Batsh*t crazy, cardboard dino costume, Milk Carton Kids and 'ampersand', chilis and new world produce

My dear friend Lauren gchatted today with a non sequitur query:

Does guano make people crazy if they eat it?

I am contemplating 'bat shit crazy'

And this IS an interesting question. There are a lot of theories out there, turns out. Wiktionary offers the theories that it stems from slang, 'to have bats in one's belfry', and urban dictionary further expounds upon this, " A person who is batshit crazy is so nuts that not only is their belfry full of bats, but so many bats have been there for so long that the belfry is coated in batshit. Hence, the craziest of crazy people are BATSHIT CRAZY". Wiktionary further goes on to include possibly influences by the term 'apeshit' (which itself may stem from the propensity of certain primates to throw feces when irritated). Another google hit came back with a highly creative blog post offering ties to fungi which grow on bat guano and harbor hallucinogenic properties, but this doesn't cite sources. Researching 'bat guano fungi' returns results for fungi which cause the lung disease histoplasmosis, but no hallucinogenic properties. Finally, this article documents early use of the word, and claims, " So, while batshit crazy certainly does seem to be influenced by the expression bats in the belfry as you suggest, its first meaning, in use by 1950, was simply a variant of bullshit. This use continued and overlapped with the "crazy" meaning: further citations are given for definition #1 from Dean Koontz's 1985 novel Door to December and from Seattle Weekly in 2002. Also, batshit as a standalone word meaning "crazy" appears to be older than the two-word phrase batshit crazy, at least as far as the written record shows. ".

i came across this cardboard dinosaur costume kit the other day. Super tempted.

i was just *thrilled* to see this taped concert of the incredibly talented Milk Carton Kids come up on NPR today; they're glorious with a bit of a dry wit in the on-stage patter. (i giggled the entire hour and 12 minutes.) Somewhere around minutes 42 through 46, Joey goes off about the title of their album, having used a '&', and how it's a ligature as well as a symbol, then branching off into the etymology of the word ampersand, as documented by wikipedia. While i strongly urge you to watch Joey's delivery of this, he pretty much paraphrases wikipedia,   "The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and (&) per se and", meaning "and (the symbol &) intrinsically (is the word) and".^[2]Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression per se("by itself").^[3][4][5] It was also common practice to add the "&" sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z,and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term had entered common English usage by 1837.^[4][6][7] However, in contrast to the 26 letters, the ampersand does not represent a speech sound—although other characters that were dropped from the English alphabet, such as the Old English thorn, did."   This random trivia tidbit made my morning.

I made the (rather intensely subjective and not entirely true) statement the other day that all the best foods come from the new world; tomatoes, potatoes, corn, beans, cocoa, vanilla, pecans, peanuts... My flatmate called me on it - and while i responded that tomatoes were probably from the Yucatan peninsula, they're actually from the Andes (like potatoes). And, turns out, researchers at UC Davis just confirmed that chili peppers originated in central eastern Mexico, " from southern Puebla and northern Oaxaca to southeastern Veracruz, that region is further south than was previously thought, the researchers found. It’s also very different than the origin of common bean and corn crops, which are believed to have been domesticated in Western Mexico. " So, that's pretty cool. 

While looking up the place-of-origin for tomatoes, wikipedia has a rather interesting aside under cultural impact, " The town of Buñol, Spain, annually celebrates La Tomatina, a festival centered on an enormous tomato fight. Tomatoes are a popular "nonlethal" throwing weapon in mass protests, and there was a common tradition of throwing rotten tomatoes at bad performers on a stage during the 19th century; today this is usually referenced as a metaphor. Embracing it for this protest connotation, the Dutch Socialist party adopted the tomato as their logo. ".