Originally, the stages were the places set up along the route and the coach was the vehicle that traveled between them. This type of coach was called a stagecoach to distinguish it from traditional coaches. Then people shortened this in common usage and called the vehicle a stage. No doubt there were pedants of that era who were upset when somebody said “I’m taking the stage to Kansas City” and explained that a stage didn’t move and it was the coach that would take you someplace.
Personally, I had never really thought about all this. I saw plenty of stagecoaches in movies and TV shows but I just saw them as another type of wagon. I didn’t consider that the wagon I saw was just part of a much larger organized system of transportation. I also never thought through the implications of seeing the horses racing along and how they couldn’t travel long distances at that pace.
I think it would, since humans don’t need much vit. C. A slice of lemon squeezed in your water would be enough.
But in a long sea voyager, by the time scurvy becomes a problem, the rats are usually long gone. Already eaten by the crews. It’s not even considered to be desperation food, you start to kill and eat them once fresh meat are gone.
Similarly, it occurred to me a while back that “penitentiary” is a place for penitent people, or for doing penance. A place you go to atone and feel sorry for what you’ve done.
I found out today that Stonewall Jackson’s sister was an abolitionist and although they had been close in earlier life, when Stonewall joined the confederacy, she never spoke of him again.
I learned about Xalisco heroin dealers. Not first-hand - from this book
The book is fantastic. I thought I knew a lot about the subject but I learned a lot from the book
Xalisco is a small town in Western Mexico. They grow poppies in the hills and make a semi-processed black tar heroin.
Young men from this town come to the US and set up small, direct to retail businesses. Each business has an owner/manager, a dispatcher and several drivers. The drivers are the point of contact with the customers and they work on salary for 3-6 month “contracts”. The drivers work unarmed and don’t carry any more product than they can swallow - the heroin is packaged in single doses in uninflated ballons. If they get caught, they just get deported which is not really a big deal since they would go home ( for a while at least) at the end of their contract.
They set up in mid-major cities like Boise, SLC, Columbus and Charlotte and avoid locales with gang-related drug operations. They are racist and only sell to white people.
They develop contacts in the addict communities and hand out free samples with a phone number. If someone calls they dispatch a drive to meet them at a prearranged location, usually a parking lot although they will go to the homes of established customers.
They even call their customers and conduct surveys “Was the delivery on time?” - “Was the driver courteous?” Was the product high quality?" If they havent heard from a regular customer in a while they’ll call them and offer freebies.
I’ve always wondered HOW all the painkiller addicts found a heroin source. It’s not the whole answer but it’s part of the puzzle.
In the Brothers Grimm fable, The Goose Girl, in which the evil chambermaid takes over the role of the princess, forces the princess to tend geese, and marries the prince, the princess has a faithful horse named Falada, and when the chambermaid-princess has the horse killed, the goose girl manages to have Falada’s head hung in an archway, where it continues to talk to her, and is instrumental in her ultimate victory over the chambermaid. I knew all that part, but what I didn’t know is that Falada, a name which I loved as a child and saved to be given to my own special horse someday (that didn’t happen), means “spoken” in Portuguese and Asturian, a related western Iberian language. Past participle of falar.
And in Galego as well, spoken and co-official in Galicia, the part of Spain that’s just north of Portugal.
The Asturian language is called Bable; the dialect of Spanish spoken in Asturias is called Asturiano (academic Spanish) or Asturiañu (dialectal version). Asturias is in the middle of Spain’s northern coast and was one of the starting points for the Reconquista; it is a one-province region which combines some highly industrial and highly technical cities with tiny villages where each house has one cow because they don’t have room for more than one; the heir-apparent to the throne of Spain gets three titles of Prince and is usually called Prince of Asturias (Princess in the current edition).
There, more things about Asturias than you ever wanted to know
I learned that California Condors are actually vultures, they were renamed “condors” to escape the deleterious vulture label so people would like them and help save them from extinction.
And I finally realized that the root meaning of “Alpine” is “of the Alps.” It’s evolved into general usage to indicate certain altitudes/flora ecologies, but its origin is Alp-ish.
Recently I learned something that challenges the received wisdom from my family of deer hunters that herds are always made up of a stag who presides over a family of females and fawns (boys get kicked out of the herd early). The last two weeks a lovely deer herd has been visiting the field behind our house at dusk; all seven of them are bucks – two of them are even 12-points! The youngest still has velveted antlers.
