Herman Boerhaave was a 18th Century Dutch physician of European renown. He is known as the ‘father of physiology’ and his contributions to medicine were legion. His name lives on in the ‘Boerhaave Syndrome’ which is the rupture of the oesophagus after forceful vomiting which he described in 1724 when the Dutch admiral Baron Jan van Wassenaer died of the condition after a particularly gluttonous feast.
In the year 856 King Aethelwulf of Wessex was returning from a year long pilgrimage to Rome. He had with him his youngest son, Aflred, who would one day be known as ‘the Great’. Aethelwulf was old by the standards of the day - probably in his mid-50s and possibly over 60 - and had been seeking spiritual peace at the end of his life by going to Rome. Whilst he was away, he had left another son, Aethelbald, in charge of Wessex.
High Intensity Interval Training involves brief periods of maximal, or near maximal effort with short rests in between. It is now enormously popular, acting as the basis for gym classes and exercise regimes all around the world. This is a recognition of the that this form of training gives good results with a much lower time commitment than traditional moderate intensity or steady state training.
If you were a man amongst the Mandan people of North America and wanted to stay part of the tribe, you really had to earn it. The rite of passage through which they went was known as the Okipa ceremony and it was extraordinarily brutal. The young men would endure 4 days of fasting and sleeplessness before having wooden skewers inserted through the skin of their chest and backs. They were then hung from the roof of a hut by these skewers until they passed out from the pain at which point their left little finger was amputated and they would set off on a race around the village to prove their strength
The English language is a glorious hotchpotch. Built on Germanic foundations, it has significant influences from Norse, French, Latin and Greek but has also borrowed words from languages as diverse as those from the Indian subcontinent and even the native languages of the Caribbean. All of these influences make the language a bit bonkers; where any rules exist, they seem to be broken as often as they are observed.
People working within organisations will keep getting promoted until they are incompetent to do their job. This is then the level where they will remain, no longer competent enough to be promoted further, and also no longer displaying the competence which led to them being promoted in the first place.
Imagine yourself as a weary traveller in the 18th Century arriving, after a long and hard day’s journey, at your inn for the night. What could be more welcome than a decent piece of roast beef or pork? As the inn keeper you would of course want to offer this to your guests but roasting large hunks of meet in those days was hard work. It all needed to be spit-roasted over an open fire, turned throughout the cooking process to ensure an even result.
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