I Could Do That...!

Looks almost like I was born into the wrong century!

I can't imagine what all it would take to be a real live garden gnome. Probably wouldn't be fun if someone paid you to do it. Still, it's an interesting concept, I reckon.

When Garden Gnomes Were Real People

By Nolan Moore on Thursday, June 5, 2014

Are you an 18th-century peasant short on cash? Then you might want to look into becoming an ornamental hermit. In the 1700s, aristocrats with too much money hired ordinary people to pose as monks or druids and live in their gardens for years. (And you thought Nicolas Cage bought weird stuff.)

The 18th century was a great time to be rich. Okay, sure, it’s always great to be rich, but the 1700s were a time of monumental excess and incredible debauchery. We’re talking about the era of the Hellfire Club, the Marquis de Sade, and Marie Antoinette. Of course, wealth and power didn’t always take such outlandish forms. In Gregorian England, rich nobles flaunted their wealth in a completely different—and much stranger—way. Instead of throwing elaborate parties or wild orgies, these people hired hermits to camp out on their lawns.

In 18th-century England, gardens were all the rage, but instead of simply planting a few flowers or sculpting a few topiary elephants, the British elite wanted paradises of Miltonian proportions. And what better way to capture all the elegance of Eden than hiring your own personal hermit? Looking for that ultimate garden ornament, aristocrats would hire random people to dress up as monks or druids and live in tiny houses or sometimes caves. Their contracts usually lasted for seven years, and during that time, the “hermits” couldn’t cut their hair, take a bath, or talk to anyone. Oftentimes, they were paid to walk around barefoot and were only allowed the simplest of belongings like a mat, an hourglass, and a Bible.

This absolutely bizarre practice dates all the way back to the days of Rome. According to historian Gordon Campbell, Emperor Hadrian built himself a little hermitage for his own personal use. A few centuries later, Pope Pius IV followed suit, creating his own getaway for meditation and reflection. And somehow, over the years, this idea morphed into the weirdest decorating scheme in history. Of course, assuming you weren’t some lowly tenant forced to perform for your master, “hermiting” could be a lucrative profession. People were often paid 400 to 600 pounds a year, and back in the 1700s, that was big money. For that kind of cash, they gladly let their nails and hair grow long. They even occasionally served wine at picnics in the garden.

But what would drive anyone to hire a hermit? The practice was oddly popular throughout the British Isles and even a few aristocrats on the continent got in on the craze. Why did so many people want smelly, unwashed men living in their backyards? Well, it all had to do with a bizarre obsession with the idea of “melancholia.” Evidently, 18th-century folks put a lot of stock in somberness, and nothing symbolized spiritual reflection and personal sacrifice better than a hermit. And naturally, if you owned one of these introspective actors, that you meant you were a pretty melancholy person yourself.

Of course, this bizarre custom didn’t last long, and as the 1800s rolled around, professional hermits found themselves out of a job. However, their legacy lives on to this very day. Next time you walk past your neighbor’s garden, take a quick look and see if you can spot the little red-capped man hiding in the flowerbed. That’s right. The ornamental hermit didn’t truly disappear . . . he just evolved into the modern-day garden gnome.

Now, I wonder if this means that all those little Gnomes living at the garden center are really just being paid to hang out there? Something to think about...maybe!

Coffee out on the patio this morning. Watch the flower beds for movement, OK?

A Little Garden Seed Mystery...!

Now, here is one for all the folks out there that like to garden. Call it a gardening mystery, if you will!

We all know that good seeds are sometimes hard to find, right? Imagine if a large quantity of usable seeds just rained down on your house. That would certainly seem to be strange, don't you think? Well, here is the story from the folks over at Listverse!

Rain of Seeds

February 1979

Roland Moody of Southampton, England, was startled to hear small, solid objects hitting the glass roof of the conservatory attached to his house. The objects turned out to be hundreds of seeds—small mustard seeds and cress seeds coated in a jelly-like substance. More seeds continued to fall during the day, eventually covering his garden. One of his neighbors, Mrs. Stockley, told Moody she’d had a similar experience the previous year.

