sirthinks

[sirthinks]

What’s the history of the Bloody Mary cocktail?

In 1917, Chef Louis Perrin, working in a hotel in French Lick, Indiana (what a name for a place) ran out of oranges and used tomatoes instead, inventing tomato juice as we know it today.

(Citation needed, this is a topic with a fair amount of discussion and it's almost certain that Perrin did not actually invent tomato juice. I mean... it's juiced tomato, a fair argument is that it's nature's creation or Gods', whatever keeps your boat afloat. It is mainly put to emphasize that the popularity of tomato juice was burgeoning or resurging at this time.) (I do think he was the first to use it in drinks? But I haven't done any juice research, I beg of you, there is other stuff to talk about (although now; I am intrigued.)

it should also explain why then, in France 1921, we finally have our first claim of the Bloody Mary!

Stating that Fernand Petoit created it in the New York Bar (Now called Harry's New York Bar) in Paris.

The confusion starts here folks!

I don't quite believe Fernand Petoit was the originator of the Bloody Mary. Frankly I'd love to be proven wrong and have this be the easiest question to answer so I can move on with the rest of it's history, but there are two things that frustrate me to think about.

1: I can only find the claim of 1921 being attributed to his grand daughter, rather than him directly. I'd be inclined to just believe historical wear-and-tear on this one, but:

2: He does have a direct quote in 1934 that describes a modernization of the Bloody Mary:

" -it was really nothing but vodka and tomato juice when I took it over"

I may be picking at words. But who says 'take it over' when they are confidently sure they've created it, If it were 1921 -way before all other claims?

To clarify, he's also right. He took the Bloody Mary and ran with it, most people site him as the creator for certain.

All the stories from here get even less clear, to prepare you.

If we zoom a decade forward to the early 1930s, and across the globe to actual New York: We find Henry Zibikiewicz.

There is almost zero information about Henry Zbikiewicz I could find, apart from that he worked as a bartender at 21 Club in New York, and that the bar claims he invented the Bloody Mary.

Let's take a short interval to talk about Henry Zbikiewicz and dead-end research.

I am under the belief that Henry Zbikiewicz was a bartender at 21 Club, and existed. I have found many different utterly too brief ancestry reports and other personal profiles of him (that state that he lived and died, but nothing else), besides this I have no confirmation.

While I would love to search the ends of the earth to discover the truth behind him and his background, I know it either does not exist, or doesn't exist to be found by amateur researchers (self-reference). A lot of information these days is behind pay-walls and internet dives about as deep as the Mariana (trench), and I unfortunately do not have all the time in the world.

What is especially upsetting for me though is finding enough.

I'm certain he existed.

I'm certain he lived.

I am not certain on anything else.

Let's take a longer interval on the nature of death and memory, along my journey to finally discover the Tumblr max word count.

Throughout my life I have always enjoyed graveyards. They are quiet, serene, undeniably holy/weird/sacred/creepy (change as required); the perfect place to be alone with this feeling of connection still running through the stones and the ground you walk beneath.

I'm quoted as saying 'I could die before you' as a small child, in response to my mother telling us about her refusing medications.

I feel as if this explains my relationship with death quite well, I was aware of it and have interacted with it in a casual way for my whole life.

Ramble, ramble, blah, blah, blah, this is all to say:

I don't fear death. I don't remember a time in my life I did fear death, honestly.

But; being forgotten?

That has always terrified me more than perhaps anything else in this world.

So the grim reaper will have to hold off. Till I do something memorable (I already have, and so have you, it's called being loved and loving).

I hope Henry Zbikiewicz is resting comfortably, I hope somewhere there's a family that is his or a friend that has told a tale of him.

These aren't answerable research questions, they'd be intrusive to find the answers to if they were, but they are so hyper-specific I doubt anyone has taken the time to find and ask.

I'd like to offer my favourite remembrance ritual to you, in trade for giving you existential dread: Go into a graveyard, find a grave (I prefer the older ones or ones that are not up kept, but any is perfectly fine) and recite their name for the week.

This way their memory continues, a little tiny bit of it. A name, alas cannot possibly contain all the things that anything is and was, or all the journeys it went down to end in our same shared fate of belonging to the ground.

