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Word of the Every So Often

furze: (noun) another term for gorse, like that really explains anything. A gorse, on the other hand, is a yellow flowering shrub of the pea family found in North Africa and Western Europe, and briefly mentioned in William Blake’s poem “I heard an angel.” It would also make a great word in Scrabble. Don’t get the furze in your fur.

The Almost Daily

Today is Neanderthal Appreciation Day. And who doesn’t appreciate a Neanderthal? Neanderthals were the predominant form of hominids from about 430,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago, when they pretty much were replaced by a more familiar hominid – us.

First off, Neanderthals were not cavemen, at least in the sense of the insurance commercial. The term “caveman” is more a general term referring to several very early species of hominids, while “Neanderthal” is a specific fairly recent hominid species. Well, recent relative to rocks. However, that’s not to say that Neanderthals didn’t live in caves. They did. They’d often build structures in the caves with rocks or stalagmites, as well as put tents over the entrances. Of course, they may have built other structures as well, but we only really know about the ones in caves because they lasted the best.

We don’t really know what happened to the Neanderthals, not for sure. They could’ve died out because of climate change, competition from humans (including outright slaughter), disease, or in-breeding. Though the percent is low – from near zero to two or three percent, virtually everybody on the planet has Neanderthal DNA in their blood. So if you’re one of those guys who wants to keep the races pure… yeah. Good luck with that. It comes down to sex. Hey, you know… you have a few drinks, the lights are low, you’re lonely, and… well… you really don’t care. Maybe tomorrow morning, but not now. And definitely not in 40,000 years.

And that brings up a story that has nothing to do with Neanderthals. But it does include old dead people and sex. Way back in 2008 German scientists, digging around in a cave, found the 3,000 year old remains of people that had been buried there. Mostly because they could, they extracted DNA from the bones. Then, for laughs, they asked for volunteers from the local town to give DNA samples… and they found two matches, two really good matches. Two get you convicted in a court of law matches. 100% positive. So here are these guys. Guys that didn’t even know they were related. Descended from easily 120 generations of people who never went anywhere. All those people who dreamed of seeing the world, of going away and never coming back, of living a life anywhere but there… and they never did. And now it’s you. Only unlike all of your past relatives, you know it. Do you want to be the guy who brought all that history to an end? Or the guy who didn’t?

Cartoon of the Week

STUFF

Seconds

School lunch was invariably the same until I got to high school. My mother would buy a cheap canned ham and have the butchers slice it. Thin. She’d put a piece of that ham – fat and all – between two pieces of cheap white bread slathered in cheap yellow mustard. And that was it. Yeah, there was fruit, whatever was in season – bruised apples, tangerines, and oranges, mostly. Sometimes a brown banana. And sometimes there were chips. But almost always there was the ham. Wrapped in plastic and put in a paper bag with my name written on it. By the time lunch came around that warm piece of ham had become a part of the bread. I wasn’t one of the lucky kids who brought a quarter every day and ate a school lunch. The most I got was three cents, enough to buy a milk. White milk.

But there was that one day. I don’t know why. Maybe we were out of ham. Maybe my mother was as tired of making school lunches as I was of eating them. Whatever the reason, I had been sent to school with 30 cents. An entire nickel more than I needed for lunch. Five cents was a lot. It would buy a chocolate dipped ice cream cone at Dairy Queen. Five pieces of candy at 7-11. A whole pack of Batman trading cards, maybe even with Catwoman in it. It’s not that my mother was giving me anything extra. I ate school lunches so seldom that she truly didn’t know how much they cost. But I had an extra nickel. And that was the day we had strawberry cake for lunch. It was just a small piece of white sponge cake with a little bit of canned strawberries poured on top, but I truly loved it. I still do. And, with my nickel, my extra nickel, I could get seconds on strawberry cake. It wasn’t something I had planned. It had just happened.

But there was a catch. In order to get seconds, along with your nickel, you had to eat everything on your tray. And that day we had beets. I really do not like beets. It wasn’t just a kid thing. I don’t know how anybody can like beets. It doesn’t matter how you fix them. They’re still bad. But I ate them. I gagged them down. And then I took my tray back to get seconds, to get another piece of that strawberry cake. The lunch lady inspected my plate, and she informed me that there was one beet I had missed. It wasn’t even a whole beet. But it didn’t matter. If I wanted seconds on that strawberry cake, I would have to eat that last miniscule piece of beet. And I couldn’t do it standing there in the line. I would have to take my tray and return to my seat. And no, I couldn’t cut through. I’d have to go back around the way I came. Then, and only then, after I had eaten that last straggling beet, could I return and get that cake. That wonderful strawberry cake.

And I did. I returned to my seat. I ate that beet. Then I returned to the lunch line... only to find out that they were now out of strawberry cake. Somebody had gotten the last piece while I was eating the last beet.

It was a long time before high school, when my friends and I would go out for lunch, and I could get whatever I wanted. It was even longer before I would try another beet.

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