For almost fifty years, Paul English has spent his nights literally watching Willie Nelson’s back, as his drummer. The rest of the time he has functioned as Willie’s more figurative back—a job that runs 24/7. From the drummer’s chair, English sees everything, just like the catcher on a baseball team. His oversight goes far beyond maintaining the odd, minimalist beats that guide Willie’s music. For him, the drummer’s chair is the perfect perspective for running the most storied touring organization in country music. More important than being Willie’s drummer is Paul English’s combined role as the road boss of Willie’s traveling company, tour accountant, protector, collector, and enforcer, roles embellished by his proud past as a hoodlum, pimp, and police character. There’s an understanding shared by one and all: Mess with Willie Nelson and the next thing you’ll see is the wrong end of a gun held by the Devil himself. (via the Oxford American)
This Japanese shrine has been rebuilt every 20 years for over 1,300 years
Deep in the forests of the Japanese Alps, Shinto priests keep watch as woodsmen dressed in ceremonial white chop their axes into two ancient cypress trees, timing their swings so that they strike from three directions. An hour later, the head woodcutter shouts, “A tree is falling!” as one of the 300-year-old trees crashes down, the forest echoing with a deep crack. A moment after, the other cypress topples over. The ritualistic harvesting of this sacred timber is part of a remarkable process that has happened every two decades for the last 1,300 years at Ise Jingu, Japan’s most revered Shinto shrine. Each generation, the Ise complex is knocked down and rebuilt from scratch, a massive, $390 million construction job that takes about nine years. It requires the country’s finest carpenters, woodcutters, builders and artisans to pour their hearts into the smallest details of structures that are doomed from the moment the work begins.(via AP)
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Namibia has a panhandle but it didn’t work the way its creators hoped it would
Namibia sits on the Atlantic coast of Africa, and its borders are roughly straight lines. But the northeast is, well, weird. There’s a thin panhandle in the northeast known as the Caprivi Strip. It extends about 450 km from what would otherwise be the eastern border of Namibia, extending the length of the nation such that it almost borders Zimbabwe. At its widest, the Caprivi Strip is only about 100 km from north to south; at its thinnest, it’s only 20 km wide. But in the 1890s, Namibia didn’t exist as a nation unto itself. It was a German colony known as German South West Africa. At the time, Germany also had a colony on the other side of Africa bordering the Indian Ocean, known as German East Africa. Germany couldn’t get stuff from Namibia to its East Africa colony over land because there were British colonies in the way. So instead, they had to go the long way around — by sea, down the Atlantic coast, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the Indian coast. And that was long and expensive. Germany wanted a quicker way to the Indian Ocean, and believed that the Zambezi — the fourth-longest river on the continent — could solve that problem. (via Now I Know)
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The tobacco-smoke enema was a popular remedy for multiple ailments in the 1700s
The tobacco smoke enema, an insufflation of tobacco smoke into the rectum, was a medical treatment employed by European physicians for a range of ailments. Tobacco was recognised as a medicine soon after it was first imported from the New World, and tobacco smoke was used by Western medical practitioners as a tool against cold and drowsiness, but applying it by enema was a technique learned from the North American indigenous peoples. The procedure was used to treat gut pain, and in attempts to resuscitate victims of near drowning. Liquid tobacco enemas were often given to ease the symptoms of a hernia. The French diplomat Jean Nicot used a tobacco poultice as an analgesic, and Nicolás Monardes advocated tobacco as a treatment for a long list of diseases, such as cancer, headaches, respiratory problems, stomach cramps, gout, intestinal worms and female diseases. During the early 19th century the practice fell into decline, when it was discovered that nicotine is poisonous. (via Wikipedia)
The Ku Klux Klan communicated with distant cells using a cryptographic cipher
Looking at the years after the Civil War, many scholars have viewed the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan as a collection of local groups of angry white men that popped up to wage racial violence with little coordination. But historian Bradley D. Proctor argues that a ciphered letter from one wealthy southern man to his brother paints a different picture. The KKK began in Pulaski, Tennessee, where, in 1866, a group of young men from prominent white families formed a fraternal organization with goofy costumes, rituals, and titles. But how did the Klan spread across the South? Was it simply local groups of white supremacists taking inspiration from media reports about the violence in Tennessee? The letter Proctor investigates comes from the collection of Iredell Jones, the son of a politically active family of South Carolina enslavers who served in the Confederate Army and then in the KKK. Dated October 23, 1868, it consists almost entirely of dots and dashes, with a few scattered English phrases. (via JSTOR Daily)
This cow figured out how to use a broom to scratch where it can’t reach
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com