The British Navy stocking their ships with lime juice is how the nickname for a British sailor - “limey” - came about. It continues to be used as a nickname long after the lime juice is gone…
The gin and tonic was developed by British officers in India - they diluted the unpleasant taste of anti-malarial quinine with gin, and added Vitamin-C rich limes to ward off scurvy.
[del]While only the French get a demeaning nickname out of it, frog’s legs also appear on the menu in Cantonese cuisine, as well as some parts of Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and the American Midwest.
They really do taste like chicken.[/del]
Ninja’d.
Emerson Hart and Jeff Russo formed the band Tonic in 1993. The group’s debut album was Lemon Parade.
In and around Boston, “tonic” is used as the generic term for “soda”. Sort of like “pop” in parts of the midwest.
In 1975, Pepsi introduced its “Pepsi Challenge” campaign, featuring blind taste tests between Pepsi and its rival, Coca-Cola, as the two brands battled for sales leadership in the soda pop/carbonated soft drink market.
Michael Jackson caught his hair on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial with pyrotechnics.
President Andrew Jackson was the first U.S. president to have an assassin attempt to kill him. Richard Lawrence fired a pistol at him from point blank range. The pistol misfired. He then pulled a second pistol and fired again. Once again, it misfired. Lawrence was then overpowered.
Later the pistols were tested. They worked perfectly.
The Battle of New Orleans was fought almost entirely AFTER the treaty ending the War of 1812 was signed. The battle began on December 23; the treaty was signed on December 24 - but the news didn’t reach them until February.
In 1814 we took a little trip/Along with Andy Jackson down the mighty Missisip
Sir Edward Pakenham, the British general at the Battle of New Orleans, was killed during the fighting. His body was returned home in a barrel of rum to preserve it. When the ship arrived back in Great Britain, legend has it, thirsty sailors had bit by bit drained off much of the rum.
Rum (and similar high proof alcohol) was the drink of choice on sailing ships bound for distant shores because unlike fresh water alcohol doesn’t go stale over time, and remains both palatable and relatively safe to drink even should, e.g. a few rats shit or even drown inside the barrel.
Since the drawback of a rum diet is drunk sailors (which if you’ve ever been in the company of one you never, ever want to again, ever) the booze was most usually diluted with water or small beer, the resulting mix is called “grog”. And it’s foul. Nevertheless, the British Navy was still issuing its sailors daily rum rations as late as the 1960s. The Royal New Zealand Navy still does.
The “scuttlebutt” was the cask on a ship that held the day’s supply of drinking water. Sailors would hang around it to shoot the breeze. Modern-day office workers continu to hear the latest scuttlebutt while hanging around the office drinking cooler.
The Cooler, starring William H. Macy, Maria Bello and Alec Baldwin, is a 2003 dark comedy about a man with very bad luck who is employed by a Vegas casino to mysteriously but reliably “cool” the good luck of gamblers there.
Captain Hilts, Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape, was known as “the Cooler King” because his repeated escape attempts led to much time spent in a cold dark isolation cell.
Actress Butterfly McQueen is best known for her role as Prissy in Gone With The Wind and the line “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies!” McQueen, a lifelong atheist, was born as Thelma McQueen, but hated the name and had it legally changed to “Butterfly.”
When Butterfly McQueen became sick of playing Prissy type characters (i.e. silly sly maids and slaves) she mostly quit show business for many years, acting only occasionally in non-stereotypical stage roles. During this time she supplemented her income by working as, among other things, a live-in caregiver to wealthy invalids, a NYC cab dispatcher, and temp worker in various offices. When she died many were surprised to learn that in spite of her almost meager lifestyle she was actually quite well-off, owning numerous rental properties in Augusta, Georgia, an apartment in Harlem, a six-figure checking account and no debts.
Bill Clinton’s post-presidential office is in Harlem, where he prominently displays a black-and-white photo of a beardless, pre-presidential Abraham Lincoln.
Most of what is known about Abraham Lincoln’s early life is owed to his law partner William Herndon who traveled the countryside interviewing Lincoln’s few remaining relatives (mainly his stepmother Sarah Bush Lincoln and his cousin Dennis Hanks) and childhood friends. A problem was that Herndon was a chronically disorganized alcoholic and a drug addict and had a collaborator who wanted to be a novelist, plus Herndon’s unmitigated hatred for Mary Todd Lincoln shines through repeatedly. (In Herndon’s defense he was far from the only person not to like her; her nickname with the White House staff was ‘Madame Hellcat’.)
The room where Lincoln died is sometimes referred to as “The Rubber Room,” because in various paintings and lithographs of the scene, it showed more and more people at Lincoln’s deathbed. The actual room is quite small – 9 1/2’ x 17’
Being across the street from Ford’s Theater, the Petersen boarding house (where Lincoln died) was popular with actors. “The rubber room” mentioned above was so small because it was the closed in porch off the ground floor hallway (what is known in folk architecture as a ‘shed room’) and unlike most of the upstairs rooms was more commonly rented by the night than to longer term guests. It is known that John Wilkes Booth had stayed at the boarding house before and it is probable he had slept in the bed in which Lincoln died.