Happy New Year! I’ve spent the day so far lazing around, eating leftover pizza and listening to music. And that’s about all I’m going to do, I think.
I’ll be back at work blogging tomorrow.
In the meantime, does anyone have any especially fond memories of Tom Martin and/or Steele from the past year?
Oh, and here’s a video from an Old School New Wave band called Polyphonic Size. It was 1983. They were from Belgium.
Kitteh’s: With the discovery of distillation (probably Arabic, but perhaps parallel), in the 1100-1200s, most of the basic distilled drinks (whisk(e)y, cognac, grappa, arack) were discovered in short order.
The increased variety (rum, cachaça Cynar, pai-chu {one of the harsher drinks of widespread fame… we called it, “Essence of Burning Village” before we learned its name} tequila, potato vodka, et al), is just people taking expertise to see what else could be fermented.
As a rule, of it can be fermented (somehow) someone will distill it.
Somethings shouldn’t be fermented, much less distilled (my list of those things includes artichokes and blue agave), but each persons list of those things will be different.
I don’t even want to think about fermented or distilled artichokes! 😀
There is a liquer, Cynar, which is quite popular in Armenia, and environs, which is distilled from them. Looks like Nyquil.
::does quick Google of Nyquil::
Eeeek!
So, the flood I was talking about, was the infilling of the Black Sea. When it took off the shoreline moved about three miles a day, and it took at least a month to stabilise on the southern side (one of the other things which came of that flood was probably the arrival of Indo-European to the area which is now Ukraine.
I’ve read about that one too. There was also an interesting article recently about the loss of what they call Doggerland, in what’s now the North Sea (the area is named after the present-day Dogger Bank). There was far more land there during the Ice Age, a bigger area than the UK and Ireland combined, stretching up to Norway. The land was slowly inundated as the climate changed, and about 8200 years ago, a huge release of water from a North American glacial lake, and a tsunami from a submarine landslide off Norway flooded what was left of it.
I mean, it seems pretty justifiable in Spinoza’s case, given that he was writing commentary on things that literally do not make sense, like that whole bit with the sun standing still. There are parts of the Bible that are just entirely inexplicable except in the context of misunderstanding.
But it’s definitely true that people underestimate how advanced our understanding of things was even thousands of years ago.