Sadi tree. To the thinking atheist, it's not a person, it's a
symbol, an idea. The population of atheist in this country is going through
the rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because I put
my hand on a book and made a wish and working together for a more
rational world. Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness,
truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way. Assume nothing,
question everything, and start thinking. This is the Thinking Atheist podcast hosted
by Said Andrews. Please do not judge me. I'm begging you don't judge
me. I'm not a sadist. I really do love the creatures of the
world, with only a few exceptions. Here's the story. I was having
dinner with the Natalie at some friends house. We had a wonderfully mild evening
in the summer, I think it was in the seventies, and so they
served dinner outside in the backyard. They had a little table out there,
and it was pleasant weather. But the flies in Oklahoma in the summertime are
just horrible. House flies everywhere They're just flying all over the food and they're
landing on us. And so my buddy Sean goes into his house and he
comes back out holding a battery powered, rechargeable electrified flies swatter. It's about
the size of a pickle ball paddle. Inside the frame is a wire grip
and so fully charged. That grid is electrified. So instead of a regular
fly swatter where you smash him whack with the electric fly swatter. When you
swat, there's a larger surface area, so there's a better chance you're going
to hit them. And then once you make contact, you hear that sound.
I mean, they're done. It's over. So Sean's back there and
it's like, I mean, I don't know how many we got right,
and I had to try it. So I go home and I log onto
the internet and I purchase one which arrived on my front porch. Now mine
has a stand on it, so you can actually stick it on the stand
hooked up to an electrical plug in so it stays charged. It's got a
light on it that attracts bugs, and occasionally a housefly will get into the
house. We let the dogs out, you know, you open the door
and they just fly right in. So we go to bed lights off,
and at random throughout the night, you will hear some poor fly hit the
grid. It's a bug zapper inside my house. How redneck can I be?
How very Oklahoma? Is that right? And I gotta say, I
mean it works, It works all too well. With a single brush against
this wire grid, flies get an instantaneous lightning bolt of death. This is
the spark of extinction. They never know what hit him. I think it
may be almost more humane, like would you rather just get zapped or smashed?
And I think, if I had to pick, I'll if it's instant
right, give me the zapp Anyway, the dogs hate it, because you
know, they used to hate the sound of the slap of the regular fly
swatter. We thought this might be better. It is not. So guard
your dog's ears. Sometimes they get stuck. They get stuck in the grid,
and then it's like and they cook like bacon. Now it's at those
moments that I start to feel real conflict, like am I acting out one
of the saw movies? Is this necessary or is it gratuitous? I'm not
sure I know for sure at this moment. Anyway, back to the light
that attracts flies, I have never stopped to ask the question why does light
attract insects? This probing question is just one of many that we are going
to answer in the show this week, Destination Education. Make room in your
skull for knowledge, because as I have learned, so also shall ye.
We're going to answer the question how does soap work? We wash our hands
with soap, but I never stopped to ask what the soap is doing.
What is the difference between software and firmware? I know very little about computers
beyond being able to point and click, which I do a lot of.
I'm editing audio and video and doing show Pramp and all that stuff on a
computer. But then someone says, you've got to update your firmware. What
does that mean? Why do we put candles on cakes? Where did that
tradition come from? We're going to talk about that allergy season. You and
I go to the drug store and we say, look, I need an
anihistamine. I need an anti for my histamine. What's a histamine? We
are going to find out today. Attorneys take on a legal case and they
do it for nothing. They do the job for free. This is called
pro bono. I have never stopped to ask what pro bono is, but
we will Today. You're at a party. It's a kind of celebration,
maybe an anniversary, birthday. I don't know. If somebody did something,
got a promotion, retired, I don't know. Everybody raises a glass and
they toast the person. What the hell does toast have to do with drinking?
Why do people clink their glasses together? Where did that come from?
We shall find out, So prepare yourself to be enlightened, expanded, entertained.
As we begin with bugs, Why do bogs fly toward the lights?
