. The weighing is fairly simple: 1 versus 8.
You are going far too fast to stop before you hit the girl. Swerving off the road will cause the truck to plummet several thousand feet.
Do you A.) run down the girl to save your companions, or B.) swerve off the road to save the girl?
This is a morally difficult question, but it’s also a theoretically simple question if you can separate yourself from the situation enough to weigh the options (please note: if you can do this without guilt or ambivalence, you are a sociopath):
Today, we’re going to apply the same moral difficulty to a different situation:
The problem: You like the rabbit, but you also like your cookies. Who gets the cookies? This isn’t fucking funny. This is a morally difficult question.
We can weigh the options here, too:
I want the cookies. But you can always make the cookies.
If I give the rabbit the cookies now, he’ll expect the cookies in the future. That’s a bad habit. But just this once couldn’t hurt.
Eating cookies will make me happy. But I want the rabbit to be happy too.
Cookies are bad for rabbits. Cookies aren’t exactly good for you, either.
See the problem? "Morality is absolute," my ass.
March 26, 2009
I had a terrible night in a room like this once.
He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.
-new yorker
Barn wrecking in Vermont.
It is very hard to wreck a barn quickly, but very easily to wreck one slowly. Just poke a hole in the roof.
March 25, 2009
Across the aisle we looked out the window of the train at the jungle.
After that Ismail squandered a fortune funding not only that inspirational movie but also the music label COZ Records ("The guy was a real good talker," says Rocket); a cosmetics procedure whereby oxygen was absorbed into the skin ("We were not prepared for the sharks in the beauty industry"); a plan to create nationwide phone-card dispensers ("When I was in college, phone cards were a big deal"); and, recently, three shops dubbed It's in the Name, where tourists could buy framed calligraphy of names or proverbs of their choice ("The main store opened up in New Orleans, but doggone Hurricane Katrina came two months later"). The shops no longer exist.
-Sports Illustrated
This is too simple.
March 24, 2009
Dirty cold water in the UP.
My brothers had a styrofoam airplane that I borrowed one fall. It flew way, way further than I expected. It landed on a floe of ice in the pond, and I had to wade out in the water to get it. The ice was freezing and dirty.
A resourceful family.
"Armed with 2 grocery bags filled with props and costumes, and a pocket full of quarters. A young family goes to the KMART and commandeers the 25 cent photobooth. Jumping in and out of the booth between each flash we came up with these 35 hysterical photos which we then dry mounted on a heavy photo mounting board. It was just one of the Christmas presents we made that year (1975) because we were so poor. "
Shu-Ha-Ri
Shu ("protect", "obey") — traditional wisdom — learning fundamentals, techniques, heuristics, proverbs.
Ha ("detach", "digress") — breaking with tradition — finding exceptions to traditional wisdom, reflecting on their truth, finding new ways, techniques, and proverbs.
Ri ("leave", "separate") — transcendence — there are no techniques or proverbs, all moves are natural.
March 23, 2009
Nurses and child in City Hospital's Tuberculosis Division, 1927
Nurses and child in City Hospital's Tuberculosis Division, 1927, originally uploaded by Seattle Municipal Archives.
Nurse with patient in City Hospital Tuberculosis Division, 1927
Nurse with patient in City Hospital Tuberculosis Division, 1927, originally uploaded by Seattle Municipal Archives.
March 22, 2009
The Brain From Planet Arous
Brains get a raw deal.
Beware the brain of the dude who's fuckin' tweaking at the 7-11, terrifying the customers who are just calmly trying to buy convenience items. Jesus Christ, look at his teeth. If this was video you'd see his jowls vibrating from the sheer muscular tension. No wonder those people are cowering. They're not sure if he's gonna hold up the place or just stand in the corner rubbing his lips on his arms while rays shotgun out of his eyes. I'm not really sure why the couple in the left are getting so intimate, though. Maybe it's an exhibitionist thing. You meet the most interesting people in these places, maybe they'd like watching us make out? Meanwhile everyone else is screaming and trembling behind the beef jerky racks, whil the confused and terrified teenage clerk stands paralyzed with fear. Pretty sure it's only that real flaky shit from Texas that makes death rays shoot out your eyes, the banana flavored stuff. You just don't get powers like that from your normal suburban bathtub crank.
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Apres moi, le Goodkind.
March 21, 2009
Crush, Texas
Two wells were drilled at the site, 3 miles south of the town of West, Texas in McLennan County. Circus tents from Ringling Brothers were erected as well as a grandstand. On September 15, 1896, 40,000 people showed up, making the new town of Crush, Texas, one of the largest cities in the state.
