[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program your
tax-dollar will go further.

Werner von Braun

 

Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee
doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.

Mary Kay Ash

 

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Tom Robbins

 

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings
wisdom.

H. L. Mencken

 

A friend of mine has a trophy wife, but apparently, it wasn't first place.

Steven Wright

 

If we're not supposed to eat animals ... how come they're made out of meat?

Anonymous

 

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Shrink

 

Psychiatrists are often referred to as head-shrinkers, which also has the
meaning of a person who cuts off and preserves other people's heads as
trophies. It looks pretty clear the meanings are related, though absolute
proof, as so often, cannot be forthcoming because there's no way to find the
person who invented the term and ask him. The original meaning of the term
head-shrinker was in reference to a member of a group in Amazonia, the
Jivaro, who preserved the heads of their enemies by stripping the skin from
the skull, which resulted in a shrunken mummified remnant the size of a
fist. The term isn't that old - it's first recorded from 1926.

 

All the early evidence suggests that the person who invented the
psychiatrist sense worked in the movies (no jokes please). We have to assume
that the term came about because people regarded the process of psychiatry
as being like head-shrinking because it reduced the size of the swollen egos
so common in show-business. Or perhaps they were suspicious about what
psychiatrists actually did to their heads and how they did it and so made a
joke to relieve the tension.

 

The earliest example we have is from an article in Time in November 1950 to
which an editor has helpfully added a footnote to say that head-shrinker was
Hollywood jargon for a psychiatrist. The term afterwards became moderately
popular, in part because it was used in the film Rebel Without a Cause in
1955. Robert Heinlein felt his readers needed it to be explained when he
introduced it into Time For The Stars in 1956: "'Dr. Devereaux is the boss
head-shrinker.' I looked puzzled and Uncle Steve went on, 'You don't savvy?
Psychiatrist.'" By the time it turns up in West Side Story on Broadway in
1957 it was becoming established.

 

Shrink, the abbreviation, became popular in the USA in the 1970s, though it
had first appeared in one of Thomas Pynchon's books, The Crying of Lot 49,
in 1965 and there is anecdotal evidence that it was around earlier, which is
only to be expected of a slang term that would have been mainly transmitted
through the spoken word in its earliest days.

 

 

Doughboy

 

The word doughboy was used to identify a U.S. Infantryman, especially one of
World War I. The word has at various times been used to refer to a dumpling
(in the British Navy mainly), for a kind of doughnut, and as a corruption of
the Spanish word adobe.

 

The infantryman meaning was first recorded in reference to the American
Civil War. One theory is that the big round brass buttons on infantry
uniforms reminded people of doughnuts, and the word was soon transferred
from the buttons to the soldiers wearing the uniform.

 

Another theory is that it derives from the use of pipe clay "dough" to clean
the infantrymen's white belts. It has also been suggested that it comes from
adobe, which it seems was once used as a slang term in the American
south-west for soldiers, but this sounds less likely.

 

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The Hundred Year War actually lasted 116 years (1337 to 1453). 

 

The influence of ancient Rome on architecture is all around us. The
Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is almost a dead-ringer for the
Pantheon. And the original Penn Station in New York was modeled on the Baths
of Caracalla. 

 

The longest reigning monarch in history was Pepi II, who ruled Egypt for 90
years; 2566 to 2476 BC. The second longest was France's Louis XIV, who ruled
for 72 years, 1643 to 1715. 

 

The Miss America Contest was created in Atlantic City in 1921 with the
purpose of extending the tourist season beyond Labor Day. 

 

The name of the first airplane flown at Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers,
on December 17, 1903, was Bird of Prey. 

 

The only repealed amendment to the US Constitution deals with the
prohibition of alcohol. 

 

The peace symbol was created in 1958 as a nuclear disarmament symbol by the
Direct Action Committee, and was first shown that year at peace marches in
England. The symbol is a composite of the semaphore signals N and D,
representing nuclear disarmament.