However, if you want to learn more about the Black Death, I have the perfect podcast for you. This is one of my top five, and I save it for my runs so I can savor Patrick Wyman’s storytelling (he has a talent for bringing history to life.) Right now, he is rebroadcasting his plague episodes. Fascinating.

The podcast is Tides of History, and I recommend every episode. He does deep dives into the history you probably didn’t learn in school. I don’t know if your world history class was anything like mine, but after learning about the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Romans, and the ancient Greeks, the school year was over. We never got to the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Middle ages, or even the Black Death. For shame!

But now, thanks to Tides of History, I get to learn cool history, and there isn’t even a test at the end. Perfect.

So check out the Black Death episode on Tides of History and be glad we don’t live in the 1300s.

I knew cats lived on ships to take care of the rat problem, but I had no idea about all the other reasons they were needed. Most of the cat featured were on British ships; I would love to learn about cats on American vessels as well.

In this video, I learned that the British government has a medal for military animals who do great things called the Dicken Medal. The United States does not have a similar honor, and I think we should.

If you want a half-hour of cuteness and military history, check out A Short History of Ships Cats. It’s the cat’s meow!

The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches per year. That means that in 600 million years, there won’t be any more solar eclipses. What a bummer.

This may seem unimportant since humans won’t probably be around in 600 million years. But it reminds us of something important. We have total eclipses right now because the Moon is the perfect distance from both the Earth and the Sun.

If the Moon is moving away from us, then in the past, it was much closer. When there was an eclipse back then, the Moon would have covered the Sun completely, and the sky would have gone dark without anything to study.

Imagine our earliest ancestors a million years ago, watching the sky go dark and the Sun completely disappearing. That must have been distressing. We are lucky that we live today and can experience the Moon covering the Sun just enough so scientists can learn from the event.

Like I said, none of us are concerned with what will happen 600 million years from now, but for the planet, it’s hardly anything. Think of it this way,  To the Earth, 600 million years is the same as six years to humans. It’s not any time at all.

I wonder what our descendants will think. Hopefully, they’ll have remarkable eclipses on whatever planet or moon they live on.

There are a ton of  quotes from our first president, but it was hard to find universal thoughts. Most of his words were about war, government, foreign powers, and God. This makes sense, but those quotes belong in other blogs.

I did find a few that were useful in our daily lives. I like the worry quote the best because I try very hard not to worry about things. Apply whichever of these works for you. Good advice is good advice, even if it is over two hundred years old.

George Washington Quotes:

• “Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

• “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

• “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.”
• “I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life, the foundation of happiness or misery.”
• “Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.”

Today used to celebrate just George Washington. Now it honors all our presidents. On my podcast today, I talk about the history of this holiday. I thought it would be fun on the blog to list some campaign slogans from various presidential campaigns. Everyone knows “Make America Great Again,” but do you know any of these others?

Presidential slogans

• 1840: William Henry Harrison – Tippecanoe and Tyler Too
• 1844: James K. Polk – 54-40 or Fight
• 1844: Henry Clay – Who is James K. Polk?
• 1860:Abraham Lincoln – Vote Yourself a Farm
• 1900: William McKinley – A Full Dinner Pail
• 1920: Warren G. Harding – Return to Normalcy
• 1924: Calvin Coolidge – Keep Cool With Coolidge
• 1928: Herbert Hoover – A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage
• 1952: Dwight Eisenhower – I Like Ike
• 1968: Richard Nixon – Nixon’s the One
• 1976: Gerald Ford – He’s Making Us Proud Again
• 1976: Jimmy Carter – Not Just Peanuts
• 1980: Ronald Reagan – Are you better off than you were four years ago?
• 1988: George Bush – Kinder, Gentler Nation
• 1996: Bob Dole – The Better Man for a Better America
• 2004: John Kerry – Let America be America Again
• 2008: Barack Obama – Yes We Can!
• 2016: Donald Trump – Make America Great Again

Oh, I hope you remembered that today is Valentine’s Day. If you have shopped at Walmart in the past two months, you couldn’t forget. I was in my local Walmart two days after Christmas, and they were putting out Valentine’s Day cards and stuffed animals. In December!

Recently, the entrance to my Walmart has been wall to wall heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. They range in size from six inches to over two feet across. Wow!

Valentine’s Day is not my favorite holiday. It might be one of my least favorites because I used to work at a Hallmark store. When I helped frantic men (it was always men) on February 14th pick out a card and gift for their loved one, not because they wanted to, but because it was a particular day of the year, I thought the whole thing was silly. Wouldn’t the gift mean more if people weren’t forced to give it?

Still, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate are popular, and I wondered who created the idea. It turns out it came from everyone’s favorite chocolate-egg-laying-rabbit company, Cadbury.

It should be noted that while Cadbury is known for small chocolate eggs in America, they are the Hershey of England. I like Cadbury eggs and was excited to learn that Cadbury is responsible for the heart-shaped box of chocolates.

