Old School Thursday: Inventors, Characters & Wine Edition

Welcome to National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day. To be fair, at least it’s hot pastrami. It’s also Vinegrower’s Day in Bulgaria, which is a holiday I can really get behind, even if I have never had Bulgarian wine. I imagine you can get it someplace in the US, right?

Today in 1841, Juliet Corson was born. She was a bit of an early Julia Child. She founded the New York Cooking School in 1876 and wrote a ton of articles and cookery books, mostly along the practical lines (Twenty-five Cent Dinners for Families of Six – that sort of thing).

Twenty years later, in 1861, we welcomed David Wesson to the earth. The man behind Wesson Oil, Wesson was the chemist who developed a method to make pure cotton seed oil palatable. He formed the Southern Oil Company, and the rest is history.

Speaking of inventors, today is also the birthday of Rolla N. Harger (1890), who invented the Drunkometer in 1931. The grandfather to the breathalyzer, the Drunkometer made a recent appearance on this blog, on December 31st, which was its inauguration date (in Indiana).

But it’s not all birthdays and inventions today. Sadly, today in 1898, Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice and all of her “eat me to grow bigger” episodes, passed away. Nearly a century later, Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s founder and entrepreneur extraordinaire, died.

There’s a lot to celebrate and honor today. Frugal eating, Wesson Oil, McDonald’s, Alice, and of course, getting drunk on Bulgarian wine.

Old School Thursday: Get Your Champers On Edition

Today, New Year’s Eve, is also known as National Champagne Day – and that’s as it should be, since it’s likely that more champagne bottles will be opened tonight than any other single night of the year.

We’ll be ringing in the new year with dinner at Crush, possibly followed by drinks at Grand Cru, which was also the site of a crazy New Year’s Eve celebration back in 2005. Crazy not because of the drinking, but because Cooper ate a bunch of espresso beans and, well, there’s a reason why “Caffeine Cooper” is always an entertaining hit.

But enough about our personal December 31st history. Lots of other things happened on this date.

To start, all the way back in 1600, the British East India Company was incorporated by royal charter, giving Britian a stake in the very busy international spice trade.

Two and a half centuries later, in 1853, England was in the news again, when a dinner party for scientists was held inside a life-sized model of an Iguanodon dinosaur. The dinosaur was part of an exhibit of 2 dozen dinosaur models, created by sculptor Benjamin W. Hawkins and paleontologist Richard Owen, at the Crystal Palace in London. No word on what was served at the party, but it sounds kind of awesome and trippy, doesn’t it?

Finally, today in 1938, the breathalyzer’s predecssor, the Harger “Drunkometer,” was introduced in Indiana. Good timing, Indiana! Also, “Drunkometer?” What a great name.

And that’s it for 2009! Hope everyone has a fun, safe night, whatever you’re doing. I’ll be taking a break tomorrow and over the weekend, then will be back, rarin’ to go, on Monday, January 4, 2010!

[Photo by Flickr user Oskay. Used under the Creative Commons license.]