RANDOM ORIGINS

Once again, the BRI asks—and answers—the question: Where does all this stuff come from?

UMBRELLA DRINKS

The little umbrella (or parasol) that traditionally garnishes rum-based faux-tropical cocktails has become so common that the term “umbrella drink” is now synonymous with them. The drinks got popular in the 1930s and ’40s as part of a “tiki bar” fad. But neither of the big tiki bar chains, Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s, were the first to put small umbrellas into drinks—Harry Yee, a bartender at the Hilton Waikiki, was. His personal touch up to that point was placing a stick of sugarcane in drinks, but he found that patrons would chew on them and leave them behind in ashtrays for him to clean up. Looking for something a little less work-intensive, he used small orchids to garnish his drinks for a few years, and then really struck gold in the late 1950s when he switched to the tiny umbrellas the Hilton had around for patrons to use as toothpicks.

HAWAIIAN PIZZA

Most standard pizza toppings are savory and salty—cheese, pepperoni, olives, and even anchovies. What kind of mind, then, would come up with the idea of putting a sweet (and cold) ingredient like pineapple on a (hot) ’za? This innovation on the classic Italian dish was invented not in Italy but by a Greek man in Canada. Sam Panopoulos left his native Greece and emigrated to Canada in 1954 at age 20, and worked in the uranium mines in southern Ontario. A few years later, he and his two brothers opened a few diners. It happened at their Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario: Panopoulos was in the kitchen, making a pizza one day in 1962, when he spotted a can of chunked pineapple on the shelf, and thought it might be a good topping.

CROWDFUNDING

The internet has created a whole new kind of economy in which friends, fans, and supporters can prepay for a product or service that’s still on the drawing board. Through “crowdfunding” sites like Kickstarter and Patreon, artists can solicit the entire world for donations, which they can then use to fund their album, movie, or other endeavor, in exchange for some kind of token prize or the patron’s name in the credits. (Crowdfunding sites can actually be used for anything—thousands of people have used them, for example, to pay off huge medical bills.) The first time anybody made a significant amount of money through what is essentially electronic panhandling was when the English rock band Marillion used the nascent internet to get fans to pre-fund its 1997 concert tour of the United States. (They raised a respectable £39,000, or $60,000.)

In 1640 Pope Urban VIII forbade all Spanish priests from smoking tobacco.

STRIP MALLS

Los Angeles is famous for its car culture (and its clogged highways and long commutes). It started in the 1920s, when the price of automobiles dropped enough to allow widespread ownership. People wanted to do everything in their cars, and in 1924 the first “drive-in market” opened in Glendale, near Los Angeles. It wasn’t a fast-food place or a drive-in movie—it was a convenience store. These stores are usually located at busy intersections, so patrons could park right in front, quickly grab a couple of items inside, and be on their way in a few minutes. Those stores became the anchors of small shopping centers. There were 250 drive-in markets in Southern California by the end of the 1920s, just as supermarkets started becoming popular…and started replacing drive-ins. Strip malls (or mini-malls) re-emerged in 1973, again in Los Angeles, and again because of cars. Gas shortages led to hundreds of gas stations going out of business, and real-estate developers started replacing them with a row (or an L-shape) of retail stores, housing nail salons, massage parlors, restaurants, dry cleaners, doughnut shops, and laundromats. (And just like in the earlier fad of the 1920s, the parking was free, plentiful, and close.) The first modern strip mall was built on the corner of Osborne Street and Woodman Avenue in the Panorama City neighborhood of Los Angeles; by the mid-1980s, Southern California was home to 3,000 mini-malls. (By 2010 there were more than 60,000 of them across the United States.)

LOW-CARB DIETS

There’s always another fad diet people go nuts over for a few weeks—often a “low-carb” regimen that calls for eliminating starches like pasta, potatoes, and rice in favor of lots of protein (and fat). Some of the more popular low-carb diets: Atkins, ketogenic, Paleo, Whole30, and South Beach. But the first weight-loss craze that had people pushing away the bread and reaching for the bun-less bacon cheeseburgers was The Drinking Man’s Diet. In 1962, former salesman and cosmetics executive Robert Cameron self-published a book by that title. A friend had told him that if he ate nothing but carbohydrate-free meat (and drank nothing but low-carbohydrate gin and red wine), he’d lose weight. He did. “I was never hungry and never missed a martini,” Cameron boasted in this book that went on to sell 2.4 million copies. Cameron’s diet offered an alternative to the other diets of the 1960s, like the cabbage soup diet. He wasn’t a doctor or a nutritionist—he geared the book toward men like him: hard-drinking, steak-eating guys of the Mad Men era. The book faded from popular consciousness by the time the similar Atkins diet hit it big in the 1970s. As for Cameron, he died a lean man at age 98.

25% of women say they’ve “ghosted” someone by not responding to their calls, texts, or social media posts.