There was actually a recent study on this, and scientists have been stymied for
a long long time. Entomologists know it works because anytime they need to go
out and collect insects for their research, they just would put a light out
inside a trap and boom they had bugs. If you have a bug zapper,
of course you know it works. Perhaps the mosquitoes and gnats and flies
drift toward the bulbs whispering to themselves that poem written by Joscelyn Soriano. They're
singing to themselves and in that darkness, I've learned how my wings could thus
take flight to fly towards you and feel how warm it must be to always
be near and never fear. How I yearn to be like you while light
shining brightly in the dark, But in your light, I saw how far
I was from who you are. Sorrow was short for Then I resolved I
must leave all else and burn. Death is sweet and pain is joy,
if only to be where you are. And then what's that smell? I
think it's burning wings. That's what happens, okay. Previously, scientists believe
that bugs were just confused. They would see our porch lights and our landscape
lights, and they would mistake it for the moon or another celestial body,
and then their sense of navigation would get screwed up. There was another theory
that the lights at night look like tiny slivers of daylight that you might see
through thick vegetation, so the insects, feeling trapped, would head toward the
light, thinking they had to escape. But just a few months ago there
was a team of biologists led by Samuel Fabian at Imperial College, London and
Josh Sunday at Florida International University. They say they may have found the answer.
These experts believe that insects see a bright light at night, and they
think that light is the sun, and they use the sun to orient themselves
on the y axis. The y axis is up and down by instinct.
Then they roll their back toward the lights. But when the light is not
the sun, when it's a porch light or whatever, this screws up the
brain. And especially when the lights are low or mounted horizontally, these bugs
will spin into banking turns. It's like an airplane spinning around about to crash.
Bugs navigate using lights, keeping their backs toward the sun. Artificial lights
hijack that system, and bugs think they're navigating by sun, when in fact
they're navigating by the coach light mounted by the garage. And then there's the
headlight of your car. Then there's the lamplight above the streets. And they
glitch out and roll and turn and spin, but always in the vicinity of
lights. The research team found that insects seem less affected by the lights that
point straight down toward the ground, landscape lighting, that kind of thing,
But the ones that go straight out or point up these attract bugs, which
try to orient with the sun over and over and over until they finally run
out of calories and fall to the ground dead from exhaustion. This is the
new theory by many experts in bugs, and it's one of the reasons that
scientists worry about light pollution human beings that produce so much artificial light in this
world that it can and does interfere with natural living systems. Bugs that only
go out in darkness, they never have any darkness. Caterpillars are much easier
to see for predator anthropods. The lights make them easy to spot as they
crawl upon the leaves. Sea turtles and birds get confused when trying to navigate
by moonlight. You've seen those beaches, the ocean beaches, and they say
no lights on the beach at night, and the reason is they don't want
the turtles that are using the moonlight to start using your light instead. It's
thought that even some animals under the surface of the ocean sometimes get confused with
the lights of ships traveling on the ocean surface. Anyway, that is the
latest theory. Bugs fly with their backs toward the sun, but you and
I have constructed a world with tiny artificial suns, millions and millions of them.
They are very possibly short circuiting the bugs in the air until they spin
and crash into objects or just fall to the ground. So you might want
to give a bog a break from time to time and flip off those light
switches when you are not using them. Next up on my list, we
wash our hands, but people always tell us we'll make sure you wash your
hands with soap. Right, So I do this and I walk away from
the sink. I have confidence my hands are now clean. But I never
stopped to ask what was going on with the soap, this bar or goop,
this magical stuff that somehow makes it cleaner than if I just rubbed my
hands together under the water. Britannica has a whole page on this. Apparently
it's all about chemistry. Now let's start here. Think of a soap molecule
like, it's got a head and a tail. The head of the soap
molecule has something called polar salt. Polar salt is hydrophilic, meaning it's attracted
to water. Now the other end, the tail of the soap molecule,
has a nonpolar chain of fatty acids or hydrocarbons. These are hydrophobic they are
repelled by water, but those tiny hydrocarbons are attracted to grease and other oily
things. So you and I go to wash our hands, and the soap
forms a kind of molecular bridge between the water and the oils on our hands.
