Notes from the Brooklyn Polygnostic Institute

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Happy Groundhog’s Day oh seekers of knowledge! In honor of the day, here are a bunch of facts about the Groundhog and his day. Most of these are from previous entries on this blog.

The most famous weather predicting groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, was named by the Punxsutawney groundhog club, an organization dedicated to hunting and barbecuing groundhogs.

Other synonyms for groundhog, are woodchuck, whistle pig and marmot.

The Algonquin word for groundhog, was wojak which was mispronounced as woodchuck by the European settlers.

Other famous Groundhogs are Ontario's Wiarton Willie, Georgia's General Beauregard Lee, Nova Scotia's Shubenacadie Sam, Quarryville, Pennsylvania's Octorara Orphie, Staten Island Chuck, Marion, Ohio's Buckeye Chuck and a whole bunch of others that I wasn't able to transcribe because my break ended.

May be verified in a book on Groundhogs Facts that was part of the seasonal display in our children's section.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that Punxsutawney Phil is only right a third of the time.

It seems to me that Punxsutawney Phil is right two-thirds of the time and that the humans are consistently wrong interpreting him.

Or, another way of looking at it, Groundhog Day is at the beginning of February, there’s always going to be over six weeks of winter after Groundhog Day. Winter is by definition the time between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. Groundhog Day sits smack dab in the middle of winter. So if it predicts 6 more weeks of winter it is always right and if it predicts an early spring, it is always wrong.

May be verified in wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundh...ctions_by_year

A groundhog’s favorite food is alfalfa.

May be verified in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog

[mikelibrarian]

February second is also Candlemas, a Catholic celebration commemorating Mary’s coming to the Temple for ritual purification forty days after the birth of her son and of the ceremony of redeeming one’s first born son. In Jewish law, the first born son is redeemed 30 days after his birth, but the two ceremonies got tangled up with each other in medieval Christianity, probably because there was no redemption of the first born in medieval Christianity. The official redemptive price of a boy was five silver coins, but as Jesus’s family was so poor, a dove was used instead. One wonders what happened to the gold given to Him by the Magi on January 6. I wonder how many students have been smacked by priests over the years for asking that question. The purification of women after the birth of a child was carried on to Medieval Christianity, so the Feast of Mary’s purification remained popular, and the lack of such purification rituals in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is probably the reason why this feast has faded into obscurity.

Candlemas was so named because it was the day that candles were blessed. These blessed candles were supposed to protect a home from thunderstorms if it was lit and placed in a window.

Due to Candlemas’s fall in popularity, the blessing of candles now falls on the third of February. February third is also the feast of St. Blaise the patron saint invoked for protection against choking and diseases of the throat. When I was in second or third grade, my teacher asked us to decorate candles to be brought in to be blessed by the priest. She told us that these candles were to be lit in case of thunderstorms. My mother had some decorative candles but was not about to let me turn them into anti-storm burning candles. She might also have been put off by my ideas for decorating the candles. One of my Christmas presents that year was a muppets paint by numbers set that had been ruined by my younger brother scribbling on it with a bunch of crayons. So I figured I’d use the paint set to decorate the candle. My mother gave me one light bulb shaped candle. So I painted the candle. I painted the candle with all 24 colors from that paint by numbers set. Waste not. Want not. And apparently I was a natural abstract painter as I was more interested in the different patterns I could make on the candle than with any sort of logical design like stripes or polka dots. I remember being quite satisfied by my Pollackesque light bulb candle. Even now I like how the splotches of Fozzie Bear tan mixed with black and red orange on one portion of the candle. I’m less enthused with the splotches of Kermit chartreuse, but all great artists must take risks.

So I brought my beautiful light bulb candle to school, and got a little concerned when everyone else had normal looking candles decorated with ribbons. I held my candle up to be blessed just like everyone else, but the priest recoiled and balked when it came to blessing my throat with the light bulb candle. I’m guessing that he must have used some spare candles he had on him to bless my throat.

The candle came back home and spent the rest of its life in the kitchen hanging around in the nook occupied by the bead box. My mother never allowed me to light it during a thunderstorm, which was just as well because for all I know its thick layer of paint might have caused it to explode when lit.

After a few years the paint started peeling off it and I think my mother threw it out when cleaning the house when I was in high school. This was a rather sacrilegious act as that candle had been blessed by a priest.

My father always joked that he got a sore throat every year after getting his throat blessed.

[mikelibrarian]

Moby was once in a band named Flipper.

May be verified here: http://www.spinner.com/2008/02/28/st...-stories-moby/

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The chow chow 's name may originate in its being a menu item.

More likely they were named by British sailors in the late 1700's for a term for Chinese knick knacks.

May be verified in Little lions, bull baiters & hunting hounds : a history of dog breeds by Jeff Crosby and Shelley Ann Jackson.

