Interesting to read how gastronomically adventurous John Ruskin was, since there was one thing he steadfastly refused to eat (NSFW).
@Slithy_Tove - I have the sense that there may be a link missing from this post? Or is it Really, Really NSFW?
j
No link, but Ruskin was a product of neo-classicism idealization. On his wedding night, he discovered to his horror that, unlike statues, women had pubic hair. For the rest of his life, he foreswore the mons venus for the marble Venus.
Urine sniffing to determine mating receptivity is not limited to giraffes. I know goats, sheep, horses, and dogs do this. I would guess it is very common in mammals generally. I think the reason humans don’t is that we have such a poor sense of smell.
I once read that comparing a human’s sense of smell to a dog’s is like comparing a person with normal vision to someone who is legally blind. I found this:
Dogs possess a sense of smell many times more sensitive than even the most advanced man-made instrument. Powerful enough to detect substances at concentrations of one part per trillion—a single drop of liquid in 20 Olympic-size swimming pools.
My pet hypothesis is that humans gradually lost their ability to smell because dogs did that for them. 30,000 years is long enough to lose a lot of your sense of smell.
I base this on no evidence, of course.
I suppose one could investigate the sense of smell of other higher primates, for comparison to humans, as they are so genetically similar to us and do not have dog companions.
But my dog’s got no nose…
Oh, go on then.
How does he smell…?
j
Horrible!
Thanks, @Treppenwitz
I concur that sniffing is by no means unusual with mammals but tasting is more uncommon, with perhaps only elephants and kangaroos joining giraffes in this practice.
Today, I stumbled across the fact that President Martin Van Buren’s Vice President - Richard Mentor Johnson - had married one of his slaves.
She had died before he was elected to the office, but the fact that he had claimed matrimony with an enslaved woman was enough of an issue in the election that Johnson was denied enough electoral votes to elevate him to office, and so he had to obtain a vote from Congress instead.
Now, it is fair to question the legitimacy of a claim that he had married a slave. But, he referred to her as his bride, she apparently dressed well, bore him two daughters which he claimed proudly, and was left in charge whenever he left their Kentucky estate.
Basically, Mr. Johnson and his wife, Julia Chinn, gave a hearty fuck you to the racist conventions of the time.
(Although I think people of today would be baffled by those racist views, not just horrified. Googling around tells me that she was only 1/8 African (an “Octoroon”), so I wonder how darkly complected she actually looked. Methinks that a modern person confronted with 18th-19th century slavery rules would be frequently found to exclaim “he’s/she’s black?!”)
I discovered that two out of three people think a guy for whom the flak jacket was named was buried in one 
Actor and polymath Peter Ustinov was an octoroon.
Cite - his wiki entry is less clear on the subject.
The oddest aspect of these charming, disposable films: their star — born Umberto Alejandro Ballentino in 1913 or 1914 — was mostly, perhaps totally Caucasian. “My mother was Irish, my father was Sicilian, and one of my great-grandparents was Ethiopian,” Jeffries told The Oklahoman in 2004. That would make him, in the parlance of slave-era America, an “octoroon” — of one-eighth African heritage — or exactly as “black” as actor Peter Ustinov, whose great-grandmother was an Ethiopian princess.
I learned this many years ago from an interview. I think he also claimed to be related to Haile Selassi.
j
I just read this, can’t stop thinking about it now!
Samurai were abolished in 1867.
The first FAX, ‘printing telegraph’, was invented in 1843.
Lincoln was shot at Ford Theatre 1865.
Does that mean for, like 22 yrs, a Samurai could have sent a ‘fax’ to Lincoln? What?
Sure! As long as the samurai was in Baltimore and Lincoln was in Washington DC 17 years before he was elected President.
So doable then?
Serious lack of a cable under the Pacific.
I guess that makes me an ‘Octojew’? I have a Jewish great-grandmother; theoretically I could claim Israeli citizenship, if I could ever document all the required connections (the usual genealogical documentation, plus showing that no-one in the chain of ancestry had explicitly joined another religion before the next ancestor was born).
One of his relatives was Haile Selassi. Some were fairly Selassi, while others weren’t Selassi at all.