Mummers

The Mummers Parade is held each New Year's Day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. It is believed to be the oldest folk festival in the United States.

Mummers tradition dates back to 400 BC and the Roman Festival of Saturnalias where Latin laborers marched in masks throughout the day of satire and gift exchange. This included Celtic variations of “trick-or-treat” and Druidic noise-making to drive away demons for the new year. Reports of rowdy groups “parading” on New Years day in Philadelphia date back before the revolution. Prizes were offered by merchants in the late 1800’s. January 1, 1901 was the first “official” parade offered about $1,725 in prize money from the city.

The exact origins of the word “mummer” have become obscure, but they likely had to do with masks or the act of disguise. In England, mummers have dressed up and performed Christmastime plays, which often told the story of St. George and the Dragon and featured themes of winter and rebirth, for many centuries. In some places, mummers’ troupes would also go from house to house to raise funds for their celebrations.

Over time, mummering traditions diverged and developed from place to place within the British Isles and spread with British settlers, across the world. Philadelphia’s Mummers’ Day Parade is derived, in part, from Britain’s mummer plays, in combination with Christmastime rituals that other Europeans brought to the city. But as mummering has been passed down, it has morphed in each place into an idiosyncratic tradition.

One day each year, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, the streets are filled with misshapen, masked figures wrapped in quilts and oversized jackets, or bright boots and distinctive dresses, with undergarments worn on the outside. Their faces are obscured behind gruesome disguises, lacy veils, giant horse heads, or beneath ghost-like pillow cases. These mummers are the latest iteration of a centuries-old tradition that has its roots in Europe, but is entirely unique to this Canadian island. More than a thousand people come out to the Mummers Parade each year, to feel what it is like to shed their normal identity for at least a few hours.

Happy Friday

A smile is a pleasant task for a happy heart.

I have a happy heart and a great smile, especially on a Happy Friday!

Santa Con and Santa Run

For over 20 years, many groups of people have dressed up like Santa to participate in annual pub crawls. The Santa Con originated in San Francisco in 1994 and has since spread to over 40 countries and 300 cities around the world.

Santa Runs are a bit different, but just as widespread around the world. Groups of people dress up like Santa and do a 2.5k, 5k run/walk to support various, mostly local charities.

Groups sizes of both vary from the hundreds to thousands of revelers. Both are meant to provide good fun for participants and onlookers. It is not too late for this year. Although many cities have already held their 'runs' and 'cons' there are still a few yet to be enjoyed. Check your local newspapers for details and if you get the chance, join in.

Go ahead get off your butts and have some good clean non-denominational, non-sectarian, non-religious, non racist, non-anti Semitic, non-misogynistic, non-deplorable Holiday fun. Get out there with your friends, make some new friends, get some exercise, and enjoy some fresh air and conversation, away from the TV, Internet, and politics. Wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, or Seasons Greetings - with no other agenda than having some fun for a change.

Oolitic Sand and Brine Shrimp

Oolitic sand is pill-shaped sand prevalent on the bottom of Great Salt Lake and several beaches. It is soft, smooth and round unlike regular sand that is jagged-edged. A grain of oolitic sand begins as a brine shrimp fecal pellet or other small bit of debris. Calcium and magnesium carbonate particles build up around it, creating oolitic sand and separating brine shrimp waste from the rest of the water. In this way, oolitic sand functions as a filter for Great Salt Lake.
Brine shrimp are the most populous animal in Great Salt Lake. These tiny crustaceans live in salt water around the world, but only one species, Artemia franciscana lives in Great Salt Lake. They measure up to 0.5 inches (1.37 centimeters) long and can live in water with up to 33 percent salinity, according to Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program. They can control how much salt gets into their body tissues better than any other organism on Earth, due to skin lining their stomachs and gills.

Incidentally, a massive brine shrimp harvest occurs every Autumn. The brine shrimp are primarily sent to Asia and South America where they are used as feeders for commercially grown prawn and fish.

