January 18, 2017

Molasses - Yes … Molasses

John believes they have had a bad rap.

According to the Urban Dictionary, we have an expression. I am sure you know it …

Slower than molasses

… which translates roughly to something like “to move or function in a slow sloth-like way … compared to cooking molasses in a slow cooker.” And the inevitable ‘working real world example … “this bus is moving slower than molasses!”. Bottom line, the human race generally takes the idea of Mollases as being slooooooooow. Very, very sloooow. As a kid. John was a little unclear as to what was - and was not - ’a molasses’, because of course when John was a lad - there wasn’t ‘a google’. I know, but life back then was different children. We had a simpler life. Anyway, he now knows that Molasses is a ‘thick, dark brown syrup obtained from raw sugar during the refining process, a version of which is used in baking.’ He has thus deduced how the expression might have come to be. … and then he read and listened about The Boston Molasses Disaster.

In 1919 a bizarre catastrophe struck Boston’s North End: A giant storage tank failed, releasing 2 million gallons of molasses into a crowded business district at the height of a January workday. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Boston Molasses Disaster, which claimed 21 lives and inscribed a sticky page into the city’s history books.

Seriously … 21 lives lost because a pile of Molasses crept up on them. John got to wondering if this was a Darwinian culling?

Graham quips…

Sweet nightmares are made of this (sorry, Annie Lennox). Meantime, if you’re so inclined, here’s something even slower – the Pitch Drop Experiment. And given all our busy lives, here’s just two years of it, on time lapse. The tension is unbearable, right?


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