The train engines were painted bright green and bright red. A special track was built so that there was no chance a runaway train could get onto the main line. On the day of the event, 40,000 people showed up to the new town of Crush, Texas.
The two trains rolled back to opposite ends of the four mile track. The engineers and crew opened the steam to a prearranged setting, rode for exactly 4 turns of the drive wheels, and jumped from the trains. The trains each reached a speed of about 45 mph by the time they met very near the anticipated spot Both boilers exploded. Debris was blown hundreds of feet in the air and fell on the crowd, killing three.
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Mr. Crush was immediately fired from the Katy railroad. However, in light of a lack of negative publicity, he was rehired the next day.
March 20, 2009
There was a red light on the horizon.
He assumed it was atmospheric, but it got bigger and moved more quickly as he came closer.
March 19, 2009
I Was A Teenage Werewolf
Weren't we all, pal. Weren't we all.
Man, remember the flat-out sucky parts of being a teenager? You had all these desires and all this drive, but none of the talent or focus necessary to get what you want. That's if you knew what the fuck you wanted, anyway. Half the time you didn't even know who you were let alone what that person wanted. Your parents and a few other people probably saw potential in you but when you looked in the mirror, on a bad day you saw bad teeth and awkward fashion choices. On a good day you saw a pale imitation of a badly chosen goal.
I guess being a teenager was pretty fun at times, though. You had all this energy and you could use it on anything, and, with notable exceptions, no one gave a shit. It was okay to be act like an idiot,. When I was twelve I thought it was both fulfilling and hilarious to go to the penny candy store and order one piece of penny candy. When I was fifteen I called in a bomb scare in the hopes of getting my friends out of class so they could drive to Little Girl's Point with me one beautiful spring day. They'd friggin' arrest me for that today.
Radon
The danger of radon exposure in dwellings was discovered in 1984 when Stanley Watras, an employee at the Limerick nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, set off the radiation alarms on his way to work for two weeks while authorities searched for the source of the contamination. They found that the source was high levels of radon – about 100,000 Bq/m³ (2,700 pCi/L) – in his house's basement, and it was not related to the nuclear plant. The risks associated with living in his house were estimated to be equivalent to smoking 135 packs of cigarettes every day. - wiki
March 18, 2009
March 16, 2009
The False Nerd
It used to be that anyone who spent their time alone did so because they were shy, or awkward, or interested in obscure or intellectual pursuits (or, more likely, they were a combination of all three). That’s a Nerd. Computers were a traditional nerdy interest, because they involved math, logic, and solitude.
But computers are everywhere now. Everyone spends time alone and everyone has to deal with nerdy things. Now everyone’s a Nerd.
Except they aren’t.
Except they aren’t.
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Let’s talk about the False Nerd.
The False Nerd has appropriated the look and interests of the historical or “True” Nerd in order to affect an image. What is this? It’s intra-cultural appropriation.
If you have ever worn this t-shirt, you are a false nerd
If you have ever worn this t-shirt, you are a false nerd
If you have ever worn this t-shirt, just...ugh...it's too depressing
True Nerds have deep-seated problems in relating to their peers. These problems lead them towards intellectual or esoteric activities which reinforce and assuage their social problems. True Nerds are either loners or they’re willing to sacrifice friendship in favor of their hobbies and interests.
I assume this is a False Nerd
False Nerds are not loners. False Nerds have vibrant social structures. They've just built these structures around the hobbies and interests of True Nerds. (False Nerds are arguably much healthier than True Nerds.)
A pretty good depiction of a modern True Nerd
False Nerds write online comic strips about how great it is to be nerdy.
True Nerds write online comic strips that are nerdy.
False Nerds listen to music that expresses nerd themes.
Whatever true nerds listen to, I can guarantee they know way more about it than you.
True Nerds have no sense of fashion, or if they do have a sense of fashion, it's woefully out of place or informed by something incredibly unrealistic. I don't have to link you to any examples. You know what I mean.
False Nerds do have a sense of fashion. It’s just a nerdy sense of fashion.
True Nerds smell bad and inspire embarrassment, pity, or even revulsion and anger. True Nerds slouch. True Nerds probably hid during recess in elementary school. False Nerds do not hide. False Nerds are proud of their "nerdhood."
You see what the problem is here? False Nerds have appropriated as "Cool" something that was never Cool.
False Nerdhood is intentional. True Nerdhood is unavoidable.
The False Nerd is not a nerd. The False Nerd is trying to be Cool. But the False Nerd isn’t actually Cool. The False Nerd is actually Boring.
False Nerdhood is intentional. True Nerdhood is unavoidable.
