blues music: May 2009

More than 100 billion crayons have been produced so far. The first crayons consisted of a mixture of charcoal and oil. In the early 1900s, cousins Edwin Binny and Harold Smith developed a nontoxic wax crayon. Binny's wife, Alice, attached the French word for chalk, Carie, with "ola," from oily, to form the Crayola name. Their first box of Crayola crayons were sold for a nickel in 1903.The first Crayola crayons came in a box of eight co lours: black, blue, brown, green, orange, purple, red and yellow. By 1957, 40 new co lours were introduced. Today there are more than 120 crayon co lours, including Atomic Tangerine, Blizzard Blue, Mango Tango, Outrageous Orange, Laser Lemon, Scream in' Green and Shocking Pink. Over 5 billion crayons are produced each year.

It is widely proclaimed that April Fool's day originated in France in 1562, or thereabouts, when Pope Gregory replaced the Julian calender with the Gregorian calender in the Julian calender month of April. The day of introduction of the Gregorian calender was made the first day of January. Some people hadn't heard about the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate the New Year's Day, but it being 1st April. So, others called them "April fools." The fact is that Pope Gregory XIII ordered Thursday 4 October 1582 to be the last day of the Julian calendar. The next day was Friday 15 October. April Fool's Day is an April Fool's tale.The April Fool's Day tradition in France includes poisson Avril ("April's fish"), attempting to attach a paper fish to the victim's back without being noticed.

During a trip to Asia in the early 1800s, a German merchant - it is said - noticed that the nomadic Tartars softened their meat by keeping it under their saddles. The motion of the horse pounded the meat to bits. The Tartars would then scrape it together and season it for eating. The idea of pounded beef found its way back to the merchant's home town of Hamburg where cooks broiled the meat and referred to it as it as Hamburg meat.German immigrants introduced the recipe to the US. The term "hamburger" is believed to have appeared in 1834 on the menu from Delmonico restaurant in New York but there is no surviving recipe for the meal. The first mention in print of "Hamburg steak" was made in 1884 in the Boston Evening Journal.The hon our of producing the first proper hamburger goes to Charlie Na green of Seymour, WI. In 1885 Na green introduced the American hamburger at the Outcome County Fair in Seymour. (Seymour is recognized as the hamburger capital of the world.)However, there is another claim to that throne. There is an account of Frank and Charles Munches who, also in 1885, went to the Hamburg, New York county fair to prepare their famous pork sausage sandwiches. But since the local meat market was out of pork sausage, they used ground beef instead. Alas, another hamburger.The first account of serving ground meat patties on buns - taking on the look of the hamburger as we know it today - took place in 1904 at the St. Louis World Fair. But it was many years later, in 1921, that an enterprising cook from Wichita, Kansas, Walt Anderson, introduced the concept of the hamburger restaurant. He convinced financier Billy Ingram to invest $700 to create The White Castle hamburger chain. It was an instant success. The rest of the history, we might say, belongs to McDonald's.And, no, a hamburger does not have any ham in it. Well, it's not supposed to. Hamburger meat usually is made of 70-80% beef, and fat and spices.

A butcher from Frankfurt who owned a dachshund named the long frankfurter sausage a "dachshund sausage," the dachshund being a slim dog with a long body. ("Dachshund" is German for "badger dog." They were originally bred for hunting badgers.) German immigrants introduced the dachshund sausage (and Hamburg meat) to the United States. In 1871, German butcher Charles Felt man opened the first "hot dog" stand in Conney Island in 1871, selling 3,684 dachshund sausages, most wrapped in a milk bread roll, during his first year in business.In the meantime, frankfurters - and wieners - were sold as hot food by sausage sellers. In 1901, New York Times cartoonist T.A. Tagan noticed that one sausage seller used bread buns to handle the hot sausages after he burnt his fingers and decided to illustrate the incident. He wasn't sure of the spelling of dachshund and simply called it "hot dog."Recipes for placing meat between slices of bread date back to Roman times. However, that was for steak, not minced meat. Thus, the steak burger is older than the hamburger.Sausage is one of the oldest forms of processed food, having been mentioned in Homer's Odyssey in the 9th century BC.The tongue is a muscle with glands, sensory cells, and fatty tissue that helps to moisten food with saliva. You cannot taste food unless it is mixed with saliva. For instance, if salt is placed on a dry tongue, the taste buds will not be able to identify it. As soon as saliva is added, the s