Spent some time reading from the 'L' section of the dictionary this afternoon. Is that not normal behavior for a snowy Saturday? Discovered the word "lypressin", then discovered it's used to treat diabetes and/or high blood pressure. Also learned it comes from the pituitary gland of a pig. Wait - what?!? How does a discovery like this occur? At what point in history did a hormone researcher throw her hands in the air and exclaim "I give up! It's not working. Why don't we look for the key ingredient...in.....I don't know......how about we start with that pig?"
I wonder about food discoveries a lot, as in how we decided to eat what we eat. Which poor schlup lost a bet and was made to watch a chicken until something fell out of its butt, and then had to be the first one to eat it? Or milk - if some other critter other than a cow had a large udder might we run to the store for a gallon of, say, rhino milk. And, much like the chicken example, who was the first to look at a cow and have the sudden thought "If there's liquid in that pink bouncy sack hanging not far from Bessie's rear, I'm gonna drink it."
Speaking of milk, I found a word in the 'K' section yesterday that was some kind of alcoholic drink made from fermented camel's milk. Really? So not only did someone decide to drink from a camel, someone else decided to wait until the camel juice rotted before drinking it. Hard to say how many carcasses litter the earth from taste adventurers whose "let it rot before you drink it" method didn't work out so well.
Plenty of other examples in our wide, weird world I'm sure, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. More like stuck on an image - giving wistful thanks to the farmer who made his brown Jersey heifer run circles around the outside of the barn in the dead of winter before milking time, providing us all with the gift of chocolate shakes. Ba-dum-bum-crash! I'm here all night folks.....
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