|
|||
Fact Archive for September 2001
SEPTEMBER |
| Why do they refer to the hottest days of
summer as the dog days? First, let's express our appreciation to canines everywhere for being so good-natured about our negative characterization of these days in their name. Finicky felines would have long since filed a class action libel suit. Rover can blame the ancient Romans for the dog days. To turn a line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar on its head, the fault was in their stars. Specifically, it had to do with Sirius, the Dog Star, which during July and early August appeared to rise with the sun. The Romans may have been pretty good engineers and soldiers, but they hadn't yet bothered to invent computers and the like, and so they just connected the dots. Sirius rose with the sun, therefore it must have worked with it to make the weather icky – a pretty Sirius allegation, based on faulty science, doggone it. Source: DICTIONARY OF WORD AND PHRASE Origins by William and Mary Morris Didja Know... All English monarchs since William the Conqueror (1066) have been crowned in Westminster Abbey? Source: Encarta.com |
| When did we start using decongestants? More to the point, what in the world did people do for sinus headaches and nasal stuffiness before decongestants? Perhaps they ate really spicy Indian or Mexican food, which at its hottest can all but blow a hole through the back of your head and open breathing passages all over the place. But decongestants ARE more specifically targeted and we've had them in our medicinal arsenal since the early 1930s, when a product called Benzedrex came on the market. It contained Benzedrine, an amphetamine that dilated breathing passages. These days the active ingredient in a decongestant is likely to be pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, found in brands such as Sudafed. Opening breathing passages isn't the only thing decongestants do. They're uppers. Swallow too many and you could go bonkers, take an axe to your neighbor, whatever. Do you really want to chance it? Say, I know a good Indian restaurant... Source: PANATI'S BROWSER'S BOOK OF BEGINNINGS by Charles Panati |
| #www.geocities.com/ardaratown# |
