Carriage

A carriage generally refers to a wheeled vehicle designed to transport passengers. The exact definition varies depending on the context.

The word originates from the Old Northern French cariage (meaning "to carry in a vehicle"), derived from carier ("to carry"), which also gives us the modern words car and carry.

Horse drawn carriage photo

The first carriage with suspension of its body by chains and ropes was developed in Europe sometime in the 13th century, for royalty and the aristocracy. It took its form primarily from the earlier two-wheeled chariots common to ancient Rome.

After the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell set up the Fellowship of Master Hackney Carriages — the official name still used for ‘black cabs’ — in 1654 in one of his first Acts of Parliament. The name is from hacquenée, the French term for a general-purpose horse. It literally means ‘ambling nag’.

Dalmatians were once used by aristocracy as a coach dog to trot beside carriages and protect them from highwaymen.

An 18 ton funeral carriage carried Wellington's body to St Paul's pulled by 12 dray horses. It was so ornate and heavy that it cracked the streets of London along the route

Queen Victoria always pulled her carriage curtains when she passed through rougher areas to avoid the distressing sight of a working class tenement.

The word "dashboard" originated as a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves.

The first motor insurance policies were issued in Britain in 1896 but they excluded damage caused by horses frightened by the new “horseless carriages”.

During the early 20th century, horses were creating so much pollution with their poop that cars were seen as the "green" alternative.

The Rolls Royce Silver Ghost was a must-have for Edwardian Lords and Viscounts. Its luxury heralded the end of the horse and carriage as the aristocracy's preferred mode of transport.

Source Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc.

Jim Carrey

James Eugene Carrey was born on January 17, 1962, in Ontario, Canada to Percy (an accountant and aspiring jazz saxophonist) and Kathleen.

He is of French-Canadian ancestry on his father's side, and has French, Irish, and Scottish ancestry on his mother's side. His family's surname was originally "Carré".

As a child, Jim Carrey used to wear his tap shoes to bed just in case his parents needed cheering up in the middle of the night.

At age 15, Jim Carrey quit school and became a janitor to support his family. They were living out of a van and he and his family all worked as janitors at a factory to make a living.

Carrey performed his first stand-up routine with disastrous results in a yellow suit and tails, which were made by his mother.

Jim Carrey's first film was a musical comedy called Earth Girls Are Easy.

Jim Carrey auditioned twice for Saturday Night Live and was never offered a role.

Studio executives balked when Carrey asked for $400,000 for Dumb and Dumber. Then Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out and the studio had to pay Carrey $7 million to do the movie.

In Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey's chipped tooth is genuine, resulting from a fight with a classmate in his childhood, but he had since had it capped. He simply had the crown temporarily removed from that tooth to portray Lloyd.

Jim Carrey was supposed to be Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers franchise but he had to back out due to scheduling conflicts.

In 1996, Carrey became the first actor to be paid $20 million for a film - The Cable Guy. 

The makeup process for the 2000 movie The Grinch was so grueling, Jim Carrey had to meet with an expert who trained CIA operatives to deal with torture.

He has one child with his first wife, Melissa Carrey, whom he divorced in 1995. Carrey married actress Lauren Holly in 1996, but they split less than a year later.

In 2014, Carey appeared on a Canadian postage stamp.

Carpet

The technique of weaving carpets is thought to have originated in Persia in ancient times, and spread to Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Anatolia, where characteristic forms developed as folk art and in court workshops.

Excavation of royal graves, dating from the 5th to the 3rd century BC, at Pazyryk, in the Altai Mountains of Southern Siberia, have uncovered the oldest known examples of knotting. The finds include a superb carpet with a woollen pile, knotted with the Ghiordes, or Turkish, knot (Hermitage). The carpet, probably of Persian origin, measures 6  61/2 feet (1.8  2.0 metres). The central field has a checkerboard design with a floral star pattern in each square. Of the two wide borders, the inner one shows a frieze of elk, the outer one a frieze of horsemen.

