Why is it called a hamburger although it contains no ham?

During a trip to Asia in the early 1800s, a German merchant – it is said – noticed that the nomadic Tartars softened their meat by keeping it under their saddles. The motion of the horse pounded the meat to bits. The Tartars would then scrape it together and season it for eating. The idea of pounded beef found its way back to the merchant’s home town of Hamburg where cooks broiled the meat and referred to it as it as Hamburg meat.


German immigrants introduced the recipe to the US. The term “hamburger” is believed to have appeared in 1834 on the menu from Delmonico’s restaurant in New York but there is no surviving recipe for the meal. The first mention in print of “Hamburg steak” was made in 1884 in the Boston Evening Journal.
The honor of producing the first proper hamburger goes to Charlie Nagreen of Seymour, Wisconsin, USA. In 1885 Nagreen introduced the American hamburger at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour. (Seymour is recognized as the hamburger capital of the world.)

However, there is another claim to that throne. There is an account of Frank and Charles Menches who, also in 1885, went to the Hamburg, New York county fair to prepare their famous pork sausage sandwiches. But since the local meat market was out of pork sausage, they used ground beef instead. Alas, another hamburger.

The first account of serving ground meat patties on buns – taking on the look of the hamburger as we know it today – took place in 1904 at the St. Louis World Fair. But it was many years later, in 1921, that an enterprising cook from Wichita, Kansas, Walt Anderson, introduced the concept of the hamburger restaurant. He convinced financier Billy Ingram to invest $700 to create The White Castle hamburger chain. It was an instant success. The rest of the history, we might say, belongs to McDonald’s.

And, no, a hamburger does not have any ham in it. Well, it’s not supposed to. Hamburger meat usually is made of 70-80% beef and fat and spices.

Why is a hotdog called a hotdog?
In 1987, Frankfurt, Germany celebrated the 500th birthday of the frankfurter, the hot dog sausage. Although, the people of Vienna (Wien), Austria will point out that their wiener sausages are proof of origin for the hot dog. (By the way, ham, being pork meat, is found in hotdogs.) In “Every wonder why?” Douglas B. Smith explains that the hotdog was given its name by a cartoonist.
A butcher from Frankfurt who owned a dachshund named the long frankfurter sausage a “dachshund sausage,” the dachshund being a slim dog with a long body. (“Dachshund” is German for “badger dog.” They were originally bred for hunting badgers.) German immigrants introduced the dachshund sausage (and Hamburg meat) to the United States. In 1871, German butcher Charles Feltman opened the first “hotdog” stand in Coney Island, selling 3,684 dachshund sausages, most wrapped in a milk bread roll, during his first year in business.

In the meantime, frankfurters – and wieners – were sold as hot food by sausage sellers. In 1901, New York Times cartoonist T.A. Dargan noticed that one sausage seller used bread buns to handle the hot sausages after he burnt his fingers and decided to illustrate the incident. He wasn’t sure of the spelling of dachshund and simply called it “hot dog.”

Eating
Recipes for placing meat between slices of bread date back to Roman times. However, that was for steak, not minced meat. Thus, the steak burger is older than the hamburger!
Sausage is one of the oldest forms of processed food, having been mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey in the 9th century BC.

The tongue is a muscle with glands, sensory cells, and fatty tissue that helps to moisten food with saliva. You cannot taste food unless it is mixed with saliva. For instance, if salt is placed on a dry tongue, the taste buds will not be able to identify it. As soon as saliva is added, the salt dissolves and the taste sensation takes place.

There are 4 basic tastes plus umami. The salt and sweet taste buds are at the tip of the tongue, bitter at the base, sour along the sides, and umami along the center of the tongue.

Afrikaner paranoia AfriForum’s fault? (the Defective Hearing of Liberal Press Aides)

Tuesday, 27 September 2011 10:11

Sitting pretty, I call it. When you're English and you trivialise minority language fears, when you're Black and trivialise minority group neuroses or when you are the couldn't-care-less majority but attack those minorities who are concerned about the future of this country, and more specifically, the future of their own descendents in this country.