Inside those oils, dirt, and germs, the soap acts like a
tiny crowbar. It's separating the oils and whatever's in the oils away from our
skin. The dirt and germs attached to the hydrocarbons, and then they lift
up and off of our hands and get washed down the drain. Soaps can
also connect with fatty membranes on the outside of bacteria and certain viruses. They
can lift those infectious agents off of our skin, breaking them apart. The
soap molecules surrounding them form tiny clusters called missills, and the missile clusters keep
the junk from attaching to anything else before it washes down the drain on the
whole. Hand sanitizers are nice, but they're not quite as reliable as soap.
Sanitizers that have at least sixty percent ethanol do destabilize and knock out some
bacteria and some viruses, but they don't do well with certain micro organisms and
other viruses. Some resilient microbes, like the ones involving meningitis, pneumonia,
diarrhea, even hepatitis A, and the viruses of the common cold. These
are less susceptible to the chemicals in hand sanitizers. They are more likely to
come off with rigorous scrubbing using actual soap. So hand sanitizers are fine when
soap is not a but the two are not the same thing. You know,
It's an interesting story. I actually told this on my True Stories podcast
a few months back. In the eighteen forties, there was a Hungarian doctor,
a well respected physician. His name was doctor Ingus Semmelweiss, and he
worked in a maternity ward and they had some maternity patients who were treated by
doctors and others were treated by midwives. And he noticed that the procedures were
different. Some of the mothers to be who came in and had their babies
delivered by the midwives, well, the whole time the midwives had been washing
their hands, but the doctors had not. Sometimes they would come straight from
an autopsy, they would jump right into a delivery room. They would deliver
the child without disinfecting, washing their hands or whatever. This was the age
before germ theory was known and understood, But doctor Semilweiss realized it. Hey,
wait a minute, people are dying unnecessarily because of hand washing. We
should sound the alarm. Change our procedures. Hand washing must make us safer.
When he brought this to his medical peers, they laughed him literally out
of the profession. They mocked and ridiculed and discredited. He ended up cast
out. He died in an asylum. These people thought he was nuts,
when in truth, back in the eighteen hundreds, doctor Semmelweiss was ahead of
his time. He realized the power of the germ and the power of soap
and water. The Centers for Disease Control the CDC says, there's a proper
way to wash your hands. You got to work up a good lather,
scrub your palms and the back of your hands, to lace your fingers,
rub the fingertips against the palms, and twist a soapy fist around your thumbs.
There's a Canadian health expert, her name is Bonnie Henry, and she
said it this way. She said, quote, wash your hands like you've
been chopping halopenos, and you need to change your contacts. These are wise
words. It's good for us. It is important. It's critical for public
safety, and honestly, it just feels really nice to be clean. Coming
up next, what is firmware? It's not software, but it is right
firmware. What's firmware? Plus other probing questions stand by my page. Let's
get this broadcast early and totally commercial free. You will never know how much
of a difference just a few bucks a month makes. It helps me to
do what I do. Thanks for your support. Patreon dot com, slash
Seth Andrews. Still to come, We're going to talk about allergies. We're
going to talk about lawyers that work for free or pro bono, and why
we toast someone when there's no actual toast involved. But first, I was
on the phone with tech support for my computer. I can't remember what was
wrong with it, but you know what it's like. You dial the number
and you wait on hold with horribly irritating music, usually involving a flute,
and then somebody comes on and they try to guide you toward the solution to
a problem. Okay, I've got a problem here, And at some point
he said, well have you updated your firmware? In that moment, I
did not admit that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
I said, oh, firmware. Yeah, I mean I think it's updated.
