John Barleycorn Must Die
John Barleycorn is a name for barley, a grain grown in Northern Europe. Barley is commonly made into beer and whisky.
For beer to be made, barley must be harvested, and go through the brewing process. This is meaning of the folk songs and lore about how John Barleycorn must die. Barley is one of the oldest domesticated grains, and we don’t know where it was domesticated.
The process of…
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Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.
(via minuty)
In past centuries, artists in Europe had difficulty obtaining a good quality yellow paint. One particular yellow paint yields a good story.
In the 1600s the Dutch set up a predatory merchant empire in Asia, financed by bringing Asian goods back to Europe and selling them for high prices. The Dutch were constantly on the lookout for new commodities, and found in India a yellow pigment that proved popular with European artists. The pigment had been used for several centuries in the painting of miniatures in India.
The pigment originated in the 1400s in Bengal. Cows were fed a diet exclusively of mango leaves. The ground where the cows urinated was gathered up and processed, resulting in a yellow pigment like the yellow colors of cut mango fruit.
Some of the yellow pigment in many of Europe’s most glorious paintings originated in cow urine. The practice was ended early in the 1900s because of concerns that mango leaf diet was cruel to the cows. It’s a good story, and one widely told. The trouble is, like so many good stories, it may not be true.
i hope alex turner walks into my house and smashes a tambourine over my head killing me instantly
ULTIMATELY, A REAL UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY MEANS THAT WE FACE *NOTHING* NEW UNDER THE SUN.” – JAMES MATTIS
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