Bed

BEDS IN HISTORY

Linen woven from flax were used by lakeside dwellers in Switzerland in 9000 BC. They used it to cover themselves and keep themselves warm as they sleep.

The first beds were used around 3400 BC after Egyptian pharaohs discovered the benefits of raising a pallet off the earth.

Ancient Egyptians did not use pillows on their beds, but had a carved headboard shaped to allow their neck and head to rest on it to sleep.

Several beds were found in the tomb of Tutankhamen including one that folded up for travelling and another of ebony and gold with a base of woven string to lie on.

Tutankhamun's gilded bed By Hans Ollermann - Wikipedia Commons

The Upper Class Romans owned beds decorated with gold, silver or bronze with mattresses stuffed with feathers, hay, reeds or wool. They also had waterbeds.

In the East in Bible times the bed was not a piece of furniture but a mat. Whole families slept on a single mat together. In the morning the mat was rolled up so that it did not take up so much space. People could, and did, quite easily take their "beds" around with them. Hence Jesus said to a man he had just healed: "Get up, take your mat and go home"

In 1495 The English Parliament passed a statute regulating the content of bed stuffing, requiring that it be good, clean feathers, not dirty old horse hair.

In the 1500s there was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

Britain’s largest bed, the Great Bed of Ware was built in 1596. It can accommodate 12 people.

The Great Bed of Ware, By The original uploader was VAwebteam at English Wikipedia 

Mattresses in Shakespeare’s time were filled with straw and held up with a rope stretched across the bed frame. If the rope was tight, sleep was comfortable. Hence the phrase, "sleep tight."

‘Bed’ is an Old English word but ‘bedroom’ arrived only in 1600.

William Shakespeare's will, still in existence, bequeathed most of his property to Susanna and her daughter. He left small mementos to friends. He mentioned his wife only once, leaving her his "second best bed" with its furnishings.

King Louis XIV of France’s rising in the morning and going to bed at night were attended by elaborate ceremonies called the "levee and couchee." Each noblemen had his own duty and part to play in these rituals. Louis collected beds, he owned 414 in total. All were elaborately carved, gilded and hung with costly embroideries. His great joy was the magnificent bed in the Palace of Versailles, on which were woven in gold the words "The Triumph of Venus". But when Louis married his religious second wife she had the pagan subject replaced by "The Sacrifice of Abraham."

Cast-iron beds and cotton mattresses were introduced in the middle of the 18th century.

Thomas Jefferson had 13 bedrooms at his Monticello home. All the beds were simply mattress supports hung on wall hooks.

The waterbed was invented in 1833 by the Scottish physician Neil Arnott. He intentionally did not patent it so that anyone could design their own variation of the waterbed and it could help as many people as it could who were suffering from bed sores.

In order to overcome insomnia Charles Dickens pointed the head of his bed north because of his belief in the powers of magnetic flow.

Mattresses with coiled springs inside were invented in 1865.

Victoria Woodhall, the radical feminist who was the first woman to run for the U.S. presidency in 1872, feared that she would die if she went to bed in her old age. She spent the last four years of her life sitting in a chair. (She died at the age of 89 in 1927.)

After near-fatal aircraft crash on July 7, 1946 Howard Hughes decided he did not like the design of the hospital bed he was laying in. He called in his engineers and had them design a new bed that would allow someone with severe burns to move freely. It became the prototype for the modern hospital bed.

In 1964 the first Habitat store opened in the United Kingdom. They were one of the first British stores to sell duvets and shoppers were so intrigued they would climb into the beds in the store to try them.

Almost one of every four beds sold in the late 1980s was a waterbed. Then the industry dried up in the 1990s.

FUN BED FACTS

The world's largest bed was created by Commissie Zomerfeesten St Gregorius Hertme in Hertme, the Netherlands, on May 28, 2011. It measures 26.5 m (86 ft 11 in) long and 16.44 m (53 ft 11 in) wide and can sleep 24 people. The bed was made by a team of volunteers and took over a week to build. It is made of wood and metal and covered with a mattress and bedding. 

The world's most expensive bed is the Baldacchino Supreme  at $6.3 million. The bed is hand-carved by Stuart Hughes from a combination of Ash, Cherry and Classy Canopy wood, with over 200 lbs of 24k gold and fine Italian silk fabric. Being hand carved, there are only two beds that have been made.

Kevin Wheatcroft, a British businessman and motor sport entrepreneur, is the owner of the world's largest collection of Nazi memorabilia. He sleeps in a bed once owned by Hitler, but has "changed the mattress."

The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time television was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Studies suggest that unmade beds are healthier for us than neat and made beds - Bed bugs have a harder time surviving in messy beds.

In a year, the average person walks four miles making his or her bed.

One out of every two million people will die by falling out of bed.

Clinophobia is the fear of beds.

Clinomania is the excessive desire to stay in bed.

Dysania is the technical term for finding it difficult to get out of bed in the morning.

Source Daily Express

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906 in the Foxrock suburb of Dublin, Ireland, to William Frank Beckett, a 35 year old Civil Engineer, and May Barclay (also 35 at Beckett's birth).