But in my brain I'm like, well, that's software, right If
if it's downloaded and it is on my hardware, then it's got to be
software already. The computer experts who are listening to the sound of my voice
right now are about to fall out of their chairs. I know, if
you know computers, you pity me in my shallow pool of ignorance. But
I'm not ashamed to admit when I am ignorant. I know when I do
not know. But I wanted to know, and so I dug up some
information the difference between software and firmware. First, we have to define our
terms hardware computer processing units, the CPU, RAM, hard drives, that
kind of thing. Software. This is a web browser, operating system,
anti virus programs, business apps, games. The stuff that runs on the
hardware firmware is the BIOS and UEFI. This does not help me. The
BIOS and UEFI these are two different types of motherboard firmware that assist when you
start up your computer. And I'll talk for a second specifically about the BIOS,
and then the computer experts can mock me in the comments section. The
BIOS Basic Input Output System. This is the program that a computer's microprocessor uses
to start everything up after we hit the power button. It manages data flow
between the operating system like Windows, and talks to attached devices like the keyboard
mouse. Think of the BIOS like a middleman between the operating system and the
hardware that it runs on. And BIOS is included on all computers on a
chip in the motherboard. And Yes, firmware is a type of software.
Aha, I knew it. I knew that much, right, But this
is specific software. It's designed to control certain and specific pieces of hardware and
tell everything how to talk to everything else. The firmware files are really small.
They are usually hidden so we can't easily find them and screw things up.
It doesn't even run on the main CPU. Firmware has other processors just
for it. So, from what I can make out, firmware is software,
but it kind of works like an air traffic controller. It's hard to
access the tower if you're a civilian because if you get in there and you
mess up the guidance system and the other instructions, then the planes are going
to get stuck on the ground or crash into the ground. The controller keeps
the planes running, gives them direction. It is ground zero. The nucleus
the center hub that helps the stuff talk to other stuff, firmware. I
guess it's like the reactor room on the Starship Enterprise. It's important, it's
powerful. But if you are not mister Scott, it is probably best to
go and pretend you're Dixon Hill in the holideck. Did I miss anything?
Computer people? Do you have further explanations, better explanations? I leave myself
humbly in your technical hands. Okay, allergy season, do you struggle as
much as I do? With allergies the spring? In the fall Oklahoma?
Time to stock up on the Bena drill and the csyrtac and the Flowne's allegra
whatever. Because the pollen and junk in the air is going to bring the
sneezing and the watery eyes, runny nose, headaches, cough, a whole
bunch of symptoms to the allergy party. I need medicine. I need an
antihistamine. I have used this word for my entire life. What's a histamine?
How would an anti histamine shot down? The histamine. I have no
idea. Well, I went out did some homework. Let us fill this
tiny hole in our minds, just above the holes in our noses. Our
bodies are fortresses and they have guards. They have biological guards that protect the
castle. We have ribs that tech the hearts and the lungs. Our skin
protects us from sun and wind and bacteria. Our eyelashes protect our eyes from
debris. Our immune system also goes to war against anything foreign that enters the
body, and sometimes these body guards overreact. Histamines are chemicals that are created
by our immune system, and they do lots of important stuff. They help
make gastric acid. They help to work the muscles and our intestines and lungs.
They affect the heart rate. They help our nerve cells talk to each
other. They also cause vessels in our bodies to swell and dilate. And
this is where we get into trouble because here comes the pollen and the dust
and the food allergens, the pet dander, mold, bug bites, latex,
even certain medications. These are strangers in our human house. The body
says, whoa wait a minute, this doesn't belong alert. The guards send
in the histamines to knock out these unwanted guests. And as the histamines work,
they are swelling and dilating our vessels, and this causes the itchy eyes
and the running noses, and the stuffy heads, and the scratchy skin,
the wheezing and the lungs. It's essentially taking the fire hose to a candle.
A little over reaction there, apparently, and so we need to try
and settle things down. We need the guards to stop marching. To reduce
the reaction, we take antihistamines. Antihistamines talk to the histamine receptor in the
brain and the spinal cord. They cross the blood brain barrier. This is
what drugs do, which is why we get so drowsy after we pop a
couple of ben a drill. Of course, since the early days, they've
developed non drowsy second generation antihistamines. You can find those pretty much anywhere.
One last thing, apparently, the long term use of antihistamines can be dangerous.
Diphenhydramine blocks the effects of a neurotransmitter called a settle coaline, and a
settle coline is vital for memory and learning, and there was a patient study
that showed a significant risk for dementia in people who just lived on antihistamines.
