Time is on everyone's mind this week, so here are a pair of curious tales with time as their core.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Time flies when you're having fun and also when you're not. Either way, the clot keeps ticking. That's never more apparent than on December thirty first, when we look back at the previous year and talk about how we can't believe it is already over. But there was one year, over two millennia ago when people did not feel like the time had slipped away. And that's because forty six BCE lasted a whopping four hundred in forty five days. You see, the calendar has always been a bit tricky to nail down. For most of human history, years were measured using the seasons, and having exact dates and times wasn't that important If you wanted to schedule an event, you wouldn't tell people to meet you on Saturday at seven pm, because the whole idea of a seven day week and a twenty four hour day didn't exist. Instead, you'd say something like meet me at sundown on the night of the full moon. And let's be honest here. That sounds way cooler than how we schedule things today. Of course, many ancient cultures had tools like sundials and lunar calendars. In the Roman Empire, for example, one year was made up of twelve lunar cycles, each lasted about twenty eight days. The problem was this resulted in a year that was slightly shorter than the four seasons. Roman officials viewed the calendar as malleable, so they would add days here and there to make up the difference, but the system was far from perfect. Problems arose anytime politics got in the way of managing the calendar. The years before Julius Caesar rose to power were so turbulent that adding random day into the mix wasn't anybody's priority. By the time he took the throne in forty nine BCE, April fell in the middle of the summer and the harvest festival was three months before the actual harvest. Everything was out of whack, so to get things back on tracks, Caesar called for forty six BCE to be a transitional year with ninety extra days packed into it. He named it the Ultima Annis Confusionists, that is, the final year of Confusion. When forty six BCE was finally over, Caesar instituted the Julian calendar. Rather than being based on the cycles of the moon, this one followed the movements of the sun. It's where we get thirty and thirty one day months, as well as leap years. The Julian calendar followed the seasons much more accurately, so it didn't need to be constantly altered, but still it wasn't perfect. Roman astronomers had miscalculated the solar year by a mere eleven minutes, and this might not seem like much, but it added up. For every one hundred and twenty eight years that passed, the calendar fell about one day behind the seasons. This meant that by fifteen eighty two, the world was more than ten days off. This problem came to the attention of Pope Gregory the thirteenth, who suggested a few changes. First, they needed to make up for lost time. Literally, those living in Catholic Europe went to sleep on October fourth of fifteen eighty two, but when they woke up the next morning it was in October fifth. It was the fifteenth. They had jumped ahead ten days, and to make sure the same thing didn't happen again, modern astronomers also needed to fix the Romans miscalculation. They changed how leap years work just slightly, making any numbers divisible by four hundred or four thousand exempt. This small alteration guaranteed that the Gregorian calendar would remain accurate for the next twenty thousand years, but not everyone was on board. The British government refused to institute the change for nearly two centuries until they had lagged eleven days behind the rest of Western Europe. In seventeen fifty two, British King George the Second had finally had enough that September lasted just nineteen days in the Briginish Empire, allowing the nation to get back in line with the seasons. These days, the Gregorian calendar is considered the international standard, but that doesn't mean that every country and culture embraces it. Even now. The way humans keep time is not an exact science, and not everyone is about to celebrate the beginning of twenty twenty four in Ethiopia, for example, people use a version of the ancient Coptic calendar, which has thirteen months. Because of this, the current year there is twenty sixteen. Iran and Afghanistan both use the Persian Solar his reclendar. In those countries it's technically fourteen forty five. Nepal uses a traditional Hindu calendar that puts them about fifty six years in the future in twenty eighty, but that's nothing compared to China. Their traditional calendar puts them all the way in forty seven to twenty. So let this be a reminder. The time is an illusion, and the way that we measure it is curious. Indeed, as the new year approaches, you might be reaching into your fridge for a festive drink like eggnog or champagne. In Scotland, though, they're mixing up a different kind of holiday beverage, one with a very curious history. It's called athel Bros, and legends about this winter time brew go back over five hundred years. There are a couple of different versions of the story. The first one goes like this, there once was a giant who lived in the Scottish Highlands in a region called Ethel. The monster terrorized innocent people, spreading fear across the hills. A local hunter wanted to put a stop to the violence, but to defeat the beast, he had to be clever. Rather than attacking the giant outright, the hunter mixed up a vat of oatmeal, whiskey, cream, and honey and set it out for the monster to eat. The spiked porridge was so strong that it put the beast into a never ending stupor, thereby ending its reign of terror. Now the second and more slightly believable version of the tale begins like this. In the late fifteenth century, the British Isles were racked by a series of battles known as the Wars of the Roses. People were fighting to gain control of the British throne, and they were willing to do just about anything to get it. Enter Ian MacDonald, a Scottish earl. In fourteen seventy five, Ian signed a traitorous agreement with British King Edward the Fourth. The contract said that if England were to subdue Scotland, the earl would be granted partial rulership over his homeland, And just like that, Ian stopped fighting England and began plotting a rebellion against his own leader, the Scottish King. Unfortunately for Ian, his plans weren't exactly secret. There were spies everywhere. Soon enough, word got around to another Scotsman named John Stewart. He was the Earl of Athel of the Highlands, the same area where our fabled giant had lived. Angered by Ian's traitorous actions, John set out to squash the uprising before it could even begin, and the Scottish spies gave John some important intel. Ian and his men had a specific date in mind for the rebel. Until then, they were hiding out on a nearby hill, eating rations and getting water from one specific well, and that detail the well gave John an idea. The night before Ian's coup was scheduled to take place, John ordered his men to sneak into the enemy camp and sabotage their water supply by filling the well with oats, honey, and scotch. Apparently, Ian and his men didn't notice that their water had magically transformed into some kind of thick whiskey cocktail. I guess we're meant to suspend our disbelief at this point in history. That's or the stuff just tasted so good that they didn't want to question it. Regardless, legend has it that Ian and his troops ate so much that they all passed out in the morning. They were too exhausted to mount their rebellion, And there you have it. With nothing more than the power of a stiff drink, John had successfully stopped the uprising. Now in both stories, ethel Bros originates in the Highlands, is made in massive quantities, and has a nearly mythical ability to leave people staggeringly drunk. It's believed to be one of the world's first cock tales, and it's remained popular throughout history. Thankfully, though the recipe has since been refined. John Stewart's descendants made one big change in the early eighteen hundreds. They replaced the oatmeal with a mixture of blended oats and water, which was then strained to ensure a smooth, drinkable consistency. And this was arguably the first version of oat's milk. Who knew that our favorite lattes could be traced back to a fifteenth century Scottish cocktail? Right these days, ethel Bros is most often brewed during hogmen at which is the Scottish version of New Year's Eve, one of the country's most important holidays. Hogmen Ase celebrations feature torchlit parades, swinging fireballs and other ritualistic traditions. Plus there's plenty of athel bros to go around. And hey, I can't think of a better way to ring in the new year than with flames, toasts and strange stories. So cheers to twenty twenty four. In all the curious tales we've yet to discover, I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.