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

An angry tribe that loses population but refuses to join another tribe will very likely diatribe [die a tribe].

[ to cross-post in the puns thread]

The Klitschkos both speak very good German and are quite popular as TV personalities here.

http://youtu.be/gyG83VT-iYA

There is a local dentist named Dr. Payne. He surprisingly has a full patient list.

On the subject of names being suitable for jobs, I met a Mr Boothman who put shelving into cupboatds and wardrobes.

I've heard but can't verify, a doctor involved in penis extensions - Dr Stubbs.

Well.......some names start out not not having any special meaning, but then their owners create some special product and put their names on it. A Hoover didn't used to be a vacuum cleaner or a Dam. A Heinz didn't used to mean 57 varieties. People didn't used to Elvis.

If you're a salad chef, and your name is Caesar, that's supposedly meaningful now, but it wasn't before the Caesar Salad was named.

Well, 'Caesar' originally meant...well, it's not clear WHAT it meant. Gaius Julius said it had something to do with elephants. His political enemies said a lot of things. But now...the German word 'Kaiser' comes from Caesar, and so does Tsar...

I was surprised to find (only recently) that Caesar was a family name. It's as though all kings were so called after a highly successful Mr King. Or as though we were to call Graham Norton a wogan.

The Julius Caesar line claimed to trace its descent as far back as the Trojan War. Who knows how true any of this was?

Well, Elizabeth II, the queen of the United Kingdom, has a pedigree going back to certainly 1066 and probably a few centuries before that.

But it seems unlikely that Julius Caesar, a Roman, was descended from the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War in about 1200 BC. And the Romans only learned writing from the Etruscans in about 500 BC - a pedigree passed down by word of mouth for over 700 years from the time of Troy sounds unreliable.

Were the Trojans considered to be Greeks, then?

Other dubious descent lines have been claimed, like the daughter of emperor Claudius who supposedly married into the first-century line of English kings, according to William of Monmouth, who was writing about it at least 900 years later. Did he have sources to back up his history? Did Claudius even have any daughters? None were recorded, though maybe no one cared about anything but sons in those days...

It is more likely that Caesar would claim descent from the Trojans than the Greeks who fought them. Descent from Aeneas would be the most desirable Roman line to claim.

Tes, there it is, descent of the Roman kings from Aeneas and Lavinia, via the kings of Alba Longa and eventually Romulus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascanius

Thanks, Recumbentman.

it is thought that Caius Julius Caesar had as many as 100 illegitimate children. Thus, even though the barbarians executed the noble Roman families after they sacked Rome, the offspring of illegitimate children would have been safe, and would have become part of the European gene pool. We are probably all descended from Caesar.

Marc Antony had children by Roman women, as well as by Cleopatra. Descendants of this second line were still being traced as much as five centuries later. The daughters and younger sons in each generation would very likely have found their way into the Arab gene pool, while the Roman descendants would have become part of the European pool.

If even one descendant of Confucius moved to Europe in the first millennium A.D., chances are his/her descendants would have gotten into the general gene pool as well.

We're all cousins if you go back enough generations.

I was long convinced that the late, noted philanthropist Armand Hammer had something to do with baking soda.

There was a noted philanthropist in Texas named Ima Hogg. When her grandfather heard of the proposed name he rushed from 15 miles away, but as news had traveled slow at the time, he arrived to late. The christening had already occurred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ima_Hogg#Name

Were the Trojans Greeks?

Yes. The war was between two groups of Greek-speaking people, one called the Trojans from Troy and the other called the Argives, from Argos.

So the Greek gene pool gave way to the Roman gene pool? No wonder they haven't always gotten along well.

I thought the Greeks were Acheans; wiki says the language likely to have been prevalent in the historical city of Troy is Luwian...