Myth Busters, Hidden Logos, and Lincoln's Cave

This is NOT a Gillray cartoon, but I liked it!

Here's a smorgasbord  of things I learned last week:

#37 August 31:   I ran across a “myth buster” site and the busted myth I liked the best was about Napoleon.  He actually was only an inch shorter than the typical man of his time and maybe not even that.  But the myth about his height came from a political cartoonist named James Gillray.  He introduced a character named “Little Boney” to represent Napoleon and portrayed him as diminutive and juvenile often pitching tantrums and stomping around in oversized boots.  Napoleon even said that Gillray “did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down”.  And our newspaper just quit printing political cartoons.  How will we get rid of our despots?!  8/30

#38  September 1:  The famous “Gunfight at the O. K. Corral between Virgil and Wyatt Earp and various outlaws lasted only 30 seconds and killed 3 people and did not take place at the corral but on a nearby vacant lot.  As we face many deaths today from gun violence, many towns in the “wild, wild West” actually had gun control laws. According to the Myth Buster site, the “wild, wild, West” was actually fairly tame with most folks living together peaceably.  8/30

#39  September 2:  Betsy Ross did not design and sew the first American Flag.  That distinction goes to Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and designer of other seals for U.S. government departments.  He asked for but was denied a payment of a quarter cask of public wine.  However, his flag was approved on June 14, 1777, which became Flag Day. Betsy may have sewn flags.  She was an upholsterer, but she wasn’t the first, nor the designer. 8/30

#40 September 3:  There is a cave including 9-foot stalactites under the Lincoln Memorial!  It was originally discovered and covered over during construction and includes caricatures of Woodrow Wilson and the monument’s construction foreman.  It was rediscovered in the 70s when excavation for an elevator shaft to accommodate disabled visitors was begun. 8/30

#41 September 4:  Another site I’ve discovered has hidden meanings in common logos.  I knew about the smile on Amazon going from the A to the Z, but I didn’t know about the arrow between the E and X in FedEx subliminally indicating that packages move from point A to point B speedily. 8/30

#42 September 5:  Similarly, there is a Hershey Kiss imbedded in the Hershey Kisses logo between the K and I. 8/30

#43  September 6:  Finally, the Tostitos logo has 2 people dipping a chip in salsa, represented by the “t – i-t” in the Tostitos logo.8/30

#44 September 7:  What do the color circles mean on the bottom of your Frito Lays, or any package for that matter?  Is it a secret nutrition code?  Nope!  I knew about color blocks in the selvages of bolt cloth and it really is the same thing.  I just didn’t know it applied to food packaging too.  The color circles are test colors for the printer to make sure the colors are consistent and “true”.  So when you reach for the yellow pack of M&M’s in CLT or Shanghai, the yellow color is the same. 8/30