[mikelibrarian]

The Manichaeans believed that bits of the divine were trapped in figs and that in order to free these bits the figs would have to be harvested by a non-Manichaean, because it was a sin for a Manichaen to do so, and then have a clerical Manichaean eat the figs and burp up the divine essence. If a non clerical Manichaean, or non-Manichaean of any sort, be it human or animal, were to eat the figs, then that portion of the divine essence would have been killed.

St. Augustine mocks the Manichaeans for refusing to give figs to starving non-Manichaens. His opinions on whether a starving non-Christian may eat bread that contains the essence of God is not recorded.

May be verified in Confession by St. Augustine. Translated by Gary Wills

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French waiters have a reputation for rudeness going back to at least the 18th century.

May be verified in Drink : A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

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One reason why medieval royal courts tended to move from castle to castle was that lack of proper sewage would render a castle uninhabitable after a few weeks.

May be verified in Mysteries of the Middle Ages : The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. by Thomas Cahill

One would feel sorry for the lords that owned or were stewards of those stopped up castles except that most of them tended to be right bastards. I guess one can feel sorry for the few decent ones.

[mikelibrarian]

Uranus was first named 34 Tauri because its discoverer John Flamstead thought it was merely the 34th brightest star in the constellation Taurus. The astronomer Herschel named it George after the reigning monarch George III.

May be verified in Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[mikelibrarian]

The boarding house where John Wilkes Booth planned Lincoln’s assassination is now a Chinese restaurant named Wok and Roll.

May be verified in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles : Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee

I believe I first heard this in a guidebook to Washington by Christopher Buckley that I read before a trip to Washington D.C, a few years ago. I looked for the restaurant but couldn’t find it.

Happy Lincoln’s birthday oh seekers of knowledge.

[mikelibrarian]

Evolution in action. Newly hatched salamander larvae are indistinguishable by the naked eye from Queensland Lungfish larvae.

May be verified in Life in Cold Blood by David Attenborough

Happy Charles Darwin’s birthday oh seekers of knowledge.

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Darwin wrote in the Decent of Man that monkeys “smoke tobacco with pleasure.”

May be verified in The Ancestor’s tale by Richard Dawkins.


Try to celebrate Darwin’s birthday in a healthy manner o seekers of knowledge

[mikelibrarian]

When sea going Green Turtles mate, the weight of the male turtle on her back forces the female underwater and she has to struggle to surface to breathe only to be forced down again. Green Turtle mating can last as long as six hours.

May be verified in Life in Cold Blood by David Attenborough

Happy Valentine's day oh seekers of knowledge.

[mikelibrarian]

Despite the excesses of the very wealthy, the common Roman lived under a set of sexual customs that included only having sex at night, the woman keeping their breasts covered during sex and men not engaing in oral sex.

May be verified in Napoleon's Privates : 2,500 Years of History Unzipped by Tony Perrotet


Celebrate Valentine's Day however you want Oh seekers of knowledge.

[mikelibrarian]

The Romans of 186 BC justified killing 7,000 devotees of Bacchus because of the cultists’ immorality. especially within regards to homosexuality.

May be verified in Drink : A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately


On second though, one can take things too far Oh seeker's of knowledge.

[mikelibrarian]

At the turn of the century Oral sex used to be generally only available from high class prostitutes, and could cost as much as $1250. That’s in 1900 money, so it was the equivalent of $27,000 in today’s money. Vaginal sex with high class prostitutes only cost half or a third as much.

May be verified in Superfreakonomics : global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

[mikelibrarian]

Prostitution used to be legal in the United States until laws started being made against it from the 1890’s to the 1920’s. Reformers wre upset that women would choose to become prostitutes because they were the best paying jobs that most women could hope to have at the turn of the century and criminalization seemed to be the best way to prevent women from choosing prostitution as a career. A typical wage for women was $6 a week, or the modern equivalent of $6,500 a year, and prostitutes tended to make from $25-$70 a week.

May be verified in Superfreakonomics : global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

[mikelibrarian]

St. Jerome was opposed to sexual intercourse and joked that marriage was for men who were too afraid of the dark to sleep alone.

May be verified in A Concise History of the Catholic Church by Thomas Bokenkotter


St. Jerome is one of the patron saints of librarians.

Happy Quirky alone day everybody.

[mikelibrarian]

Chinese accountants still use abacuses.

May be verified in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles : Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee

Count off the new year however you like oh seekers of knowledge.

[mikelibrarian]

In 1840 New Yorkers paid to see a ship with a Chinese crew because they had never seen Chinese people before. The boat stayed in the harbor as a tourist attraction.

May be verified in the article The Tombs, an article collected in The Eight Million : Journal of a New York Correspondent by Meyer Berger

Have an entertaining Chinese New Year oh seekers of knowledge

[mikelibrarian]

Marine Biologist Andrew Parker refers to a shrimp’s mating outside its species as embarrassing in the short run and dangerous to the creature’s species’ survival in the long run.

May be verified in : In the Blink of an Eye by Andrew Parker.

May you not have an embarassing Valentine's Day oh seeker's of knowledge.