Now I'm not a doctor, but this is a subject that is worth exploring
on your own if you're taking constant meds to calm down that army inside your
body. Cleveland Clinic says, we ought to be thankful for our histamines because
they do so much good and necessary work. They regulate the heart and lungs
and keep our immune systems on alert. Sure, sometimes those little histamines can
get oversensitive, but they are hard workers and mostly they just want to keep
us safe. One of my favorite TV shows of all time is called Better
Call Saul, And this is really not a spoiler, but one of the
main characters, Kim Wexler, is an attorney. She's a lawyer with a
conscience, and at one point during the series, she decides she wants to
take on hard luck cases, people who are stuck with a bad public defender
they can't afford good lawyers. She decides, I'm a good lawyer, I've
got something to all for. I am going to defend these people for free.
She defends them pro bono. Well, you and I have already assumed
what pro bono means, and we would be correct. Pro Bono is the
offering of free services, and as you also may have guessed, it is
Latin. It comes from the Latin pro bono public go, which means for
the public good, and the American Bar Association actually encourages this. They say,
it's a privilege to practice law. Being an attorney is an honor and
with it carries great responsibility beyond billable hours. And for that reason, the
American Bar Association says this quote. When society confers the privilege to practice law
on an individual, he or she accepts the responsibility to promote justice and to
make justice equally accessible to all people. Thus, all lawyers should aspire to
render some legal services without fee or expectation of fee, for the good of
the public. They recommend that every lawyer donate at least fifty hours of pro
bono service every single year, specifically helping people who have limited incomes and few
options out there. Pro Bono is also a term that applies outside of the
legal profession. Corporations can loan a fully trained and fully paid employee out to
a nonprofit organization, a charity, or whatever. There might be an advertising
firm and they produce and donate a sixty second commercial about protecting the environment or
funding our schools. There might be another kind of for profit organization that gives
resources time too, battered women shelters, the offering of free services for the
public good. Now forgive me because I'm a little cynical about attorneys. I
mean, I've met some good ones. I've met some really good ones,
but I've also met a whole bunch of them who would never consider working for
free. You know what I'm saying. It is kind of a billable hours
game. But then again, maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe these
people just aren't talking about it. Maybe attorneys don't need to talk about it.
Maybe they're doing public good and they're just not wanting to perform about it.
For the rest of us, I guess we could all find more opportunities
to give our time and talents to people who are locked out of opportunity by
the system. Pro bono publico. Next time you say it out loud,
realize how fancy you're being you are speaking Latin, and then after you do
that, go out and help somebody. Here's one that I've been thinking about.
I don't know if I teased it in the opening, but we'll do
it here. The loafer you put on. Those shoes you slip them on,
and they're not slippers. They're kind of dress shoes known as loafers or
penny loafers. Why do we call them loafers? I have done some homework.
There's a page by the Floor Shim Shoe company on this very shoe style.
Let me just read it for you. It says, no men's shoe
style rides the line between casual and dress quite like the men's loafer. One
of the most versatile of men's shoe designs. Loafers date back to the mid
nineteenth century. Back in the eighteen hundreds, there was a Norwegian shoemaker whose
name I simply refused to butcher on this broadcast. He took his inspiration for
this shoe without shoelaces from the moccasins that were worn by the Native Americans.
He actually combined the style of the moccasin with shoes that were used by Norwegian
fishermen. These became known as loafers because you weren't doing the work of tying
your shoelaces, and honestly, these were casual shoes. Meant for relaxation.
In the early twentieth century in the United States, shoemakers started stitching on this
half moon shaped leather piece right across the saddle of the shoe. And then
in the nineteen fifties, a weird fashion trend started among teenagers. They wore
their loafers and they placed a coin in the slot of the shoe, hence
the penny loafer. Today, the loafer has so many colors, so many
designs. Many have that half moon leather piece, some have tassels dangling on
the front. Still others are decorated with metal, and a great example of
this is the Gucci loafer. And these casual shoes for loafing have become common
with business people wearing business suits. They're the ultimate bridge between how shoes and
dress shoes. The loafer. All right, let's talk about toasting people raising
a glass, clinking a glass. I toast to you. What's that about?
