MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Do We Make New Year’s Resolutions?
In the past 2 days, I’ve heard 4 different people say, “Welp…I’ve already blown my New Year’s resolution!” Which got me thinking: why do we make these sweeping annual promises to ourselves? Where did this tradition come from? And why does this tradition continue when so many people fail? Well, to start, we have the ancient Babylonians to thank (or blame).
The earliest recorded celebration that honored the coming of a new year was held in Babylon about 4000 years ago. Calendars weren’t what they are today, as the Babylonians kicked their new year off in late March, during the first new moon after the Spring Equinox, with their 11-day Akitu festival, dedicated to the rebirth of Marduk, the sun god. During those festivities, Babylonians made promises so they could get on their gods’ good sides, in the hopes of starting the new year off right.
Resolutions continued with the Romans. Julius Caesar decided to make a change to the early Roman calendar when it didn’t jive with the sun any longer. Caesar introduced the Julian calendar, which is basically what our modern calendar is today, and declared the first day of the year to be January 1, in honor of Janus, the god of new beginnings, to whom they promised to better themselves.
This tradition’s persisted around the world ever since. Back in 2012, Google even launched a Resolution Map where people could add their resolutions in real time. And, the experiment showed the number of people who maintain their resolutions is bleak: only 9.2% of people are successful in sticking them out.
The most popular resolutions:
Lose weight/eat healthier
Get organized
Save more money
Quit smoking
Enjoy life
Spend more time with friends/family
Get & stay healthy
Learn something new
Help others pursue their goals
Find love
If those sound familiar & remind you the whole concept’s a bust, or if they inspire you to create your own, just remember: this tradition’s destined to live on, since 4000 years of history shows us that, which is a hard-to-argue-with statistic. But, if you’re still plugging along, I wish you all the success in the world!
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Do We “Let The Cat Out Of The Bag”?
We’ve all heard the phrase, “Whoops, I let the cat out of the bag” when someone accidentally reveals a secret. But where did that phrase come from? And who put that cat in a bag to begin with?
The phrase’s first documented usage was in a book review in The London Magazine back in 1760: “We could have wished that the author had not let the cat out of the bag.” That, unfortunately, is about all we know for sure. There are 2 popular origin stories for the phrase, but both seem pretty implausible.
The first claims the phrase refers to the cat o’ nine tails, a whipping implement infamously used by the Royal Navy as an instrument of punishment aboard its ships. The whip’s nine knotted cords could scratch an undisciplined sailor’s back badly, hence its feline nickname. The bag comes into play because the cat, being made of leather, had to be kept in a sack to protect it from drying out in the salty sea air & keep it flexible.
The other explanation is that it was born from a ridiculous bit of livestock fraud. Supposedly, merchants would sell customers live piglets, and, after putting a pig in a sack for easier transport, would sometimes swap the pig for a cat when the customer wasn’t looking. The buyer wouldn’t discover they’d been cheated until they got home & literally let the cat out of the bag. Yet, while pigs were bagged for sale, there doesn’t seem to be any recorded evidence that that kind of con-game was commomplace.
There’s a certain implausibility to that trick, though, as piglets big enough for market have different sizes & builds than cats. Also, cats meow, they don’t oink. It’s hard to imagine enough people picking up their purchase and thinking, “this sack seems a bit light, and isn’t making the right noise, but I guess everything is normal,” to create an idiom out of it.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Are Our Spouse’s Family Called “In-Laws”?
The other day, as I was trying to describe to someone the difference between my current & past mothers-in-law, I began to wonder: “why do we call our spouse’s relatives ‘in-laws’ in the first place?”
It’d be easy to assume that it’s because your spouse’s family members are related to you by law, not by blood. But, that law actually has nothing to do with the marriage license your officiant ships off to the county clerk. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the “in-law” title refers to canon law, a set of church rules & regulations that cover, among other things, which relatives you’re prohibited from marrying. The earliest known English mentioning of “in-laws” is “brother-in-law” from back in the 14th century, most likely a citation of the canon law of the Catholic Church.
At its inception, “in-law” was specifically used to describe any non-blood relative you were forbidden by the church from marrying if/when your spouse died; that included your spouse’s siblings, parents, and children, along with your own step-siblings, step-parents, and step-children. The term “father-in-law”, could either have meant your spouse’s father, or your mother’s new husband. But by the late 19th century, at which point the Church of England & other Protestant doctrines had established their own various canon laws & marriage rules, the colloquial definition had expanded to include all spousal relatives, at which point “in-laws” became its own standalone term. The earliest written mention of it comes from an article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1894, which stated: “the position of the ‘in-laws’ (a happy phrase which is attributed with we know not what reason to her Majesty, than whom no one can be better acquainted with the article) is often not very apt to promote happiness.”
In other words, tension between people & their in-laws has been around for as long as the term itself. So, if you’ve got strife between yourself & your own in-laws, take heart in knowing you’re not the first & certainly won’t be the last.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Does Altitude Affect Your Baking?
While you might be proficient in the kitchen, you could potentially find yourself with a deflated cake or bone-dry brownies if you happen to go bake in Aspen, CO. Because an oven at high altitude can, very often, wreak havoc on your baked goods? But, why does altitude affect baking?
It boils down to air pressure. The higher you go above sea level, the lower the air pressure will be, mainly because of the smaller amount of air pressing down from above. Also, it’s further away from gravitational forces on the Earth’s surface. Less air pressure keeping liquid molecules in their liquid form means it takes less heat to evaporate them. Basically, boiling points are lower at higher altitudes.
