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September 29 - October 18, 2023
Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), for example, likened the deadly malaria season of summer and early fall to the nightly arrival of Sirius the Dog Star, a period of sickness he branded the “dog days of summer.”
Another popular Roman malaria remedy was to wear a piece of papyrus or amulet inscribed with the powerful incantation “abracadabra.” While the origin of the word is unclear, it appears to be borrowed from the Aramaic, meaning “I will create what I speak,” essentially summoning a cure.*
We reap what we sow. Or where we sow, the reaper appears.
To put this another way, roughly 40–45 million people currently on the planet are his direct descendants. If we collected all the descendants of Genghis Khan into one country, it would be the thirtieth most populous nation in the world today, ahead of countries like Canada, Iraq, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Australia.
“the umbilical cord of maternal union was threatening to become a noose.”
In the wake of the Stamp Act of 1765, these future insurgents met in the dank basement of Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern and Coffee House, which gained the historical reputation as the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” I like to envisage the Green Dragon as something akin to the Prancing Pony tavern from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where scheming, shifty-eyed, cloaked and hooded colonists sip on bitter tea or coffee while sneeringly conspiring to plot revolution.
Mark Twain cynically remarked, “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”
His detractors commonly referred to him as “Jackass” or “Jackass Jackson.” In true Jacksonian spirit, he embraced the name and the ass/donkey became the symbol for the Democratic Party.
The two halves of the country, sundered by the Mason-Dixon Line, were so different that they were masquerading as one nation in name only.
In fact, the paper bag was invented in 1862 as a lightweight, cheap, and compact way for Union troops to carry their coffee.
A casual observer imparted the wisdom that attempting to whitewash mosquito-borne disease was as pointless as “a one-armed man [trying to] empty the Great Lakes with a spoon.”
The downside to CRISPR is pretty much the definition of dystopia.