Unreasonable Celery Intolerance No. 1

This was recently seen on a church sign in Hertfordshire. We can only assume that the CLS (see Interesting Celery Fact No. 5) are continuing their campaign from the underground.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 47

The word celery features in a new phonetic alphabet, recently created by Canadian social services, who wanted to get away from the stigmas implied by the old Nato phonetic alphabet. It would be greatly appreciated if all readers could switch to the use of this alphabet as soon as practicable

A – Albatross

B – Basingstoke

C – Celery

D – Dangle

E – Elderberry

F – Funnel

G – Globule

H – Hatstand

I – Ibsen

J – Jerusalem

K – Kermit

L – Linguini

M – Mellotron

N – Nougat

O – Oratorio

P – Persistence

Q – Quaalude

R – Redundant

S – Sausage

T – Teflon

U – Uttoxeter

V – Viticulture

W – Walrus

X – Xanadu

Y – Yesterday

Z - Zaphod

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

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

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.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 94

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

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.

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.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 362

Celery is packed with pentopeptides, the latest anti-ageing ingredient. A leading cosmetics manufacturer was recently threatened with legal action for claiming that celery was not contained in its product when their manufacturing plant was raided by the celery police and was found to contain 43 tonnes of the vegetable. When asked why the company made this claim, a spokesman said "well, celery's just not cool, is it?"

Interesting Celery Fact No. 158

A brief passage concerning celery from little known 18c Welsh novelist Arwyn Jones novel "The Tiny Mind" was for a time mistaken by scholars for a lost section of the book of Ezekiel. It was this which led to the extraordinary "celery cults" of midwestern America, about which so much has been written.

Little Known Celery Poem #1

Oh mighty dawn sentinel
Of thrusting foliage and indomitable fibre
Thy alabaster column standing proud
Enshadowing all, like some dark rider
Oh prince of the market garden
Denizen of the salad plate
Unpalatable yet strangely ever present
How long until you seal mankinds fate?

Percy Shelley

This poem was published as part of a joint anthology with Byron, in 1817. The collection, entitled "To all the greenest pastures" was primarily concerned with salad stuffs, but, being of the romantic era, was not without it's references to root vegetables.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 972

Until now, the prosthetics used to create the heads of Kling-ons in the popular television series "Star Trek" have been made from a rubber, taken from a cast of the actor's head. However, recent developments in preservatives means that the substance of choice, celery pulp, now no longer dissolves on contact with human skin, and is set to replace the rubber. "Celery is ideal for our purposes," said the show's Head of Make-Up and Prosthetics, Danbert McEagleburger. "It also cuts down on the food bill too - once the guy's scene is over, he can just eat his own damn head."

Interesting Celery Fact No. 5

Between 1978 and 1981, the Chesham and District Conservative Ladies Association embarked on an escalating campaign against celery. Initially, the vegetable was banned from Association meetings, on the grounds that it was crude and ribald in shape, and ought not to be seen in public. After a while the Ladies Association decided that it was their responsibility to protect the public at large from the evils of celery, and so was launched the infamous, and increasingly extremist and brutal, Celery Limitation Subcommittee.

The CLS, as it became known, started by writing to local groups, progressed to picketing greengrocers and salad bars, and by the end, were thought to be behind acts of violence and intimidation towards local market gardeners. Much of the suffering could have been avoided, except that the local council followed a policy of appeasment, resulting in a ban on celery on all council premises, and local bye-laws being passed to prevent the eating of celery in public.

Eventually, an enquiry by the City of London police force revealed that the local police were too cowed by the CLS to interfere, and that the shadowy group was carrying out vigilante attacks on local celery eaters. Their web of informants had spread fear throughout the area, and there were reports, never confirmed, that they were planning an attempt to overthrow the government, and put in their own anti-celery administration. Today, the ringleaders remain behind bars, pending a Truth and Reconcilliation project.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 9

Following in the American of tradition of providing nicknames for cities (Chicago, The Windy City, New York, the Big Apple, and Los Angeles, The Devils Armpit), Collingbourne Ducis in Wiltshire decided to call itself The Celery City, in 1978. The idea was not a success.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 161

In Rutland, England's smallest county, the eating of celery has long been associated with the gentry. So much so in fact that, in 1642, in common with many countys at the time, the eating of celery by commoners was outlawed. Rutland, however, is unusual in never having officially repealed this arcane law.

However, whilst the law remains on the statute books, it had not been used in many years, until recently. Young Macauley Fulford, 15, had received an ASBO for constant disturbances and problems with his neighbours, and the police, knowing he was breaching it in a variety of ways, were unable to catch him in the act. On Jan 17th of this year, Fulford stole large amounts of fruit and veg from his local Tesco, but was not caught, and later, paraded in front of the Police Station, brazenly chewing on the celery he had stolen, with the Police powerless to stop him, as they were unable to prove the theft. Young Macauley, however, was unaware that the Police COULD arrest him simply for EATING the celery, and quick thinking local historian PC Threbblethwaite did exactly that. Sadly, at the local magistrates court on 2nd February, Fulford was aquitted on the grounds that he was the illegitimate son of Viscount Lindlay, and therefore fully legally entitled to celery consumption.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 153

In 1920, amid spiralling inflation and burdensome war reparations, a German people at it's wits end elected a stick of celery as Mayor of Cologne.

Polar Celery Fact # 1

The failure of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's fateful second expedition to the South Pole, with the consequent deaths of Scott and his comrades, and the loss of the Poles conquest to Amundsen was not, as widely suggested, down to his adoption of ponies rather than dogs. Neither was it, as some pseudo-intellectuals are given to suggesting, due to the English tradition of brave gentleman amateurs refusing the best advice of experienced professionals. The trouble was, in fact, related to celery.

Scott, as is well known, was a devotee of quack and quasi holy-man Sai Mpopo Om, purportedly from Tibet, who was in fact on Clive McQuaig, of Welwyn Garden City. McQuaig, who had links with one of the major celery exporters in Portugal, spent much time convincing Scott of the curative and nutritious properties of this wonder-salad-item, so much so that Scott became unshakeable in the belief that the only way to conquer the pole was by substituting celery for pemmican. Given celery's status as a negative-calory food, the pitfalls of this scheme are obvious, but there was yet one more unforseen hazard. Two of Scott's crew perished after only three days on the ice, through tripping whilst eating, and driving frozen celery through their chests. Say no to salad, kids.

Interesting Celery Fact No. 12

Celery fibre is the third strongest substance known to man, after spiders web, and baked on cheese. If a celery fibre the same thickness as a power line were made, it would be able to stretch between towers 18,643 miles apart without breaking.