There are some curiosities in this day’s look back at history.
The first one, I will mention, isn’t so curious but perhaps sad. Back on February 28, 1954, the Republican Party was organized in Ripon, Wisconsin. All I can say about that is the party had a pretty good run, depositing some decent presidents throughout our American history. It crapped out some real turds too. However, now, we are seeing the decline and death of the party. The Trump Party will emerge. We’ll see how that goes.
The next point in our past happened on February 28, 1849. As you might have guessed by the date, it has very much to do with the old Forty-Niners. The first boatload of gold rush prospectors arrived in San Francisco from the east coast. Now, this is very curious to me. The Panama Canal was not finished until 1881.
That means the ship had to go around Cape Horn in South America. This whole fiasco of a voyage was some 8,000 nautical miles longer than going through the future canal. The trip around the Horn took about two months to complete.
But, given the option of the wagon train, it was speedy. The wagon trains would travel at around two miles an hour. That added up to an average of ten miles a day. So, even if they had great weather, the 2,500-mile journey from east to west coast would take about six months. However, heavy rains or poor weather would increase this by several weeks. Either way, that was some serious yearning for gold nuggets, which many of them never found.
And, then, the next one hails from the dictionary. In 1939, the erroneous word “Dord” was discovered in the Webster’s New Dictionary. This prompted an investigation. Blame on it chemistry. The word was accidentally created, as a ghost word, by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster). Here’s how it came out in the printed copies of the book:
dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density.
This was an honest mistake, if you ask me, because headwords were typed with spaces between the letters. They typed the string “D or d” for density, which looked very much like “D o r d”. The would-be word was not questioned or corrected by proofreaders. As such, the entry appeared on page 771 of the dictionary around 1934, between the entries for Dorcopsis (a type of small kangaroo) and doré (golden in color). A very big bungle at Webster, apparently. The heads must have rolled.
Whoever made the mistake was such a Dord.
And finally, a very big one. In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the chemical structure of DNA-molecule (double-helix polymer). Yes, it took until 1954 to figure out how we humans were made. Well, besides the obvious.
Good old deoxyribonucleic acid.
DNA is just like a recipe. It holds the instructions telling our bodies how to develop and function. Amazingly, our bodies have around 210 different types of cells. Each cell does a different job to help our body to function — like blood cells, bone cells, skin cells. And on. Those cells get their instructions on what to do from DNA.
About 99.9 percent of the DNA of every person on the planet is exactly the same. It’s that 0.1 percent that is different that makes us all unique.
But don’t step too far. Chimpanzees and their close relatives, the Bonobos, are humans’ closest living relatives, with each species sharing around 98.7% of our DNA.
Isn’t that something?
When it all comes down to it, we are all very close to being gold-seeking Republican chimpanzee dords. Like we are seeing at CPAC this week.
Thank God — and I mean this sincerely — for that 0.1 percent.
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“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
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“One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.”
― John F. Kennedy
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“He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.”
― H.G. Wells
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The anomaly of the Republican Dords. Gold seeking, it seems.
