The origin of this Chinese delicacy, also known as century eggs, is said to go back six centuries to the Ming Dynasty, when, according to legend, a man in the Hunan province found some two-month-old duck eggs in some slaked lime that was being used as mortar in the building …
Capitalism isn’t the road to riches for everyone. Take the examples of the 1990`s dot-com boom and bust, or the 1929 stockmarket crash (as well as a series of disastrous depressions across earlier decades), not to mention the imploding speculative European market disaster known as the South Sea Bubble of …
Ancient superstition decrees that a person’s hair contains their ‘essential spirit’ (this could be a forerunner of what we now call DNA). Therefore, anyone who has a strand or lock of your hair has the power to command your person and bewitch you. So should you give such a valuable …
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web – which is the operating system upon which the internet runs – but what is less well known is that his invention was inspired by a forgotten Victorian bestseller. Enquire Within upon Everything was a ‘how-to’ miscellany that was first published in …
It is very cold today and when I went out to brave the elements to get my morning paper, I heard somebody say ” it is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” A phrase I knew well but the thought occurred… why brass and why the poor …
A big thank you for all the responses, but sadly I can only take 10 of you on. The lucky recipients have been notified, and we will start the classes on Wednesday.
Recently I have received a number of emails requesting help in understanding the vagaries of the English language. So, I have put together a small course for all you lucky people. Let me ask you a question… When you’re at work do you find it hard to express yourself in …
Did you know that there is an eighteenth-century English word for shoving live eels up a horse’s arse?. Here is the definition given in Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785): FEAGUE. To feague a horse; to put ginger up a horse’s fundament, and formerly, as it is said, a …
