Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 5

Seven More Years of Wrinkles and Gray Hair

Today marks exactly four weeks until my fifth book launches into the world. It’s been nearly seven years since I published my first, a collection developed from the first five years of this blog. That book, called Launching Sheep & Other Stories from the Intersection of History and Nonsense, is part history, part memoir, and a good part made-up silliness. The cover features a picture of me in period costume.

This picture has served me well, but it’s time to age up a little bit. Image by KarenAndersonDesigns

That was my first professional author photograph. My second was taken not long after in preparation for the release of my first novel, which happened about five months later. That one is a tad bit more professional and includes much less ridiculous clothing. I’m smiling, but not too much. I look like an approachable but also knowledgeable and literary lady in her thirties.

Most of those things, I hope I am. One of them, I definitely am not. And that’s why I recently had some new photos taken. Having portraits taken is uncomfortable for me. I don’t exactly run from the camera, but as a typical mom and keeper of memories, I am more often behind the lens than in front of it.

But I’ve earned nearly seven more years of wrinkles and gray hair since the last set of head shots, and readers have been expecting author portraits since the papyrus scrolls of Ancient Egypt. I couldn’t avoid them any more than John Milton could have when his printer Humphrey Moseley insisted the poet include one with his first collection of poems in 1645.

Maybe not the most flattering portrait ever. William Marshall, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Milton enlisted the help of renowned engraver William Marshall to create a frontispiece including an author portrait. At the time, Milton was thirty-seven years old, but the standard of the day was to include a picture of the poet at a younger age. Alas, that is no longer the standard.

According to the words engraved around the portrait, William aimed to depict Milton at the age of twenty-one. According to the overly large nose, greasy hair, puckered lips, and swollen right eye of the portrait, he missed.

The picture was so unflattering and Milton so upset about it, that the poet asked the engraver to include the following lines in Greek (a language that Marshall allegedly could not read) beneath the portrait:

“Looking at the form of the original, you could say, perhaps that his likeness has been drawn by a rank beginner; but, my friends, since you do not recognize what is pictured here, have a chuckle at a caricature by a good-for-nothing artist.”

An approachable, knowledgeable, literary lady with seven more years of wrinkles and gray hair, looking pretty darn okay. Image by Karen Anderson Designs.

When the collection was updated in 1673, the portrait was no longer included, but Milton, apparently still bitter about the worst head shot ever, moved his added poetic words to the interior of the book and slapped a title on them: “On the Engraver of his Portrait.”

Fortunately, my good friend and photographer is much more pleasant to work with than William Marshall apparently was. She doesn’t bat an eye when I ask her to photograph me in period costume holding a laptop, or to meet me in Forest Park in St. Louis so we can get a hint of the 1904 World’s Fair into the pictures.

She makes it as easy as possible for an awkward, squinty-eyed person such as myself to look pretty darn okay. I can trust that she’d never make my nose appear too large, my eye swollen, or my hair extra greasy. She’d probably even digitally remove my wrinkles and gray hair if I asked her to, but I didn’t. And she can trust that I’ll never include an insulting poem about her work in my book.

Yielding the Circumference Day

In honor of Pi Day, I have dusted off a post from the early days of the blog. Enjoy!

Today is March 14 (3/14 in the US), which means that millions of nerds are spending the day happily celebrating that most mysterious of irrational numbers, pi. I’ll just briefly explain in case you don’t happen to be a nerd (because the jury’s still out). Pi (which is a stage name because this rock star number is too irrational to have it any other way) is the expression of the ratio of the circumference (the distance around) of a circle to the diameter (the distance across and through the center) of that same circle.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Ancient nerds discovered that this ratio is constant for any circle and like nerds will do (and this is the reason they generally make more money than non-nerds), they correctly decided that this might be information worth noting. And when I say “ancient,” I’m talking before Egyptians and Babylonians started writing down their various approximations for this handy little ratio, say 4000 years ago.

