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Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.

- Josh Billings (1818-1885)

From the memoirs of William Hickey, a Georgian rake:

This was in the summer of 1756. In the month of July of that year a large party dined with my father, at Twickenham, at which were present Lord Cholmondeley, and his brother, the General, Sir Charles Sheffield, the owner of the Queen’s Palace in St. James’s park, then called Buckingham house, Sir William Stanhope, to whom Pope’s place belonged, Mr. Simon Luttrell, afterwards Earl of Carhampton, my God-father Colonel Mathews, and others. As I was sitting upon the knee of the latter, after dinner, having just swallowed a bumper of claret which he had given me, I, with a deep sigh said to him,

“I wish I was a man.”

“Aye,” observed the Colonel, “and pray why so, William?”

To which I quickly replied,

“That I might drink two bottles of wine every day.”

This wish, and the reason, being communicated to the company made a hearty laugh, and Mr. Luttrell, who was a famous hard liver, pronounced that I should live to be a damned drunken dog, the rest agreeing that I should undoubtedly be a very jolly fellow!

A Yürük [a nomad, walker] does not need to go anywhere, but needs to be moving.

-Turkic nomad proverb

Here is a list of different currencies used in Europe in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, gleaned from F. Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II by J. H. Hexter:

ducats, ecus d’or, sequins, lire, soldi, zeanars, dobles, soltaninis, livres, sous, ecus d’argent, doblones, escudos de oro, reales, aspri, tourrones, escus pistolet, courrones, tallieri, quat-trini, bajocci, kronenthaler, marchetti, pesos, reali ad 8, 6, and 4, maravedis, pfennigs, drachmas, reales, deniers, thalers, maidin.

Cool spacey pop from The Ruby Suns.