From the CBC: “Joshua Haldeman was just one of thousands of Saskatchewan farmers who lost their land in the drought of the Dirty ’30s. While that trauma shaped the lives of everyone who went through it, the crisis affected Haldeman so much that he never stopped raging at what he perceived were the causes of the Great Depression. Haldeman came to believe that an international communist conspiracy controlled the banks, the media and the universities and was aiming to run the world. “An ‘Invisible Government,’ working to carry out the objectives of the International Conspiracy, is operating in every country,” he wrote. He also said the conspiracy was pushing for the fluoridation of water supplies, mandatory milk pasteurization and mass vaccination programs. Haldeman embraced the solution proposed by a movement called Technocracy: that government should be run by scientists and engineers rather than politicians.”
In the 1700s and 1800s pink was the color of princes and kings
From Literary Hub: “He was a prince whom all of Europe nicknamed “the pink prince”: Charles Joseph de Ligne (1735–1814), marshal of the army of the Holy Roman Empire, diplomat, thinker, writer, scholar, and a great ladies’ man. His courtly manner, wit, elegance, and gaiety charmed all the European courts. His nickname came from the traditional livery of his house along with his personal taste for pink, notably in clothing and furnishings, but also from his optimism and good humor. Hence we have proof that in the late seventeenth century, the color pink, symbolically, already evoked joie de vivre, pleasure, and lightheartedness, a pink that was not pale and delicate, but strong and saturated, closer to a light, vivid red. It would be anachronistic to see a sign of homosexuality or effeminate behavior in the wearing of pink by men. The prince of Ligne, who happily wore this color for many decades, had sixteen children by his wife and multiple affairs with women throughout Europe. All women found him charming.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
The discovery of rainbow obsidian glass created an Aztec version of the Gold Rush
From The Marginalian: “Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly beautiful. Soon, they were laboring in obsidian workshops by the thousands, making from it delicate beaded jewelry and deadly weapons, household tools and ritual figurines, mirrors and surgical instruments, which traveled along trade routes to become the pillar of the Toltec economy. Not a mineral but a volcanic glass made of igneous rock, obsidian forms as lava cools too rapidly for mineral crystals to nucleate. Rainbow obsidian soon became the most valuable kind of obsidian in Mesoamerica, attracting people from faraway lands in search of wealth, much as the Gold Rush changed the demographics of nineteenth-century North America.”
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
How the Irish Pub became one of the Emerald Isle’s greatest exports
From the Smithsonian: “Alan Hynes grew up in Kinvara, a small Irish village in County Galway. It had one shop, a post office, a church and two pubs. When he’d go to the auction house with his father on the weekend, they’d stop into a few pubs on the 12-mile trip home. He moved to California’s Marin County in 1998 and today owns a concrete and excavation business. Seven of his nine brothers and sisters are also in the Golden State, but he says he has always felt something missing—that community cornerstone. So, at 51, he decided to open a pub. The Burren House had its grand opening on March 7 on a main strip of downtown San Rafael, about 5,000 miles from Kinvara. Each element was designed and produced in Ireland, then sent over in a shipping container. The Liscannor stone in the entryway was sourced in the Burren region, the bar’s namesake.”
A tour of Pompeii’s best graffiti from ancient times has some real zingers
From Open Culture: “The history of writing on the walls in Western civilization stretches at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire. A selection of translated pieces of the more than 11,000 pieces of ancient Roman graffiti found etched into the preserved walls of Pompeii includes: “Marcus loves Spedusa”; “Phileros is a eunuch”; “Secundus took a crap here” (written three times); “Atimetus got me pregnant”; and “On April 19th, I made bread.” One piece of writing, discovered on the door of a Pompeii inn, reads:“We have urinated in our beds. I admit we should not have done this. If you ask why? There was no chamber pot.” Many of the prominent pieces of graffiti from this time are too sexual or violent to repeat here, much like what can be found in any high-school bathroom stall. You can read more of them at The Ancient Graffiti Project, whose archive is browsable through categories like “love,” “poetry,” “food,” and “gladiators” (as decent a summary as any of life in ancient Rome).”
You haven’t seen anything like the new sport of ice football
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com