In fact, I think it’s safe to suggest that the approximate value of pi was probably discovered first by the same caveman (let’s just call him Og) who invented the wheel. He carefully painted the number (out to 300 decimal places) on an as yet undiscovered cave wall and proudly showed it to the other cavemen because he thought it was so neat. At that point (and again, I’m just assuming here) the other cavemen gave Og a wedgie.

This is an artist’s approximation as it is believed that Og never sat for a portrait. It’s pretty good, I think.
Image by GraphicMama-team from Pixabay

Don’t fret, though. Og didn’t suffer in vain because humankind has been using his handy little observation ever since, and has spent thousands of years approximating the constant. After the Egyptians and the Babylonians, who each found the number to be a little more than 3, pi shows up in the history of India and China (where again it was found to be a little more than 3).

It also gets a nod in the Hebrew Bible (in 1 Kings 7:23) where it is calculated to be 3. This has (believe it or not) been a source of great controversy for Hebrew scholars, but what I think it indicates is that God isn’t all that impressed by our efforts to calculate pi out to well over 10 trillion places. This may also be illustrated by the fact that if one were to calculate the circumference of a circle that enclosed the entire known universe (you know, just for fun), using just 39 decimal places of pi would yield an answer with a maximum error equal to the radius of a hydrogen atom.

William Jones. Not nearly as famous as Leonhard Euler, nevertheless important to pie-loving nerds everywhere. William Hogarth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Still, I suppose it’s nice that thanks to computers, we can now calculate that the value of pi is a little bit over 3. Most of us (at least those of us who aren’t mathematicians by trade) never bother with much more than 3.14. So on March 14 we release our inner nerd (some more inner than others) to celebrate by baking and eating pie because if we can’t be bothered with all those extra decimal places, we sure aren’t going to be concerned by an extra (delicious) “e” at the end.

One question that remains for me, though (because my inner nerd is actually more interested in symbol origins than in geometry), is why is this super important irrational constant referred to by the Greek letter π? The answer is pretty simple. Before it had a stage name to call it’s own, pi was referred to most often as “quantitas in quam cum multiflicetur diameter, proveniet circumferencia” or “the quantity which, when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference.” Admittedly this name is highly descriptive, but probably a little cumbersome written into an equation.

Yum. Happy Pi Day!

In 1706, a Welsh math teacher by the name of William Jones first introduced π as the now universally recognized symbol for this precise meaning. Though Jones isn’t well remembered for any other contributions to mathematics, Leonhard Euler (who was a heavy hitter in the field) adopted and popularized the symbol. It was chosen simply because in Greek, π is the first letter of the word for perimeter.

And I suspect that it was chosen because no one could figure out what to eat in order to celebrate Yielding the Circumference Day. Whatever you call it, it’s a day for all of us nerds (and, yes, if you stuck with this post until the very end, the jury is done deliberating) to enjoy a piece of piE. I’m thinking strawberry.

Malapropos of Nothing

I admit to being a little bit of a language snob. Of course I recognize that language evolves and a misspoken word today may be perfectly acceptable tomorrow, at least for some, but know that if you use a malapropism, I’ll probably judge you.

In case you are unfamiliar with the word malapropism, in lame man’s terms, it’s the mistaken replacement of a word with another that sounds similar. The term, derived from the French mal à propos, meaning inappropriate, got picked up in the English language because of playwright Richard Brinsely Sheridan. In his 1775 play The Rivals, a character named Mrs. Malaprop is notorious for muddling up her words. 

One version of Mrs. Malaprop looking “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,” which is one of her delightful lines. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

That’s not to say that Sheridan was the only, or even the first, writer to make use of such a character trait, but I suppose that’s a moo point. For all intensive purposes, that’s when the concept entered the English language where it’s been driving language snobs like me bonkers ever since.

I’ve been thinking about malapropisms a lot lately because the publication date of Paradise on the Pike, my new historical novel set in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, is drawing near and I have discovered that not everyone is familiar with the word “pike.” 

If you happen to live in one of the handful of US states that contain a turnpike, you might be able to puzzle out that “turnpike” is another word for toll road and that “pike” is another word for a road. You might even be familiar with the phrase “coming down the pike,” meaning something is going to happen in the future. For example, I have a new novel coming down the pike. 