Computer Christmas Songs

 "The Christmas tree is filled with flowers. I swear it is Christmas Eve. I hope that is what you say." These are lyrics to a holiday song. You are thinking it is a boy band totally drunk. You assume they are trying to revive a rock band vibe until they fall on their foreheads and their manager rings for a designated driver.

However, the song did not come from a human. The Guardian's Ian Sample, science editor, explained what happened in simple terms. "Scientists fed a Christmasy photograph with a tree and presents into a computer and let it do its thing." Sample said the creators call it "neural karaoke."

The program sang the lyrics to music that it composed along the way. The project is at the University of Toronto. "By feeding the neural network a particular scale, it gives the system a series of notes it can choose from to make a melody." A lab student trained a neural network on 100 hours of online music. Once trained, "the program can take a musical scale and melodic profile and produce a simple 120-beats-per-minute melody. It then adds chords and drums."

The University of Toronto team effort is one example of interest among AI researchers choosing to explore computers and music-making. In September this year it was announced that "At SONY CSL Research Laboratory, we have created two entire pop songs composed with Artificial Intelligence, thanks to Flow Machines. The Flow Machines software learns music styles from a huge database of songs. Then, exploiting unique combinations of style transfer, optimization and interaction techniques, it can compose in any style.

What's in a Name, Diesel

Diesel is used in about 50 percent of cars in Europe, but only in about three percent of the market in the US. The German word Diesel was named after the German inventor and mechanical engineer Rudolf Diesel, who patented the idea for his new engine in 1895 that used diesel fuel rather than gas (petrol).

The engine works by compressing only the air and therefore does not use a spark plug to ignite the air-fuel mixture. Although the diesel engine and German car industry has taken a serious hit recently with Volkswagen's diesel emissions scandal, diesel engines are still very common across Europe.

Gingerbread

This time of year we see many confections made with gingerbread. It has long been woven into the fiber of American history. George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, developed a recipe for gingerbread cake in 1784. Gingerbread was Abraham Lincoln’s ‘biggest treat’ and he invoked a gingerbread anecdote in his Lincoln – Douglas debates. Witches used gingerbread men as voodoo dolls in the early 17th century.

During the late Middle Ages, Europeans had their own version of gingerbread. The hard cookies, sometimes gilded with gold leaf and shaped like animals and kings and queens were a staple at Medieval fairs in England, France, Holland and Germany.

Queen Elizabeth I is credited with the idea of decorating the cookies in this fashion, after she had some made to resemble the dignitaries visiting her court. Over time some of these festivals came to be known as Gingerbread Fairs, and the gingerbread cookies served there were known as ‘fairings'.

Shapes of the gingerbread changed with the season, including flowers in the spring and birds in the fall. Elaborately decorated gingerbread became synonymous with all things fancy and elegant in England. The gold leaf that was often used to decorate gingerbread cookies led to the popular expression ‘to take the gilt off of gingerbread'. The carved, white architectural details found on many colonial American seaside homes is sometimes referred to as ‘gingerbread work’.

Gingerbread houses originated in Germany during the 16th century. The elaborate cookie-walled houses, decorated with foil in addition to gold leaf, became associated with Christmas tradition. Their popularity rose when the Brothers Grimm wrote the story of Hansel and Gretel, in which the main characters stumble upon a house made entirely of treats deep in the forest. It is unclear whether gingerbread houses were a result of the popular fairy tale, or vice versa.

Recently the record for world’s largest gingerbread house was broken. The previous record was set by the Mall of America in 2006. The new winning gingerbread house, spanning nearly 40,000 cubic feet, was erected at Traditions Golf Club in Bryan, Texas. The house required a building permit and was built much like a traditional house. 4,000 gingerbread bricks were used during its construction. A recipe for a house this size would include 1,800 pounds of butter and 1,080 ounces of ground ginger.
Gingerbread gets its name from the ginger root and its color from molasses. The ginger root has long been associated with many health benefits. It is thought to aid in digestion, be an anti-inflammatory aid, help with menstrual cramps and morning sickness, fend off disease, and even relieve some of the nausea associated with motion sickness. Some folks use it to relieve heartburn as well. It is usually made with a variety of spices, including brown sugar, molasses, granulated sugar, honey, and/or light or dark corn syrup.