A Bloody Mary is in this way quite cyclical. Tomatoes natively grow in France, so along with being a cheap post-war resource, (and good lord did France take a huge blow after The Great War (or WW1) but this is a different subject) it is a symbol of new life. Vodka, is a process of decomposition and fermentation (as all alcohols are) and so I feel represents death in a way.

The other well-known (how much knowledge do normal people have of any of this?) story of invention includes George Jessel, noted 1920's comedian and a socialite named Mary (which is where I swiftly transition from invention to naming).

Apparently he fixed the concoction in order to sober up quickly while hiding the smell of alcohol from his wife, then, when his friend Mary asked to try, it was spilled on her. To which she reportedly said:

'Now you can call me Bloody Mary!'

From the 1920's (anecdotal) it is posited that it was made for a Vladimir Smirnoff (yes, of vodka fame) and named Bloody Mary after the inability to pronounce the Slavic syllables in the name (???).

That absolutely STUMPED me until I actually said it aloud a couple times, in a really bad French accent. The 'Vl' quickly turns into a 'Bl' and can see how the rest slips into place. I hope it was something they were laughing about rather than laughing At Vladimir for.

But according to the manager of that same bar (In the 1920's again, he claims), the drink was named after the first person who ordered it. The first said it reminded him of his girlfriend, who he met in a cabaret called The Bucket Of Blood (naming convention match, not the same show), her name of course being Mary.

But! In the 1930's, where Fernand's cocktail is confirmed, he says himself it was called the 'Red Snapper'!

It was called the 'Mary Rose' in a publication from El Floridita in 1939, and claimed as a new cocktail in Life magazine (MAY be the December 7, 1942 magazine as I can find no other mention of drinks on the extensive list of life magazines (yes I looked through all of them)) as the 'Red Hammer'.

So, everyone says something different, and you have to be a special kind of crazy to look through all of it (you're welcome).

There's one more story, and then I'll leave you, I do hope this has been entertaining, I have worked really hard at this in my spare time to make this awful jumbling mass of spoken word information. I do think I've failed slightly at that.

I'm sure all you brits have been waiting, but bide your time just a couple more seconds before I say one more thing:

There is another story of the Bloody Mary, but I don't want to tell it, because it's not history yet. The violent crime in Chicago and the amount of bars playfully nicknamed 'The Bucket of Blood' there over the years are a later claim to the Bloody Mary. It's a story of a waitress called Mary at one of these 'Buckets' and as much as I think that deserves light shed on it, frankly my mental state is not stable enough to.

I want to try my best to be an ethical source of information, and because of this I do want to mention it, but a longer discussion is not going to be healthy for me right now.

So, with that in mind, I have one last story to tell you.

The nickname 'Bloody Mary' for Mary Queen of Scots, or Mary I is first seen written in a historical series by Charles' Dickens named 'A Child's History of England' in early 1851 to late 1853.

She got her name from the over 280 protestants she had burned during her reign (July 1553- 17 November 1558), although it's disputed whether she was called 'Bloody Mary' by her protestant opponents.

Although this name is indisputably much older than any of the 1900's claims to the name 'Bloody Mary', it's hard to pinpoint if it is the true origin for the cocktail being called the 'Bloody Mary'. If it is the true origin, the people who invented the cocktail have tried very hard to find original reasons to call it that. If it isn't true, it is an odd but not implausible coincidence.

In the very end, when all the Mary dust has settled and all the peppercorns have been crushed into the mix, it's always a story of history and memory.

When the tomatoes are squeezed, the vodka added or left out, celery or parsley garnish presented, lemon juice, salt or just tomato juice.

What is the history of the Bloody Mary?

And who says there has to be one?

My first Bloody Mary was in London in a restaurant I don't remember the name of, before seeing Hadestown, a musical about memory and oral tradition, for my longstanding historical advisor (bullshit checker) 's birthday, it's all memory and perception, even at the beginning.

Now, in this moment, and in the past already for those reading (and you, future Tyler, editor extraordinaire). I sit eating eggs and drinking coffee and writing in a cafe I frequent in my town.

There will be a day I don't remember what the interior looks like, how the coffee tastes, what books I rest one of my arms on, and maybe it will haunt me, or maybe I won't care.

If you haven't had a Bloody Mary before, do!

It might not be your cup of Mary, but it tastes like spicy gazpacho soup and I really like it.

