Cureth post-Thanksgiving!

One of the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving is the "food coma." People eat enough to get sleepy and then doze away the afternoon watching football or placeholder soap opera episodes. Or, of late, they prepare to talk with their family members who think differently about how wrong those members are, knowing that the ties of blood will prevent their being sat outside on the porch with the smallest possible slice of pumpkin pie.

Nicholas Culpeper offers a solution for the former; the solution for the latter is better candidates so we can discuss them instead of howling about them. Ask the Past brings us his Culpeper's Last Legacy from1655, where he writes that there are various cures for this "lethargie." Among them are burning brimstone under the nose, frequent provocations to sneeze with "white Helleborne," shaving the head and pouring "Vinegar of Roses" upon it, preferably letting it "drop down from some high place upon the crown of his Head." Ladies either never suffered from lethargie, or had different cures such as shaving their husbands' heads while they slept and pouring rose vinegar on it from the balcony.

For my money, the most likely method to work is "burning assa foetida to wake him." The name alone awakens my inner middle schooler to tell me a thousand jokes and explain the origin of the phrase, "that smells like ass." Given that it's nicknamed "devil's dung," I can't imagine anyone could sleep through the stench.

A Voice About Nothing

I’m somewhat concerned to still be posting about one of my favorite football players and the world’s biggest pop star, but interesting things still crop up. For example, on Thursday The View’s resident sage, Joy Behar, opined that she doesn’t want to see Taylor Swift end up with Travis Kelce. The reason? Some tweets Kelce made in his early 20’s, back when Twitter was just a place people sometimes tossed out random thoughts.

It seems the young Kelce spelt not well, and, moreover, made judgmental statements about women’s appearance. Such tweets offend the author of SheetzuCacaPoopoo: My Kind of Dog and SheetzuCacaPoopoo: Max Goes to the Dogs. Said she, “He’s illiterate is more to the point. He’s obsessed with the girls looking good, that was his thing.”

Now, evidence suggests Ms. Behar was never a young man. Her only child is a daughter, but she does have a grandson nearing the teenage years. The number of young men “obsessed with the girls looking good” is sizable, and if she was previously unaware of that he may demonstrate it to her soon.

But all of this is moot, because these are the tweets from a dozen years ago. Had that young man come calling at a concert a dozen years ago, I suspect Scott and Andrea Swift might have shown him the door too. In Joy Behar’s world, though, dozen-year-old tweets define who you are forever. Even if you learn to spell.

It’s in memes all over social media, but it’s true: Thank goodness I didn’t have an online youth.

Rider on the Storm

Several science-related websites noted the long, fast and high flight of a male shearwater bird caught up in Typhoon Faxai back in 2019. Shearwaters generally fly just over 300 feet around the ocean, while during this particular daredevil made it up to around 16,000 feet higher than usual. And it traded in its usual speed of between 3 and 37 miles per hour to almost 125 miles per hour as it made five circles with the typhoon. During the period the eye of the storm was over ocean, the bird landed and rested on the waves.

And stoners with their gummies think they get high...