We're going to find out after this our show on common random fascinating absolutely
essential knowledge to us. Just rolling through some random stuff that soaked into my
brain. Things I do and say that I don't know why I do and
say them. A couple of other quick random ones, treadmills. Go to
the gym, you run on the treadmill. I know you're not doing it
at home. I had a treadmill once. You know what it was.
It was a closehanger. I just threw clothes on it. I think I
used it three times in the first week, and then I might as well
have just left it unplugged. Anyway, the treadmill, why do we call
it that. The truth is is it used to be thought back in the
day, back in the nineteenth century, that's the best way to rehab criminals
and also to make money for private prison owners, was to put the inmates
to work, and they would grind grain in the mill. And these mills
were run by foot pedals, and so these poor inmates would every day,
for an entire day, be stuck standing and treading and pushing and walking on
these devices that ran the mill. They tread upon the mill. And even
though the practice was pretty much done away with in the early twentieth century,
the idea of getting a workout on the tread mill became popular, especially in
our fitness focused culture. So the next time you go out to Planet Fitness
or whatever, and you stand upon the treadmill. Know that you are standing
upon a device originally designed for prison inmates to grind grain, a device so
intense, so painful, so exhausting, so abusive, that had sent many
inmates to the hospital or the grave. Here's another interesting piece of trivia.
Why do we put candles on birthday cakes. It's an awesome tradition until you
hit middle age, and then it's just obscene. Yeah, it looks like
you're trying to burn the house down. So if I'm fifty five, they
don't even bother. They just go out and buy two candles in the shape
of fives five five Happy Birthday. Seth candles on birthday cakes. The theories
of bounds, but many say it was the ancient Greeks who started this tradition,
with a festival every spring called the Maunichia. Women would make offerings to
Artemis, the goddess of the moon. They prepared honey cakes, and they
filled those cakes with candles that were meant to shine like the moon in the
sky. These early cakes were nothing like the cakes that we see day.
It was the seventeenth century when people started to layer them and frost them and
decorate them. Those kind of cakes at that time mostly prepared for and served
to the super wealthy, the powerful, and privileged. Even royalty candle cakes
didn't segue toward mass production served to everyday people until the seventeen sixties. By
the eighteen fifties, cakes with candles had really caught on in Germany. Twenty
years later that tradition had made it to the United States. These types of
cakes usually often served to children, with a number of candles for the child's
age. Everybody would sing a hymn, and then the kid would blow out
the candles one by one. By the way, and I hate to bring
this sub but there was a study done back in twenty seventeen from the Journal
of Food Research on the whole blowing out the candles thing. I hesitate to
tell you this. I don't want to steal your joy, but according to
this study, blowing out your candles on a cake increases the amount of bacteria
on the icing by fourteen hundred percent. That's all right, though, apparently
the authors of the study went on to elaborate that it's okay. It's still
safe for people to eat. But if you're a germophobe, if you're a
bacteria phobe. Just know that, okay, blowing on the cake means bacteria
on the cake. And now you know, speaking of special occasions, it's
your birthday or retirement day, or you just won an award, or you
got married or something. Let us toast the honored guest. Now I'm not
a drinker, but I do toast. I'll toast people. My glass is
usually root beer. But you know, as I'm toasting, I never stopped
to ask why is lifting a beverage and then sipping it a toast? Well?
I found some information at Farmer's Almanac and Toastmasters International. This tradition of
toasting began long long ago. The ancient Hebrews, Persians, and Egyptians were
toasters, So were the Saxons and the Huns and other tribes of ancient times.
In the eighteenth century book called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Edward Gibbons wrote about a feast held by the Huns and their leader,
who was Attila. The Hun led a big toast before every course of a
massive banquet dinner. The ancient Greeks would drink to each other's good health and
welfare. When Homer wrote The Odyssey, he had ulysses drinking to the good
health of Achilles. Raising a drink was also the expression of a wish that
you didn't want anyone to be poisoned by someone else. Remember, the powerful,
the kings and dictators of old had special tasters who would sip the wines
that were given to them to make sure somebody wasn't trying to take them out.