There will be a day you don't remember where you were when you first sipped one, what it tasted like, how much pepper was in it, what kind they used, if it had a full stick of celery in it or just the leafy bits or if it had no garnish at all-

-and maybe it will haunt you. You might go back on your memory and overwrite a grand experience of falling off a cliff, Bloody Mary clasped in one hand as the rocks narrowly avoided, you might tell yourself the harsh bite of the wind rushing by you, you may create perilous rocks below;

or maybe you won't care.

But wouldn't you rather have it (the memory) and decide how you feel about it later?

Try new things, or historical revisionism is kinda fine, whichever lesson you'd rather take,

Enjoy your Bloody Mary.

-Ace x

Indirect/various sources:

-A few drinks blog: Who invented the original bloody mary?

-Fernand Petiot: Wiki and Granddaughter blog post

-Life magazine 1942 Archives

-It always begins with a simple search. (Bloody Mary wiki)

Big thanks Henry Zbikewicz, and all the beautiful stories people tell about things, for existing.

And my Sibling, or my historical advisor, for giving me this idea at the restaurant. I almost lost my mind TWICE (Henry Zbikewicz and trying to find the exact Life volume) but it was overall, a very enjoyable experience.

Maybe the next post will take me less than 3 months to write! I doubt it, but the night is young.

[sirthinks]

Hello all! I am working on something that will hopefully be done in the coming days!

It is hard for me to motivate myself these days and the mental health is simultaneously incredibly functional and incredibly not fun so I am trying to feel that and not deny it.

I have a poem for you that is Either from the perspective of a god or a demon and I think it is really good either way you read it.

50 in an instant:

When I was younger, I offered a man a deal.  

A fifty-year long life, with zero strife, 

He said yes in an instant, what a fool. 

And when he was done 

I showed him one, long movie of all the things he could’ve changed 

He wept for the first time, confusion in his eyes, his lips quivered, deranged. 

I asked again, if he wanted to play, this time with no such guarantee. 

He said yes in an instant, what a fool. 

Although it is difficult to continue through the harsh and cold of life, and you may find yourself questioning what it's all about, it is imperative to keep living.

This universe is not one without you.

-Ace x

[sirthinks]

What's the difference? (I said I'd see you next week)

Between a week and a month, between a pond and a lake, between friendship and love, between a sound and a song?

Where do we draw the line between two words?

Where does a human become a person?

I've been reading and working a lot, I haven't taken a day off for a while, I've been tired. Maybe my Person-ness is stagnating a little, or I feel it is, so this question is increasingly hard to answer. It's true that as you get older it becomes easier to be the person you've made yourself and harder to make yourself something new; all to say I don't believe personal growth has a time limit.

But maybe I believe that we shouldn't have to always try to be better.

I like accepting people's flaws. It makes me feel much safer to show mine, much more ready to be accepting for things. Not because I can't change them; but because I might not want to.

Although there are obviously some flaws that need fixing. You can't go around killing or stealing your neighbors' mail, but people snore and people lie and they leave their washing in the sink sometimes.

That's okay.

I'm chaotic. I can't really fit to a genre or stay in focus. It makes writing or doing anything consistently pretty hard for me but it also makes my life absolutely relentlessly interesting. And to me, Happiness is the same as intrigue, learning and discovery are the pillars of my existence.

I like this 'flaw' of mine. I don't want to fix it.

[sirthinks]

#2dfcc9

'What's a little bit more? What else is living for?' -Dirty nice: 'this is gonna hurt'.

I've been settling back into normal life after all the hustle bustle and bristle. Although it's always weird to get back into the groove, I feel a little different about this rhythm.

For the first time in a long while, it feels like home. It may be the first time ever. That's what it feels like, at least.

I hope everyone can feel this comfortable always. I hope they already do.

That's the strange thing about discovering a new plain of calm, you hope everyone is currently feeling it, and also hope it's just yours, no one else has found this sanctuary yet.

Especially as someone who's aware I've had a sort of middling life so far, I mean there are those who have had it so much worse, but I definitely wouldn't word my experience as easy. Everyone's a little abnormal, in that, we're all normal, aren't we?

This isn't a post for me to brag or tell a sob story, I just wanted to check in on y'all and tell you you are doing great.