Cleopatra, once wrapped herself up in a carpet as a gift for Julius Caesar. When he unrolled it, he found the beautiful Egyptian queen.

In Western Europe the replacement of carpets and matting for rushes in the first half of the seventeenth century meant that there were fewer fleas in middle class homes, which thus diminished the chance of the richer classes catching the flea-borne plague. Good carpets were by now being made in England or imported from Turkey and Persia.

English carpet maker Thomas Whitty devised his specialized method of creating luxury carpets in 1755. Impressed by a Turkish carpet he saw at Cheapside Market in London, he spent months working on one of similar quality. They are known worldwide as Axminsters after the Devon town where he had his business.

When the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe (1753-1831), disembarked from a riverboat in Georgetown, South Carolina and his welcoming party greeted him with a red carpet. This was one of the earliest reported instances of a ceremonial red carpet.

Melville Bissell had a china shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was allergic to the dusty straw scattered on the floor after unpacking china from crates. So, he invented the first carpet sweeper in 1876 to clean up the mess and protect his sinuses..

In 1901 the British engineer Hubert Booth patented an electrically powered machine, which he demonstrated extracting dust from carpets by suction; he called it a 'vacuum cleaner'. The machine was mounted on a horse-drawn wagon, and equipped with a long tube for access into buildings.

Percy Shaw, the inventor of the cat's eye, lived in a house without any carpets. He thought that carpets harbor unpleasant smells.

Persian rugs have an imperfection by design in them, because of the belief that only Allah can make perfection.

The length of the red carpet at the Dolby Theatre where the Academy Awards are held is about 500 feet. The width is thirty-three feet.

98% of British homes have carpeted floors. In Italy, only 2% do.

Sources Encyclopedia Britannica, Europress Encyclopedia

Carp

Closely related to the goldfish, carp are native to Asia and eastern Europe. 

The first treatise on carp culture was written by Fan Li, an ancient Chinese advisor in the state of Yue in the Spring and Autumn Period. It gave useful advice on the construction, harvesting and economic management of fishponds.

Monks brought them to western Europe from the 13th century as food. Carp ponds in the Middle Ages kept monasteries, courts and manors supplied with fresh food.

Image by Chat GBT

Monks fattened the carp up to feast on and they were a delicacy in Tudor England.

Anglers see carp as the cleverest freshwater fish. In The Compleat Angler (1653), Izaak Walton calls it a 'river-fox' and a 'very subtle fish.'

In 1983, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi blew up Richard Branson's prize carp. Iommi was at the Virgin head honcho's recording studios and launched fireworks into his private lake and accidentally destroyed some of his fish. Iommi described Branson as 'not happy at all' about it.

Demand for carp has declined in time, partly due to the appearance of more desirable table fish such as trout and salmon through intensive farming, and environmental constraints. However, in Germany and Austria carp is still part of Christmas Eve dinner.

Although the carp was not brought to the United States until 1876, it is now established in nearly all parts of the country.

In 2016 the Australian government released a strain of herpes into its waterways to kill an invasive European carp species.

Common carp can grow up to 5ft long.

Carp feed on water plants, crustaceans, insects and smaller fish.

They are often considered an invasive species because they can decimate other fish populations.

Carp have teeth at the back of the throat, which they use to crush and grind food.

One female can lay up to one million eggs in a single spawning. But many eggs and young fish perish because of disease or predators.

The biggest carp ever caught was a Siamese carp weighing 232 lbs (105 kg) landed at Gillhams Fishing Resorts in Krabi, Thailand, by British angler, John Harvey. 

In August 2011, while headlining the Tennent's Vital festival in Bangor, Northern Ireland, the rapper Eminem requested a custom wooden pond stocked with koi carp to be constructed in his private backstage garden area. The request was reportedly intended to create a relaxing environment before his performance.

Carp are amongst the longest-lived fish species, with wild specimens over 60 years old being recorded.

