Just Plain Bananas

No one thinks much about the plain old banana, but overall there is probably few other fruits that have had such an effect on the modern history of many parts of the world.  Between 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, farmers in Southeast Asia began cultivating bananas as a food source, which then spread over time into the Indian sub-continent.  Arab traders of the 9th century spread the banana even further; across the Middle East, Africa, and portions of the Mediterranean.  They were followed by the Portuguese, who took the fruit across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Central America. 

Despite the worldwide spread of bananas, they weren't really all that popular or well known in the western world (the U.S., Canada, and Europe) until around the 1870's.  A combination of modern rail and steamship networks with the invention of refrigeration made it viable to carry bananas long distances prior to ripening, bringing the fruit to consumers who quickly fell in love with them.  Bananas were yellow, sweet, and shaped like dicks.  What wasn't there to love?  Well, this being Professor Errare, you can bet your ass things went bad pretty quickly.  

By the end of the 19th century, most of the banana exports to the developed world came from countries along the Caribbean basin.  The trade was dominated by two massive vertically integrated behemoths called the United Fruit Company (today known as Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (today known as Dole).  Both companies owned everything dealing with bananas; from the plantations where they were grown, to the ships that brought them over the ocean, clear to the trucks that delivered them to local mercantile.  The fruit's cheap price helped fuel an amazing growth in demand for bananas, and both United and Standard saw keeping prices low as being of the utmost importance.  

With such conditions present, it goes without saying that things got out of hand.  At first the activities of United and Standard were rather benign, at least relative to the activities of other evil corporations.  Local officials were bribed, people were kicked off their land to make way for expanding plantations, and those same people were then hired to work in said plantations for dirt low wages.  You know, pretty hum-drum every day kind of stuff.  However, things began to escalate when the people of Central America began to wake up to the fact that they were getting the shit end of the stick.  What with living in democracies and all, the citizens of many of these countries began to elect governments that opposed the banana monopolies.  The banana monopolies responded by using mercenaries, and even at times the U.S. Marines, to overthrow said governments, putting in place pseudo-dictators who were under their control.  Via these methods, by the 1930's numerous countries were under the sway of United and Standard, with Guatemala and Honduras almost completely under corporate control.      

The people of these Banana Republics, understandably a little less than pleased by this turn of events, resisted as well as they could, mostly via strikes and protests.  The banana companies responded by having their puppets send out the military to shoot anyone who got out of line.  By the 1950's, United and Standard convinced the U.S. government to help them overthrow several governments again, based upon charges that said governments were dominated by communists.  To be fair, this was likely true.  Though to also be fair, the rise of communism in said countries was likely due to the banana companies just treating pretty much everybody like shit.  The rule of the banana monopolies set back the economic development of many of these countries by decades, led to long lasting civil wars, and caused widespread environmental harm.  Their power did not begin to wane until the 1970's, after the U.S. government finally began to crack down on United and Standard for violating anti-trust laws.  That's right, it wasn't decades of pure evil that caused the United States to react, but the idea that the companies were overcharging American consumers for a product that cost 50 cents per pound.  Under increasing litigation at home, the old monopolies lost much of their former power, resulting in most Caribbean countries getting out from underneath their thumbs.      

Luckily, today we can sit down and see how much of a banana we can fit in our mouth at one time without any worries of the horrible past of this most delicious fruit.  Wait what's that?  In 2007, Chiquita was convicted of hiring and arming a terrorist organization to silence union leaders and intimidate farmers?  Really, they got convicted of that and nobody went to prison?  They just paid a fine?  Well shit, never mind then.  I guess bananas are still evil as all get out.    

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bananas.jpg

Laughter is the Best Medicine

The world of 18th century chemistry was a bit of a cluster fuck in that it was not so much a science as much as just mixing together whatever chemicals one had lying around to see what happened.  Many of these early discoveries often involved burning one’s eyebrows off, or worse.  This was probably why in 1772 an English chemist named Joe Priestly was probably rather pleased at the result of his sticking iron filings in nitric acid.  The resulting gas not only didn't burn his face off, it also made Joe feel giddy to the point that he started laughing uncontrollably like an idiot.  Being a man of science, he of course repeated his experiment numerous times to verify his results, which he then wrote about in a paper which mostly went on about the gas' possible use as a medical painkiller for surgeries and the such, because even back then scientists who wrote about discoveries that got you high as shit got little to no respect.  In the scientific literature the gas became known as nitrous oxide, but everyone else called it laughing gas.

For the next twenty years or so scientists continued to experiment with laughing gas based on the claim that it could "totally be used for medicine man".  However, the only result of these experiments were some extremely giggly scientists.  This eventually led to one enterprising young man, a laughing gas aficionado by the name of Humphrey Davy, inventing a large machine that could produce enough nitrous oxide for anyone to huff to their heart’s content.  He was pretty much that guy you knew in college who built a bong out of an old vacuum hose and a pineapple.  Being a man of science, Humphrey of course wrote about his machine’s possible use in medicine.  However, he pretty much only used it when he invited over large numbers of friends for giggle parties.  Humphrey later became one of England’s top scientists.      

