Innovation Of The Week (5)

A soggy burger is a first world problem if there ever was one.

But it may soon become a thing of the past, if an innovation I came across this week takes off.

American based Emily Williams, co-founder of Bo’s Fine Foods, has come up with a dry version of the condiment that is tomato ketchup that people will insist on slapping on their food.

She stumbled across the idea when she eschewed the normal method of making ketchups and condiments which entails braising vegetables and then throwing them away. Appalled at the amount of waste the traditional method entails, she chose to mix, grind and dry the vegetables into flat slices, not unlike those horrible slices of processed cheese that are readily available.

Instead of using preservatives and high fructose corn syrup that go into the traditional ketchup, she has used healthier ingredients. This seems to me to be counter-intuitive. No one chooses to eat a burger for its health benefits.

Anyway, the ketchup slices come in a sachet of eight and can be carried around conveniently and don’t need to be kept in the fridge.

Whether it will take off is anyone’s guess but the resourceful Emily is trying to raise some dosh via Kickstarter.

Ketchup in a sachet is messy, for sure, and there seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for the stuff. I had a pre-packed breakfast picnic provided for me in India recently which consisted of a cucumber sandwich, two muffins and a bowl of fruit together with two sachets of liquid tomato ketchup. I couldn’t work out which of the three dishes it was supposed to go with but, in any case, splashing it around in a moving car would have proved problematic. If I only I had had a dry version.

Emily’s idea may be a solution looking for a problem but more power to her elbow, I say.

What Is The Origin Of (173)?…

The whole shebang

Often in these etymological excursions I find that a word just seems to spring up into common usage, seemingly from nowhere, and there is little in the way of consensus as to where it came from. One such example is the noun shebang which is used in everyday speech today accompanied by whole and means the whole thing or all of it. But what is a shebang?

The word first appeared in print in America in the 1860s and already had assumed two slightly separate connotations. The poet Walt Whitman, writing in his Journal entry for the period 23^rd to 31^st December 1862 and describing the appalling conditions of the survivors of the battle of Fredericksburg, described “their shebang enclosures of bushes.” Given their parlous state, these shelters could have only been temporary shelters from the elements.

Contemporaneously, the Annual Report of the US Department of Justice for 1862, noted near a particular reservation; “an inn or shebang is established, ostensibly for the entertainment of travellers, but almost universally used as a den for supplying liquor to Indians.” The link to an establishment serving alcohol has suggested to many that its origin is to be found in the Irish noun shebeen which was used to describe an unlicensed and often disreputable drinking den, often run by women. The Irish word sibin meant illicit whiskey and in turn came from seibe which meant a mugful. That there were many migrants from Ireland flooding into the States around that time is indisputable and about the only things they had to bring with them was their language and traditions.

But almost at the same time the word had taken a broader meaning as shown by Samuel Bowles’ helpful definition in Across the Continent, published in 1865. Shebang is described as being “any kind of an establishment, store, house, shop [or] shanty.” These were more substantial structures than the bivouacs of the survivors of Civil War battles but only just and the word was probably used to describe any mean or rough and ready building. This meaning is not at odds with the drinking shack – it just has a broader connotation. As the Marysville Tribune of November 1869 revealed in its list of The Idioms of Our New West, published in March 1869. “shebang is applied to any sort of house or office.”

By the time Mark Twain got to use it in Roughing It, published in 1872, its meaning had changed once again, this time to describe a vehicle. “You’re welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang’s chartered..” This vehicular sense has led some to consider it as a variant or corruption of char-a-bancs, the French term used to describe a vehicle with benches as seats which was Anglicised by deleting the hyphens. I don’t find this convincing as the two words are quite dissimilar and, anyway, we need only consider it to be another example of the speed at which shebang, once had it had been let loose into the world, accumulated meanings.

That this must be the case is illustrated by its usage in the Sedalia Daily Democrat in June 1872; “Well, the Democracy can flax – this meant to beat up – the whole shebang, and we hope to see our party united.” This is the first recorded usage of the whole shebang and it seems to have its modern sense of the whole thing. The phrase came into its own from the 1920s but it is remarkable to see how its meaning changed so dramatically in the course of ten years. And for what it is worth, I think it owes its origin to shebeen.

Some People Are So Poor All They Have Is Money

Losing my religion

I’ve seen the future and it’s a golf ball.

“Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too/ Imagine all the people/ Living life in peace.”