If you don’t happen to live near a turnpike, then you might mistakenly believe the phrase is “coming down the pipe,” in which case, I’m probably judging you. 

But this particular malapropism does make some logical sense because there is another phrase “in the pipeline” that also refers to something that is going to happen soon. I could, for example, tell you that I have a new novel in the pipeline. Conflating the two seems like a fairly innocuous mistake.

And of course you can go ahead and say whatever you like. It’s a doggy dog world and I don’t always get my way even if I do think malapropisms ought to be nipped in the butt whenever possible. Really, I could care less. Except that the expression, “coming down the pike,” may actually have its roots in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis in which a mile long stretch of road along the north side of the fairgrounds that formed the main entertainment section of the fair was referred to as “the Pike.”

A new historical mystery coming down the pike on April 18, 2024.

The Pike contained all manner of concessions including battle reenactments, rides, a wax museum, fashion demonstrations, mock-ups of exotic locales, dancers, musicians, and animal shows. It was also the site of daily parades, leading to much excitement as people crowded around to catch a glimpse of what wondrous things might be coming down the Pike.

And so, the cover of my newest novel in the pipeline that will be coming down the pike on the 18th of April, just in time to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the 1904 World’s Fair, features a picture looking down the historical Pike. I hope you’ll forgive me for stringing out the cover reveal and keeping you on tender hooks for a few weeks. I also hope you’ll really enjoy the book when it’s finally here. And in the meantime, language snobbery aside, I hope you’ll love the book by its cover.

A Nice New Pair of Gloves

It was in the 5th century when St. Brigid of Kildare brought a problem of inequality to the attention of St. Patrick, who may not have particularly cared. Brigid’s complaint was on behalf of all the single ladies who kept waiting and waiting and waiting for a man to propose marriage.

It’s also said that St. Brigid once prayed for God to make her less beautiful just so she wouldn’t be pressured to marry, so the St. Patrick proposal stories may be a little off brand. Glaaaastonbury88, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

St Patrick set down his shamrock, swallowed the last of his green beer, rolled his eyes, and graciously suggested that every four years (except in years divisible by 100, but not by 400), when February 29th rolled around, it was okay with him if the womenfolk wanted to go ahead and propose to the men.

In one version of the story, a thankful St. Brigid immediately dropped to one knee and proposed to St. Patrick, but he was too busy driving the snakes out of Ireland to notice. Also the lives of Brigid and Patrick didn’t overlap that much, making her maybe five years old when this event allegedly took place and him not more than a few years from the end of his life. The story, either version, is a bit dubious.

But the strange tale got even stranger when in the year 1288 Irish monks brought the tradition to Scotland where Queen Margaret cemented into law that if a woman proposed marriage to a man on February 29th then he’d better either say yes or compensate her for her disappointment with a pretty silk dress or a nice new pair of gloves. That just sounds to me like a great way to get a free dress and gloves.

I could always use a nice new pair of gloves.
Image by 378322 from Pixabay

Of course Queen Margaret was at most only five years old when the law would have been written and there’s no record of any such law having ever existed. But regardless of where the tradition of women proposing marriage to men on leap day might have come from, there’s no question that the notion has been around for a long time in western culture.

The tradition showed up in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries where it mostly became the subject of ridicule. Today of course it feels a little silly because women in western cultures have more agency than ever and incidences of proposals from women to men are on the rise at any time of year.

I’ll really be spending my leap day preparing for the launch of my new historical mystery in just seven weeks. Watch this space next week for the full cover reveal.

Still, it feels like this strange day that has been popping up on our calendars more or less every four years, with only a few necessary tweaks, since 46 BC should be marked as special in some way. If nothing else, it feels like a stolen extra day and I for one want to make the most of it.

As a woman who has been happily married for going on twenty-four years now, it would probably be pretty inappropriate for me to propose marriage to anyone, but I guess I wouldn’t say no to a pretty silk dress or a nice new pair of gloves. I’ll just have to shop for them myself.

