A TO Z THEME REVEAL!!!

     It's both the first day of spring, AND the day for the A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal!!!  YAHOO!!!  So, I'm a technological idiot, and it would take me a week to figure out how to post the badge for the 2016 A to Z Challenge, let alone the Theme Reveal badge, and I don't have a week to spare because I need to devote every minute to pre-writing my posts.  And so without further ado, or (alas) further badges, my theme is:

              SO YOU THINK YOU'RE SO MODERN?

     Here's the premise.  We 21st-century humans are convinced that we are incredibly original, and that we've invented every single current cultural meme entirely out of our brilliant imaginations.  The purpose of my posts is going to be to prove us all wrong.  Allowing for the differences that new technological discoveries make, I propose to show that, for the most part, people in the 16th century got there first.  Actually, my timeline is more like "up to and including the 16th century."  I give myself the option of diving even further back into history if I feel like it.  And my goals are to amuse, entertain, and maybe even edify (the order varies, depending on the post).
     Thanks for visiting!  Hope to see you back in April!!

p.s. OMG I'm such a moron.  Theme Reveal was supposed to be tomorrow!!  Perhaps that would explain why none of the A to Zers whose websites I visited today had yet posted theirs!!  Let's just never mind this minor screw-up, okay?  Erase my theme from your mind and then open this post anew tomorrow and say, Wow!  Awesome theme!  It's a idea whose time has come!!

oy.

M IS FOR MICROBREWING

     This one isn't strictly fair of me.  Of course, all 16th-century breweries were microbreweries, because no factories of the time could produce the volume of beer that would qualify them as anything but.  Actually, you might say that the 16th century marked a period of transition from mini-microbreweries - individuals making beer in the home for family consumption - to breweries in pubs and monasteries, producing beer in larger quantities for public sale.

 

 

     Evidence of beer production dating back about 7,000 years has been found by archaeologists, although the process might well be even older than that.  But the addition of hops to beer came much later.  The oldest surviving written record of using hops in beer came from Abbess Hildegard of Bingen in the year 1067: "If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops."  Hops were first introduced in northern Germany in the 13th century, and the process then spread to the Netherlands.  England began importing beer made with hops from the Netherlands in the early 1400's, and by 1428 it was planting its own hops.  At that time, hops were the ingredient that changed what was called an ale to a beer.  But by the 16th century, all ales and beers were made with hops, and the word "ale" was used to refer to any strong beer.  This was also the century during which lagers were discovered by accident after beers had been left stored in cool caverns for long periods.

     The addition of hops to beer was a crucial element in developing an export trade, because the various herbs used prior to hops didn't preserve the beer long enough for it to be shipped elsewhere without spoiling.  Germany remained the hub of beer production.  In the 16th century the city of Hamburg had more than 600 independent breweries, and was exporting beer to places as far away as India.  But even the largest-scale exporters in 16th century Germany would be considered very small fry by 21st-century standards. 

     As an interesting aside, what might be the oldest surviving European food regulation dealt with the subject of beer.  In 1516, William IV, the Duke of Bavaria, adopted a "purity law" requiring that the ingredients of beer be restricted to water, barley, and hops.  Enaction of a law that enforced quality control was, at the time, a groundbreaking concept. 

 

low-tech beer transport system

 

     Microbreweries, artisanal food production, locavorism...  everything old becomes new again.  Does anyone other than me find it funny that modern foodies would love to be transported back to the 1500's, a time 200 years before that damned Industrial Revolution came along and ruined everything?

I know, I know, I was ranting against food conglomerates in my J post.  Maybe I'm being inconsistent, and maybe it's because I don't like beer.  I do think that people should eat fresh un-processed food whenever possible, and that they should cook it themselves.  Sometimes, though, trends just get to the point of being ridiculous, IMHO.  Your thoughts? 



R IS FOR ROGAINE

 