I’ve always been mildly irritated by John Lennon’s tiresome, idealistic nonsense but about ten kilometres north of Pondicherry in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu is to be found a curious and rather disturbing manifestation of the chanteur’s vision. Auroville, the city of the dawn, actually predates the song by some three years, and was founded on 28^th February 1968 when a crowd of 5,000 including representatives of 124 countries bearing gifts of soil assembled around a banyan tree.

During the inauguration ceremony, the soil was tipped into a lotus-shaped white marble urn, which sits in the centre of the golf ball aka the Matrimandir. The aim of the community is to be a universal town where people from all countries live in peace and harmony, rising above all creeds, politics and nationalities. Its purpose is to realise human unity.

It has been going for 50 years and has had oodles of money pumped into by the Indian government and various United Nations’ funds. The tenets by which the adherents abide, currently around 2,500 representing 49 countries, were established by the Mother.

It was impressive in an oddly cultish, 1960s sci-fi movie sort of way but it seemed to me that all they had done was swap established religions for a bizarre set of tenets. Disturbingly, there seemed little way out of the community for any children born there. Child abuse of the worst sort.

The Mother was a French woman, Mirra Alfassa, who became interested in spiritual development. When she visited Pondicherry in 1914 she met up with Sri Aurobindo who, whilst banged up the Brits for agitating on behalf of Indian independence, saw the light and devoted the rest of his life to yoga and inner meditation. A PhD thesis can be written on which was the worst outcome.

Anyway, these two set up an ashram in Pondicherry – we visited it, as you do – and the very profound sense of calm there was only disturbed by the ring of the cash register and the swipe of the credit card machine.

The Mother was a prolific writer and her books, a mix of the bleedin’ obvious and the bonkers, seem to sell like hot chapatis and fuel this very obvious money-making machine. But, fair play to them, they saw a gap in the market and went for it.

If I felt the need to buy a golden ticket to ensure my admission through the pearly gates, I’m not sure I would have thrown my rupees at the grotto which graces the rear of the grounds of the peaceful church that is St Mary’s on the banks of the backwater at Champakulam in Kerala, standing on the site of one of the seven churches that St Thomas is reputed to have founded in 427 CE.

It is hard to describe how truly grotesque it is with its blue boulders that look as though they have been made out of fibre glass. It is modelled on the grotto at Lourdes, I’m told. The religious icons housed in it draw quite a crowd of devotees each day.

If I was St Peter, I would have a list of the subscribers to the grotto at the ready and if any of them had the audacity to show their face, I would direct them downstairs.

There is only so much one can take, after all.

Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Eighteen

William Beckford (1760 – 1844)

Whether William Beckford was truly an eccentric or just behaved in a way that was untypical of his time – but perhaps that is a definition of eccentricity – is a matter for debate. A modern biographer wrote of him; “he was as much a martyr as Wilde, and almost certainly a more interesting and civilised man” while Lord Byron called him “the Great Apostle of Pederasty.” Sex was at the heart of the scandal which engulfed Beckford, having been caught in 1784, at least according to the story promulgated by his paramour’s uncle, “whipping Courtenay in some posture or another.”

Married at the time and bisexual if not primarily homosexual, Beckford tried to see out the furore. Although he was never charged – Courtenay was a minor at the time and George III not only refused Beckford’s application for a peerage but wished that he could be hanged – he eventually went into exile, spending most of the next decade in Portugal before returning to Blighty. It was in Portugal that he wrote the extraordinary History of the Caliph Vathek, published in 1786, in which the Caliph is satiated with sensual pleasures and builds a tower so he can penetrate the forbidden secrets of heaven itself – a blueprint for the rest of his life.

The primary source, though, of Beckford’s troubles was his fabulous wealth, which he inherited at the age of ten upon the death of his father, whose sugar plantations and other interests provided his son with an annual income of around £100,000. Whilst this funded a splendid education – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was briefly his piano tutor – it meant he could spend with gay abandon. Like many of his class Beckford was a collector of art but eschewed the classical marbles that were the rage, concentrating on Italian quattrocento paintings and exotic objets d’art or, as William Hazlitt rather sniffily put it, “idle rarities and curiosities or mechanical skill.” Beckford was notorious for compulsive purchases and just as readily selling pieces only to often buy them again at vastly inflated prices.