The False Nerd is not a nerd. The False Nerd is trying to be Cool. But the False Nerd isn’t actually Cool. The False Nerd is actually Boring.
March 15, 2009
Devil Girl From Mars
When I look at posters for movies like this I feel distinctly like a guy without legs at a tennis match: I don't have any desire to join in, and lack the apparatus that would allow me to. I know zero about bad movies. Generally, I'm okay with that. But sometimes I heave myself out of the proverbial wheelchair and crawl towards the tennis court. But it's not a racket I'm leglessly clawing at. It's gasoline, and that's a book of matches in my hand. I'm gonna burn the place down. This movie looks awful.
Do you ever get the idea these posters come not from an era of exploitation but of experimentation? One where the entire approach was of throwing conceptual mud against the cinematical wall in the hopes some would stick? That it's less about a few Ed-Wood-esque pioneers finding titillation in vinyl-clad alien bustiers, and more about some sad, bitter group of screenwriters making a desperate grab towards figuring out what audiences want because they're too old to change careers and have bills to pay? I have a sneaking suspicion we are still in this era.
Random points
I like how the tagline promises "sights too weird to imagine." It's Lovecraftian horror on a smaller, dumber scale.
The poster is way more intriguing than the actual movie. The devil girl on the poster looks svelte and vaguely inhuman - like one of the New Gods. In the film, she looks like a schoolmarm dressed in a non-recyclable trash bag.
The actress subject to the Hefty-bag indignity is Patricia Laffan, who four years prior was acting opposite Peter Ustinov in Quo Vadis. Does anyone know how to say "Oh, how the mighty have fallen" in Latin?
-
You may find Seth's interpretation more charitable. Read it here.
And, since you're up, check out his film review site, Lost Video Archive. If I'm a legless bystander at exploitation movie-tennis, he's John MacEnroe - he's temperamental and angry, but that's what makes him good at it.
(Did that tennis metaphor work at all?)
March 13, 2009
Juvenile Jungle
At some point in my early twenties "teenagers" stopped referring to me and my peers. Later I stopped thinking of it as an age range which included a wide variety of individuals. Now -and I don't know quite how it happened- now when you say "teenager" I think "a young person lacking the self control necessary to control his/her justifiable amount of frustration such that I will cross the street when three or more are walking towards me."
The "subgroup as Other/cultural boogieman" progression in post-Civil War American history goes something like this.
I have helpfully bolded the only group whom you need legitimately fear:
- freed slaves
- fascists
- German farmers
- Chinese laborers
- suffragettes
- Italian families
- Irish immigrants
- Japanese shop-owners
- Communists
- beatniks
- juvenile delinquents
- hippies
- first-wave feminists
- homosexuals
- Cuban refugees
- Japanese businessmen
- inner-city African-Americans
- white supremacists
- Mexican farmworkers
- Arabs
- Chinese businessmen
-
My associate's version of this is significantly less stupid.
March 10, 2009
Hanging
Hempen Fever: A man who was hanged is said to have died of hempen fever; and , in Dorsetshire, to have been stabbed with a Bridport dagger; Bridport being a place famous for manufacturing hemp into cords. - Grose, 1788.
Feeblemindedness
Feeblemindedness: a former name for mental retardation. The feebleminded were divided into three grades:
- idiots, with a mental age below two years;
- imbeciles, with a mental age between two and seven years; and
- morons, with a mental age between seven and twelve years.
Inertia
The biggest problem with being depressed is that you stop trying. It's not so much that you're unhappy, it's that you don't have a desire to stop not being happy. Remember that.
March 9, 2009
Syphilomania
A mania, with which some persons are affected, so that they subject themselves to antivenereal treatment, under the erroneous impression that they are affected with syphilis.
Hotel Fever
Any of a number of affections that occurred to people staying in small unsanitary hotels. In 1857 the National Hotel in Washington, D.C. had several cases of hotel fever that were attributed to an open sewer line that ran beneath the hotel. The sewer gases would travel through the heating ducts and enter the rooms. - Schmidt, 2007.
The She Creature
Oh, sweet bird of heaven. I cannot engage with this poster without becoming a brute.Got nothing but bile for this. The kneejerk contrarian in me sees the obvious course of action: Identify the position. Divide it into its constituent elements. Break the elements down individually until the position which they make up can no longer hold together without the aid of faith or a reliance on cognitive dissonance. The part of me that sees this postcard every day looks tries to look away.
