Apple of Your Eye - 91423
We're in Apple Picking season so ...
Good morning! … or afternoon or evening depending on when you open this. Let’s jump in.
The Daily Rabbit Hole: Who invented podcasts?
You can start with that link and then read this Guardian article from 2004 (the first ever mention of podcasts) and quickly go down a rabbit hole. The article’s language immediately takes you back to the mid 2000s. For example: “Cheap applications are available to record RealPlayer streams, and Windows Media for that matter, and convert them to MP3, ready for a waiting iPod.”
The Beatles last public performance was on the roof of Apple headquarters on January 30, 1969. It was an impromptu show that stopped traffic and caused a rush of onlookers. The last time they had performed a concert was 2.5 years earlier in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park - so it certainly would have caught everyone off guard to suddenly be playing on a rooftop for free. If you’re thinking “why the San Francisco area for both of these?” - it’s not the same Apple of which I’m sure you’re thinking. Apple Records was The Beatles company created in an attempt to become more tax efficient. The 42 minute show took place in London, and they recorded it to be the finale of their documentary “Let It Be.”
The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: Isaac Newton has two birthdays.
Or rather, most people born in his era from England do. “Isaac Newton was born on the 4th of January 1643 in line with the Gregorian calendar, which we use today. However, back in the 17th century, when Newton was born, they told the time using a different method. This was called the Julian calendar, and, according to that, Newton was born in the early hours of Christmas day, 1642!”
Forbidden fruit
We don’t actually know what specific fruit the Bible references in the story of Adam and Eve. In fact, while most people can picture a naked Adam and Eve holding an apple, Rabbis in 500 AD discussed this topic at length. Since the original Hebrew text used the generic word for fruit, a debate ensued and in the Talmud, they never even mention apples.
Many Jewish scholars come back to it being a fig, but most Christian scholars point back to Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin in 382 for Pope Damasus I. There, he translated the Hebrew word for generic fruit into a slightly more specific, but still generic term for fruit that translates into English as “apple” even though it is meant to be a word that references any fruit with seeds in its core surrounded by the flesh of the fruit. After writing that sentence, I recognize you might have to read it twice to follow, but I don’t know a better way to put it succinctly.
But there is another catch - Jerome likely used the Latin word “malum” (the one we translate to English as apple even though it is technically more generic in Latin) because it also means “evil.”
Which means yes, the reason we view it as an apple today is because a man in the latter half of the 4th century made a great pun.