Source Daily Mail

Carousel

A carousel or merry-go-round is a traditional fairground attraction featuring a rotating circular platform with seats for riders—most commonly wooden or fiberglass horses mounted on vertical posts that move up and down to simulate galloping, accompanied by music.

In the UK, "merry-go-round" or "gallopers" is the traditional name, and these rides typically rotate clockwise. In the US and mainland Europe, "carousel" is the preferred industry term, and the rides almost always spin counterclockwise.

Below is a traditional steam-powered gallopers in Blists Hill Victorian Town in the UK, built by Thomas Walker in 1911.

Source Gaius Cornelius via Wikipedia

The earliest known record of a carousel device is a Byzantine etching from 500 AD which portrays riders swinging in baskets tied to a center pole.

The first fairground merry-go-round is referred to in records of an event in Philippolis, Turkey in 1620. 

In the early nineteenth century some advertisements claimed that riding the carousel was good for the circulation of blood.

The carousel developed from a training exercise used by knights and Ottoman/Arab horsemen in the 17th century, in which riders on horseback would toss balls to one another while circling — the Italian and Spanish word "garosello"/"carosella" (little battle) is the likely source of the name.

The world's oldest surviving operational carousel is the Hanau Carousel in Hanau-Wilhelmsbad State Park, Germany, built in 1780 and restored to working order in 2016.

The "brass ring" tradition, in which outer-row riders reach for a ring to win a free ride, grew out of ring-jousting practice and became a fairground staple from the 1870s to the early 1930s.

Carved carousel animals reached their artistic peak in America between 1880 and 1930, an era known as the "Golden Age of the Carousel," led by master carvers such as the Philadelphia Toboggan Company and Charles I. D. Looff.

The song "Carousel Waltz" by Richard Rodgers, the orchestral overture to the 1945 musical Carousel, is one of the most famous pieces of music associated with the ride, opening the show as the curtain rises on a working fairground carousel.

Carol

 In medieval times the word “carol” had a purely secular meaning. It originally referred to an open air dance, especially a ring-dance accompanied by singing, which later evolved into a merry song with a tune suggestive of dancing. They were often linked to pagan festivals or harvest time as well as Christmas.

Early Christmas carols included the 11th century "sys willekommen heirre kerst," the oldest surviving German Christmas carol.

A strong contender for the oldest Christmas carol that people still sing regularly today is The French version of "The Friendly Beasts" which goes back to the 12th century. The song was written about the animals surrounding Christ at the nativity.

In the thirteenth century St. Francis of Assisi and his fellow Franciscans understood the appeal of catchy carol tunes especially when compared to their rather more stern religious chants, so they borrowed them writing brand new Christian words to fit popular melodies bringing folk songs into churches along with the people who sang them. Among the Christian tunes they sang were some of the earliest Christmas carols around a nativity scene.

The earliest extant English Christmas carol, "A child is boren amonges man" can be found in a set of sermon notes written by a Franciscan friar in the early fourteenth century.

Prior to the fifteenth century the Church felt that Christmas should be celebrated in a solemn way and discouraged the singing of Christmas carols. However when the Church began to relax its attitude, there was a great increase in the writing of Christmas carols and they began to be sung in church. Most referred to the Virgin Mary, the Christ child, or the saints whose feasts follow Christmas. In Britain the earliest printed edition of a “sett of carols” was published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1521.

"Joy to the World" was written by Isaac Watts in 1719. The scripture-based words are from Psalm 98, in particular verse 4: "Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth, burst into jubilant song with music." It was not written as a Christmas song—the original theme was the second coming of Jesus our Lord and King.

The 19th century revival of interest in the Middle Ages and in folk music led to carols being collected and published. A great many pastiche carols were also written in the same Victorian burst of enthusiasm, but they have mainly been discarded by now in favor of the traditional ones.

