The Second Book of General Ignorance (30 page)
Read The Second Book of General Ignorance Online
Authors: John Lloyd,John Mitchinson
Just about anything except ‘Mush!’ You can call ‘Hike!’, ‘Hike on!’, ‘Ready!’, ‘Let’s go!’, or simply ‘OK!’ – but a sled driver will only shout ‘Mush!’ when he doesn’t want to disappoint the tourists.
‘Mush’, far from being an authentic Inuit word, is a Hollywood mishearing of the command given by French Canadian sled drivers:
Marche!
It’s most unlikely that any reallife husky handler ever said ‘Mush!’, but it’s certainly not favoured today. It’s too soft a sound for the dogs to hear clearly.
Stopping
sled dogs is the problem, not starting them. They are born to run. If they ever get free, they’ll just head for the horizon until exhaustion overtakes them and you’ll never see them again. While they’re in harness, though, yelling ‘Whoa!’ and standing on the sled’s brake pad should be enough to hold them. To get them to turn right, use ‘Gee!’ and for left ‘Haw!’ (no, they’re not Inuit words either). Only the lead dog needs
to understand your commands; the rest just follow the leader.
Huskies, the best known of the many kinds of dog that have been used to pull sleds, were originally bred for winter transport by the Chukchi people of Siberia. In the summer, the dogs ran free, fending for themselves. This combination of tameness and independence made them perfect working dogs.
They’re surprisingly small – weighing between 15 and 25 kilograms (35–55 pounds) – but those who race huskies for sport prefer dogs with outsize appetites. After marathon runs, covering as much as 160 kilometres (100 miles) in twenty-four hours, they will need to eat and drink enthusiastically to replace lost calories and prevent dehydration.
If you’re thinking of getting a husky as a pet, you might want to take some advice from the Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain concerning the breed’s ‘bad points’. Siberian huskies have no guarding instinct: they will greet a burglar with the same sloppy kiss they give their master. They howl like wolves when happy. They’re notorious killers of pets and livestock: if you take them for walks, they have to be kept on a lead. They must have company: they’ll wreck your home if you leave them alone. They’ll wreck your garden, in any case – and you’ll need a 1.8-metre (6-foot) fence to keep them in it. Also, they moult massively – twice a year. In conclusion, the Club says, the Siberian husky isn’t suitable for anyone looking for a ‘civilised’ dog.
The Swiss polar explorer Xavier Mertz (1883–1913) is remembered today as the first person to die of vitamin A poisoning. He was on a three-man mapping mission to the interior of Antarctica when one of the team, most of the sleds and half the dogs fell into a crevasse. On the 480 kilometre (300-mile) trek home, the two survivors were forced to eat the remaining dogs – a necessity which caused Mertz (who was a vegetarian) great anguish. Both men became ill, but Mertz died.
The polar food chain is based on marine algae that are rich in vitamin A. The further up the chain you go, the more it concentrates. Huskies – like seals and polar bears – have evolved to cope with it. Humans haven’t. There is enough Vitamin A in just 100g (3½ ounces) of husky liver to kill a grown man.
Advent usually starts in November, not on 1 December.
In the Western Christian tradition, Advent begins on Advent Sunday, the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which also begins the Church’s year. This can occur on any day between 27 November and 3 December, so there’s only a one-in-seven chance of it falling on 1 December. As a result, Advent varies in length from twenty-two to twenty-eight days. The next time Advent Sunday falls on 1 December will be in 2013. For five of the next seven years, Advent will begin in November.
Not that anyone seems to care. Despite their name, ‘Advent’ calendars are now firmly established as a secular custom and the first door is opened (or the first chocolate consumed) on 1 December, a date whose main function is to remind us that there are only twenty-four shopping days to Christmas. In the UK and USA, a quarter of all personal spending for the year takes place in December.
Counting down the days to Christmas grew up among German Lutherans in the early nineteenth century. At first, they would either light a candle every day or cross off each day on a blackboard. Then, in the 1850s, German children started to draw their own home-made Advent calendars. It wasn’t
until 1908 that Gerhard Lang (1881–1974), of the Bavarian publishers Reichhold & Lang, devised a commercial version. It was a piece of card accompanied by a packet of twenty-four small illustrations that could be glued on for each day of the season.
Because it wasn’t practical to manufacture a different number of stickers each year, this was the moment that Advent became a standard twenty-four days long and the tradition of starting the calendar on 1 December began. By 1920 Lang had introduced doors that opened, and his invention was spreading across Europe. It was known as the ‘Munich Christmas Calendar’.
Lang’s business failed in the 1930s – Hitler’s close association with Munich can’t have helped – but after the war, in 1946, another German publisher, Richard Sellmer from Stuttgart, revived the idea. He focused his efforts on the US market, setting up a charity endorsed by President Eisenhower and his family. In 1953 he acquired the US patent, and the calendar became an immediate success, with Sellmer earning the title of ‘the General Secretary of Father Christmas’. His company still produces more than a million calendars a year in twenty-five countries. The first Advent calendars containing chocolate were produced by Cadbury in 1958.
