{"id":25249,"date":"2021-07-07T20:36:39","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T00:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=25249"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:43","slug":"things-i-learned-while-looking-up-other-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2021\/07\/things-i-learned-while-looking-up-other-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Today’s post is a direct rip-off of Sidney J. Harris<\/a>‘s columns of the same name.\u00a0 I am not the first<\/a> and won’t be the last<\/a> to do so — it is hardly the most original idea — but a tip of the hat to Mr. Harris in any event.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

\u229b In 1793, the French Republic rejected the royalist\/religious calender of its times and adopted the calendrier r\u00e9publicain<\/i>.\u00a0 Day One of the new calendar was September 22, 1792 (or 1 Vend\u00e9miaire I) to mark the day the Republic was born.\u00a0 The months were all given new names<\/a> (Fructidor<\/em>, or giving fruit<\/em>, is my favorite) along with each day of each month.\u00a0 Years were designated by Roman numerals, which turned out to be less unwieldy than one might fear: the calendrier<\/i> lasted only to Year XIV.\u00a0 Had that calendar persisted, and had my parents lived in France, The 100 Billionth Person would have been born on 22 Vent\u00f4se (Windy<\/em>) CLXI, on Percil (Parsley<\/em>) day.<\/p>\n

\u229b I was surprised to learn that the Pittsburgh Pirates, winners of the 1960 World Series, played a rare tie game in the regular season that year, so their season record was 95-59-1.\u00a0 I thought they might have been the only World Series winner with a regular season tie, but I was wrong.\u00a0 The 2016 Chicago Cubs, who won the World Series vs. Cleveland that year, played a 1-1 game on September 29 that was suspended after 6 innings due to bad weather. As the game lasted five innings, it was an “official game” and could have been ruled a tie.\u00a0 Instead, the league simply wiped the game off the books, as its outcome did not affect the final standings.\u00a0 This Chicago Cubs non-tie was played against… the Pittsburgh Pirates.<\/p>\n

\u229b Is there an English word that means “next to next-to-last”?\u00a0 Yes — antepenultimate<\/em>.\u00a0 This describes, for example, the 60th episode of Breaking Bad<\/em>, in which Hank dies in a desert shoot-out.\u00a0 That episode was titled “Ozymandias” based on a sonnet by the English poet Percy Shelley<\/a> in 1818.\u00a0 Ozymandias in turn was the Greek name of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, who had the longest reign of all Egyptian kings.\u00a0 We could keep on walking down Association Avenue, but let’s turn to my penultimate item instead.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u229b The other day as we were Netflixing The Long Riders<\/em>, a 1980 western, I began to notice how rarely the actors and, especially, the actresses blinked their eyes.\u00a0 It was eerie to watch an actress stare at her eyeline<\/a> (film-speak for focal point) as if possessed.\u00a0 This led me to look up the typical rate of human eyelid blinking: about every 6 seconds.\u00a0 But that is trivia; the more interesting thing I learned is that infants do not produce tears until they are one month old<\/a> and that they only blink once or twice a minute.\u00a0 So, we are all born actors!
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u229b As my faithful readers know, I’m sort of a map nerd<\/a>.\u00a0 Earlier this spring, I ordered from our library How the States Got Their Shapes<\/em> by Mark Stein (2008), to satisfy my curiosity about the seemingly arbitrary alignments<\/a> of various state borders.\u00a0 The thing I learned was how the institution of slavery — those striving to preserve it pitted against those hoping to contain it — played an outsized role in setting the borders of states west of the Mississippi.\u00a0 But the thing I learned while learning that<\/em> thing was how Idaho Territory, formed in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, became a Confederate (later, Southern Democrat) stronghold for almost two decades.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

After the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863), the Union Army marched southward.\u00a0 Refugees from the battle states fled northwest to Idaho Territory, lured by the news of gold strikes<\/a>.\u00a0 Those ex-Southerners brought their Confederate sympathies<\/a> with them, as evidenced by the various Confederacy place names in present-day Idaho, e.g., Atlanta, Dixie, Leesburg, and Secesh River.\u00a0 (Secesh<\/em> was not a Nez Perce word for caribou but rather the shorthand of its time for a Southern secessionist.)<\/p>\n

Not long after the Civil War, the Idaho World<\/em> of July 24, 1867, heralded the publication of The Lost Cause, <\/em>a 750-page book by pro-Confederacy writer and editor Edward A. Pollard<\/a>.\u00a0 Pollard described slavery as a “system of servitude [which] elevated the African and was in the interest of human improvement” and called his Southern brethren to remain steadfast and take their fight to other arenas:\u00a0 “The Confederates have gone out of this war with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous<\/em> consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN, <\/span>and that [nothing was] wanting but a change in a set of circumstances and a firmer resolve to make them the victors.”\u00a0 The editor of Idaho World <\/em>wrote that he had “no hesitation in warmly commending the book to all our readers as a faithful, interesting, ably written volume.”<\/p>\n

And so were those poisonous seeds scattered and sown.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u229b Postscript: I had always wondered why the diamond-shaped District of Columbia had a northeast (Maryland) sector but no southwest (Virginia) sector.\u00a0 The reason, I learned, was again related to slavery.\u00a0 Alexandria was the northern hub of the U.S. slave trade.\u00a0 It had been included in the lands that Virginia ceded to help form D.C.\u00a0 But in 1846, slave-owners forced the U.S. to recede the land to Virginia, so that Alexandria’s slave trade would not be subject to D.C. law.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If the lands that Virginia ceded in 1790 still belonged to D.C., the D.C. population would easily exceed one million, greater than that of six and possibly seven other states, each of whom enjoy representation in Congress from two Senators and one House member.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Today’s post is a direct rip-off of Sidney J. Harris‘s columns of the same name.\u00a0 I am not the first and won’t be the last to do so — it is hardly the most original idea — but a tip … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25249"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25979,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25249\/revisions\/25979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}