Category: goo brain

Siberian Chicken Counting, Pre-Hatching

In July of 1580, the Russian Tsar, feeling his backyard wasn’t large enough, decided to conquer Siberia. At the time, the territory was largely populated by a number of loosely-connected tribes under the taxation of Küçüm Khan. To retaliate at the intrusion, the Khan decided to force Islamic rule upon his people, and raised armies of Tartars to beat back the invasion.
[From Wikipedia] Laminar armour from hardened leather enforced by wood and bones worn by native siberians and Eskimo
The problem, however, was a fellow named Yermak. Nominally an explorer, he was much of the Spanish school of discovery which required any freshly encountered people to be hit with something heavy or sharp. His journeys went well, for him, and his expeditionary force of Cossacks and slaves quickly subdued everyone they happened upon.

The Tsar was quite pleased, and sent more men to help put down anyone who wasn’t fond of the new map. Everyone but the Khan was sure that Yermak had sealed Siberia’s fate, and it was just a matter of time before the last bits of resistance were stamped out. To reward the “explorer”, the Russian leader also gifted him a fine set of chain mail armour, an item that would make Yermak practically invincible to the weapons of the remaining Tartars.
Yushman Amour
It may have been the ease of his success, and the knowledge of his relative invincibility, that lead Yermak to folly.

From the wikipedia:

Küçüm Khan retreated into the steppes and over the next few years regrouped his forces. He suddenly attacked Yermak on August 6, 1584 in the dead of night and killed most of his army.

Now, to be fair, the army referenced in this snippet was just a portion of the total force that Yermak had spread over the Siberian countryside, and if he’d managed to survive the confrontation, he would have likely been able to rebound.

Unfortunately, for him, he did not.

Again, from the wikipedia

[…] Yermak was wounded and tried to escape by swimming across the Wagay river […] but drowned under the weight of his own chainmail.

Picky (Apple Axiom)

My first taste of Christmas this year involved Alton Brown’s Good Eats – and I learned something during the show which answered a long standing question I’ve had.

Snow White meets the guy in charge of the local produce section

How and why does a single rotten apple ruin the barrel?

First, a little background from botany.org

In addition, ethylene promotes fruit ripening. Like many hormones, it does so at very low concentrations. Apple growers take advantage of this by picking fruit when it is not ripe, holding it in enclosed conditions without ethylene, and exposing it to ethylene right before taking it to market. This process is why we have newly ripened apples grown in temperate North America even in the spring and summer (apples ripen in the fall).

Ethylene acts as the signal for apples to ripen, but if that signal never reaches them, they can apparently be kept – unrefrigerated – for three or four months. The suggested method is to wrap each apple individually in newspaper, then simply store.

The trick is, you’ve got to be careful not to store a bruised fruit alongside your good ones – the bruise will throw off gouts of ethylene, causing your one bad apple to ripen the rest too early, and spoil the bunch.
Snow White Witch with Apple

Meese

Logging Moose(This image is a Photoshop-ed fake, but an interesting one.)

In a recent story, The Elg Herra, I greatly enjoyed turning moose from the forlorn forest roamers that they are, and into massive war mounts and beasts of burden.

I did get some guff about the unlikeliness of domesticating such an animal, but, in truth, I certainly wasn’t the first to consider attempting to tame the lanky monsters.

From the wikipedia:

Domestication of moose was investigated in the Soviet Union before World War II. Early experiments were inconclusive, but with the creation of a moose farm at Pechora-Ilych Nature Reserve in 1949 a small-scale moose domestication program was started, involving attempts at selective breeding of animals based on their behavioural characteristics. Since 1963, the programme has continued at Kostroma Moose Farm, which had a herd of 33 tame moose as of 2003.

Moose Drawn CarriageThis picture, originally found on Archives Alberta, depicts people carrying out activity not unlike that mentioned in the story.

The unusual beasts of burden pictured here were a pair of moose, hand-raised by owner Peachy Prouden. The photo was taken at Athabasca Landing, Alberta in 1898.

Although snapped 60 years after the time of the Blackhall tales, this was coincidentally taken just east of where Thomas first encounters the Moose Lords of the Northern Reaches.

Also, Peachy Prouden is a fantastic name.