A natural athlete, Beckett played two first-class cricket matches for his university, Trinity College Dublin, against Northamptonshire in the Twenties. He was a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler.

Beckett is the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the bible of cricket.

After graduating from Trinity College Dublin, Becket took up the post of lecteur d'anglais in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He found himself there a member of the same circle of artists as renowned Irish writer James Joyce. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake.

Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia.

In 1932, Beckett wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1993).

In January 1938 in Paris, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed when he refused the advances of a notorious pimp called Prudent. Joyce arranged a private room for Beckett at the hospital. A tennis acquaintance of Beckett’s, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, heard about the attack and visited Beckett regularly in the hospital during his two week stay. 

Beckett and Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who was six years older, fell in love, lived together for many years, and eventually married in 1961.

Beckett joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by Germany, in which he worked as a courier. For over two years, he and Déchevaux-Dumesnil hid from the Germans in a village in the South of France. Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation. 

The Theatre of the Absurd is a post-World War II movement that emerged as a reaction to the horrors and lack of meaning experienced during the war.  Playwrights used humor, parody, and illogical situations to explore themes of existentialism, alienation, and the absurdity of human existence in a seemingly meaningless universe.

Samuel Beckett is considered one of the most important figures of the Theatre of the Absurd. His plays perfectly capture the movement's essence.

Beckett first won international acclaim for his play En attendant Godot, which was first performed on January 5, 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris. The original French production was directed by Roger Blin, who also played the role of Pozzo1. The play's debut marked a significant shift in modern drama. It challenged conventional theatrical norms by presenting a minimalist set, sparse dialogue, and a seemingly plotless narrative centered around two characters waiting for someone who never arrives in Paris, The play was later premiered in his own translation as Waiting for Godot in London in 1955 and New York in 1956.

The premiere of Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone

He was renowned for the bleakness of his work. Beckett's most well-known line of prose was arguably: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Samuel Beckett bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet around 60 km (40 mi) northeast of Paris. He built a cottage for himself with the help of Boris Roussimoff, the father of French professional wrestler and actor André the Giant. 

Beckett used to drive a young André the Giant to school in his truck because he was too large for the bus. When André recounted the drives with Beckett, he revealed that they rarely talked about anything other than cricket.

In October 1969 while on holiday in Tunis with Déchevaux-Dumesnil, Beckett heard that he had won the Nobel Prize For Literature. In true ascetic fashion, he gave away all of the prize money.

Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and Samuel Beckett

Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Samuel Beckett died on December 22, 1989. He was interred together with his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. They share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be "any color, so long as it's grey."

Source Mentalfloss.com

Saint Thomas Becket

Thomas Becket was born in Cheapside, London on December 21, 1119 (or 1120 according to later tradition.) He came from relatively humble origins, his father, Gilbert Beckett, meaning "Little Beak", was part of a Norman family of knights, who originally came from Rouen in France.

Becket was educated by monks at Merton Priory, Surrey, where he learnt to read and City Grammar, London. He then studied canon law in Bologna, Italy and Auxerre, France.

Becket was appointed Lord Chancellor in January 1155. As Chancellor, Becket became a good friend of King Henry II of England. It was commented they acted like two schoolboys at play.

 14th-century depiction of Becket with King Henry II Wikipedia Commons

                      
After being appointed chancellor by the king, Becket amassed such wealth that 52 clerks were needed to run his affairs.

At Tarring on the outskirts of Worthing in Sussex, there is a fig orchard said to be descended from a tree planted by Becket.

After being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket fell out with the king as the interests of the Roman Catholic medieval church conflicted with those of the crown and he was forced into exile in France.

Thomas Becket enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury from a Nottingham Alabaster by Saracen78 

Becket was six foot tall, strong jawed, slim, pale skinned, with dark hair, a long nose and a straightly featured face. His forehead was creased with frown lines. 

Becket dressed in fine clothes such as scarlet furs until his appointment as Archbishop when he adopted a more austere style. In his final years he wore a lice ridden hair shirt next to his skin.

Becket introduced a two-pronged fork to England after his continental exile but when he tried to explain that one of the advantages of the fork was it could be washed Henry II replied “But, so can your hands”.

After Becket fled to France, his dispute with Henry remained unsettled, the King refusing to give the kiss of peace on which the Archbishop insisted if there was to be a reconciliation. Instead Henry conducted a campaign of attrition against his former friends' associates expelling many of them. In return Becket excommunicated his adversaries.

In 1170 Henry had his eldest Son, also named Henry, crowned by the Archbishop of York, a violation of the Archbishop of Canterbury's traditional right. The exasperated Becket returned to England, landing in Sandwich. His entry into Canterbury was triumphant, the common people flocked to show their adulation.

On hearing that Becket still refused to absolve the Archbishop of York and his associates from excommunication and indeed had excommunicated some more. Henry  roared "what miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and prompted in my household, who let their Lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low born clerk. This fellow who has eaten my bread has lifted up his heel against me."(a quote from Psalm 41 v 9). "Have I no friend who will rob me of this upstart Priest."