When I look at that image I see four borders with compost inside. A filthy, stinky pile of organic waste, but from this nothing will grow. It’s an architecture of shitty tropes. A tenement populated by bad ideas, in a ghetto of monolithic stupidity. Sometimes you’ve got something constructive to say, and sometimes you just want things to go away. I don’t know what is being conveyed here. This is film as by QVC: a cheaper copy of something already useless. I would honestly rather watch four hours of CCTV tape of a disused elevator than see a single frame of this movie. Just get me out of here.
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I encourage you read my friend's writing on this as well.
March 8, 2009
Deer Camp
Opening day of the two-week firearm deer season in Michigan is a beloved holiday in the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) that has been cherished for many generations. The Yooper tradition of hunters heading out to deer camp in late November for hunting, socializing and a sauna is still very much alive. Camps range in degree of luxury from old campers and shacks to more modern facilities. Many of the camps are primitive cabins that rely on wood (or propane) heat and generators for electricity. Some still have outhouses for bathrooms and a separate wood-heated sauna for sweating away the impurities. This abandoned camp is located north of Ironwood on Lake Road a short distance from Mud Creek.
Allantiasis
A morbid condition produced by eating unwholesome sausages. It is characterized by constipation, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, imperfect vision, muscular prostration, and enfeeblement of the circulation, and is frequently fatal.
- Applleton, 1904.
- Applleton, 1904.
Little Girl's Point - Lake Superior
Sandstone cliffs lead down to the beach here. You could take the path down if you wanted to, but me and my brothers slid down the cliffs instead.
March 7, 2009
March 6, 2009
Unrecognizable Photograph
The central difference between analog and digital photographs is that digital photographs cannot be damaged (and are arguably impossible to destroy once publically available).
This is boon to archivists, but a tragedy for me.
Caducity
The portion of human life which is comprised generally between 70 and 80 years.
The age which precedes decrepitude. It is so termed in consequence of the limbs not usually possessing sufficient strength to support the body. - Dunglison, 1855
The Brain Eaters
The day they brought their daughter home from the maternity ward, her father took one look in her eyes and saw something that made him sell his hunting rifles.Much later, after the bulk of humanity had been devoured, her parents were to reflect that it made sense that she had been the first to be taken. Huddled in their home as the things from space came for them, they took comfort in knowing that at least she had found some closure.
She had been an ice skater in high school, but it wasn’t the motion and joy of motion that she found compelling, it was the ever-present threat of drowning below her feet. One winter she built a cairn as tall as herself on the ice, and then retreated to the shore to watch it slowly crack the ice and fall into the freezing water. It was inevitable. It was final. It was destructive.
They didn't have eyes, just a fish-colored spot where the eyes should have been. And they had no teeth: just mouths rimmed with things that whipped around sharply, like brambles in the wind. But they had something magnetic. You could not look at them for too long, because they were genuinely ugly, but nonetheless, you wanted them near you. It was only a matter of time before someone took the next step of touching one. It was inevitable, in some ways, that it was her. Her parents had seen it happen. The whip-rimmed mouth had locked onto her skull.She could speak while it happened. She said giving in to it felt like falling into water. Like ice cracking.
-
Read my associate's here: Progression Towards Something of Questionable Significance.
March 5, 2009
Chrisom
A child which died within a month after its baptism; -- so called from the chrisom cloth which was used as a shroud for it. - Webster
Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God
Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is one of the best-known sermons from the mid-1730s.
Reports of one occasion when Edwards preached it said that many of the audience burst out weeping, and others cried out in anguish or even fainted. One member of his congregation, Joseph Hawley, slit his throat after listening to it.
-Full text
Reports of one occasion when Edwards preached it said that many of the audience burst out weeping, and others cried out in anguish or even fainted. One member of his congregation, Joseph Hawley, slit his throat after listening to it.
-Full text
Forditis
A name given to a repetitive motion disorder that caused many Ford Motor Company employees to be absent from work.
-http://www.americanheritage.com
-http://www.americanheritage.com
March 4, 2009
Calenture/Calentura
A febrile delirium, said to be peculiar to sailors, wherein they imagine the sea to be green fields and will throw themselves into it if not restrained. - Hooper, 1829.
A violent fever, attended with delirium, incident to persons in hot countries. Under its influence it is said that sailors imagine the sea to be green fields, and will throw themselves into it, if not restrained. - Hoblyn, 1855.
Fever. The term was used by the old Spanish navigators to denote any form of fever with delirium observed in the tropics, and from them Sauvages adopted it as the name of a special disease (which has been described as peculiar to mariners and characterized by a particular form of delirium in which the patient, unless prevented, will jump into the sea, thinking that he is walking into green fields); but its use in the sense has been discarded. - Applton, 1904.
