There is so much in this world. So much. We don’t even know the smallest part of it. In all of time, something is going on right now, in billions of lives. If you multiply that by the multitude of history, all the happenings are infinite.
So here are a few that are interesting, weird, or quirky.
We don’t really have blackouts here in Ohio. Power outages? Yes, we have those. But not specifically blackouts. But New York has them. As such, there was something once called the Blackout Cake. It is sometimes also known as the Brooklyn Blackout Cake.
It is a multi-layered chocolate cake filled with chocolate pudding, topped with chocolate icing, and sprinkled with chocolate cake crumbs. A Brooklyn bakery, Ebinger’s, invented it during World War II in recognition of the mandatory blackouts to protect the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I had never heard of these before. I wonder if people still make them.
Speaking of baking. Here is the next thing. But worse.
In the 17th century, English women baked a special kind of bread meant to be an aphrodisiac. Here is the thing. They would do this by kneading the dough against their privy parts, specifically their vulvas. They would wriggle against the dough before baking the loaf. This bread, known as Cockle bread, was then given to the object of the baker’s affections.
I’m not sure if any women still bake this bread either. But I sure hope not.
Let’s just walk away from that one.
Speaking of walking. Here is the next thing.
Pedestrianism used to be a major spectator sport. That means someone is walking. And we’re walking…
So. In 18th- and early 19th-century Britain, a common challenge was to walk 1000 miles in 1000 hours, and gambling was often involved. That a mile an hour. It seems doable. I can walk a mile in about 15 minutes. That 1,000 hours is about 42 days. Again, it seems like a walk in the park to me. Or a cake walk. You know.
And finally. A little snow for you.
During WWII, a guy named Buddy Lewis served in the war. He was an MLB player in the daily going of things. Anyway, he served as a pilot and received instructions to carry a cake of cocaine in his pocket while flying over the Burmese jungles.
He was told to do this because, in the event of a crash, the locals had a fondness for the Coke. Give those natives a little cocaine? And they would assist him, or anyone for that matter, in safely navigating out of the jungle. The Burmese Coke Fiends.
So there it is. A few things about this world that you probably didn’t know before now.
And if you did? You’d better sign up for Jeopardy. https://www.jeopardy.com/be-on-j
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“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” — Albert Einstein
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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” — Carl Sagan
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“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” — J. B. S. Haldane
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“History is full of events which nobody expected.” — E. H. Carr
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