What are you doing with your extra February day?

Back Soon

Some days are for blogging. Other days, like this one, are for editing and formatting. I’ll be back next week. But if I’m not, just read this post again.

Chocolate, Vinegar, and Ashes

We’ve finally made it to the half-way point of February, which has the nerve to include an extra day this year. I realize if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, this milestone is not a huge cause of celebration for you, but if like me, you are located in the Northern Hemisphere, February is the last great stronghold of dreaded winter, and you know, it hasn’t really been that bad, at least not in my little corner of the world.

That’s probably because it’s been busy. The month started with that famous rodent prognosticator Punxsutawney Phil failing to see his shadow, allegedly a sign that spring is not a long six weeks away, but is in fact right around the corner in just a quick six weeks or so. 

If you want to keep the good times rolling, apparently today (February 15) is World Hippo Day. I
mage by Don Orchard from Pixabay

Then last Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Superbowl, which was a big deal here in the Great State of Missouri, and I guess also for fans of Taylor Swift. In case you are not familiar with Midwestern geography, Kansas City is located in both Kansas and Missouri. The Chiefs represent the latter. And in case you have been fortunate enough to escape the hoopla, Taylor Swift is dating a Chief, so she’s been at a lot of the games, including this one, over which there was much ado made.

Then came Pancake Day, followed by Ash Wednesday, which this year fell on Valentine’s Day, a holiday that celebrates chocolate and overpriced roses (both sharply discounted today, in case you forgot).

Of course Valentine’s Day isn’t so special for everyone. It can be a tough day if everyone else seems to have a special someone and you don’t. But it could also be worse, because it turns out people knew how to be mean to one another even before the invention of the internet.

Valentine’s Day has been celebrated in some capacity as a day of love since the early 15th century, but card makers didn’t get in on the action until about 1840. That’s when mass produced Valentines hit the market, and when they did, not all of them were nice. Sure, you could find a beautifully constructed card with a sweet romantic poem on the inside and address it to your sweetheart, but on the shelf next to it, you might just find what came to be known as a vinegar Valentine.

These were more cheaply made, tended to feature grotesque drawings and included rude suggestions and insults. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also went through the mail anonymously with postage to be paid by the recipient. At the height of their popularity millions of such sour Valentine’s greetings were sold in both the US and England, and in the mid-19th century, they made up about half of the Valentine’s Day card market. 

Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What isn’t entirely known is whether a large percentage of these might have been viewed as friendly jokes, but what is true is that it’s harder to find well preserved examples of them than it is their sickeningly lovey-dovey counterparts. That could be because they tended to be cheaper and made of flimsy materials. Or it could be that people didn’t feel particularly compelled to hang onto the insults.

Thankfully, it’s not as common to find an insulting Valentine’s card today because as a species, humans have evolved past the point of sending anonymous hate through the mail. Instead we create false social media profiles and spew it on the internet. As God intended.

Anyway, I hope you had a good February 14th, free of vinegary insults, and that you got from it what you hoped—to eat chocolate and feel loved or to don ashes and reflect on the weight of sin and death. Or both. Either way, the end of February is in sight. And I don’t think it’s really going to be that bad.

Challenge Accepted

There’s a rumor running around out there on the Internet where, as everyone knows, all things are true, that William Shakespeare invented more than 1,700 words of the English language. If one considers that the Modern English of Shakespeare’s day was a fairly young language, then it makes sense that new words might have been developing pretty fast. And if you’ve ever met a writer, and particularly a poet, then you’ve probably noticed that they do occasionally invent new words or more likely, new uses of old ones. There’s no question Shakespeare did his fair share of that.

Challenge accepted.

Also roaming around on the Internet lately is a fun challenge in which three columns of insulting Shakespearean words can be combined to come up with a single devastating slight to use in your next piece of writing. Most recently posted by The Writer’s Circle, this was issued as a challenge to me by a friend who knows I’m a writer who likes a good challenge as much as a like a good old timey insult.

