The fig eats it.
No, really.
I took this from a Ripley’s Believe or Not book
I make applesauce frequently (our neighbors have a commercial apple orchard). I use different kinds of apples each time for a slightly different taste. I simmer beyond what most people would expect, getting a smooth, thick sauce but not all the way to apple butter.
Sometimes I’ll peel/core/chop apples and put them in a crockpot with a splash of water. Cooked on low overnight you end up with warm applesauce for breakfast. Great over pancakes.
The Greeks had a goddess of helplessness named Amechania.
According to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, the Romans had a Goddess of Nipples and a Goddess of Buttocks.
I haven’t been able to corroborate this elsewhere, and it might just be Voltaire being teasing.
In any case, “goddess of buttocks” wouldn’t be Venus Callipygia – that’s a statue, not a goddess. And it’s Greek, not Roman.
This would be an obvious fact if I’d really thought about it, but I hadn’t.
The factory where they make camera film must be dark inside. After the point where the coatings are added (before cutting into strips for the canisters) they must work in near total darkness.
Or course they must, but I never thought about it until watching the “Smarter Every Day” Youtube videos about it.
I once toured a Kodak plant, and the dark areas were very interesting. There’s a zig zag entry way painted black to absorb ambient light so that when you get through there’s no light from the outside corridor, but it wasn’t blocked off with doors, since they move product in and out that way, and you don’t want opening a door to flood the area with light.
It’s very dark, of course, and our tour guide told us that workers were in the habit of talking to themselves or just making noise all the time so they don’t bump into each other. Who knows if he was kidding or not.
Don’t they use safelights?
Safelights are primarily used while making B&W prints. Most B&W and all color films are sensitive to all colors, and therefore would be exposed by safelights.
I wonder how many blind people work there.
The Romans had a goddess of hinges named Cardea.
I think all these minor gods and goddesses were the reason why the Church had to invent the concept of (patron) saints to replace them as helpers for every mundane thing in life for the common people.
That got worked into the plot of the novel Red Dragon.
And the Discworld has a goddess of jammed kitchen drawers named Anoia.
The movie based on it, too. The first one, Manhunter. I don’t recall if they did it in the second one.
You can do something similar with quinces and you end up with membrillo (aka quince cheese and other names). It somewhat resembles turkish delight when you’re done. And yes, I have done it - never again; cooking up a hugely hot boily, sticky, spitty thing - it’s like cooking with napalm.
j
Was that the movie about the F-111 pilot whose plane went down in eastern Cambodia, and he made his way across the Thai, Burmese and Indian jungles to end up in Kathmandu?
I did not know that. If it helps, I imagine that in an organism with a lifecycle like that, that the males are so tiny that they’re only barely even organisms at all.
That lifestyle does lead one to question the genetics of the arrangement, though. If the new females are all impregnated inside the fig, and the wasps in any given fig are all the offspring of the one female who crawled in, that’s basically the equivalent of asexual reproduction.
Well, strictly speaking, it’d be true. The pre-Greek Roman religion animistic, based on the concept that there was a spirit of everything and every class of things. The spirits of big important things were called gods, but they weren’t qualitatively different from the spirits of little things. And if there’s a god of everything, then logically, there must have been gods of nipples and of buttocks, even if nobody ever specifically worshiped them (though, knowing people, I’m sure someone did), or knew their names.
And guardian angels, because everyone had their own personal gods, too.
Yes, them too. Probably private, personal religiosity hasn’t changed much in the history of mankind. (yeah, I know, protestantism got rid of that, but there are still many such folk {or even canon} beliefs in other flavors of christianity and other religions)
Yeah, I thought of that too. I’ve been poking around to try to understand how fig wasp genetics works, but haven’t found a clear explanation. I think this answer is, sometimes two or more females will enter the same fig around the same time, so two separate populations of wasps will hatch and interbreed inside the same fig. This seems to imply that genetic mixing is rarer in fig wasps that in species with more flexibility in finding mates.
I found a source with the delightful title “How to be a Fig Wasp” which talks about fig wasp speciation and how it is linked to fig tree speciation (since each wasp species usually pollinates only one fig species and vice versa). It says:
Mating within the fig reduces the effective population size of pollinators, and the loss of genetic variation in traits pertaining to host selection and performance could constrain the evolution of host use. In addition, the linkage of fig and pollinator life cycles implies that a founder invading a new host would compete for resources with an established pollinator population.
A friend of mine visited the Boeing plant in Seattle, and when he texted the photos to the guys back in Oz, he wrote ‘It’s so big, it has its own airport!’.
We’ll let him forget it … someday.