Touched By A Drug Addled Angel

St James gives Charlemagne's soul a helping hand
Santiago, the capital of Chile, was founded by the Spanish Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia in 1541. The Spanish, not being particularly welcome in the neighbourhood, were met with some resistance from the natives.

The Inca ruler Manco Cápac II warned the new rulers that his Indigenous people would be hostile to the occupiers. – Wikipedia

This was a bit of an understatement, as the few hundred Spanish at the site were quickly inundated by thousands of natives who were annoyed with the land grab.

So why do we still have a city of Santiago at all? Was it the Spanish’s guns and armour that saved them? Gumption and technology?

Not according to the conquistadors.

Santiago Appearance

This is a footnote from The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History By Américo Castro, Willard F. King, Selma Margaretten, but the book I originally read about this incident in, Lost Explorers*, pointed out that, while it was a useful bit of propaganda for the Spanish to claim that St. James (Sant Yago) arrived on the scene on his spectral pony, wearing a crisp waistcoat and bearing a white lance and shield, it’s hard to understand why the heavily overwhelming native force apparently suffered a mass delusion and broke into retreat.

1657 St James The Great In The Battle Of Juan Carre o de Miranda

While I personally don’t believe that a martial phantasm came down to take up the Spanish cause, I do believe the practice of chewing coca leaves was common amongst the South American population of the time.

* I apologize for the lack of further attribution, I’m physically well away from the book at the moment, and can’t recall the author’s name.

Old Time Gamblin'

Copyright Darren Kirby (Click For Original)cIf I might once again refer to the song Stagger Lee for a moment:

I was standing on the corner
When I heard my bulldog bark
He was barkin’ at the two men
Who were gamblin’ in the dark
It was Stagger Lee and Billy
Two men who gambled late
Stagger Lee threw seven
Billy swore that he threw eight

Whatever happened to old time gambling? The skeazy craps game is a classic fixture of a certain period of crime fiction – it seems as long as we’ve had alleys, we’ve had indigents hoping for a 7 or 11. I mean, dubious men tossing dice is a concept that goes at least all the way back to the Roman legion of the bible.

Cowboy Craps, original source unknownYet, these days, you don’t hear much about it. Maybe I’m just running with the wrong crowd, but it feels like sometime in the late-80s or early-90s, the on-the-street-casinos started to lose traction, at least in the popular consciousness.

So what happened?

Well, when the gin racket was run by criminals, the American government brought them down by simply legalizing and controlling the product. My suggestion is that we no longer have a large contingent of people tossing the bones because we’ve found new dim alleyways online.

Why pull on that heavy leather jacket and stand out in the cold when you can just as easily bilk a table full of grandmas from the comfort of your own home (or a public internet cafe)?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtmvvarZLwg]

The Real Thanksgiving?

Counterfeit $10This suite101 page got me thinking about the American Thanksgiving – and its follow up pseudo-event, Black Friday – and how they’re an interesting combination of history and materialism.

Massachussetts authorized the first mint in British North America in 1652. The mint created silver coins. Some were stamped with NE for “New England” or had images of trees.

Of course, 1652 seems a little late in the game to be utilizing legal tender, so what did people do before that?

It wasn’t all just British coinage:

Wampum in Rhode Island was made from white whelk shells and purple quahog shells. The quahog shells were worth twice as much as the whelk shells in the Indian economy.

With gold and silver coins in short supply, the colonist agreed to accept the wampum as legal tender.

I love the romantic notion of using a naturally occurring resource as legal tender, but, to return to the first American mint as an example, ne’er-do-wells will often crop up.

[The silver coins] also became the first coins counterfeited in America. John duPlessis was convicted of counterfeiting these coins in 1674.

How bad was it?

In 1682, William Penn complained that he could not bring his ‘holy experiment’ in Pennsylvania to fruition when half the coinage in the colony was phony.

Yikes – so, maybe we should all head back to the naturalistic idea of trading shells?

It wasn’t long before the Indians realized that here was an opportunity to take advantage of the newcomers. They hoarded the valuable quahog shells for themselves, dyed the cheaper white shells a dark purplish black, then passed them off as the real thing to undiscerning Europeans.

If there’s a lesson here, I think it has something to do with high-end laser printers.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!