Of course I’m only assuming these columns of words show up somewhere among the nearly 29,000 unique words spread across Shakespeare’s forty three surviving works. There are no citations, and I’m not going to take the time to search for them, because regardless of their origin, they make up some pretty fantastic insults.

Still, it’s worth noting I think that if Shakespeare invented 1,700 new words, that means his works contained roughly 6% unique words that would have been entirely unfamiliar to his audience.

Now, because I enjoy a challenge, I certainly don’t mind reading a work that is going to make me pick up a dictionary once in a while, but if I have to look up 6% of the unique words I encounter, I’m going to find myself pretty quickly frustrated by the beslubbering hasty-witted joithead who wrote them.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a brilliant insult is forming behind those eyes. Attributed to John Taylor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s worse than that, too, because the first English-language dictionary wasn’t put together until more than a century after the saucy doghearted coxcomb of a poet William Shakespeare produced his venerated works.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the written origin of English words, wasn’t even attempted until the second half of the nineteenth century and wasn’t completed until 1928. This thanks to somewhere around three thousand contributors who meticulously hunted through centuries of English language works to determine that 1,700 words or so probably came from the mind of that one old English playwright/poet that everyone had actually heard of.

In other words, the editors and contributors of the OED, while dedicated and deserving of our respect and thanks, may have occasionally been loggerheaded tickle-brained foot-lickers when it came to Shakespeare. Arizona State University English professor Jonathan Hope has been particularly effective in pointing out that OED contributors had more access to and read more carefully from Shakespeare’s works than from those of other writers who now in the digital age, we can more easily discover used quite a few of The Bard’s newfangled words before he did.

Just eleven more weeks until the release of my new historical mystery! I can’t share the cover just yet, but this picture gives a hint about the book, which contains no Shakespearean insults and probably very few made up words.
Photo by Winfred C. Porter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t think that discovery necessarily takes anything away from Shakespeare’s works or his influence on English literature and language. In reality, I think it makes him better, because he wasn’t asking his dictionary-deficient audience to puzzle out what he was trying to say. That joy he reserved for the mewling folly-fallen gudgeons in future high school classrooms.

To the audience of his day, and to those who care to notice today, what he did was use words well. And while he probably didn’t use most of the words in this handy kit in quite the same combinations I’ve attempted to use them in this post, there’s no question the man knew his way around an insult.

And now I challenge you to use one in the comments.

0p3N SE$@me!

Once upon a time in a Persian town, there were two brothers. One was a much better hacker than the other. The first brother stumbled on a password, carelessly scribbled on a sticky note and stuck to the underside of a keyboard. Thus he was able to open a secret door, sneak into a cave filled with stolen treasure, and take a pouch of coins, small enough not to be noticed. 

If I’m honest, I relate to the second brother. Not that I would steal gold from someone’s cave, but if my life depended on my recall of a password, I’d be in trouble. Maxfield Parrish, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The second brother, learning of this success, decided he’d go a little bigger, hacked his way into the cave, loaded himself and a bunch of mules down with enough treasure that it would most certainly be missed, and then promptly forgot the password to get back out of the cave. Then the thieves who’d stolen the treasure to begin with, returned to the cave and did a little hacking of their own.

It’s a familiar story of course, added to the collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights in the eighteenth century by French translator Antoine Galland who heard the tale from Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab. It also feels a little bit like the story of my life. 

I don’t mean the part about the hacking. Rest assured, I have no skills whatsoever in that area. Most of the time I can’t even remember my own passwords. I have zero brainspace left over for yours, even if I overhear you loudly proclaim them at the hidden door leading to your treasure trove.

In fact, were you to leave your password written down on a sticky note underneath your keyboard, your biggest concern should be that I would mistype it enough times that I’d accidentally lock you out of your cave. And if I ever ask you the name of your first pet, I assure you, I’m just curious. Also, I’ll probably forget that, too.

Can’t be too careful.
Image by S K from Pixabay

Like most of us I have a pretty contentious relationship with passwords. I recognize they are necessary. So much of our lives are stored digitally now and it is certainly important to safeguard our privacy and our treasure from unscrupulous people with enough skills and mules to try to steal it. 

