Old and recent history

Hayter for October 1, 2023

“Be careful out there”

I taught Government, U.S. history, economics, and geography. It seemed like there was something else. Nothing in math or science. Sociology! I also taught that for one semester. A fun course.

Teaching was enjoyable, but challenging for me. It required working my buns off reading and researching. While I am now retired, I still read and research a lot of things, I just don’t teach them to anyone. Especially not to anyone in my family. Those Jakelegs do not like to be taught anything by a family member. Particularly a family member by the name of Mark.

Of course, you’re pretty much a captive audience, so I’m going to share some stuff with you that I recently discovered. Much of this you may know, but it was all pretty much a surprise to me.

Let’s start with the piece about there being only five basic tastes? I never took a count on the number of my tastes, but I sure thought there would be more than five of them. According to some smart people, the five tastes on the planet are salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. The first four are well-known. However, “umami” sounds made up to me. It’s supposed to be what we refer to as “savory”. From what little I’ve read, “savory” is a combination of the other four tastes.

Humans have all five of life’s tastes. The same as monkeys. We are both the only animal groups that peel its bananas. The others are either too lazy or don’t give a rat’s rump. Whales can only taste salt. No big surprise there. Any creature that swallows a mouth full of ocean water with fish in it can’t taste anything but the salt. Whales have never even heard of Umami.

Kay shared something with me last week that I thought was fascinating.  I also thought it a slap on the face of modern man. It involves concrete. The average life span for concrete as a building source-- as opposed to, say, a dessert-- is 50 years. I consider that a good source for building stuff.

However, and it’s a big HOWEVER, the formula that the Romans used for their concrete was way superior to what we have today. Have you ever heard of Quicklime? I hadn’t, either. Nor do I have any idea why it should be capitalized. Quicklime is made by heating limestone, chalk, marble, and seashells. Each of those is not completely necessary, it’s just the formula the extraterrestrials gave to the Romans. – That’s my guess.

The Romans used seawater to prepare their concrete. The key there is salt. For some reason, salt helped strengthen their concrete. Many of the Roman domes, buildings, and walls were made using quicklime. Most of their roads were made with rocks set into Quicklime. Some of the roads are still used 2000 years later. That’s, like, more than 50 years.

It begs the question, why don’t we make our concrete out of Quicklime? Either the highway department has never heard of Quicklime, or the stuff costs a dollar a bag more than crackable concrete, or nobody cares for a road to last any more than 50 years.

Let’s move past the topic of inventions and delve into the study of bones. Did you know that your skull never stops growing? Mine doesn’t, either. All other bones stop growing in about 20 years, give or take. Not your head, though.

Your forehead starts growing forward and your jaw backward. You don’t even want to know about your hips. I assume God thought that, as we age, it would be nice for us to have something wider to sit on. I don’t think we should question God on that.

Next, I’ve got some good news and bad news. The good news is that when you’re born you’ve got some gold in you. We don’t know where it comes from. Milk? I have no idea. The bad news is that as you age, the gold becomes a smaller percentage of your body. I assume that is a sign that we’re worth less.

If you worry about that too much, you may get really upset about Henry II’s significant other. Diana de Poitiers started ingesting gold in the hope it would add to her beauty. The few paintings I’ve seen of the woman, show her to be lovely. At least for a little while. However, it wasn’t long before she had enough gold inside her to end her life. I suppose gold has an effect similar to that of lead. -- Platinum? One of you might want to try that out. (Urgent: That last sentence had no legitimacy to it whatsoever.)

November 30, 1954 -- Flash: Ann Hodges of  Sylacauga, Alabama was struck by a nine-pound meteor that came through her ceiling as she slept. The woman was the first live person ever recorded being hit by a meteor. The meteor came through her ceiling, smashed through her radio, and then hit her on the left side of her body before smashing to the floor. 

Her landlady sued for the right to have the softball-size meteor. I don’t know how the trial came out, but Ann died of kidney failure at the age of 52. Kidney failure and possibly pancreas, liver, lung, and gall bladder failure. 

Unfortunately, Hodges wasn’t the last person to get hit by a space rock. In 2009 a 14-year-old German lad was struck in the hand by a pea-size meteor. He said, “"When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road," – Keep in mind that these are the only people reported to have been hit by a meteor. How many since the dawn of mankind?

Okay, that’s all the time we have for now, class. There is no homework tonight… other than, try to be careful out there.

end

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