I'm a husband. And a dad. I once fell off the back of a moving car and landed on a cactus while trying to catch an escaped horse. That's kinda me in a nutshell.
![theatlantic:
Coffee: Preventing Scurvy Since 1650
In 1650, St. Michael’s Alley, London’s first coffee shop, placed an ad in a newspaper. That ad — archived in the British Museum, and Internet-ed by the Vintage Ads LiveJournal — extolled the many Vertues of the newly discovered beverage. Which “groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia,” and which is — despite and ostensibly because of its Vertues — “a simple innocent thing.”
What’s amazing about the ad — besides, obviously, its crazy claim that coffee can prevent Mif-carryings in Child-bearing Women — is how flagrantly its copyrighters flung the Vertues they extol. Per these 17th-century Mad Men, coffee could be used to aid and/or prevent: indigestion, headaches, lethargy, drowsiness, arthritis, sore eyes, cough, consumption, “spleen,” dropsy, gout, scurvy, and — my personal favorite — hypochondria.
Read more. [Image: British Museum]
Don’t know why “Coffee - drunk generally throughout all the Grand Seigntors Dominions” never really caught on.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m79bdhhpm41qcokc4o1_400.jpg)
Coffee: Preventing Scurvy Since 1650
In 1650, St. Michael’s Alley, London’s first coffee shop, placed an ad in a newspaper. That ad — archived in the British Museum, and Internet-ed by the Vintage Ads LiveJournal — extolled the many Vertues of the newly discovered beverage. Which “groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia,” and which is — despite and ostensibly because of its Vertues — “a simple innocent thing.”
What’s amazing about the ad — besides, obviously, its crazy claim that coffee can prevent Mif-carryings in Child-bearing Women — is how flagrantly its copyrighters flung the Vertues they extol. Per these 17th-century Mad Men, coffee could be used to aid and/or prevent: indigestion, headaches, lethargy, drowsiness, arthritis, sore eyes, cough, consumption, “spleen,” dropsy, gout, scurvy, and — my personal favorite — hypochondria.
Read more. [Image: British Museum]
Don’t know why “Coffee - drunk generally throughout all the Grand Seigntors Dominions” never really caught on.
I imagine that when not bicycling groups of sick men around he was able to travel over land very much like the Hulk.