But I also feel like it’s a little much. For example, why exactly do I need a password to protect my popcorn rewards at my local movie theater? Are there a lot of hackers who are anxious to steal my $2 off coupon? And do I care enough to dedicate already pretty crowded memory space to a unique password made up of a minimum of ten characters that must include both upper and lower case letters, a number, a symbol, a sign of the zodiac, a knock-knock joke, and a blood sacrifice? 

Also, it’s February 1, which means there are approximately 12 weeks to go before the launch of my new historical mystery. Cover reveal coming soon!

The experts, who I assume in some cases are the hackers themselves, say the era of passwords may be coming to an end anyway. In the coming decades the whole system may be replaced entirely by biometrics. As often as the fingerprint scanner on my phone fails and I have to either put in a password or wait thirty seconds and try again to see if my thirty-second-older fingerprint works any better, I’m not yet convinced that will be a huge improvement.

But in the meantime, we will just have to hustle to stay a step ahead of the hackers with our wily strings of ever-changing mixed-up characters. To aid in that effort, I am reminding you that today, February 1, is apparently Change Your Password Day. I suspect that, like me, you have too many passwords floating around in your head to remember such a thing. So, you know, take a little time today to change up your one thousand and one passwords and be proactive in protecting your vital information. And your popcorn coupons.

If Not for a Boatload of Pirates

It’s been a long, cold week or so in my corner of the world as temperatures plunged to the kind of face-freezing levels that cause businesses to delay opening, schools to cancel classes, and mamas of stir-crazy little ones to go just a little bit crazy themselves. I have one teenager at home and no little ones anymore, but I do remember such days, and I understand your pain.

Yesterday we finally warmed up, our precipitation became much less solid, temperatures climbed all the way into the mid-40° range, and mamas rejoiced as kids went back to school. Today we’re expecting to be maybe a couple of degrees cooler than that, but still it feels downright balmy compared to 0° with a windchill of -15° and Monday’s ⅛ to ¼ inch of ice that made the 3 mile drive my son would normally make to school treacherous enough I was grateful for the cancellation.

For the non-American readers who might be into this kind of thing, I’ll translate the previous paragraph. Yesterday topped out at around 7° Celsius and today will likely be only a couple of degrees cooler, which does feel pretty refreshing after temperatures as low as -17.778° C with a windchill around -26.1111° C and anywhere from 3.175 to 6.35 mm of ice, enough to make even a 4.82803 kilometer drive pretty dicey.

Image by newsong from Pixabay

Personally, I don’t think going metric is an improvement, but I suppose it all depends on what your brain is used to, and I recently learned that had it not been for a boatload of pirates, we might all be speaking the same measurement language.

That’s because in 1793, then US Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was looking for a solution to the problem of inconsistent measurement systems in use throughout the new nation that made doing business both at home and abroad a little bit of a confusing hot mess. As a man who was interested in most things French following a successful revolution in which France had been a crucial ally, Jefferson was most intrigued by their newfangled base-ten measuring system.

In hopes of learning more and implementing such a logical and useful set of measurements in the US, Jefferson eagerly awaited the arrival of Joseph Dombey, a French physician and botanist who had been tasked by the National Assembly to bring its American friends a meter long copper bar and a copper grave (soon renamed the kilogram).

To be fair, if a bunch of pirates sent this to me, I probably wouldn’t know what to do with it either. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The weather did not cooperate with Dombey’s planned journey and his ship was forced south into the Caribbean where pirates attacked and took the scientist hostage. He died in captivity, but his luggage, marked for the US Secretary of State survived. Much delayed, it was eventually delivered into the hands of Jefferson’s replacement Edmund Jennings Randolph who had no idea what to do with it.

Without a proper introduction to the metric system, the US ended up adopting a standardized reformed British Imperial system of weights and measures in 1824 and all subsequent attempts to move entirely to the metric system, which yes, we do realize makes a lot more sense, have been unsuccessful.