      Sorry, whoever it is that makes Rogaine; you're way late to the baldness-curing party.
     About 3,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians were rubbing the fats of various animals (lion, hippo and crocodile, to name a few) into their scalps to regrow hair.  As an alternative method, they would sautee the leg of a female greyhound in oil with the hoof of a donkey, and apply the resulting mixture to their scalps.  Alas, we don't have any before-and-after photos to prove how incredibly effective these methods must have been.
     A thousand years later, the Greek physician Hippocrates (you've heard of his Oath?), who found himself going bald, prescribed a remedy he had invented: a topical mixture of opium (good for whatever ails you, as I noted in my "Doping" post), horseradish, pigeon droppings, beetroot and spices.  OMG, how could the Egyptians not have thought of that???
     And yet somehow, male-pattern baldness persisted.  But, as you might expect, scientific knowledge had made tremendous leaps forward by the 16th century.  That's when British herbalist John Gerard recommended that hair-loss sufferers stand in the sun while rubbing onion juice into their scalps to stimulate the hair follicles.  Apparently King Henry VIII either was not privy to this information, or tried it and wasn't happy with the results.  Several sources I found report that when Henry started losing his hair, he addressed the problem by rubbing both dog and horse urine into his scalp.  Sadly, I don't have any pictures of him engaging in this practice to show you, and that leaves me to wonder whether he did the rubbing-in himself, or entrusted that task to his Groom of the Close Stool.  But here's what else I wonder: whose job was it to follow the dogs and horses around with bowls or jars or whatever else they might have used to catch the flow?
     I don't know whether or not that enchanting custom died out after Henry's death, but allow me to present you with a recipe from a book called Queens Closet Opened: Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chirurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (1655):

          Take three spoonfuls of Honey, and a good handful of Vine sprigs that twist
           like wire, and beat them well, and strain their juyce into the Honey, and
           annoynt the bald places therewith.

     This remedy might have been every bit as futile as the animal-urine one, but can we agree that it would have made the user a whole lot more popular?

WOULD YOU CONSIDER AN A TO F CHALLENGE?

     So I signed up for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge - third year in a row.  A pledge to produce 26 blog posts in the month of April, one every day except Sundays, tripping lightly through the alphabet.  And I have my theme, and I love my theme.  But it's March 9th, and so far I haven't gotten past the letter B.
     As I learned from previous challenges, prewriting at least some of your posts is essential.  There's just no way to be able to commit to spending several hours every night, six nights a week, for a month, composing posts.  Life gets in the way.  It's best to prewrite as many posts as you can, as early as you can, so all you have to do on the designated day is hit "publish," sit back, and bask in your glorious productivity.
     Right.  So, as I said, I just finished prewriting my post for B.  The topic I've chosen is requiring a lot more research per post than I was anticipating.  Not going to tell you what my theme is because that's what Theme Reveal Day (March 21st) is for - duh - and if you forced me to reveal my theme before the appointed day, I would unquestionably have to kill you.  But trust me, it's a good theme.  The best thing about it, from my viewpoint, is that it involves a lot of things I don't know much about, so it satisfies my curiosity.  The worst thing about it is that it involves a lot of things I don't know much about, so it requires me to spend a lot of time - time I apparently don't have - researching and writing.
     So I have a modest proposal.  What would be so terrible about an A to F Challenge?  Six perfectly reasonable letters serving as the catalysts to six delightful and leisurely posts?  Who are They to tell me that's not good enough, not challenging enough?  Go ahead, Challenge Police, do your worst.  I ain't afeard.  In truth, I'm thinking primarily of you, the Reader.  The last thing I want is to do is overload your poor brain with more information than it can absorb.  Let's face it: you have enough stress in your life already.  Do I seem like the kind of person who would want to add to it?
     So HA HA HA.  Here it is only March 9th, and I'm already 1/3 done!  I ROCK!!!
     Now, on to C...

WORST. BLOGGER. EVER.

     I have excuses, but you don't want to hear them, and I'm tired of making them.  All I'll say is that I'll have no excuses at all for April, because I signed up again for the A to Z Challenge and so I'll be forced to post 26 times in that month (every day except Sundays).  And since at this point I have pre-written zero of my 26 posts, I would say that I have a pretty busy March and April ahead of me.
     I might also mention, not as an excuse or anything, that my flight from Israel landed at 4:00 a.m. today after a mind-numbing 12 hours in the air, so I'll just wrap up for now.  But I'll include one photo of me, my daughter and my mom, with my 5'3" daughter looming over us the rest of us midgets like a giant:

     It's good to be back home.

GOOD TIMING

     Just what I needed... being around new life.  This guy is my less-than-2-week-old great-nephew snoozing during our visit yesterday.

DOG MATH

Subtract:

     1 joyous plume of a tail
     2 soulful black eyes
     1 huge infectious grin
     1 curly blond coat
     1 pure heart

_________________________________________________

What are you left with?
Nothing at all
But love.

Rest in peace, Murphy, beloved friend.  (4/29/05 - 2/6/16)  I don't know how you knew that this morning would be the only time all week when none of us would be at work, the vet's office would be open, and Amy would be home.  But you knew.  As always, you made everything as easy for us as you could, right up to the very end.  Thank you, sweet boy, for being a role model for all of us.