I get this all the time, other tribes prescribing to me how I should face my fears and mourn my dead as an Afrikaner. And a White. And although it shouldn’t make a difference in the modern world, in this country, it certainly does. I’d like to change the stereotype from the inside but we have government policy arresting me in that demographic. When Adriaan Basson highlights my misguided paranoia by mentioning some White millionaires with regulation tennis courts, I wonder about modern journalism too.

A few basic questions remain. One: are these concerns justified in a country with the most embarrassing mortality rate, the highest incidents of violent murder and rape on the planet, in a country nose-diving through every possible global performance index. And two, should level six genocide targets just shut the fuck up, thus gagging white Afrikaner farmers (and all South African women, our Genocide Watch 2011 co-targets!) Level eight is when it's over and everyone lives in denial.

Who exactly is mislead about what, Adriaan Basson? (Hoekom mislei AfriForum Afrikaners? By, Saterdag 24 September, 2011)

Paranoia is a euphemism here, maybe even a luxury. You are not wrong about the paranoia, you are wrong about arrogating to yourself the right to prescribe the way to react to these fears. This can be done from any cozy urban office where the medical extraction of strange objects from raped women’s wombs is neatly out of sight and their screams safely outside hearing distance.

The worst case scenario is where you ignore history, denouncing your culture to the point where it becomes impossible to understand who you are, because you don’t know where you come from. In these circumstances it’s liberal bigotry to scream ideology over mortality. None of the basic rights in the world can be exercised by the dead.

In this debate, right and wrong are, of course, oversimplifications. As in politics, art, theology and philosophy, personalities merely gravitate toward comfort. I'm comfortable knowing that I'm heeding the warnings and reading the signs that simply would not concern many others who are “sitting pretty”.

Let’s look at AfriForum, the only civil rights group in legal confrontation with the ANC (without using taxpayers money) having any sort of success in recent times where government concessions for Afrikaner's heritage, culture and economic survival have bordered on the ridiculous . Otherwise, the Afrikaner (and white) minority is still footing the bill, as they have always done. A current case comes to mind. The ANC reps are fighting for the right to call these very Afrikaner taxpayers rapists and dogs that should be shot (in a song called Kill The Boer). Paranoia? Cold sweat better describes what I see when I travel the white rural communities and devastated farmlands where the white commemorative crosses on the hillsides dwarf the mortality rate of the worst of war torn countries in the world. This concerns some. Not all. The latter call the former paranoid, Adriaan.

According to you AfriForum does not defend a real minority as this minority has economic power. Let’s clarify this. They merely have economic means, weaned from millennia of work ethic, Euro-cultural momentum, travelling and industrial evolution. Although the colonised are envious individuals, they also were colonisable individuals. The aggravating and mitigating forces of history are impossible to redress now without skewing it all over again. Maybe wê should find the descendant of every slave in history? But saying the rich cannot be defended when they serve in minorities, is an old Stalin-style justification for socialism. Or theft, as I perceive it. This minority, with no political power, has paid the taxes that have carried this country for centuries. This minority has paid the taxes that carried the tax-exempt majority for centuries. This minority is taxed for unusual achievement under grave circumstances over many decades. This minority fought on borders, sacrificing their children in a war to keep communism at bay for decades. This minority bridged the gap between civilizations light years apart. This minority never curbed black population explosion as colonizers elsewhere did. This minority then sacrificed political power and for their economic achievements still carry the tax burden of the masses.

One wonders what the punishment is for the pre-18^th century non-achieving tribes and nations? The taxing to death and demise of this minority has not benefitted other South Africans: unemployment is worse than ever, with the “bonus” of an extra 700 000 white squatters thanks to government induced poverty by social engineering and propaganda much like yours, Adriaan.

