BACK to Blog Posts

November 28th, 2007 wednesday.
November 27th, 2007

Question: Why are checks, theater and color in Britain spelled checques, theatre and colour?

Answer to yesterdays question below: Why is a bunch of tubs of food along a wall where you serve yourself, called a buffet meal?
___________________________________________________________________________________________
History for 11/28/2007
Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederich Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Randy Newman, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Ed Harris, Paul Schaefer, Laura Antonelli, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, John Stewart is 44

885 A.D. est. date that the VIKINGS ATTACKED PARIS-Viking warchief Ragnar Lothbrocks, or Ragnar Hairy-Legs decided the Parisians would get a big surprise if he rowed his dragonships down the Meuse, pulled them out on rollers and lowered them back into the Seine to attack Paris. The Parisians under Duke Bernard put up a stout resistance from the city walls until French King Charles the Fat sent help.
The Vikings seldom bothered with besieging big walled cities, preferring quick raids in the countryside. Paris at the time had shrunk from it's Roman splendor to just the Isle de la Cite' the island in the middle of the Seine River.

1815- After Waterloo and a prisoner on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte for the first time put away his uniform and appeared in civilian clothes. It was his tacit admission that after more than twenty-five years at war his career was now indeed over.

1870- Painter Jean Bazille was shot and killed while serving in the French Army fighting the Prussians. He was only 29. He had been one of the leaders of the new Impressionists painters. Had he lived he might have produced many masterpieces and would’ve been as famous as Degas, Monet or Cezanne.

1895- The GREAT CHICAGO RACE- first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Number 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2000 and a good cold.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Lady Astor became the first woman elected to the British Parliament. She was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill who said "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband I would drink it !"

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1926- California oil tycoon Edward Doheny went on trial for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. That he and Harry Sinclair bribed the Secretary of the Interior to lease them U.S. strategic oil reserves. And like most millionaires he was acquitted.

1942- THE COCOANUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1953- Frank Olson, a US government employee, jumped out a window of the New York Statler Hotel. In 1975 it was revealed Olson was given LSD by Dr Sidney Gottleib given as part of a government “mind-control” experiment.

1981 - Moviestar Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and
drowned. Her husband Robert Wagner friend Christopher Walken, were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.

1994 –At the Columbia Penitentiary in Portage Wisconsin mass murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was beaten to death with a broomstick by inmate Christopher Scarver while cleaning the prison bathroom. Scarver also killed a third man on their work detail and told prosecutors God told him kill them both. Dahmer’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde but his mother ordered it’s destruction in 1995.
_______________________________________________________________________
Question: Why is a bunch of tubs of food along a wall where you serve yourself, called a buffet meal?

Answer: One version is that the French definition of a sideboard is a Buffet, but the origin of the word is not clear.
The version I like is when the notorious Pope Alexander VI Borgia was Pope, he staged orgies at the Vatican with his children Cesare and Lucretzia Borgia. So the guests wouldn’t be slowed down in their sexual escapades by having to break for a sit-down dinner, the Pope had all the food lined up along the wall. This way the participants could take a quick time out for a snack, then jump back into the pile.

The cook of the French ambassador to the Vatican thought this was a neat idea.
His name was Pierre Buffet.


RSS