Wednesday 25 April 2007

Interesting Celery Fact No. 158

If all the celery grown last year in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't really lead anywhere interesting

Friday 13 April 2007

Interesting Celery Song #1

This rare version of Gloria Gaynor's I will survive was only found on the b side of the limited edition picture disc.

First I was afraid, I was petrified

To try to live without celery would be suicide
Oh how I love the watery taste
And how I love it's fibrous feel
If you wanted to destroy me
It's the first thing you would steal.......

I looked in the fridge
And behind the couch
Wherever you hid that celery
I'd find it out
But then suddenly I saw
Then I suddenly realised
That if I was a celery stick
There's one place that I'd hide.....

Chorus

It was under the bed
Under the bed
I find the celery at last
Before I lost my head
And now I've squirrelled it away
And now I've stored it in the fridge
That's what I said
It was under the bed
Oooooh

Thursday 12 April 2007

Interesting Celery Fact No. 545

The infamous planks, which the captives of pirates were made to walk during the "Golden Age Of Piracy", were not made from wood. They were in fact made of celery, for two reasons.

1. If the captive was too heavy, the plank would snap before the captive reached the end, providing much hilarity amongst the crew.

2. If the captive was light, and made it to the end, the natural springiness of celery again made it much more entertaining - when the captive tried a discreet and dignified jump off the end of the plank they found themselves hurtling upwards, usually bashing their heads on the underside of the crow's nest before smashing through the plank on their way to the bottom of the briny.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 8

Guns don't kill people - celery does.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 101

9 out of 10 cats prefer celery.

Wednesday 11 April 2007

Interesting Celery Fact No. 94

Celery is the third most common cause of burst eardrums, after cotton buds and, curiously, plastic funnels.

Thursday 5 April 2007

Interesting Celery Fact No. 7

In 1876 the Austro Hungarian empire was thrown into turmoil when the merchant classes led a revolt against taxes. Most hated of all was the Celery Tax, which had been considered iniquitous when introduced in the 1840's, and had then been regularly increased. Celery was seen as "the little luxury everyone can afford", not just in the low countries (as has been well documented), but across Central europe since the 1750's, but the celery tax ate into the customer base very quickly. First to suffer were the very poor, who were immediately priced out of the celery market, but as the tax burden grew heavier and heavier, the wealthier peasants, and even burghers started to feel the pinch, and farmers found demand for celery was plummetting.

In '76, the worm finally turned, as the merchants found that they, too, were no longer able to afford the celery which was so much a part of their daily lives, and a pamphlet, entitled "Against the Gentrification of Celery" began to be circulated. As the upper middle classes began to forcibly resist the celery tax, the poorer and more downtrodden followed suit, until the Duke of Hapsburg gave way, and removed celery tax altogether, in what was known as the Budapest Celery Amnesty.

An interesting aside to this story is that the little town of Unterdenverdegris had it's very own Lady Godiva moment as a result of this crisis. The mayor of the little town was begged by his wife to stand up to the Hapsburgs, and refuse to collect the celery tax. He laughingly told his wife that he would do so, if she would ride naked through the town on a donkey. This she did, but there the parallels with Godiva end. The mayors wife was, to put it kindly, a rather homely lady, and once the people of the town found out why she was undertaking this naked ride, they swore never to complain about celery tax again, if only she would promise never to repeat her daring ride.

Monday 2 April 2007

Interesting Celery Fact No. 223

The legendary Dennis Holsworthy-Jones, the only man to have survived the Baltic Sea's Great Windsurfing Disaster of 1934, escaped the small, remote island he found himself stranded upon only by utilising the dense field of celery he found thriving there. By constructing a small raft from celery sticks, tied together with fibres torn from the shell of the little known Arctic Coconut, Dennis had the means to row back to civilisation. Unfortunately, in building the raft, Dennis ate vast amounts of celery, resulting in a severe case of Celery Delusion. This caused Dennis to take a somewhat convoluted route to shore; where he began 4 miles from the Polish coast, he eventually arrived in Riga, Latvia.