The other money pit was the transformation of Fonthill Abbey into a gothic cathedral-like structure, the impetus for the building work being Beckford’s acquisition of the library of Edward Gibbons and the need for somewhere to put his ever-growing collection of art. With the assistance of architect James Wyatt he built an enormous tower which stood 300 feet tall and had four bedrooms some 120 feet off the ground. Although it was far from complete Beckford organised a grand opening party in 1800 and whilst most of respectable society shunned the event, Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton attended.

Beckford’s lifestyle and his collection of fey attendants, including a dwarf who guarded the38 feet tall doors at the entrance, excited comment and rumours about homosexual orgies and practices. His neighbour, Sir Richard Hoare from Stourhead, asked for a tour in 1806, an act which so scandalised the neighbourhood that Hoare was forced to apologise for his actions and never saw Beckford again.

By 1822 Beckford was in debt and put the Abbey and his art collection up for sale, an event which excited much excitement. John Farquhar, who had made his fortune selling gunpowder in India, bought it for £330,000 and sold off much of the art collection, part of which the irrepressible Beckford, back in funds again, bought once more. By this time he had moved, complete with entourage to Bath, buying 20, Lansdowne Crescent and 1, Lansdowne Place West which he connected by building an archway and in 1836 acquired nos 18 and 19, the former he left empty to ensure peace and quiet. When he died in 1844, his assets amounted to just £80,000.

His tower at Fonthill Abbey also had an unhappy ending. It was so badly built and unstable, due to inadequate foundations, that it collapsed five times, Beckford rebuilding it each time, but then on 21^st December 1825 it fell down for the final time, the new owners not bothering to reassemble it and so very little of his folly remains today.

You’re Having A Laugh – Part Ten

The Great Lunar hoax of 1835

The moon has always held a certain fascination. After all, it is the nearest heavenly body to planet Earth and on a clear night, not that we have too many here in Blighty, you can easily see its contours and shades of light and dark. The more fanciful amongst us speculate whether there may be life lurking in amongst the craters. It was this stream of thought that the New York Sun tapped into with its elaborate lunar hoax.

It all began with a discrete announcement on page two of the edition for 21^st August in which the paper announced that it had got its hands on some reports, from a publisher in Edinburgh, of some astronomical discoveries which the eminent scientist, Sir John Herschel, had made whilst out in South Africa. The full details were to be provided exclusively in the paper over six days the following week. And so it was. The articles ran to around 17,000 words in total and were supposed to have been based on articles that had appeared in the Edinburgh Courant which had taken the account from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

Of course, to be able to inspect the moon so closely and with such clarity, Herschel would have needed a telescope far more powerful than those currently deployed. So the first article, published on Monday 24^th August, went into great detail about Herschel’s immense telescope – it was said to be 24 feet in diameter – built on new principles and so powerful that it could be used to study “even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface.”

Having established the fact that Herschel had the means to explore the surface of the moon in minute detail, the article published on the Tuesday recounted the moment on 10^th January 1835 when the scientist first trained his telescope on to it. He wasn’t disappointed finding rocks “profusely covered with a dark flower” and then, more sensationally, herds of brown quadrupeds, a goat and “a strange amphibious creature, of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach.” Day three brought even more discoveries – a wide variety of flora and fauna, including bipedal beavers which lived in huts “constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages.” Naturally, they had fire.

Day four revealed the discovery of bat-like humans, dubbed Vespertilio-homo, whose appearance was a “slight improvement upon that of a large orang outing.” They spent their time conversing and copulating in the open.  In the fifth extract the discovery of a mysterious abandoned temple was announced and the cliff-hanger for the weekend was what did it all mean. The answer was revealed in the sixth and final extract – a superior version of Vespertilio-homo who lived near the temple, spending their time collecting fruit, flying, bathing and conversing in a “universal state of amity.”

The discoveries caused a stir. When Herschel heard about them – he was alive and blissfully unaware that his name had been taken in vain – he was naturally pissed, initially commenting “it is a most extraordinary affair! Pray, what does it mean?” and later complaining “I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the Moon — In English French Italian & German!!” The story was quickly declared a hoax by the Journal of Commerce which pointed out, amongst other things, that the Edinburgh Journal of Science did not exist and named the perpetrator as one of the Sun’s staff, Richard Adams Locke. More detailed exposes appeared in the New York Herald.

But the genie was out of the bottle and throughout the rest of the 19^th century, the moon hoax was the gold standard against which anything suspicious was measured. In Van Kempelen and His Discovery, Edgar Allan Poe used the term moon hoaxy. Quite what Locke was hoping to achieve by such an elaborate and time-consuming hoax has been lost in history.

If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/