I just stumbled across this while doing research amongst old newspapers. This is from 1915, and just too amazing not to share
The Pacific Coast Biscuit Company of Portland Oregon, back in 1915, urged mothers to serve their kids Swastika Graham Crackers. The box is emblazoned with a big swastika in a sunburst.
Really
Yeah, I know – swastikas were a good luck symbol. They represented the ci5rcular motion of the heavens. It was an Indian symbol in both senses – subcontinent of and American original inhabitants. And this swastika isn’t balanced on its point.
But you look at that ad and it hits you right in the Solar Plexus.
I’ll bet if anyone had one of those boxes today it’d go for a pretty penny at auction
My late mother’s condo building was built long ago enough that the ornate tile work surrounding the swimming pool features reverse swastikas. We always called it “the nazi pool”, much to her dismay. The building is on the annual city architectural tours and the pool always gets surprised notice from participants.
A few days ago we had a day out in Penshurst Place, Kent.
That part of Kent is stiff with castles, stately homes and so on. In fact, Penshurst is only three miles from Hever Castle. Now, this is where it gets slightly weird. Anne Boleyn was born and raised in Hever Castle. At a distance of 3 miles, it’s almost inconceivable that Anne didn’t visit Penshurst. At the time she was living at Hever, Penshurst was owned by… Henry VIII (rather conveniently the previous owner had been a bit traitorous and so it became crown property).
Now, if you haven’t seen The TV series Wolf Hall, you really should, if only for Mark Rylance’s performance, which won pretty much every award going (and rightly so). Wolf Hall details, as part of the story, the stormy relationship between Henry and Anne.
And one of the locations used to film Wolf Hall was … Penshurst Place.
Wolf Hall was filmed in two locations in Kent: Dover Castle doubled for the Tower of London, and the Long Gallery, Tapestry Room, and Queen Elizabeth Room at Penshurst Place were used as specific rooms in Whitehall (York Place), which was Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s residence. The Long Gallery doubled as Anne Boleyn’s chamber.
So did Henry and Anne ever get it on in the stately home used, five centuries later, for the filming of them getting it on? And indeed, was that thought part of the process of selecting filming locations? Here, sadly, I’ve run light on fact:
Penshurst Place was once owned by Henry VIII who used it as his hunting lodge. Henry may have stayed at Penshurst while secretly courting Anne Boleyn when she was at Hever Castle, prior to their marriage in January 1533. It was also rumoured that Henry had earlier enjoyed a liaison with Anne’s younger sister, Mary, and some of their meetings may have taken place at Penshurst.
My bold {Sighs}. If anyone can fill in the gaps in this story, please do.
The word or word element “drift”, as in “driftwood”, is etymologically related to “drive”. I know, it’s obvious after a moment’s thought, yet the notion of “drifting” seems rather passive while “driving” seems purposeful and active.
In semi-conductor physics, the passive process is called “diffusion”, and the driven process is called “drift”. In that context, “drift” can be a fast high-energy process. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that the “drift” was semantically related to the “drive”. The language sometimes adds to the confusion of beginner students. Perhaps the person who originated the terms was German?
In terms of phonology, the derivation of drift from drive is obvious (as I now realize). I don’t know at the moment where the /t/ in “drift” came from, but the changing of the /v/ in “drive” to /f/ , when followed by the voiceless /t/ is an instance of of a very common phenomenon in Germanic linguistics. Essentially, the idea is that a voiceless consonant within a consonant cluster tends to make the entire cluster voiceless. in the case of “drift” this is reflected in the spelling. In very many past tense verbs, however, the tense marker in writing remains a “d” but is pronounced as a /t/. This happens when the final consonant of the verb is voiceless, as in “duck” or “kick”.
Another example is “snowdrift” and “[pure as] the driven snow”.
Watching documentaries while half asleep has watching them while awake beat to hell. My Antho degree dates from long before the Denisovan people were invented, so I had on a show about them. The cave where they were discovered was named after the resident hermit named Dennis. It’s twoo; It’s twoo!
Later on they started talking about how the finest cave art was drawn by autistic cavemen, but I went back to sleep.
Henry Hathaway, director of the 1969 True Grit among many other Hollywood films, was the grandson of Marquis Henri Léopold de Fiennes, who had been tasked by King Leopold II of the Belgians to acquire the Hawaiian Islands.
The Hawaiians are rightly aggrieved by Sanford Dole, but wow, horrible if Leopold had gotten his claws in!
I’ve been reading lots of old newspapers (mainly from the 1920s through 1960s) while doing some genealogy research. Here’s something I recently learned: the press reported on damn near everything. You stayed in the hospital for a couple days? There’s a short paragraph on it. You got straight A’s this quarter in school? It’s in the paper. You volunteered to help your neighbor? The press somehow found out and reported it. And there was lots of self-reporting. Your parents came to visit you? It’s in the paper. You’re wanting to hire someone? Put it in the paper. A 10 year old girl is having a birthday party? A paragraph listing everyone in attendance is in the paper. Someone stole clothes off your clothes line? Complain about it in the paper.
Oh, yeah. I grew up in a very small Minnesota town that had a weekly paper. College classmates loved to come spend a weekend there because they knew that they would make the paper (along with home cooking):
Joe Blow was home from college visiting his parents Sean and Seanette for the weekend, accompanied by his friends Barney Flintstone and Fred Rubble.
Two nature-related facts that we discovered in our back yard about a month ago.
Squirrels need to chew things to prevent their teeth from getting too long. Included in the things they can chew are our plastic resin Adirondack chairs
Grackles (a type of bird), when they are raising their young, will transfer “fecal sacs” of their young out of the nest (in order to not attract predators) to convenient bodies of water, such as our bird bath which, by the way, is located about five yards from our squirrel-chewed chairs. Fortunately the fecal sac thing only goes on for a few weeks, until the younglings are mobile.
My mom kept a bovine skull on our patio. Surprised the hell out of me when we moved to the New Orleans 'burbs and the local squirrels started gnawing on it.