A name formerly given to various fevers occurring in tropics; esp. to a form of furious delirium accompanied by fever, among sailors, which sometimes led the affected person to imagine the sea to be a green field, and to throw himself into it. - Webster, 1913.
Cryolophosaurus Ellioti
Eradication of Smallpox
The global eradication of smallpox was certified based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980 as Resolution WHA33.3. The first two sentences of the resolution read: "Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America."
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The last cases of smallpox in the world occurred in an outbreak of two cases (one of which was fatal) in Birmingham, England in 1978. A medical photographer, Janet Parker, contracted the disease at the University of Birmingham Medical School and died on 11 September 1978, after which the scientist responsible for smallpox research at the university, Professor Henry Bedson, committed suicide.
-
In March 2004 smallpox scabs were found tucked inside an envelope in a book on Civil War medicine in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The envelope was labeled as containing the scabs and listed the names of the patients they came from.
March 3, 2009
Bricks of Wine during Prohibition
"After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a
jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine"
An independent California concern put on the market a patented grape concentrate in solid form about the size of a pound of print butter. Known as Vino Sano, selling at $2 each, these nonalcoholic wine bricks were flavored sherry, champagne, port, claret, muscatel, et al. Instructions came in the form of warnings against dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, adding sugar, shaking daily and decanting after three weeks. Unless the buyer eschewed these processes, 13%, wine would be produced. Vino Sano's "Don'ts" were designed to prove that the intent of each sale was not to violate the law.
-Time
-wiki
S. M. Bower Reporting Live and Un-cut in a Chair in a Field in a Mexican Wrestling Mask in Contentment with His Life and His Coffee & Wearing the Infamous Dead Boots
March 2, 2009
Milk Sickness
Milk Sickness Death Certificate
Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting, or in animals as trembles, is characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe intestinal pain that affects individuals who eat dairy products or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot. Although highly rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of lives in the early 19th century. A notable victim was Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Nursing calves and lambs may have died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot even though the mother animals show no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned.
Snakeroot
The disease emerged in the early 1800s when it became common to graze cattle in the areas where the white snakeroot grows. Cattle will not graze on this plant unless other forage is not available; however, when pastures are scarce or in times of drought, cattle will graze in woods because of the abundance of green plants.
Milk sickness was first diagnosed by Dr. Thomas Barbee of Bourbon County, Kentucky in 1809. Variously described as "the trembles", "the slows" or the illness "under which man turns sick and his domestic animals tremble," it was a frequent cause of illness and death, sometimes killing as many as half the people in a particular settlement. Bloodletting was attempted as a treatment, with little success.
The disease emerged in the early 1800s when it became common to graze cattle in the areas where the white snakeroot grows. Cattle will not graze on this plant unless other forage is not available; however, when pastures are scarce or in times of drought, cattle will graze in woods because of the abundance of green plants.
Lincoln's Mother
-wiki
Jake Leg
Jamaican Ginger Extract (known in the United States by the slang name Jake) was an early 20th century patent medicine that provided a convenient way to bypass Prohibition laws, since it contained between 70-80% ethanol by weight.
Jake was not itself dangerous, but the U.S. Treasury Department, which administered the Prohibition laws, recognized its potential as an illicit alcohol source and required changes in the solids content of jake to discourage drinking. The minimum requirement of ginger solids per cubic centimeter of alcohol resulted in a fluid that was extremely bitter and difficult to drink. Occasionally, Department of Agriculture inspectors would test shipments of Jake by boiling the solution and weighing the remaining solid residue. In an effort to trick regulators, bootleggers replaced the ginger solids with a small amount of ginger and either castor oil or molasses.
A pair of amateur chemists and bootleggers, Harry Gross and Max Reisman, worked to develop an alternative adulterant that would pass the tests, but still be somewhat palatable. They settled on a plasticizer that was able to pass the Treasury Department's tests but preserved jake's drinkability. This plasticizer was later determined to be a neurotoxin that causes axonal damage to the nerve cells in the nervous system of human beings, especially those located in the spinal cord.
In 1930, large numbers of jake users began to lose the use of their hands and feet. Some victims could walk, but they had no control over the muscles which would normally have enabled them to point their toes upward. Therefore, they would raise their feet high with the toes flopping downward, which would touch the pavement first followed by their heels. The toe first, heel second pattern made a distinctive “tap-click, tap-click" sound as they walked. This very peculiar gait became known as the jake walk and those afflicted were said to have jake leg, jake foot, or jake paralysis. Additionally, the calves of the legs would soften and hang down and the muscles between the thumbs and fingers would atrophy.
-wiki
March 1, 2009
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