From today’s Sunday Times, I learnt that the world “cocktail” comes from the practice of stuffing a piece of ginger up a horses arse. Something to think about when you are supping your Martini tonight
“Why are cocktails called cocktails?
It’s to do with horses’ anuses. If you were an 18th-century horse trader and wanted to zhuzh up a tired nag on market day, you’d shove a bit of ginger up its bum. It would duly cock its tail and behave in a frisky manner. Which is precisely the effect the first (orally ingested) “cock-tails” had on human drinkers. The first recorded definition of the term linked to the drink was in 1806, when The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, New York, referred to it as a “stimulating liquor, composed of spirits, sugar, water and bitters”. That combination (with whiskey) is now known as an old fashioned, since it’s the old-fashioned way to make a cocktail.”
Over to you.
AKA to feague
However it is also said to come from dock tail the practice of shortening the length of the tail. Other ideas were it was stirring the drink with a cock’s tail feather.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/cocktail
I learned a while ago that dog owners push a match stick up the hound’s arse before showing them – there’s only one way for the pooch to get it out, which reduces the chances of it taking a crap in the arena.
Erm… surely having a poo would be the ‘only’ way for the dog to get it out? Oh, I see it has the poo before the show! Got it. That would have kept me awake for hours!
I used to do a similar thing with my nan when Corrie was about to start.
You shoved her up the dog’s arse..? Impressive work!
The etymology I belive was that during prohibition, bars serving alcohol showed themselves by displaying chicken feathers.
Long Island Iced Tea was a prohibition cocktail so named because it looked like Iced Tea but was loaded with booze
I learnt today that one of Liverpool’s new players’ name is a palindrome (Ekitike). He looks good too.
He actually looks good whichever way you look at him
Peter The Great, on securing absolute power as Czar of Russia (Muscovy) as a very young man, immediately decamped across to Germany, Holland and finally England in disguise as a diplomat for over a year.
It was a fairly transparent ruse given that he made it clear who he really was. Nevertheless he spent the year absorbing the western ideals and mores, and learnt practical skills as a shipwright in a south London Deptford shipyard.
His entourage of guards/thugs wreaked havoc on the rented house in Deptford and ruined the pristine grounds by having drunken wheelbarrow races in the middle of the nights.
Sounds about right for Deptford even now.
There’s even a statue to him in Deptford.
http://www.tiredoflondontiredoflife.com/2013/12/find-peter-great-in-deptford.html
We saw it as we had a river cruise on the Thames when we were staying in Greenwich for R Thompson.
Whenever I hear Deptford my mind immediately says Deptford Fun City
Remarkably unexpected, isn’t it?
I briefly lived in neighbouring Lewisham about 30 years ago in what was then a new-build flat in a block behind the railway station.
Not fifty yards away was Leathwell Road. Where at No. 3 Spike Milligan lived with his parents after his WW2 demob while he tried to make it as a jazz musician.
There’s no plaque or any of that. I recognised the address from reading his memoirs.
I learnt you can eat acorns.
I assume you aren’t a cow.
Acorns are not good for cows, were you thinking of pannage where pigs are let into woods to feast on the fallen acorns?
I learnt that if you’re trying to lose weight by reducing calorie intake, your appetite increases as you do so, with the result that you put back on all the weight you took off until you stop feeling hungry.
Also that there’s a theory that a lot of people who get diagnosed with dementia as they get elderly could be suffering from undiagnosed autism instead, which only became significant when those providing the ‘cover’ they needed for social situations and normal life functioning were no longer there.
Thank you, Radio 4’s ‘More of Less’.
I learnt that if one is on the ‘vulnerable customer’ list at Dŵr Cymru and there is a problem with one’s water supply because of a knackered water main they will deliver twenty four two litre bottles of water to one’s bijou council penthouse flat.
Result!
Whisky would have been better.
My thoughts exactly.
Do they supply donkey milk? I’ve always fancied having a bath like Cleopatra.
Amanda Barrie…um, err…
Oh I say…
Ass.
No offence taken.
I pondered that but couldn’t decide on ass’ milk, ass’s milk, or asses’ milk. I only got a grade-B English O-level, and that was 40 years ago.
Definitely not arse’s milk, anyhow.
I was going to write “Assistance may be available if you meet with Dŵr Cymru’s requirements” but I was struck with a passing and overwhelming feeling of ennui so I gave up and pealed a grape instead.
Oooh, I could crush a grape.
I learned that it is not a good idea to oil the blades of newly sharpened garden shears with your fingers. Not if you want avoid covering them with copious amounts of blood.
See also: mandoline slicer. Use the bloody gismo they gave you, idiot.
The two times I used my mandoline slicer, I did use the “pronged handle” thingie for safety, and I still sliced my hand both times…
I don’t use the mandoline anymore.
I learned that if you cut a sphere and into slices of equal width (like an egg slicer) each slice will contain an equal area of the original surface.
It’s similar to my favourite maths fact that if you bore a 6cm hole through the middle of a sphere from one side to the other, the remaining volume of sphere is the same, regardless of the diameter of the hole and the starting size of the sphere (Assuming it was >6cm diameter). It’s called the napkin ring problem.
Can’t get my head around the hole problem…the volume of the remaining solid remains the same, despite volume(?) having being removed?
My neither. This gif from the Wiki page helps (a bit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napkin_ring_problem#/media/File:Cut_Napkin_ring_problem_Animation_created_with_openscad.gif
The clue is in the title: Napkin Ring.
Think of it this way. Whenever you bore a hole through the middle of a sphere, you are reducing the width of the sphere, as you have just removed the caps from the edges. Think of coring an apple: you lose the poles. So just say you had a sphere 6cm diameter, if the diameter of the hole is anything less than infinitely small then the sphere is no longer 6cm across. So imagine now a beach ball with a diameter of 100cm. To drill a hole 6cm long that passes from one side to the other, the diameter of the hole you drill would have to be quite large, almost as large as the diameter of the beach ball itself. All you have left is a thin 6cm strip around the circumference, like a strip of orange skin. Now think of the Earth. A 6cm hole from one pole to the other would leave a teeny tiny 6cm strip around the circumference. The amazing fact is that the leftover bit of the sphere in each example has the same volume, whether you start with a 6cm diameter sphere or the entire Earth. That volume is in fact the volume of a sphere 6cm in diameter ( as the hole would have to be infinitely small).
This GIF from Wikipedia explains it as well as anything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napkin_ring_problem#/media/File:Cut_Napkin_ring_problem_Animation_created_with_openscad.gif
Ha Gatz! Just saw you posted the same link!
Here’s a vid:
some t-shirts are better than others