Glorious list of questions. Hosted just down the river, too… A good place to find the right person to chat with about any really important ideas you might have.
For those of you forever looking for new anecdotal tokens of liquidity and value:
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. … The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber …… They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace … the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
-from Peter Forbath’s history of the Congo (ref’ed in WP)
I’ve found my new fortune replacement. Eddy Duchin, Ethelbald of Wessex (wife Judith), List of collective nouns by collective term A-K(an aurora of polar bears? a corps of giraffe?), Mass murder metal, and Kalamazoo college.
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