In 1840, Victorians in England celebrated Valentine’s Day big time with elaborate gifts and cards. Richard Cadbury had improved chocolate making, and his eating chocolates were very popular. Heart-shaped boxes existed, but he was the first to decorate them with images of cupids and roses and then fill with chocolate.

The gift was actually two gifts. Once the chocolate was eaten, the box could be used to hold trinkets or love letters. Over the years, the boxes became more and more elaborate until World War II when sugar was rationed.

The heart-shaped box might have toned down to the printed cardboard container most of us buy, but antique Cadbury boxes are still prized by collectors. Even with a simpler style, 36 million heart-shaped boxes are going to be sold, especially to men who forgot today is Valentine’s Day.

Whether you celebrate today a lot or not at all, I appreciate all of you for reading this blog. Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

I always wanted to, and finally listened to a translation on Audible. It was amazing, and like nothing I expected. Anyone who studies writing learns about Gilgamesh. However, hearing the story itself was so much more.

I highly recommend the version I heard. The narrator was excellent. You can get it from Audible. The story itself is only about two hours long. The other two hours are an essay by the translator, Stephen Mitchell. I appreciate that they put the essay after the story, and I loved how he went into the decisions that translators have to make.

One of the things I liked best about the story was its repetitive style. At one point, Gilgamesh has four or five dreams. The verse leading up to each dream is identical, and by the third dream, I could repeat it myself. This helped me understand how oral stories were passed from person to person, and I felt part of the history of Gilgamesh.

One warning, there is a lot of sex talk in the book, and they don’t hold anything back. It might not be appropriate for kids. There may be other translations that toned that part down. It’s mostly at the beginning of the story and is important to the plot. I can understand why this translator didn’t mince words.

No, this isn’t from one of the great Brendan Fraser Mummy* movies. Thanks to science, a 3,000-year-old mummy spoke for the first time since his death (one assumes.)

It’s not easy to get a mummy to talk. Vocal cords are made up of soft tissue and don’t preserve well. Skeletons can’t talk at all. But Nesyamun, a mummy first unwrapped in 1824, had well-preserved vocal cords.

The fact that scientists brought back the voice of this particular ancient Egyptian is quite the coincidence because Nesyamum worked for the pharaoh Ramses XI as a scribe and priest. He would have used his voice often for rituals. (Do you think the embalmers put a spell on him so that someday he would talk again?)

If you want to know how they reproduced Nesyamum’s voice, check out this article from Nature. It has every detail (there were a lot of steps.)

If you’re hoping that the mummy said a complete sentence, you’re going to be disappointed. The sound that was made was short and sounded like a vowel because the vocal chord was frozen in one position. Vocal cords change shape as people speak, so only one sound can be created from the mummy. Plus, our tongue helps us make sounds, and poor mummified Nesyamum doesn’t have hardly any tongue left.

Listen to the sound of the mummy here. What do you think he is saying? I presume that it relates to his last words ever spoken, which is fascinating. (Perhaps he said, “Death is only the beginning.“)

*Amazon affiliate link

I talked about some of his fun inventions on Friday’s podcast, and I won’t repeat that here. Instead, I want to expand one of his quotes.

On Facebook, I saw several memes of the following quote.

That is only the back half of that quote. I think the entire quote is much more poignant and meaningful. Plus, it’s a little gross.

Feel free to share this meme on your social media to celebrate this wise and witty founding father.

I love putting lights on my house, and I love seeing other decorated homes. It’s such a happy sight. I also love learning cool history, and the history of Christmas lights is both surprising and totally expected.

In a round-about way, we can thank Thomas Edison for Christmas lights. (I found a great article on Smithsonian.com that shared this story.) Edward Hibbert Johnson helped get Edison’s inventions in front of the public. He toured with the phonograph, charging people to hear this modern marvel. In 1880, Johnson invested heavily to form a company with Edison to sell light bulbs because they knew it would be the next big thing.

The Christmas tree came to England thanks to Prince Albert in 1841. The idea soon spread to the United States. President Franklin Pierce had one in the White House in 1856, and by the 1870s, they were common in stores and homes. Ornaments were plentiful, but the lights on the trees were candles, and that was a real fire hazard.

Back to Edward Johnson. In 1882, he set up a Christmas tree in the window over Edison’s shop at 136 East 36th Street in New York City. He strung 80 hand-wired red, white, and blue light bulbs on the tree. To add to the electrical magic, he put the tree on a rotating pedestal. To make sure everyone knew about his lighted spectacle, he invited a reporter to see it.

People gathered at 136th Street to see this remarkable tree. Johnson continued the tradition, adding more bulbs each year. While he put electric lights on his tree above Edison’s shop, electricity was not widely available, and the lights were expensive. (really expensive.)  In 1900, a strand of 16 lights sold for $12 ($350 today.) However, people wanted these lights, and more and more were sold. By 1914, a 16-foot string cost $1.75. As electricity spread, so did Christmas lights.

About 150 million boxes of lights are sold in America each year. These lights decorate about 80 million homes. Take some time to wander around your neighborhood and town and admire a tradition that started with American ingenuity. Don’t forget the hot chocolate.