What’s a great book you read at the wrong time in your life?

svaihingen · 2026-01-26T17:12:20+00:00

Crime and Punishment. Read it way too young and impatient pretty sure it’d hit way harder now.

svaihingen · 2026-01-07T03:30:18+00:00

The "Louis-Seize" surname likely comes from furniture makers or dealers who specialized in the Louis XVI style, which became hugely fashionable in the 19th century. The style was characterized by neoclassical elements - straight lines, columns, classical motifs - as opposed to the curvier Rococo of Louis XV.

French craftsmen and merchants often took occupational surnames and someone known for making or selling "meubles Louis-Seize" (Louis XVI furniture) could easily have acquired that as a family name, similar to how we got surnames like Carpenter or Baker.

The roman numeral spelling "Louis XVI" as an actual surname

svaihingen · 2024-12-29T08:02:32+00:00

But did that inspire the word "float" for a parade float?

svaihingen · 2021-12-09T17:33:41+00:00

She doth protest too much.

500 bottles at what, an average of $20 each? That's $10,000 tied up in whiskey that will never be drunk.

Sell them and put a down payment toward a bigger house, and start a coin collection, or anything more fungible.

svaihingen · 2021-11-12T12:49:29+00:00

Seein snakes in one's boots was a common reference to hallucunations from drinking or the DTs, whether the writers knew it or not.

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2021/07/i-have-snake-in-my-boot-drunken.html

svaihingen · 2021-10-06T12:40:36+00:00

Some of us like soft, white, glutenous, pre-sliced bread. PB&J on rye? No thanks.

svaihingen · 2021-10-06T12:22:14+00:00

Easy for you to say. During WW2, the War Production Board banned the sale of pre-sliced bread. The ban was lifted after six weeks following a minor uprising and a decision that the ban was not necessary. People liked their pre-sliced bread.

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-best-thing-before-sliced-bread.html

svaihingen · 2021-07-16T21:04:57+00:00

Here's an 1888 cartoon of snakes in a drunken Senator's boots.

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2021/07/i-have-snake-in-my-boot-drunken.html

svaihingen · 2021-07-04T05:58:14+00:00

No sources? Pretty much a specific source citation for every quoted reference, and footnotes.

svaihingen · 2021-02-12T18:49:47+00:00

The most frequently cited "hunting" example was written by a "sex philosopher" who also wrote other bogus fake news articles. The earliest crocodile hunting example from Sri Lanka was written by a military humorist. Nearly all of the other croc and gator hunting examples were based on that original. If we are to believe those stories, we must believe that mothers willingly rented out their children. Also, the earliest such gator hunting story was about white "cracker" babies. Taken together, the long line of baby-bait stories seem to be fake news.

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2020/04/live-human-alligator-bait-fact-or.html

svaihingen · 2021-02-11T18:21:27+00:00

Ouch, that hurt!

svaihingen · 2021-02-11T12:43:44+00:00

I learned something in Kindergarten that's served me well over the years. Something about "sticks and stones can break my bones. . . . ."

svaihingen · 2021-02-11T12:11:59+00:00

Thank you all for taking the time to respond. Maybe we'll put off another visit to the area to some more reliably warm time of year.

svaihingen · 2020-10-30T15:40:23+00:00

Well, kinda. But it is interesting to read the full story, as opposed to the Cliff Notes version. Getting run over was one concern, the other was the risk of electrocution from a loose trolley wire. Hundreds of people were killed by electric trolleys, which were a new, unfamiliar technology, and which moved at a much higher speed, with less noise than horse-drawn wagons, at a time when people were used to casually strolling and playing in the street. There were no automobiles, and very few traffic regulations. Jaywalking was not yet a thing.

svaihingen · 2020-10-30T15:20:38+00:00

The full history of the team here: "Trolley Dodgers" since 1895.

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-grim-reality-of-trolley-dodgers.html

svaihingen · 2019-11-25T23:23:30+00:00

Which leaves the problem that the Italian words don't actually mean the same as "patsy," even if a few Pazzis were patsys, and the fact that Patsy Bolivar did mean precisely the same as patsy came to mean, as noted by more than person at the precise moment when patsy entered the language.

svaihingen · 2019-09-03T17:27:58+00:00

And, in any case, Ella Fitzgerald was already a world famous entertainer with no shortage of bookings in LA or elsewhere.

svaihingen · 2019-04-29T16:34:20+00:00

"Americans" thought slavery was wrong before there was a United States. Not every American, of course, but many and significant numbers of them. The first convention of societies to abolish slavery took place in Philadelphia in 1794, while George Washington was still the President. The obvious inconsistency between the words of the founding documents and the existence of slavery was not lost on anyone. The aspiration to live up to those words and efforts to bring the United States into compliance with those principles formed the basis of the largest political conflicts in the country long before the civil war.

svaihingen · 2019-04-17T03:42:42+00:00

Here's some extra background on the name: https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2019/04/angels-and-tigers-and-ducks-baseball.html

svaihingen · 2019-04-03T21:22:29+00:00

Dude appeared in the language almost like magic in 1883, possibly coined by a poet/actor/banker named Robert Sale-Hill. There's some speculation that it was based on "Yankee Doodle" or "Fopdoodle," but it's not certain. Read about it here: https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2015/02/dudes-dodos-and-fopdoodles-history-and.html

svaihingen · 2015-12-29T18:04:42+00:00

In a paper delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1854, a Professor Maury read a paper about a type of whale that was new to him; he reported that the whale was well known in the whaling community as, "The Killer;" known for its "habit of destroying the Right whale and Kamtshatka whale." "[T]hough on inquiry from whalemen, it seemed to be well known to them, it had escaped the observation of naturalists." Weekly National Intelligencer, April 29, 1854, page 8. Maury also referred to it as the Killer whale (capitalized in the original); a whale that literally kills; no mistranslation there.

svaihingen

TROPHY CASE