Happy Friday

Laughter is a universal language.

Everyone understands and appreciates laughter, especially on a Happy Friday!

More About Time Zones

Prior to standardization, there were thousands of local times around the world, generally based on the Sun’s position at a given time. Even after clocks became somewhat commonplace, two cities a short distance apart sometimes had very different ideas about what time it was at any given moment. Usually, the accepted time for a given city was based on a well-known clock in the town, like a clock tower, which was often at least partially based on the Sun’s position.

Once people began to travel, establishing a universal time became more important. During 1675 the GMT was invented at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. As transportation and communication continued to advance, the need to have standard timekeeping became increasingly apparent. During 1840, the Great Western Railway in Great Britain adopted GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) as the standard for its schedule, and by 1847, all British rail companies were using GMT, which was also called Railway Time.
The Royal Observatory began telegraphing time signals in 1852, and by 1855, 98% of the public clocks in Great Britain were displaying GMT, either alone or in conjunction with local time.
Sir Sandford Fleming was the instigator of a single, worldwide system of timekeeping. His basic idea of having a universal day beginning at Greenwich was ultimately adopted at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. The conferees decided that the line of longitude that passed through Greenwich would be the prime meridian where each universal day would begin at midnight.

As had once been the case in Europe, and for some semblance of standardization from town to town, railroad companies set their own times, which differed from company to company. William F. Allen’s proposal was adopted by the US rail system on November 18, 1883. It was called the day of two noons, every railroad station clock was reset to reflect new time zones, which were designated Intercolonial, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific.
Less than one hundred years ago, the US Congress passed the Standard Time Act in 1918, which established a single, standard system of timekeeping for the entire country and designated its five time zones by reference to the Greenwich meridian.
Incidentally, it is called “Greenwich Mean Time,” because the Earth’s daily rotation time is slightly irregular, causing a variance of about plus or minus 16 minutes, so to be consistent, the mean time is used.

Unique Quote

The chairman of a meeting introduced puzzle-loving logician Raymond Smullyan and praised him as unique.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,” said Smullyan, “but I happen to be the only one in the entire universe who is not unique.”

Berlin 1953 - 2016

The Berlin Morning Post has developed a fascinating interactive map of Berlin during 1953 and updated as of 2016. The map is split in the middle and you can move cursor to slide the view from one side to the other interactively and can zoom in, as well as move north and south.


You can search for an addresses in the top left hand corner and see what the neighborhood looked like more than sixty years ago, before the Berlin Wall and while the city was still recovering from the Second World War. Berlin removed 75 million cubic metres of rubble in the years after the war. All names are in German. LINK

Laughing Sailors

 If you feel the need to hear some laughing, click on this YouTube LINK. It is 50 seconds of animated sailors laughing. Completely useless, but a momentary diversion from what ails you.

Wordology, Delicatessen

Most of us are familiar with the word Deli, which conjures up sliced sausage and cheese piled high on rolls and ordered at the counter. The term also brings to mind baguettes and camembert, or olives and prosciutto. The term deli comes from delicatessen shops, which came from the German 'Delikatesse'.

The shops called delicatessens were first opened in New York and London by German proprietors, such as Lingner’s Delicatessen on London's Old Compton Road in Soho, recorded in 1877.

The German word has its roots in Latin “delicatus” and the French word “délicatesse”, but the French term for a fine foods shop is actually “une épicerie fine”.

Centenarian Advice

Five people, all women 113 to 117 years old provide thoughts about what helped them live so long.

 No jogging, smoked until husband had his first heart attack, then quit. Eats anything, but prefers oatmeal.
 Has compassion for others and positive attitude.
 Eat delicious things, including ramen noodles and beef stew, as well as hashed beef and rice mackerel sushi. Learn to relax.
 Eats fish and mutton and sometimes cow foot. Also has locally-grown produce like sweet potatoes, breadfruit, oranges and mangoes.
 Believes being single is what keeps her alive (she left her husband in 1938). Eats two raw eggs and one cooked egg every day and cookies.