For every 500-foot upsurge in altitude, water’s boiling point drops by 0.9°F. And, since liquids evaporate at lower temperatures, all the moisture that makes your signature chocolate cake so deliciously dense could vanish long before you would usually remove it from the oven. To avoid this, it’s best to bake certain things at lower temperatures.
Gases expand faster with less air pressure, too, so anything expected to rise in the oven could end up collapsing before the inside gets finished baking. Cutting back on leavening agents like yeast, baking powder, and baking soda, can help prevent that, though. That also goes for bread dough prior to baking (“proofing”, as fans of The Great British Bake-Off know). The dough’s rapid expansion negatively affects its flavor & texture, so you may want to adjust how much yeast you’re using.
Thankfully, we’re only 302-feet above sea level here in Frederick. But, because there are far too many things that can go wrong at high altitudes, including ruined recipes, that’s why I recommend doing what I do: buy your cakes & other baked goods from a professional baker.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
House of the Week: 01/01/21
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: What Color Is A Tennis Ball Really?
How each of us sees the world is, of course, subjective. But, some colors are meant to be constant. Oranges are forever orange. Fire engines are always red. Tennis balls are always yellow. Or…are they green? Which is it?
According to the International Tennis Federation, a tennis ball should be yellow in color, a mandate that came down in 1972 after TV viewers had trouble following the previously white balls’ movements across the court. Tennis ball manufacturers also officially identify their products as yellow.
So, why is it that some people perceive tennis balls to be green? Well, a yellow hue by itself can be hard for some people to distinguish. While yellow’s easy to identify when you contrast it with other colors (think paint swatches), it’s harder for people to visually decipher when there’s nothing to compare it with. Also, people tend to color correct based on lighting conditions. Warmer colors, like gold, or cooler colors, like blue, may be discounted by some folks upon their initial viewing. Which one of those ends of the color spectrum a person falls will ultimately affect how they perceive & interpret the overall spectrum. So, if you discount cooler colors, then the ball might appear to be yellow. If you discount warmer colors, you probably see it as green.
It’s also possible that people who are active in the evening time, under artificial light, discount warmer colors, while people active in the daytime, under natural lighting, discount cooler colors; those elements further shift our perceptions.
Objectively, though, a tennis ball is yellow. But, whether or not YOU think so, however, all depends on how you see the world in your own unique way.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected]!
House of the Week: 12/25/20
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Santa Clause + Cookies & Milk = Weight Gain?
Each & every Christmas Eve, Santa Clause sets out across the world, delivering toys to good little girls & boys. And, along the way, his yuletide mission is fueled by everyone’s traditional offering of cookies & milk. With all those goodies at every single stop, just how much weight would St. Nick pack on?
There’s a little bit of guesstimating involved, but it’s actually a simple question to figure out if you utilize the Factor Label Method. Also known as Unit Analysis or Dimensional Analysis, it allows you to solve this problem fairly easy. Basically:
Write your given on the left side of your paper (“1 Santa Claus”)
Mark your intended answer on the right side of the paper (“Pounds”)
Set up a chain of units from left to right
Fill in the numbers for the units
Multiply by all the tops
Divide by all the bottoms
Then, clean it all up.
So, using those 7 steps, the Factor Label Method gives us our answer: 400-million pounds. We’re assuming a generic sugar cookie has around 200 calories, while a glass of milk contains about 100, and that there are also approximately 2 billion houses on Santa’s route.
Now, again, this is an approximate answer; it could be 300 or 500 million, since we’re basing our math on assumptions. But, while we might not know the precise answer, we do know that the number is very big. So, if Santa burned calories like a normal man his size & age, he’d probably gain around 400-million pounds.
But, as we all know, Santa burns no calories like a normal person during his trip, because it’s a well-known fact that Santa uses those calories to propel his sleigh around the world, in what experts call “calorie-to-magic conversion”. It’s how he’s able to travel the entire world, because he uses all those calories from his cookies & milk, thus gaining no weight in the process. It’s mind-boggling, but all the best magic is. And Christmas Magic is probably the trickiest to quantify.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected]!
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: What’s The “Scuttlebutt”?
As we get ready to celebrate the holidays, you might be around friends & family (please be safe). And, if/when you are, you might want to share the latest “scuttlebutt”. But, have you ever wondered what that exactly is, and why we want to hear it?
When we make conversation, we use a variety of different prompts. You might ask how someone is doing, what’s happening, or if they’ve been anywhere or done anything interesting lately. And, sometimes, you might ask them what the latest scuttlebutt is. “What’s the scuttlebutt?” you might say, and then they’d spill the tea on that requested scuttlebutt.
The word “scuttlebutt” is clearly a slang term for information or gossip. But, what exactly is a scuttlebutt & how did it become associated with idle chatter?
According to Merriam-Webster, 1800s sailing ships carried scuttlebutts, or casks of drinking water, for those on board. Scuttlebutt was later used as the name for drinking fountains on ships or within Naval installations. The barrel was known as a “butt”, while “scuttle” came from the French word escoutilles, which means “hatch” or “hole”. A scuttlebutt was therefore a hatch on the barrel.
Since sailors usually received orders from shouting supervisors, talking amongst themselves was discouraged. But, because sailors could congregate around the water fountain, it became a place to finally catch up & exchange the latest news & gossip, which made scuttlebutt synonymous with casual conversation. For sailors, at the scuttlebutt was really the only place to do it.
Technological advances ultimately rendered the scuttlebutt obsolete, but the term, itself, endured, and eventually became a catch-all word for baseless rumors.
So, the next time someone asks you what the scuttlebutt is, now you can tell them. Just remember…the scuttlebutt could be about you, if you’re not careful.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected]!