The following day, Moody’s home was struck by corn, pea, and bean seeds that seemed to simply fall out of the sky. His neighbors on both sides were also pelted with peas and beans. Only those three houses in the neighborhood were targeted for the bizarre showers of seeds, and a police investigation was unable to pinpoint a source.

The phenomena gradually decreased and went away. By that time, Moody and his neighbors had endured twenty-five separate barrages and collected ten pounds of beans from their gardens. Moody himself gathered eight buckets of cress seeds. He claimed the produce grown from the seeds was good quality. Both Moody and Stockley were interviewed for Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World television series in 1980. To date, no adequate explanation for the weird showers has been found.

Now you have to admit that all this is rather strange. I'm not sure if I would want to eat anything that grew from those mysterious seeds, but it couldn't be much worse than some of the trash being sold in a few of the big name stores, could it?

Coffee out on the patio this morning. Keep an eye out for falling seeds, OK?

How About A Nap...?

I'm one of those folks that really believe in the benefits of a good nap! I try and take one every day!

When I was younger, I never thought about taking a nap in the daytime. Of course, back then I didn't know how much better I would feel after taking one. Now...I'm a believer!

The Benefits Of The Different Types Of Naps

By Debra Kelly on Tuesday, June 3, 2014

There’s a lot to be said for the benefits of napping, and taking differently timed naps during the day can provide you with quite the variety. Short naps lasting no more than about 20 minutes will increase your immediate processing ability, while slightly longer, 60-minute naps can provide you with a boost to your creativity. And 45-minute naps will leave you with health benefits like lowered blood pressure.

As much as we might have hated the necessity of taking naps as children, chances are good that we can’t seem to get enough of them as adults. Naps have always had a very distinct sort of stigma attached to them. However, in some parts of the world, taking a mid-afternoon nap means that you’re probably doing something you’re not supposed to be doing all night, or that you’re just inherently lazy. Other parts of the world find it absolutely acceptable to have an afternoon siesta, and according to science, they’re the ones that are getting it right.

Humans are programmed to sleep not in one eight-hour stretch, but in smaller sections. It’s been shown to reboot our brains and make us better problem solvers, learners, and workers. Not all naps are created equal, though, and how long you nap depends on what kind of benefits you’d like to get.

Many experts—such as those over at the National Sleep Foundation—recommend a relatively short nap of between 20 and 30 minutes for an immediate boost in productivity and alertness. Nap for any longer than that and you’re likely to have trouble falling asleep later.

There’s also the problem of something called “sleep inertia.” That’s the recovery time you need to wake up completely after a nap, and spending more than half an hour sleeping during the day will leave most people with a prolonged, groggy feeling that completely negates the idea of napping in the first place. This differs between people, and some of us can’t nap for more than about 10 minutes without struggling to wake up.

The improvement to alertness and brain function that we experience after a short nap lasts only between one and three hours, on average, before we’re feeling tired again. Longer naps of more than half an hour will give us a much, much longer period of feeling better, once we shake off the groggy feeling and recover from the shortened sleep period.

There’s also a very different and bizarrely specific type of nap that’s been called the six-minute nap. Because of the length of time that our sleep cycle takes, sleeping for six minutes can help us become more efficient at accessing our long-term memory. Similarly, napping through a few of these cycles can also help lengthen the improvement of our recall, as long as we’re in that six-minute time frame.

For those of us with irregular schedules, we might also try a 90-minute nap. Putting your head down for 90 minutes has been found to produce a minimum amount of the above-mentioned sleep inertia, while completing one of our full sleep cycles. This means that if we’re looking for a boost to our creativity or a little stability to our emotional state, a 90-minute nap is the way to go.

Different naps have different associations with physical benefits, too. Nap for 45 minutes, and you’ll find you’re lowering your blood pressure. Nap for 30 minutes a day on a regular basis, and you’re 37 percent less likely to suffer from heart disease.

Aside from duration, there are other differences in naps. Taking a nap purely for relaxation and enjoyment is called appetitive napping, while those who work naps into their daily schedule are habitual napping. Emergency napping happens when you’re in the middle of doing something and become so run down and sleepy that you just can’t keep doing what you’re doing without a break to recharge. And those of us that prepare for a late night out with a quick afternoon nap? That’s planned napping.

I have to thank the folks over at Knowledgenuts for proving what I always guessed at. For me, naps are a good thing. Won't make me prettier, but just makes feel better at the end of the day!