The Afrikaner is not the richest, mightiest minority in the world. Africa merely has the poorest, violent, most economically paralised majority in the world. It was easy to appear the sole achiever in a continent where nothing had happened for eons. The best you can do is trivialise the incredible achievements of Wiese, Rupert, Dippenaar and Ferreira or the legal ownership of Afrikaners over their land and how they went about with resources.

Your question: why does AfriForum focus on white Afrikaner victims when Blacks seem most vulnerable to violence? You don’t know your stats. Afrikaner neuroses is based on annihilation far beyond population ratio and further beyond what we are going to pretend to be used to. My question: why are other South Africans NOT as paranoid as Afrikaners? But more importantly: the “Chosen Nation” propaganda and multicultural bullying of rainbow-liberals simply won’t allow for definitions like my people, my tribe and my culture, especially not if they care to demographically distinguish themselves as White or Afrikaner. (This does not apply to Blacks, off course). And don’t we know why. Composition (“samestelling”) smoothes over blame, thin enough to ensure that no solutions can ever be found for crime.

Please stop prescribing to South Africans where they should choose to feel comfortable, welcome and safe. Our pride (your taboe) and other Afrikaner interests, the few we have left after demolished city names, white history, Boere Monuments and Afrikaans Universities, are much safer in the hands of AfriForum than without. The hate speech statutes that protect Blacks, women, gays and any other citizens simply don’t apply to Afrikaners and AfriForum thankfully restored this in a South African court of law.

Your naiveté with statistics is mindboggling. For instance, how much of this (decreased) white unemployment was solved by the State? Do you want to punish white entrepreneurs for income generated in spite of our government’s skin-based policies, corruption and nepotism? Are you accusing AfriForum for not organising a national happy fest when our mortality rate drops from the absurd to the ridiculous? Do you blame anybody for not believing any government projections? You blame Solidarity for polarisation when the New South Africa we Afrikaners/Whites voted for should never have had need of such dire civil rights protection or “racist lobby groups”. Must we always feel White before African you ask? Yes, it seems that until the B in BEE stands for All South Africans, we are nothing but the W in Whipping Boy.

Adriaan, die laaste ding waarop jy jou sal moet beroep as ere liberaal is die demokratiese beginsel waarby ’n sekere groep Afrikaners verkies om in ander omstandighede as dié waarop jy so trots is, te wil leef en oorleef. Jou voorreg is dat jy nie hoef op te daag nie. Sal ons iemand soos jy die segsman maak vir Afrikanervrese? Dit sal wees soos om die Gestapo oor Joodse belange aan te stel. Ja, jy sal altyd die reg hê om as Afrikaner namens ander Afrikaners te praat, maar as segsman vir die dooie Afrikaners, het jy jou kanse verspeel.

Steve Hofmeyr

What's the most expensive toilet in the world?

by Josh Clark

They say that the road to the palace of wisdom is paved with excess. The folks at Hang Fu­ng Gold Technology Group in Hong Kong must be very wise indeed. The company's Hong Kong showroom features the "Hall of Gold," which contains several opulent handcrafted treasures. But the tourist favorite is "The World's Most Expensive Gold and Jewelry Sparkling Environmental Friendly Washroom" [source: Hang Fung]. Perhaps the most admired item in the gold bathroom is the 24-carat solid gold toilet.

In early 2008, some concern arose that the famous gold toilet could be melted down. The jewelers assuaged the public's worries by announcing that the toilet will remain intact. However, the company says that some of the other fixtures in the golden lavatory may not fare so well [source: AFP].
The company's owners stipulated that if the price of gold reaches $1,000 per ounce, one ton (32,000 ounces) of the tourist attraction will be melted into bullion and sold [source: AFP]. The company would gross a cool $32 million, and the owners would net about $17.6 million.

The one-of-a-kind posh potty will be spared and remain in Hang Fung's showroom -- it's not for sale. But if you're itching to add some bling to your bathroom, there are some other fixtures on the market that might appeal to your expensive taste.