23 Celebrities who don’t use their real name

Once upon a time, a tribe of nomads named the Germanyė, inhabited one of the seven hills of what would become Rome.  Later, they wandered off – or were forced off. They drifted up the peninsula, and through the Alps, to the west, where they finally settled. Now they called themselves Germanotta – an Italian-ish word that meant the Germanyé people who journeyed here.

The main group split up, and various clans spread out.  Some of them took ‘Germanotta’ as a surname.  Later, Diaspora Jews settled in the same areas and some also took the name.  These clans of people, and the territories they occupied, became a group of little principalities which were collectively known as “The Germanies,” until the middle of the 1800s, when they were united into the ‘Empire of Germany.’

From one of them, a family emigrated to America, and a female descendant named Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born, who grew up to be the singer/performer who called herself Lady Gaga.

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I was reading a science fiction novel about a time traveler in Tyre, in ancient Phoenicia.  To make his conversations seem like formal, upper-class-speak, the author wrote his speech in Middle-English, upper-class-speak, with an overabundance of ‘tis and ‘twas, and thee and thou.

He addressed a nosy gate-guard as a “gossoon,” and the search was on!  Gossoon means lad, or boy.  It came to English 1675/1685, from the Irish Gaelic, garsun, also meaning boy, or lad – which, in turn came from Old French, Garçon, which surprisingly, also means boy, or young, unmarried man.  That word has grown up in English when we pretentiously use it to refer to a waiter – young, old, married, or single.

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Once upon a time – Snake Oil was real
I was viewing an article titled Un-noticed Movie Mistakes.  In Django Unchained, Django and his white mentor blow up something with red sticks of dynamite – decades before Alfred Nobel got around to developing it.

In those days, if you wanted to blow shit up, you used black powder – because the more powerful smokeless powder had also not been developed.  For large, or special, explosions, unsafe, unstable, nitroglycerine was used.  That’s why Nobel soaked it into guncotton, to make it safe and reliable.

In both the US, and Canada, when the railways were being extended to the west coast, large numbers of coolies, expendable Chinese workers, were imported to do the dangerous work.  A report said that taking the rails through the Canadian Rockies cost one Chinaman per mile.  A Canadian Minute PSA showed one Chinaman being handed a glass vial of nitro, and told to go into a cavern, and tamp it into a bored hole.  There was a muffled explosion, and a huge cloud of smoke and dust.  The foreman just assumed that the payroll had been reduced by one more, when the coughing, but smiling, man emerged.

Rail crews work hard, and the Chinese were probably made to work harder than white men.  At the end of a hard day, they were stiff and sore.  Many of the Chinese rubbed an unguent on their joints that seemed to reduce pain, and aid flexibility.  They told inquiring whites that it was Chinese snake oil.  Much later investigation revealed that the “snakes” were actually aquatic, freshwater eels, whose bodies contained Omega3 fatty acids.

With the white guys sharing it, buying it, and stealing it, the supply eventually disappeared – but not the demand – that remained as hot as ever.  The Chinese caught garter snakes, grass snakes, milk snakes, even rattlesnakes, and rendered them down.  Being land animals the results were not the same, but sometimes at gunpoint, they were forced to supply the now nonexistent magic elixir.  Of course it didn’t work – and another urban myth was born.