Coffee on the patio this morning. Anyone want some fruit?

Mark Twain On Western Wednesday...!

I doubt if any a one writer has influenced as many folks world wide as Samuel Clemens, better known as "Mark Twain!"

I don't think he intended to be much more than a humorist, but he ended up being far more than that. I think most would agree that he left his mark on American literature for many years.

Mark Twain begins reporting in Virginia City

Writing under the name of Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens begins publishing news stories in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.

Born in Missouri in 1835, Clemens followed a circuitous route to becoming an observer and writer of the American West. As a young man he apprenticed as a printer and worked in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. In 1856, he briefly considered a trip to South America where he thought he could make money collecting coca leaves. A year later, he became a riverboat pilot apprentice on the Mississippi River, and worked on the water for the next four years.

In 1861, Clemens' brother Orion was appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. Clemens jumped at the offer to accompany Orion on his western adventure. He spent his first year in Nevada prospecting for a gold or silver mine but was no more successful than the vast majority of would-be miners. In need of money, he accepted a job as reporter for a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper called the Territorial Enterprise. His articles covering the bustling frontier-mining town began to appear on this day in 1862. Like many newspapermen of the day, Clemens adopted a pen name, signing his articles with the name Mark Twain, a term from his old river boating days.

Clemens' stint as a Nevada newspaperman revealed an exceptional talent for writing. In 1864, he traveled farther West to cover the booming state of California. Fascinated by the frontier life, Clemens drew on his western experiences to write one of his first published works of fiction, the 1865 short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The success of this classic western tall tale catapulted Clemens out of the West, and he became a world-hopping journalist for a California newspaper.

In 1869, Clemens settled in Buffalo, New York, and later in Hartford, Connecticut. All told, Clemens spent only a little more than five years in the West, and the majority of his subsequent work focused on the Mississippi River country and the Northeast. As a result, Clemens can hardly be defined as a western writer. Still, his 1872 account of his western adventures, Roughing It, remains one of the most original and evocative eyewitness accounts of the frontier ever written. More importantly, even his non-western masterpieces like Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) reflected a frontier mentality in their rejection of eastern pretentiousness and genteel literary conventions.

I know a lot of people that think Twain is an over-rated writer, but I like his style. Contrary to popular belief, I don't think he was a racist, but rather wrote in the style and language widely used at the time. In fact, I think he even apologized in the beginning of some of his books about the use of words considered offensive and explained the use of those words.

Coffee out on the patio this morning. Another hot one is on the way!

Candy Goes To War...!

For all troops away from home, any type of treat like candy or gum could really brighten their day. Often the field rations for soldiers included some type of extra treat, including gum and candy and even tobacco! It made a big difference in the moral of the troops, I'm sure!

The Wartime Origins of the M&M

By Laura Schumm

It may not surprise you to learn that many amazing discoveries and inventions are spawned from war, but did you know the hugely popular M&M candies beloved by kids and adults of all ages around the world are one such innovation?

After clashing with his father—the creator of the Milky Way bar—for a few years at Mars Inc., Forrest Mars Sr. moved to England, where in 1932 he began manufacturing the Mars bar for troops in the United Kingdom. It was during the Spanish Civil War that Mars purportedly encountered soldiers eating small chocolate beads encased in a hard sugar shell as part of their rations. In an age when sales of chocolate typically dropped off during summer months due to the lack of air conditioning, Forrest was thrilled by the prospect of developing a product that would be able to resist melting in high temperatures. He returned to the United States and, shortly thereafter, approached Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey executive William Murrie, to join him in his new business venture. Anticipating a shortage of chocolate and sugar as World War II raged on in Europe, Mars sought a partnership that would ensure a steady supply of resources to produce his new candy. In return, Murrie was given a 20 percent stake in the M&M product, which was named to represent ‘Mars’ and ‘Murrie.’

In March of 1941, Mars was granted a patent for his manufacturing process and production began in Newark, New Jersey. Originally sold in cardboard tubes, M&M’s were covered with a brown, red, orange, yellow, green or violet coating. After the United States entered the war, the candies were exclusively sold to the military, enabling the heat-resistant and easy-to-transport chocolate to be included in American soldiers’ rations. By the time the war was over and GIs returned home, they were hooked.

