h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why was it called the "Black" Plague - rather than say the "White" Plague or sumthink

Okay it caused people to go black (or at least black lumps). Maybe it should have been called the black boils plague or perhaps the black carbuncle plague

Right, like he said, boils and soars. Also caused necrosis. Here is picture. Not for faint of heart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_Plague#mediaviewer/File:Acral_necrosis_due_to_bubonic_plague.jpg

Here is better picture --- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acral_necrosis_due_to_bubonic_plague.jpg

When I was taught history it seemed like a dry and remote subject and it never gained my interest. I suppose that is why there were moves to induce empathy in the teaching process. Pictures like these would certainly do that.

I honestly don't understand how teachers can screw the subject up. Movies are a billion-dollar industry where people pay tons of money so they can see films that are filled with loads of drama and charged with immense excitement! But history has all of that FOR FREE and it happened in REAL LIFE!!

Inexplicable. Baffling.

The black death arrived in China almost simultaneously with its arrival in Europe.

There's no disputing that the Rennaisance was almost exclusively a European and for that matter, west European affair.

Though the Chinese did attempt to pioneer a maritime trade route to the Mideast, arriving just barely too late to stave off the the destruction of the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem, the subsequent Chinese imperium, in part on account of their bad experiences of the black death went into a lasting isolationist phase.

"The black death arrived in China almost simultaneously with its arrival in Europe."

True; it originated there. But I'm pretty sure it was relatively isolated to a small area of the country until the late-1800s.

Actually it originated in central Asia west of Afghanistan as a rodent disease transmissible to humans and was spread along the silk road trade route east and west of its origin.

And transmitted to humans by fleas. I know.

And transmitted to humans by fleas... with radios using an early version of Morse Code?

The Mort Code?

Meanwhile, while evolution is an undeniable natural process, that does not mean one has to approve of it, or accept it.

The black death and the other old world diseases did produce an evolutionary impact that gave the old world voyageurs a temporary advantage against the native Americans and Polynesians, an effect that was at first evolutionary happenstance of no greater consequence than flood or famine, though later the effect was exploited, for example by governor Amherst of the Massachusetts colony during late pre-revolutionary times, versus the native Americans.

Amherst is also thought by some to have deliberately started the smallpox epidemic in Massachusetts of the revolutionary war era proper, prompting what may have been the first mass public vaccination program in history by the revolutionary government of Massachusetts.

During the same time frame, Captain Cook deliberately curtailed voyages of discovery to Samoa and Fiji, having obtained locations and sailing directions from the people of Tonga, on account of the epidemiological problems he'd seen in Tahiti and Hawaii.

Still in this same time frame, having learned a little from early colonial era history and not wanting to repeat those epidemiological disasters, the Spanish colonial era government in California was so assiduously careful on public health and moral character issues that the epidemics were postponed until the annexation of California by the United States and the arrival of the 49ers.

Then the death rate was the same 90% observed elsewhere in the Americas and Polynesia.

California was almost as difficult to visit during the period the quarantine was in effect as China or Japan.

The biological hazard worked against the colonials in the Dutch east Indies.




Relics of that (thankfully) bygone era, plague pits and bone churches in Europe and trench mass graves in California.

There's one near my sister's place in the Perris Valley, CA. a long mound covered with a heap of earth and stone about six feet high.

Once, during my early elementary schools years, I Saw a cross section of a mass grave of the character in a Los Angeles area museum, about six feet deep and wide packed with bones of men women and children jumbled together, meticulously cleaned and polished, displayed behind glass, both pathetic and horrible.

Displays of the character are these days impolitic under the Native American Graves Repatriation Act.

A final tale of pathos, "The Island of the Blue Dolphins", about a native American woman stranded for twenty years on Santa Cruz island, sole survivor of a piratical raid on the island where her tribe was native.

She was then discovered by a missionary and brought to the mainland, where she was dead six months later of TB.




On the controversy on evolving antibiotic resistant disease, I think the phenomenology to be more an artifact of statistical reporting than
anything else and the related hysteria driven by the characteristic paradoxical emotive response of hysteria counter productive.

Meanwhile, while the topic drift is compelling, this is supposed to be, "Useless Facts".

Locusts are the only kosher invertebrates.

The fruit of the honey locust, or carob, is also called 'St. John's bread' since John the Baptist is said to have subsisted on it.

The only German word for it is Johannesbrot.

There are also Johannesbeeren (blackcurrants) and a great deal more related to St John. His saints day is 24 June (so it was last week)

Rural folklore has it that as from St John's Day, rhubarb and asparagus are no longer fit to eat, and the cuckoo should have shut up by then, too.

St John's Day is practically the only saints day that commemorates the birth of the saint. There are many festivities, as it is, liturgically speaking, a sort of pendant to Christmas. It is also almost exactly 6 months away from Christmas, commemorating the birth of John's more famous cousin. (As many who have stumbled over the reading that starts "In the Sixth month.." might have worked out)

All other saints days commemorate the date of the death of the saint in question.

Of course, the fact that 24 June and 25 December are really close to the Solstices tells us that people would have been having a party on those days anyway.

Which I'm sure is no coincidence.

Johnny Cash was the first American to learn of the death of Joseph Stalin. He was in the US Air Force stationed in Landsberg, Germany monitoring Morse code transmissions when he translated the news in March 1953.

Useless information achieves new heights.
But aren't we glad we know that now.
A cold war, a man in black... it all makes sense now.

But what's this morose code you talkin' 'bout Willis?

~jwf~