I'll keep on breathing if you do, and if you keep down the maze, I promise they'll be somewhere to rest along the way.

We're not at the middle yet.

See you next week,

-Ace x

[sirthinks]

Tired in paradise

Hello all! I've been gone a while but I have returned to answer a question I've been asking myself lately:

I wonder how ancient sighing is?

How many people, unaware of themselves have sighed around someone else and been randomly comforted?

While yawning is a survival tactic to show tiredness, sighing is only to show mental exhaustion, being done with the shift, or the day, or the world. Sighing, and how old it is (beyond the count of years) is indicative of how long empathy has been around.

What other animals participate in sighing?

Is sighing actually rude? Is it a function of the body and cannot be repressed? Is it physiologically important?

And why is it fun?

The lungs filter air. (and whatever else you're breathing (nudge nudge)) That's the well known stuff, good ol' primary school science. But what are your lungs doing while they're posing for fig.1 textbook shots?

So, there are a bunch of tubes in your lungs: Bronchi and Bronchioles. They end in a bunch of terminal bronchioles (that's right, it is terminal.) and those attach to the alveoli, which is the thing that actually does the filtering.

My question before we get into that was: why we have so many tubes when all we really need is the filtering of oxygen? As well as transporting the air to the alveoli, the bronchi and bronchioles control the flow of air into the lungs, and constrict when they sense dust or pollutants in the air!

Super sick of them, thank you bronchi and bronchioles! Just like at closing they work together and make each other's jobs a lot easier.

All mammals sigh, at least I'm 90% sure of that, the aerobic respiratory function and alveoli mean they have to.

Probably. Science is prone to throwing some wild shit out last minute so... Let's actually talk about the function of sighing.

What does sighing do? Why is it necessary? Why can I never spell necessary without auto correct?

It resets the alveoli, our alveoli are prone to collapse from many many different natural sources, and I can never remember whether the 's' or the 'c' comes first.

When you're living, you're breathing, and it's important to keep that breathing rate steady or you could experience irregularity in the lungs, alveoli collapse and eventually, lung failure.

Life is stressful, you can't keep your mind exactly on how much you're breathing all the time when you're trying to make pasta and trying to figure out whether or not sighing is connected more to psychology or science, and most things are both, so what's the split there and which is more important to talk about! Because of all of that you can't blame your alveoli for getting a little confused sometimes.

By taking in a sigh, and releasing it, you filter more air through your alveoli than usual. As they are filled they pop back open, and reset, ready for another multitask, another shift, another day!

"If you don't sigh every five minutes of so, the alveoli will slowly collapse, causing lung failure" That's a quote from Jack Feldman in a UCLA and Stanford newsroom on the function of sighing and it's insane. Insane as in surprising, not calling Feldman crazy.

With that being the imperative rate of sighing, I think it's important to note that you most likely don't sigh too much. Your sighs may be pronounced, loud, theatric even, but if someone says you sigh too much, they probably just think your sighs are annoying, sorry to break it to you this way.

People who sigh a lot may be experiencing stress in high doses causing irregularity in the breathing, or they may have weaker alveoli (genetics/smoking) or have less alveoli (genetics/smoking).

Don't smoke, guys. I know that's obvious but c'mon your alveoli are already trying super hard, it's just the balanced thing to do (quitting as I type (this is my last mid-tumblr cigarette I swear haha)).

Breathing exercises and taking moments out of your day to be aware of your own breath can help massively with the health of your lungs and with 'realisation' sighs. Those are the breaths or sighs you take when you realise you've been holding your breath and you aren't totally sure how long you've been doing it (it's a fear/stress response grabbed straight from the 'there's a mammoth chasing me' times, and can harm your lung health in the long term).

Now, I'm gonna level with you guys. I don't know if reptiles sigh. I know, I know!

While doing research I had difficulty finding a yes or a no, so I'm keeping it up in the air. They have lungs, and alveoli, so it would make sense for them to, but I'm not finding confirmation on that. The composition of their alveoli could be different, less prone to collapse, more prone to resetting through normal breathing.

I think it would be fair to assume they sometimes sigh. Perhaps the rate is different. My friend (who owns two lizards) reckons he's definitely seen them sigh, but that's no confirmation of rate or how much they need to.

Why is sighing fun? It's fun to do!