Disaster hit the church at St. Nicholas in Oberndorf, Austria when the church organ broke down just before the Christmas of 1818. The curate, 26-year-old Josef Mohr, realized it couldn't be repaired in time to provide music on Christmas Eve. He recounted his troubles to his friend, a headmaster and amateur composer named Franz Gruber, while giving him as a present a poem he had written two years earlier. Gruber was so taken by the rhythm of the poem that he set it to music, and on Christmas Eve there was music after all. Mohr played his guitar while the pair sung the song. It was the first public performance of "Stille Nacht" or "Silent Night".

Autograph (c. 1860) of the carol by Franz Gruber

In the mid 1850s the Americans were only beginning to celebrate the Christmas traditions of their English forebearers. The influence of works such as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens were beginning to enthuse the American nation. "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear" was possibly the first Christmas song to be composed in the United States, which today is considered a standard. Within 20 years other classic carols celebrating Christmas such as "We Three Kings of Orient Are," "Jingle Bells" and "O Little Town Of Bethlehem" had been written in the United States.

"Away in a Manger" was first published in an 1885 Lutheran Sunday School book, by James R. Murray (1841-1905) but the author of the first two stanzas and the music's composer is unknown. The third stanza was added in 1904 by Dr. John McFarland of New York City. Because Murray published it with the subtitle "Luther's Cradle Hymn (Composed by Martin Luther for his children and still sung by German mothers to their little ones)" it created the misconception that the lyrics of "Away in a Manger" were actually written by Martin Luther himself.

Jonny Mark the writer of well-known Christmas classics such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree" and "A Holly Jolly Christmas" didn’t celebrate Christmas because he was Jewish.

Sources History World, The Big Issue and information previously written for Songfacts

Carnival

Carnival is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent. It is traditionally held in areas with a large Catholic and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox makeup.

The word "carnival" originally meant "a farewell to meat," referring to the Christian tradition of giving up meat during Lent. Some etymologists instead trace it to the Latin "carnem levare" ("the taking away of meat"), which became "carnelevare" in Old Italian and later "carnevale" - meaning the popular "farewell to flesh" explanation is likely a folk etymology rather than the true origin.

Dominican friar and preacher Girolamo Savonarola at the 1497 carnival of Florence organised a "bonfire of the vanities" at the carnival celebration before Lent, in which Florentine luxury goods, works of art, pornographic books and gambling equipment were publicly burnt.

The Carnival of Venice was first documented in 1296, when the Venetian Senate proclaimed a public festival on the day before the start of Lent; it was, for centuries, the most famous carnival in the world. Its subversive nature is reflected in the many laws Italy passed over the centuries attempting to restrict celebrations and the wearing of masks, and the tradition was halted when Venice fell under Austrian control in 1798 before being revived in the late 20th century.

Carnival in Venice, by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1750

The Carnival of Viareggio, the second most popular in Italy after Venice's, held its first masquerade in 1873 as a protest by the upper classes against heavy taxation, and in 2001 the town built a dedicated "Carnival citadel" for float-building and celebrations that continues to draw thousands of visitors each year.

The term “mark” originated from the carnival. When dishonest game operators found someone they could entice to keep playing their rigged game, they would "mark" the player by patting their back with a hand that had chalk on it. Other carnies would then keep an eye out for rubes with chalk marks.

The word Geek was originally an early 20th-century term for a carnival worker who was so unskilled that the only thing they could do at a carnival to attract a crowd was to bite off the heads of live animals such as chickens, snakes and rats and swallow them.

The Mardi Gras tradition, the French term for the final day of carnival, spread from Italy to Spain, Portugal and France, and from France on to New France in North America, eventually giving rise to famous celebrations such as those in New Orleans.

The street carnival of Rio de Janeiro is designated by Guinness World Records as the largest carnival in the world, attracting around two million people each day; its earliest form dates to 1641, when musical processions called "préstito" marked the coronation of King John IV of Portugal.

London's Notting Hill Carnival, founded in 1966 by Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones as a response to the racial tensions of the era, is now the second-largest carnival in the world after Rio and the largest street festival in Europe, drawing around two million attendees, 40,000 volunteers and 9,000 police each year.