Beer caused civilization, The Washington Post has learned.
We learned this by reading the latest issue of Mental Floss, a delightfully eccentric and eclectic new magazine devoted to educating Americans about all the stuff they should have learned in school but didn't. Here's what Mental Floss reveals about beer's crucial role:
"Anthropologists speculate that cave men, foraging for their daily sustenance, were the first to experience the pleasures of this fermented beverage. Happening upon a cache of grain dampened by rain and fermented by wild yeast, these hominids took note of this wholly natural occurrence.
"Once they came to understand this simple beer-making process and were able to repeat it successfully, the Stone Age people of the late Neolithic period abandoned their nomadic lifestyle to become farmers of grain in order to make their favorite beverage. . . . Thus began the civilization of man."
See? Beer caused civilization. Why didn't they tell us this in high school? Did they think we might try to get a little too civilized on Saturday night?
Mental Floss is full of fun stuff like this. The current issue explains everything you need to know about coral reefs, Zoroastrianism, the Federal Reserve, and the baroque movement in art and music. And manages to make it all entertaining.
I particularly enjoyed the cover story on genius, which revels in the eccentricities of some of history's smartest humans. For instance, Nikola Tesla, the early pioneer of electricity and radio, fell in love with one of his pet pigeons. "Yes, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me," he wrote. "When that pigeon died, something went out of my life . . . I knew my life's work was finished."
Mental Floss was founded a couple years ago by five Duke University undergraduates, who enjoyed sitting around shooting the breeze about all kinds of stuff.
"We thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if you could get a magazine every month that would cover everything from black holes to the Dead Sea Scrolls?' " recalls Will Pearson, the magazine's editor. They couldn't find such a mag, so they started Mental Floss. They put out a couple issues as a campus magazine and then, last spring, shortly before their graduation, they raised some money, found a distributor and took it national. Now Mental Floss is available in most big chain bookstores and is selling most of its 25,000-copy press run.
Pearson thinks he understands Mental Floss's appeal: "Basically, people want to feel smart but at the same time they want education made simple."
Many of Mental Floss's contributors are the authors of books in the popular "For Dummies" series. These guys know how to make learning fun. They also enjoy skewering sacred cows. Like Henry David Thoreau, for instance.
"Thoreau's 'Walden, or Life in the Woods' deserves its status as a great American book," writes Richard Zacks, "but let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar."
While living the simple life in the woods, Thoreau walked into nearby Concord, Mass., almost every day. And his mom, who lived less than two miles away, delivered goodie baskets filled with meals, pies and doughnuts every Saturday.
"The more one reads in Thoreau's unpolished journal of his stay in the woods," Zacks writes, "the more his sojourn resembles suburban boys going to their tree-house in the backyard and pretending they're camping in the heart of the jungle."
I'm not sure I'd want to base any doctoral dissertations on Mental Floss's analysis, but it is a lot of fun. And it goes great with beer, the beverage that caused civilization.
Eunuchs and Bikers
In the spirit of Mental Floss's celebration of "useless knowledge," here is a collection of random info gleaned from this month's magazines:
• Book magazine reveals that Charles Dickens was the first author to hype his books on tour, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was the first novel to sell a million copies and that paper was invented by a Chinese eunuch named T'sai Lun. The magazine also quotes singer Eartha Kitt on reading Nietzsche: "On one page, I would say, 'This is absolutely fantastic, he's wonderful,' and on the next page, 'Aaaarrgh! You son of a . . . !' "
• People magazine has named Pierce Brosnan "Sexiest Man Alive." People also named Phil McGraw the "Sexiest Self-Help Guru," Rocky Strong the "Sexiest Shark Expert," and Vicente Fox the "Sexiest World Leader."
• In the special Pearl Harbor issue of Naval History magazine, editor in chief Fred L. Schultz writes that he and his colleagues were watching, re-watching and re-re-watching rare film footage of the Pearl Harbor attack in a conference room near the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11, when someone entered the room to announce that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been attacked. "The irony," Schultz writes, "wasn't lost on any of us."
• Outdoor Life reviews the latest in high-tech hunting equipment -- a CD-ROM called the "Ultimate Calling System." You pop it into your computer and then you start quacking like a duck. The software compares your duck calls to the real thing, displaying the results on a graph that let's you see just how ducky you are.
• Outlaw Biker magazine reveals that the "Dawgs on Hawgs" biker festival held in Texas this summer was a splendid success. "The host, Jim Pruett, was his usual self, judging the Get Naked contest on Friday night and performing a wedding on Saturday," writes a correspondent named Mad Doc. The aesthetic highlight of the party was, he reports, the all-female coleslaw wrestling contest: "The girls ripped off each others' tops and pulled down each others' bottoms." You think he's kidding? Check out the photos.
Which shows just how weird life gets when you live in a beer-based civilization.
Cover Line of the Month
Jane: "How to be a celeb without a single original thought in your head."