Sighing like it's a performance, like you're lying on a chaise longue awaiting your wife's return from the grocery store. Exhaling and rolling your eyes in unison, (-Los Campesinos!) sighing at the end of a hard lost or hard won battle (in minecraft). You sigh to a friend before a story, after they tell you something that infuriates you, after reading a book where injustice is highlighted and not completely solved, and to a coworker on a smoke break when you sit down.

Sighing not only resets your lungs physically, but also resets your brain because of it.

As you take in more air, more filtered air and oxygen goes to your body, and therefore your brain. When your brain gets more oxygen, it works better, basically (obviously it's very complicated, but I've been talking for too long to get into that right now).

A sigh helps you process information and helps your lungs relax into a better state of breathing.

Oh my wife will be back soon with milk and cigarettes but boy, do I miss her! Oh wait, a sigh will surely help me work through the pain!

People are unfair and misogynistic to female artists (it's a really good song), let us sigh and roll our eyes together to show how truly disappointed we are.

I broke my sword but at least it's it my enemy! I am exhausted and I shall sigh to show I'm done with the fight.

I must prepare for this story, must alter my reaction, be upset at the world (again), relax into this surprisingly weighty conversation, I must sigh, must change my perspective.

A sigh is like a insanely swift power nap.

So sighing has been around for as long as lungs have, safe to say a while.

I think we should all sigh more. For our health! And to enjoy being dramatic.

Sigh at the people you love today.

Other links I used but not directly quoted are:

Sighing is a life saving reflex - Science alert

Why do we sigh? - Psychology today

Alveolar dynamics during mechanical ventilation in the healthy and injured lung - The national library of science

The human lungs - innerbody

How do reptiles breathe? - Only Zoology

[sirthinks]

This is a work event!-late weekly

Second week and already late, I won't bore you with excuses or reasons.

How have you lot been this week? I've been Busy (with a capital B). Covered a shift and went out like every night and now:

I'm exhausted. That's to be expected, but god. It's been a heavy one and there were a couple moments there where I thought I was sinking into a mania which wasn't totally fun.

Anyway, that's not where we are right now, so overall good!

I don't really feel like an interesting fact today, and I'm not gonna push myself to write something I don't want to because that's the antithesis of why I started a blog. So I'll tell you a story/poem:

Once I was born, And once I will die, Not I, But I.

Count your days and lose your mind, Go by, Not I.

Cover those tired and dripping eyes, With wings of Seraphim on high, And sink into smoke, Those brooding skies;

One lie, enough for life.

Recover from that awful sunstroke, Talk your head off to a brand new bloke, Remember you can choose to let the silence soak,

Try to find that buzzing-fly.

The song; not just the notes.

-Ace x

[sirthinks]

I think that:

A) A universe with humans is better than one without them

B) It's complicated

and also why??

[yes i did steal this from the green brothers]

This is a good question, and a good pair of brothers.

I think that, as an alternative to a universe with humans is better than one without:

A universe without humans is simply; not one.

Now, as egomaniacal as that beginning sounds, let me explain why it is, and why it isn't.

The earliest known Homo genus subject is LD 350-1, an adult's jawbone dating from 2.75/2.8 million years ago. The estimated age of the universe (NASA's WMAP project in 2012) is about 13.772 Billion years.

Something, somewhere in the grand expanse of everything has existed for 13.772 Billion years.

I need everyone to think about that for the rest of their lives and never stop.

And now you're asking 'how the hell are you going to say that OUR lifespan (let alone mine) is so small comparatively to the age of the universe that it cannot be described by a percentage, and then tell me that the universe, is dependent on us?"

It's very simple.

Have you ever experienced something you've never experienced? Did you see what you can't see? Have you ever read something that's never been written, thought something that couldn't be thought and gone somewhere no one can go?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: 'oh my god I'm having an existential crisis, what am I talking about? No obviously not, huh and what and another huh for good luck.'

-

When you were born, so was everything else. When you opened your eyes to conscious existence, the universe blinked back. To drastically change the wording and try and be simple, your life is the only thing you can live.

You can only see what you see, hear what you hear, do what you do and feel what you feel.

'Is everyone else fake?'

No. Well, it depends how you see it! (haha). Everyone else is themselves. They too, can only live as themselves. Although you can describe, maybe even explain something you experienced -if you're lucky- You can only ever exist.