The art of getting high on laughing gas just kind of took off from there.  What started as a way for Humphrey to convince girls that he was cool, soon blew up into the latest craze for the bored upper class.  After all, why should they wile away their days worrying about big piles of money and poor people learning to read when instead they could spend all their time laughing for absolutely no reason whatsoever?  Eventually, as always happens with such things, the middle class noticed the stupid thing the rich were doing, and rather than rolling their eyes at the frivolities of their so-called social betters, instead demanded to get in on the action.  As a result, a whole industry was born, with countless laughing gas peddlers making their way across Europe and North America throughout the early 19th century.  They were pretty much the ice cream men of their day, selling a hit of laughing gas for what amounted to a couple of bucks in today’s money.  One of the more famous of these laughing gas peddlers was Samuel Colt, who later became rich and famous for inventing guns that made killing people much easier and more convenient, but that’s not important to this story.  What is important is the fact that everyone getting high on laughing gas pretty much killed any interest in using it as any type of medicine.    

Things continued this way until 1844, when an American dentist named Horace Wells noticed that some random guy high as shit on laughing gas didn't curse or shout when he banged the crap out of his leg on a bench.  Dentistry back then mostly involved getting patients drunk off their ass or having a bunch of big guys holding them down, both of which often led to the dentist getting punched in the face.  Not really liking a good sock to the mouth, Horace decided to try laughing gas on his patients, which lo and behold, worked like a charm.  Believing himself to be on the cusp of greatness, Horace decided to show off his discovery at the nearby medical college.  Unfortunately, it did not go well, probably because medical students are complete jackasses.  Horace was jeered off the stage.  As a result of the ridicule, his dental practice soon after collapsed, which eventually led to him losing his mind, throwing acid on two prostitutes, and slitting his own throat with a razor.    

Somewhat deterred, it took another twenty years for any other dentists to try using nitrous oxide again.  However, once the ball got rolling, within a decade it became common practice throughout both the dental and medical industries.  In fact, nitrous oxide became so popular that for a time snake oil salesman pushed it as a cure all.  Oh, but don’t you worry, even today people still use it to get high as shit.   

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_man_breathing_in_nitrous_oxide_(laughing_gas)_and_a_man_ex_Wellcome_L0023721.jpg

I Want My Mummy

It probably goes without saying, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyways in case any intrepid readers have spent the entirety of their lives with their heads underneath rather large rocks.  The ancient Egyptians were just plain wild for mummification.  When most of us think of mummies today we probably think of the ancient pharaohs and their families getting all wrapped up for their high class journeys to the afterlife.  However, mummification wasn’t just for the rich and powerful in Egyptian society.  In fact, pretty much anybody who had two pennies to rub together (or whatever it was they used for pennies back then) got themselves mummified when they died.  The practice was pretty much as ubiquitous as the embalming of bodies today.  It wasn’t just people who were mummified either.  The Egyptians mummified literally millions of animals, cats being the most popular choice, which were used as offerings to the myriad of gods who needed such bribes.  At least that’s what archeologists think, though in reality who really knows, perhaps the Egyptians were just an entire culture who were super attached to their pets.  Anyways, the Egyptians’ love of mummies lasted a couple thousand years, not dying out until Roman times.  As a result, the whole region was pretty damn chock full of dried out bodies, which aside from a bit of grave robbing, were largely left alone until the Middle Ages. 

Things changed when the Crusaders first entered the area during the twelfth century.  Though most of the Crusaders’ time was spent killing random people for not being the right religion, they did happen to notice that the Arabs had some kind of miracle cure for broken bones, fractures, and other such wounds.  Decidedly impressed, the Crusaders stopped hacking people to death long enough to inquire where such medicine came from. 

What happened next is up for conjecture.  It’s possible that some Arabs were playing a practical joke, or that the Crusaders were just dumb asses who weren’t good at translating.  Whatever the reason, while the miracle cure was actually a naturally occurring type of asphalt, the Crusaders became convinced that it was the dried embalming fluid of mummies.  This information was taken back to Europe where it was mistranslated again, probably by some jackoff who was more interested in drinking wine than doing his damn job correctly, shortening it to just ground up mummies. 

You can probably guess what happened next.  As a result of people being exactly as they are today, meaning desperate for any kind of miracle cure, a strange sitcom situation developed where people across Europe became convinced that ground up dead guy was a miracle cure.  At first it was just for broken bones and the such, but it soon expanded to pretty much anything that might ail somebody living in the Middle Ages, which was a pretty extensive list.  The Arabs of Egypt, valuing the money of stupid people more than a bunch of old random dried out corpses, began shipping thousands of mummies across the Mediterranean, where they were ground into a fine powder called Mummia.  Before too long everybody in Europe, from the highest king to the lowest serf, was happily self-medicating themselves with the totally useless product.   

This fuckery pretty much continued unchallenged until the 16th century when the Renaissance sparked a rash of book learning which increased skepticism towards the whole idea of magic powders.  However, it also led to some rather enterprising painters developing a new paint color called Mummy Brown, which of course contained ground up mummy.  So overall it was kind of a wash.  It was also around this time that the authorities in Egypt made it illegal to sell mummies, what with the whole desecrating the dead thing.  While this did little to slow the trade, it did raise the price, leading to some entrepreneurs back in Europe getting the bright idea of making fake Mummia by just throwing random corpses in their ovens.

The use of powdered dead guy remained a widely used medicine in Europe until the 18th century when skepticism finally caught up with reality, though the decreasing supply of mummies just lying around probably had something to do with it too.  Painting with ground dead guy didn’t fall out of favor until the 19th century.  This was fortunate for the world at large, but unfortunate for those who made their living selling mummies.  However, luckily for them, Europe was soon after gripped with a fascination for all things ancient Egypt, which gave the traders a new market selling mummies as items for home decoration, a fad that didn't fade until the early 20th century.  The less Feng Shui mummies were sold to be ground up for fertilizer.  That's a lot to think about the next time you attend a funeral.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F%C3%A9lix_Bonfils_-_Mumienh%C3%A4ndler.png