Advent comes from the Latin
adventus
, meaning ‘arrival’, and it was meant to be a season of fasting and contemplation, in preparation for the feast of Christmas.
Despite this, it often started with the raucous celebration of St Andrew’s Day on 30 November. ‘Tandrew’ customs included schoolchildren locking their teachers out of the classroom, organised squirrel hunts and cross-dressing. An 1851 account describes how ‘women might be seen walking about in male attire, while men and boys clothed in female dress visited each other’s cottages, drinking hot “eldern wine”, the staple beverage of the season’.
Forty-six. Or forty-four if you’re a Catholic.
Lent runs from midday on Ash Wednesday to midnight on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday. For Catholics it ends two days earlier, at midnight on Maundy Thursday. The ‘forty days’ of Lent commemorate the forty days that Jesus (and before him, Moses) spent fasting and praying in the wilderness, but the Sundays don’t count because you aren’t supposed to fast on them.
The technical term for the period is
quadragesima
, Latin for ‘fortieth’. In the late Middle Ages, when preachers in Britain began using English instead of Latin, they cast around for a simple but appropriate word to replace it, and fastened on ‘Lent’ – which then just meant ‘Spring’ and was related to the days ‘lengthening’.
The reason why penance and fasting are suspended for the six Sundays that fall during Lent is that they are considered celebratory tasters for Easter Day, the most important feast of the Christian year.
Some may consider this weak-willed or against the spirit of the thing, but the terms of the Lenten fast have always been treated as negotiable. Even in the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great first came up with the idea of giving up meat, milk, cheese, butter and eggs for forty days, it was loosely interpreted. The Celtic church advised fasting during the day but having a hearty supper of bread, eggs and milk in the evening. In tenth-century England, Archbishop Aelfric went the other way and took a hard-line approach – banning sex, fighting and fish as well.
In general, though, fish have always been the saving grace of Lent. Henry VIII encouraged Lent to support the nation’s fishing industry. As hungry Christians carried the Good News to distant climes, the definition of ‘fish’ became quite flexible.
At various times, muskrat, beaver and barnacle geese have all been officially counted as ‘fish’ – as has the capybara, a kind of giant South American guinea pig that can stay underwater for five minutes. In Venezuela today it forms a magnificent centrepiece for Lenten feasts: it’s the world’s largest rodent. Perhaps because of all these shenanigans, or perhaps because fasting implies the value of its opposite (feasting), the Puritans abolished Lent completely in 1645.
Easter is a ‘moveable feast’, calculated according to a complex formula that the Church took centuries to agree. It moves about because it has to fall on a Sunday but must never coincide with the Jewish Passover, which was dishonoured when the Crucifixion was held on the same day. There are thirty-five possible dates for Easter. The earliest in the year, 22 March, last fell in 1818 and won’t happen again until 2285. The latest is 25 April, which last happened in 1943 and is next due in 2038. The whole sequence repeats itself once every 5.7 million years.
You might think a fixed date would be simpler. The confectionery industry certainly does – 10 per cent of the UK’s annual chocolate sales take place in the run-up to Easter. As long ago as the 1920s, they successfully lobbied Parliament to fix it as the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. The Easter Act (1928) was even passed but, despite having the support of both main churches, it was never implemented as law. No one knows why.
Rather positively, on the whole.
In 1860, the year after the publication of
On the Origin of
Species
, there was a debate at Oxford University between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of London, and one of the theory’s fiercest supporters, T. H. Huxley (known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’). At one point the Bishop sarcastically asked Huxley whether he was descended from a monkey on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. But this wasn’t typical of the Church of England’s reaction in general.
Much mainstream biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century viewed the Bible as a historical document backed up by archaeological evidence, rather than as the actual word of God. As a result, many senior Victorian Anglicans already thought of the Bible in the same way moderate contemporary Christians do: as a series of metaphors rather than a literal account.
In the same year as the Oxford debate, Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby School and later Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a sermon praising Darwin. He said that scientists could have all the laws in the universe they liked, but that ‘the finger of God’ would be in all of them. The influential author Rev. Charles Kingsley also congratulated Darwin. ‘Even better than making the world,’ Kingsley wrote to him, ‘God makes the world make itself!’
By the time Darwin himself addressed the debate about human origins directly – in
The Descent of Man
(1871) – there were at least as many leading churchmen who had accepted his
theory on similar grounds as those (like Wilberforce) who still opposed it. At the same time, many scientists (Huxley included) continued to support compulsory Bible study in schools.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
– as it was originally called – was the first genuinely popular work of scientific theory. Published by John Murray, the first print run sold out before it had even been printed and Darwin produced another five revised editions. Many of the initial reviews were hostile, anti-evolution organisations were formed, and Darwin was often ridiculed, but the mockery came as much from politicians and editors as from churchmen. Darwin had to get used to pictures of his head on a monkey’s body in newspapers, and when he went to collect his honorary degree from Cambridge University, students dangled a stuffed monkey from the roof.