Blessings, Beers, and Brain Issues
- Humpday
- Apr 24, 2019
- 5 min read
Happy HumpDay!!
Happy HumpDay!
Happy HumpDay! Has anyone ever needed a pick me up to get through a week more? Game of Thrones final season premieres this Sunday and so many of us just wish the week would end so we can find out the fate of Westeros and all our favorite characters. If this newsletter isn't enough to get you through to Sunday night, check out the HumpDay website here and read all of the issues of the HumpDay Newsletter.
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History
“AH CHOO!”…”God Bless you”. We are all familiar with this exchange. It is basic curtesy to say “God bless you”, “Bless you”, or “Gesundheit” when someone sneezes, but have you ever wondered why we invoke the name of God for a simple sneeze?
The practice of saying “God bless you” began in the 6th century A.D. when Pope Gregory I asked everyone to start saying “Bless you” when someone would sneeze. At the time, Europe was in the middle of the bubonic plague and one of the main symptoms of the devastating disease was coughing and sneezing. People who saw someone sneezing believed that the person would soon die from the plague, so they would say “God bless you”. People hoped that saying “bless you” would bring about a divine intervention that would save the person’s life. The practiced was continued on by Catholics long after the plague ended, and we still say god bless you to this day.
Alcohol
If you were one of the 111 million viewers who tuned in for this years Super Bowl, you probably saw a controversial Bud Light ad that claimed Miller lite and Coors lite use corn syrup in their beer. Turns out, this isn’t the first time that shots like this were fired between competing beer companies.
In Germany during the 1500’s, there were a number of beer manufacturers who began using cheaper materials like corn to brew their beer. This caused the quality of German beer to fall so, the German government passed a law requiring all beer to be made with only three ingredients, water, barley, and hops. After the law was passed, the beer manufacturers using corn were run out of town and the German recipe became the gold standard for brewing beer. For nearly 500 years this German beer quality law has been in place and prestigious beer companies pride themselves on meeting the German’s high standards.
In 1986, a number of high profile beer companies, like Heineken and Becks, began using corn syrup to cut costs on the beer making process. A start up brewery, known as Samuel Adams, saw this blatant disregard of the German standards and decided to do something about it. The tiny brewery took out radio ads to call out Heineken and Becks for using lower grade products, starting a media frenzy knowns as “the Corntroversy”.
In the wake of the Corntroversy, beer drinkers began thinking about what was in their beer, leading them to try smaller, less industrial breweries that were using more traditional ingredients. A boom in craft beer sales began and Samuel Adams grew to become a global beer distributor. To this day, we still see craft beers as “higher quality” than industrialized beer like bud light and miller, regardless of the ingredients those beers use.
Craft beer cellars and hipsters alike owe Sam Adams trolling for today’s $26 billion craft beer industry.
Psychology
On November 30th, 1835 Samuel Longhorn Clemens, also known by the pen name Mark Twain, was born in Florida… Florida, Missouri that is. Also in November of 1835, was an appearance of Halley’s comet, the famous celestial body that visits earth once every 76 years.
Loyal HumpDay readers may have read the above paragraph and had a feeling of déjà vu. Déjà vu is defined as phenomenon that feels like a moment has already been experienced or lived before. Almost everyone has experienced this eerie and unsettling feeling before but what causes it? Can we all briefly glimpse our futures or is there a glitch in the matrix?
Psychologists don’t have a single explanation for déjà vu, but the leading theory involves multiple neuropathways trying to process information at the same time. For instance, if you drop a spoon on the ground, your brain will process the spoon falling the exact same way using three separate parts of your brain. Most of the time, all three pathways will process information at the exact same time allowing you to perceive a single cohesive event, but sometimes one pathway processes information a little slower. The slight delay in one part of the brain processing the information causes the brain to perceive the spoon falling as two separate events rather than one. Since the perceived second event is processed so close to the first, the brain gets confused and thinks and that the second event is an exact copy of the event that just happened (i.e. the spoon falling). The confusion in our brains makes us think that we have experienced an exact moment in the past even though we didn’t.
Sorry to say but humans probably don’t have the ability to see the future, we are just susceptible to glitches in our own mind that sometimes freak us out. Although, even though déjà vu isn’t what we expect it to be, we are definitely still in the matrix!
HumpDay Healthy Helpings
Pasta is so easy to make but it can get boring really quickly. That's why its always nice to mix up a pasta routine with something new.
Calories Per Serving: 254 I Servings: 8 I Cook Time: 45 Min
This Week in History
On this week in 1865, confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, Virginia, effectively ending the American civil war. The Confederate army was on the run from Union forces after being defeated in Richmond, VA. The soldiers had limited access to food and supplies while retreating and many of the soldiers gave up and surrendered. Union General Sheridan surrounded the retreating confederate army, eliminating any chance of escape. The trapped confederate army had no choice but to surrender and Robert E. Lee contacted Union forces and agreed to surrender. The confederate surrender brought an end to the American Civil War which claimed over 1.2 Million American lives.
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