Or maybe they would take just a tiny sip to gauge and see if
there was an odd taste, anything a foul here. So there it is
a toast with a sip that sounds familiar, but it was not called anything
like a toast. It was just a good wish of goodwill, a salute
with a drink. And then came the Romans. The Romans were really good
at taking the traditions of their cultures and then adding extra stuff. When the
Romans drank to your health, sometimes the wine could be rather bitter, and
they would add toasted bread crumbs into the wine. They would just drop breadcrumbs
right into the goblet, which reduced the acidity of the wine and made it
more sweet and more tasty, and thus began the toast. At first,
it just referred to the drink itself. The Latin is toastus, and toastus
means to dry up or scorch. Over the centuries, toasting the wine to
make it sweet evolved past the drink itself into the people we were drinking too,
our brothers and sisters, as we honor and celebrate them. Now,
the clinking of glasses as toasting people was gaining popularity throughout Europe. People would
touch glasses and goblets with such enthusiasm that the drinks would splash into each other.
Their wine might splash into your wine, and vice versa, a sharing
of the grog. It became a kind of communal drink, a bonding experience.
Everybody was served separately, but as they smashed their goblets and splashed the
wine, they were all drinking from the same cup. Some historians think this
also might have been another method to try to avoid being poisoned. After all,
if you're clinking glasses, a poisoner wouldn't clink toxins into your glass and
then sip from his own and literally drink himself to death. The seventeenth century
saw the popularity of actual toastmasters. Think of a grand marshal at a parade
or the leader of a party. They presided over these big celebrations. They
would give grand speeches and oversee every toast that was given. There was a
reason for that. Sometimes these massive banquets included rivals enemies, and the toast
was a chance to bring them together. It was an olive branch. The
toastmaster was kind of apparent supervising squabbling siblings. There was a seventeen ninety one
book called The Toastmaster, and the situation was described in this way. The
book said this, a toast or sentiment very frequently excites good humor and relieves
languid conversation. Often does it when properly applied, cool the heat of resentment
and blunt the edge of animosity. A well applied toast is acknowledged universally to
soothe the flame of acrimony when season and reason oft use their efforts to no
purpose. Okay, now that we know that toast was dipped in to wine
and that wine glasses were clinked together to share the spirits, do not just
randomly do this when you are traveling elsewhere. Toasting traditions are very specific,
so you got to brush up on the customs. For example, Apparently there
is a common toasting tradition in Hawaii. You don't say cheers or good cheer
or whatever. You say I kiola, which means here's to life. You
lift up your cocktail, you look your companion straight in the eyes, you
say his or her name out loud, and then you say, I kiola,
here's to life. And if you really want to send good vibes,
you follow that with the words mackay or poo. Makai means goodness, poo
means praise and righteousness. Norwegians are well familiar with the toast and shouts of
s Right, you have the goblet, you raise it up. Skull.
This word originally comes from the Old Norse word for bowl, and it roots
all the way back to the tradition of warriors who used to drink ale or
mead from the skull of a defeated enemy. Skull skull. You're making that
connection. In Peru, you say salude to your health. In Turkey,
sirref means honor. Nigeria at kell deary means thanksgiving, and the toast gets
kind of formal. If you go to Japan. In this scenario, the
Japanese host pours you a small glass of beer. He pours his before he
pours yours. You're supposed to then hold your glass with one hand, and
then you take your other hand and you put it underneath that glass with your
palm flat, and the host will lower his own glass below yours as a
show of respect. But then you are supposed to lower your glass below his
glass. You gotta do this or else you are showing your host disrespect.
So you hold it out, he lowers you lower. Then you clink your
glasses together and say conpie. Conpie means dry glass. Enjoy and drink up
until your glass is dry. That's fun stuff. I really do enjoy these
random trivia shows, general knowledge broadcasts, learning new things. And as I
sit here with my glass, it's actually a bottle, plastic bottle with sugar
free root beer. Allow me to raise my sugar free root beer and fish
today with the toast to you. I raise my root beer, and I
offer to you the words of this popular toast from the days of old.
There are good ships, and there are wood ships, the ships that sailed
the sea. But the best ships are friendships, and may they always be.
Have a great week. I'll see you next time. Follow the Thinking
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