Shortly after wartime quotas ended and the candies were made available to the general public, Forrest Mars bought out Murrie’s shares in the company and took sole ownership of the M&M brand. The familiar brown bag package that remains in use today was introduced in 1948. In 1950, the candies were imprinted with a black “m” (which changed to white in 1954) and customers were encouraged to “Look for the M on every piece” to ensure they were getting the real thing. Peanut M&M’s made their debut in 1954, along with the cartoon characters Mr. Plain and Mr. Peanut, and by 1956 M&M’s had become the No. 1 candy in the United States.

In 1964, Forrest merged his various businesses (which by then included pet food and rice, among other products) with his father’s company, Mars Inc., and soon began to phase out external chocolate suppliers like Hershey’s. Upon request by the crew aboard NASA’s first space shuttle, Columbia, M&M’s were the first candy to rocket into space in 1981. Three years later, they were advertised as the Official Snack of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Today, the crowd-pleasing and satisfying candies continue to sweeten a soldier’s day as a welcome part of their individual Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE) field ration

It's funny that we don't often consider where the original ideas for some of today's products came from, but this story just goes to show that not only is history fun to learn, but it often taste good as well!

Coffee out on the patio this morning. Watch out for those big ol' horse flies! Man, do they bite!

A New Monday Mystery...!

Here is one that is new enough to be interesting to some of you.

So often, the mysteries we talk about here are old and mostly forgotten. This is not the case here. The fact that it is fairly recent and still unsolved makes it even more delightful to study!

The Great Mull Plane Mystery

There is very little that makes sense about the disappearance and death of Peter Gibb. On Christmas Eve 1975, just after he’d finished dinner and a bottle of claret in a hotel on the Isle of Mull, the former Royal Air Force flying ace announced he was going out for a flight in his Cessna plane. The staff and hotel guests suggested that it wasn’t such a good idea, to which he responded “I am not asking permission, I just thought it was courtesy to let you know. I don’t want a fuss.”

He left with his dining companion Felicity Granger, a former university lecturer. She later reported that Gibb had given her instructions to stand at one end of the runway with torches to guide his takeoff. Multiple witnesses claim two torches moved independently in ways that would require another person to be helping, though Granger claimed there was only her. Gibb took off, and shortly thereafter, a sleet storm rained down that would last for 72 hours. Gibb didn’t come back.

While his motives were baffling enough, the real mystery began four months later, when Gibb’s body was found on a nearby hillside. A pathologist ruled that he had died of exposure. There was a cut in Gibb’s leg but no other injuries. Tests also concluded that neither his body nor his clothes had been in contact with the sea, so he had definitely exited the plane on land, but no one could find the plane. Mull is not a large island—about the same land area as Dallas—so the disappearance of the craft was quite troubling. A light aircraft matching the description was found in 1986 in the sea between Mull and the mainland, but the doors were locked, and the plane had apparently crashed extremely hard. The wings were a significant distance away from the rest of the fuselage. It suggested the sort of impact that a person wouldn’t get out of without serious injury.

Two explanations have been suggested, neither of which sound likely. The first is that Gibb leaped from his plane while it was in midair above the hill. He landed on the hill without suffering anything worse than a cut leg, then lay down and died in the cold. The problem with that explanation is that the aircraft would have been left to fly itself into the sea while the doors somehow locked themselves. The other theory is that Gibb was working for MI5 and had to attend to an urgent mission in Northern Ireland. He was captured by terrorists, somehow killed without being injured in any way, and his body was planted back on Mull. The light aircraft found in the sea is left out of that theory. Then again, it doesn’t make much less sense than the alternative.

Now this is the type of mystery that just screams for investigation, don't you think? I would think that with all the tools available today, or even back in the 70's, some logical explanation could be made. Still, not having a suitable answer is what makes it a mystery, right?

Today's mystery came from the folks over at Listverse, who always seem to have plenty of them to study!

Better have our coffee inside today. It appears that rain is back in the forecast!

No Cartoons Today...!

Sorry, but I'm going to take today off. Got some things I just have to attend to.

I do appreciate you dropping by, though. I'll make it up, I promise!