In short: Conceptualising, even trying to imagine a universe without humans is near impossible, implausible, inconceivable and to me, a little unhelpful.

You're human.

You could imagine a world without bees or apples or art or elephants, because you are not a bee or an apple, you are a piece of art but not in the paint and mediums sense and I don't think you're an elephant either.

But even so, a world devoid of apples could (and probably would, considering just how strange our world is) affect humans in a way that we also can't think up.

-

I do not need to be particularly important to be me. I do not need to have existed for 13 Billion years to be me. I am me. I am a thing that experiences the universe uniquely, since I am me and only me. And so are you.

Experiencing the universe uniquely, that is; you're not me.

((That's a topic for another day))

Extremely in short: A universe without humans isn't one because a universe without YOU cannot be experienced.

A world without experience is not a Universe.

Live, keep living; and after that live a little bit more.

-Ace x

[sirthinks]

What does 42 degrees Fahrenheit feel like, emotionally and spiritually? What makes for an appropriate outfit in these circumstances?

Well, with a converter that's about 5 degrees Celsius.

5.55555556

to be more precise. So five and a half with a slight tilt towards warmth.

Okay:

After some field research (going for a walk out tonight) in slightly different circumstances, 7C or 44F (although that nifty little 'feels like' feature says 3C or 37F), I can determine that 42 degrees Fahrenheit is the perfect temperature for a wistful or reflective short to medium walk; depending on your cold tolerance.

For me, at 7C, my walk was about 20 minutes, although I didn't time it, I listened to Garbage's 'the trick is to keep breathing' Maxi CD (four tracks adding up to 13 and a half minutes, plus listening to one 'strange' track (as in I don't know the name of it) from a MP3 mix CD that's about 6 minutes long). This is honestly mostly because I had work today and my legs are kinda dead.

The fact that the temperature (or the fact it began to lightly rain) wasn't the deciding factor in me going back home, is evident of how pleasant the walk was.

I even took the time to feel slightly disappointed that I couldn't sit and read (I forgot my book).

So emotionally, I'd say, the cold welcomed me and although I zipped up my jacket, I felt very comfortable feeling however I wanted to (which is this case was calm and slightly melancholic reflection).

Spiritually, I felt overwhelmingly soothed. I felt as though the world was holding me as I walked.

I love a nice cool walk. A night time walk especially. There's something so kind about the night, and so upsetting to me that it's been twisted to mean hurt and worry. To go out at night nowadays is to worry for death. The night itself does not deserve this judgement (in my opinion), and should be weighed upon humanity and our actions alone.

Beauty is night and cold, to me true beauty is natural, harsh, and understanding of it's own nature. A walk in a dark night with a thick fog and a drizzle hanging in the air. A sun-bleached bucket with a rusted hole at the bottom. A tree, fallen and ripped from the ground, still growing new leaves. A cool-looking cloud, a bold green lawn, a warmth that could only be made from the sun and a cold that could only be made by the absence of it.

TLDR; Spiritually I think 42 degrees F would be perfectly enjoyable.

I wore my cargo trousers out, a cotton t-shirt, a jacket made out of football scarves (you know the one, Traff), and some fingerless gloves.

This outfit worked perfectly fine for me at 7C, if being a titchy bit warm on the arms, so I think it'd be fine at 5C or 42F as well.

Hoping this answered your question, and that you haven't waited outside in 42F the whole time I was answering it;

-Ace x

[sirthinks]

Bleeding lips and first days

Hello all or none! I'm new to blogging but I wanted to do this so here we go! I'll try to update every week!

Here's a small introduction to me:

My name is Ace, or Achilles. I'm a writer, poet and artist and I'm here to share some hopefully interesting facts and stories to intrigue your brain!

The first fact comes from my pocket bug book:

Dance flies give gifts to their spouses before mating! How sweet, or manipulative depending on which way you look at it. They also 'dance' or perform flight displays to impress their mates (mates in the scientific sense, although I'm sure their friends would be impressed too).

What gift or dance would you have to receive to be worth your affection?

I think anyone brave enough to do a funky chicken in the middle of a dance floor has my vote. As for gifts, maybe a thoughtful CD mix?

That's all for today,

-Ace x