Monday, April 12, 2010

What could be drier than a desert?

The town of Arica, on the border between Chile and Peru.

With a population of 14,000 inhabitants, Arica receives a mere .02 inches of rain per year. This is all the more remarkable because Arica is situated on the Pacific Ocean.

To give you an idea of how dry this town is, the rainfall of Arizona—the driest of the 50 American states—is almost 400 times as heavy.

In 1871, a book entitled Rosicrucian Dream Book was published in Boston, containing the solutions to over 3,000 different dream symbols in alphabetical order.

According to this work, a dream about potatoes indicates that someone is trying to poison the minds of those who would do you good. And camels in a dream mean that one's beloved is far better than he or she looks.

A baby rattlesnake at birth has the same amount of poisonous venom as a full-grown rattler.

Ocean waves are sometimes 80 feet high. Most so-called mountainous waves are only 30 to 40 feet high, and no ocean wave is higher than 100 feet from trough to crest.

The highest wave ever scientifically measured was 80 feet tall. But mariners are sure some waves are as high as a ten-story building.

Nicotine Nostalgia

Originally raised in Virginia, rustica tobacco is now grown chiefly in Turkey. American cigarette manufacturing dates from the Civil War period.

During that era, Greek and Turkish tobacconists in New York City hand-rolled the expensive tobaccos then popular among the carriage trade: Havana, Turkish, Perique, Cavendish, Persian, Cut Navy, Latakia, and St. James.

By the 1880s, natural leaf cigarettes, such as Bull Durham, began to dominate the market. The hoi polloi could buy a pack of smokes for a nickel.

Fatima, Sweet Caporal, Vanity Fair, Between the Acts, Melachrino, Murad, Wings, Spud—do these names ring a bell?

Well, some of them are still around, but most of them are only nostalgic memories to veteran smokers.

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