We do scientific research, medical treatment, international business, and soda bottle purchasing in metric, but there’s a 100 yard football field at the high school several miles from my home and as long as the temperature stays above freezing, which happens at 32°, and we don’t get two feet of snow or a quarter inch of ice on the roads, my son will use much less than a gallon of gasoline to drive an approximately 2,700 lbs. car to get there. Because that’s how his brain works, too.

And because of pirates.

Abbott of the Stanley Cup

It has come to my attention recently that there is a trend in the world of drinking vessels. It’s all the rage and has frankly gotten a little out of hand, this bizarre obsession that has captured the enthusiasm of people all over the globe and has even caught the attention of celebrity.

I’m speaking of course of the cups made from human skulls that litter our history like the red Solo cups of last night’s frat party. 

I wouldn’t camp out in a Target parking lot for it, but that’s one fancy cup. Nicolas Perrault III, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It all started about 15,000 years ago in a cave in Somerset, England where ancient human remains include skulls that show signs of being carefully cleaned of bodily gunk and intentionally smoothed around the edges to offer a comfortable drinking experience for those who are into that kind of thing.

At this point you might be asking who would be into that sort of thing. It turns out maybe a good number of people, because skull cups have been dug up from lots of cultures and lots of time periods throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Writings about such things abound, or at least exist from multiple sources, which is significant when considering ancient texts.

Why people might have chosen to drink from human skulls is a little tougher to determine. Most researchers assume it was an act of ceremony, whether honoring the dead or drinking the blood of an enemy. It’s difficult to know for sure.

Rumor has it, Byron also wanted to make a cup with his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skull, but his family said no. Then Mary Shelley allegedly kept her husband’s heart in a drawer. As one does. National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps there’s an answer in one of the more recent and high profile celebrity uses of a skull cup from the early 19th century when a gardener uncovered a human skeleton at Newstead Abbey, the home of the bad boy of English poetry Lord Byron. 

Byron did what any slightly imbalanced hot mess of a celebrity would do and took the skull of what he assumed was “some jolly friar or monk” to an (I have to think surprised) artisan to commission a skull cup. The poet then dubbed himself “Abbott of the Skull,” drank to his heart’s content, and wrote a poem about how it’s better for a skull to hold wine than worm castings.

So it was a noble pursuit. Or perhaps Lord Byron just wanted to stay really well hydrated like all of the people who are losing their minds right now over the Stanley Quencher. This steel vacuum cup, with reusable straw, holds up to 64 fluid ounces, fits nicely in a standard cup holder, causes stampedes at Target every time there’s a new limited edition collaborative design released, and keeps the blood of your enemies warm for hours.

Okay, so they do look like pretty great cups, and while I still wouldn’t camp out in the Target parking lot, I might be lying if I said I didn’t kind of want one. Photo courtesy of my niece who is clearly much cooler than I am.

Honestly, I don’t understand either trend, but there’s no doubt the Stanley Cup has become a sensation recently. The obsession apparently started with TikTok and has spawned a Stanley Cup Buy, Sell, Trade, and Raffle group on Facebook with more than 68,000 members, as well as another group called Stanley Cup Hunters Anonymous Support for Spouses. 

The wild fad has spurred sales for the Stanley company, which has been in the business of making steel water bottles since 1913, to grow from $94 million in 2020 to $750 million in 2023. 

If you camped out at Target to get one and you want to make a few bucks, the resale value of $45 limited edition Quenchers is currently in the neighborhood of $200. Given that Lord Byron’s skull cup sold at auction a few years ago for only somewhere around £1,000, that feels like a pretty substantial markup. 

As far as I could find, no one has yet started penning verses about the Stanley Quencher. My promised year of not attempting to write poetry is over, so I might see if I can come up with something about staying ultra-hydrated by sipping the well insulated blood of my enemies through a straw. “Abbott of the Stanley Cup” sure has a nice ring to it. Maybe the company would consider a collab and etch my poem on the outside of a limited edition Quencher available only at Target.