Even gravestones are “permanent records”. A problem is that permanent records don’t last permanently.
My Junior High councilor lied to me?
They were waiting until you fixed that C- you got in Social Studies before telling you the truth.
Ever hear of Alfonsina Strada?
Me either, before yesterday. She is the only woman ever to take part in a cycling grand tour (the great stage races*: Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Vuelta a España). She rode in the 1924 Giro.
The ‘start list’ was reduced because of a strike, so the organiser Gazzetta dello Sport allowed independent riders to enter without support teams, as they provided bed, board and massage. The event was unique because of the participation of Alfonsina Strada, the only female competitor in the history of the Giro. Entry number 72 was granted to Alfonsin Strada to conceal her gender. She successfully completed the first 7 stages but a series of crashes and punctures between L’Aquila and Perugia led to her exclusion [that is to say, she failed to make the time cut-off for the stage](such was her heroism that the organisers allowed her to continue each stage without inclusion in the overall classification) [ie, riding the route with the other racers, but excluded from race results].
Even aside from the above she was a remarkable woman; born piss-poor, but made a life for herself:
She rode her first race at about 13, winning a live pig. She won nearly all the girls’ races she entered and many of the boys’ events. Her reputation brought an invitation to ride the Grand Prix of St Petersburg in Russia in 1909. She was such a success that the Tsarina Alexandra⋅wanted her husband, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, to give her a gold medal….. She won 36 races against men….
Last year was the 100th anniversary of her participation in the Giro. I am flabbergasted that I had never heard of her before yesterday. Why was the 2024 Giro not one long celebration of her achievement? She should be better known and celebrated. I’m doing my bit.
j
*- there is now a matching set of three women’s grand tours. Cycling is getting better.
Update:
In the first part of this thread I wrote about Millie Robinson, the winner of the inaugural (short lived) Women’s Tour de France in 1955, another trailblazing woman, but even less well known these days than Strada. I am pleased to report that as of Feb 2024, Robinson has a wiki page.
Three other (male) finishing riders were also allowed to continue despite exclusion. 90 riders started the race and only 30 (including Strada) finished. The roads really sucked back then.
Apparently this is one way juice is extracted from sugar cane. Especially interesting is that the press including the gears look carved by hand.
They don’t talk much about the Glorious Revolution in England, where James II was deposed without bloodshed. Turns out there was bloodshed - out of James’s nose.
He had an army out to attack William of Orange but had to stop for two days because of a bad nosebleed. James’s commanders switched over to William, and James’s army was weakened too much to win a battle. He fled and William marched into London unopposed.
Some elsewheres, I used the word “addlepation”, which apparently does not actually exist, in the dictionary anyway. So I did some exploring and learned that “addle” derives from a ME word that means “rotten”, which comes from an OE word that means “pool of excrement” (cognate with a nearly identical old German word). Hence, “addlepated” (which is in the dictionary) literally means “shithead”.
Or perhaps ‘piss head’.
In 1946, after a period of hyperinflation, Hungary exchanged one new Forint for 400 octillion old Pengos. That’s a 4 followed by 29 zeros.
Why did they bother preserving any value for the Pengo at all? I would have thought all stored value lost at that point. Was it that the government didn’t want to completely default on the Pengos it theoretically owed people?
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the history of the Hungarian pengő and the forint, The pengő lost value after World War I very quickly. It lost value even more quickly after World War II. Only when they introduced the forint did the value more or less stabilize. They intend to eventually place the forint with the euro. Many people had hugely large collections of pengős when they went out of use. Letting people exchange pengős for forints allowed the government to say that they knew that people had tried to keep up with the hyperinflation, while no conversion at all would come across as making fun of those people:
By golly, that is an incredibly tedious and frighteningly boring thing to watch as a spectator. It really couldn’t get much worse than this.
Some say baseball consists of a few seconds of action accompanied by minutes or hours of nothing… table football is that times a million. It has mere microseconds of action along with minute upon minute of utter zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Do not recommend.
Oh, I don’t know. I find it weirdly fascinating — in short doses, to be sure, but still — to observe the uncanny level of finesse and ball control displayed by the top players, in what I normally think of as a rowdy, loose-limbed bar game.
Here’s a three minute highlight video for the curious.
I mean, I wouldn’t want to sit and watch this for a whole hour (and the focused attention of the refs in the background is pretty funny), but there’s at least a marginal bit of interest for me in the supernatural reflexes and crazy-high quality of play.
We used to watch arcade game players for the same reason - Galaxian, Defender, etc. Nothing objectively interesting about the subject, but lightning fast reflexes and awesome level of awareness.
The community of Orange, and thus William of Orange, are coincidental spellings with the fruit and color and are completely unrelated etymologically.
The fruit started out with an initial ‘n’, but by the time it made it into Western Europe, it had gotten dropped in Italy.
The oranges seem to have taken a weird route all the way from China to Italy because in Spain the initial N is maintained till this day: naranja.
Spain is not Western Europe then?
They were kicked out in 1588 over the Armada Incident. They’re Southern Europe now.