Tomatoes are as ingrained in Italian culture as Potatoes are to Ireland. But just like the mighty potato, it originally came from South America and it took several hundred years to be even accepted as food, let alone loved. Aztec Indians gifted Spanish Conquistadors with tomatoes when Hernan Cortez visited them in 1519, and by that I mean when Hernan Cortez killed everyone and stole anything that wasn’t nailed down…then they stole the nails. The name tomato comes from the Aztec word “Tomatl” which means “tomato.” (Actually it means swollen fruit)

Is there a Hive app? I looked in the Apple App Store and didn’t see one.

Roman philosopher, Pliny the Elder, suggested workers should cover their mouths with skins of animal bladders to keep from breathing in dust while mining cinnabar, which was highly sought after for it’s use as red pigment. This was good advice since cinnabar is a form of mercury. Unfortunately, his animal piss mask didn’t do him any good when Mount Vesuvius erupted. After watching the eruption from a perfectly safe distance, Pliny’s dumb ass road out on a boat to get a better look at the ash cloud around Pompeii and died of volcano inhalation.

In grade school I asked my teacher why we had to learn history. I mean who cares, it already happened. She pulled out the old, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”Philosophy was way above my pay grade and thirteen-year-old me was about as deep as a plate of cereal; so, I just went back to thinking about boobies.

In 1774 King Luis XV, died of smallpox. Vaccines hadn’t been invented yet at the time but the process of using dead cells from infected patients to inoculate against smallpox was sweeping Europe at the time because not dying is fucking awesome. At the time, inoculation was illegal in France. You can’t inoculate someone if you don’t have a sick person to get some scabs from and the idea of running around during an outbreak, smearing pus on healthy people didn’t add up for some folks. Which, I get. Also, sometimes people would confuse chickenpox with smallpox and get inoculated against the wrong disease, which led to some hilarious results, and by that, I mean dying. After Louis died, his grandson, Louis XVI said, “I ain’t goin out like no bitch!” and had himself and the rest of the royal line inoculated. Holy Science, Batman! It worked. To commemorate the occasion, women’s hat makers started cranking out gaudy headpieces with a bunch of shit that symbolized being inoculated called the pouf à l’inoculation.

If you find yourself visited by the smallpox fairy you’re gonna spend a day or two with body aches, fever, and a wee bit of vomiting. Over the next four days, red spots are going to start breaking out on your mouth and tongue. The spots will swell until they burst, followed by the rest of your body breaking out in pustulating lesions. Don’t worry. It only hurts a lot. The sores that now cover most of your body will turn into firm, painful, cysts. After five days of dealing with that, the pus sacks will start to scab over and flake off. By the end of four weeks, you will either be dead or covered in crater-like scars where the pustules have subsided. You’re probably going to look like Edward James Olmos had a baby with the elephant man, then that baby was badly disfigured in a house fire and doctors scraped all the dead skin off with a cheese grater. Three out of ten people who contract smallpox die, unless you are sick, young, or elderly, in which case your chance of survival drops to approximately jack shit.