Regarding champagne, i learned yesterday that 'veuve' (as in Veuve Cliquot) means widow in French; apparently the wine-making company was taken over by a woman, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, who was widowed at 27. She went ahead to turn the company into one internationally known for champagne as well was revolutionize the process though the invention of riddling, or removing of the lees (yeast sediments) from the bottles before selling them.
Also regarding wine, comet vintages are wines made in years where there were comets, which were said to have a highly positive effect on the wine. From a friend's FB link, here's an article from the 1930s on the benefits of consuming alcohol.
Jack and i climb. i've got a 48-ish hour lag when it comes to muscle soreness. This is not terribly uncommon, but we were curious about why it's not immediate. i looked around online a little, and came across two pretty decent, researched articles covering delayed onset muscle soreness (one and two). It's said to be mostly attributed to "eccentric contractions", or when muscles lengthen, disrupting the order of your muscle fibers and leading to eventual muscle soreness.
Tripped over on Out Of Context Science today, this is an informative and entertaining article regarding why you might have to pee when you're diving. This raised the question; why are they called 'sea shanties'? A quick toss through wikipedia puts forth that it's probably derived from the French word chanter, or 'to sing'. There's a disambiguation for shanty, with the other entry belonging to shantytowns. In that instance, "Shanty may have derived from the Irish seantigh, pronounced shant-tí, meaning "old house". The synonym shack may also have passed from Gaelic into English from teach, pronounced chaċ, meaning "house"."
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