Four knights took their King at his word and set off  to confront then kill the Archbishop. Becket was assassinated on December 29, 1170 at Canterbury Cathedral.

Illumination from an English Book of Hours 

Becket's death caused a scandal in all of western Christendom. When the clothes were removed from his dead body, it was discovered that unbeknown to anyone, he was wearing a hair shirt riddled with lice and maggots, the skin on his chest ripped to shred. Becket was immediately a saint and martyr.

In the years following his death many miraculous cures were said to have occurred at Becket's shrine. Indeed 700 miracles were recorded in the decade after his assassination at the crypt.

Becket was canonized in 1172. His feast day is December 29th.

At one stage during the Hundred Years War, the King of France obtained a cease-fire to enable him to make a pilgrimage to see Becket's tomb at Canterbury.

Becket was the first Englishman since the Norman conquest, a hundred years before, to hold high office and the first commoner of any kind to make his mark on English history.

Pilgrim's Way, a country route from London to Canterbury over the Downs, which was used for centuries by pilgrims visiting Becket's grave, still exists.

Boris Becker

Boris Becker was born on November 22, 1967 in Leimen, Germany, the only son of Elvira and Karl-Heinz Becker. 

Boris Becker’s father Karl-Heinz, an architect, designed the tennis center where Becker learned to play the game. 

He and Steffi Graf played against each other in training matches as children.

Boris Becker became the first unseeded player to win the Wimbledon's men's singles title in 1985.

Becker is also the youngest men's Wimbledon champ in history (at age 17 years, 7 months).

The German tennis star went on to win 49 singles titles and 15 doubles titles. His Grand Slam singles titles comprise three Wimbledon Championships, two Australian Opens and one US Open.

Becker in 1994 By Flickr-User mandj98 

Becker left his £200,000 for winning Wimbledon in 1989 in his tracksuit bottoms - only for his mother to wash them, destroying the check. He had to go back and ask for another one.

Since his playing career ended, Becker has engaged in numerous ventures, including coaching Novak Djokovic for three years, a commentator for the BBC at Wimbledon, and appearing in the European Poker Tour and the World Poker Tour. 

Becker was married to Barbara Feltis from 1993 to 2001 and on June 12, 2009, he married Dutch model Lilly Kerssenberg in St Moritz, Switzerland. In May 2018, Lilly and Becker announced that they had separated after nine years of marriage. 

He has four children named Anna, Elias, Noah and Amadeus. Becker famously fathered Anna with Russian waitress Angela Ermakova in the broom cupboard of a London restaurant while his first wife was pregnant with their second child. 

On June 21, 2017, Becker was declared bankrupt by the Bankruptcy and Companies Court in London. Becker was legally charged with hiding millions of dollars in assets. including failing to hand over trophies in satisfaction of his debt during his bankruptcy, He was found guilty of four charges under the Insolvency Act. and on April 29, 2022, Becker was sentenced to 30 months imprisonment for the offences. 

Sidney Bechet

Jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer Sidney Bechet was born on May 14, 1897 in New Orleans. Bechet's father Omar was both a shoemaker and a flute player, and all four of his brothers were musicians as well.

He began playing his brother's clarinet at the age of 6 playing at a family birthday party.

Bechet studied clarinet in New Orleans with Lorenzo Tio, Big Eye Louis Nelson, and George Baquet and he developed so quickly that as a child he was soon playing with some of the top bands in the city.

Bechet's primary instruments were the clarinet and the soprano saxophone.

During a 1919-20 tour of Europe with a concert group, Bechet became the first jazz musician to receive critical attention.

He was one of the first important soloists in jazz (beating Louis Armstrong to the recording studio by several months). Bechet recorded "Wild Cat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues". "Wild Cat Blues" is in a multi-thematic ragtime tradition, with four themes, at sixteen bars each, and "Kansas City Man Blues" is a genuine 12-bar blues.

He was with Duke Ellington's early orchestra for a period.

Bechet and Josephine Baker were part of the Revue Nègre, which toured in Europe in 1925. Bechet toured Europe with multiple bands, reaching as far as the Soviet Union in mid-1926

Sidney Bechet in 1922

After being found guilty of assaulting a woman, Bechet was imprisoned in London from September 13 to 26, 1922. He was jailed again in Paris in the late 1920s when a female passer-by was wounded during a shoot-out. After serving time in prison, Bechet was deported to the United States.

After a lean couple of decades, Sidney Bechet's fortunes changed drastically in 1949. He was invited to the Salle Pleyel Jazz Festival in Paris, caused a sensation, and decided to move permanently overseas

In 1953, he signed a recording contract with French Vogue, which lasted for the rest of his life. He recorded many hit tunes, including the international hit "Petite Fleur."

Bechet died in Garches, near Paris, of lung cancer on May 14, 1959 on his 62nd birthday. He is buried in a local cemetery.

Source Allmusic

Bebop

Bebop is a jazz style characterized by a fast tempo and ever-shifting chord changes.

It was developed in the early 1940s by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and other black musicians reacting against swing music.

According to Dizzy Gillespie, the audiences coined the name after hearing him scat the then-nameless tunes to his players and the press ultimately picked it up, using it as an official term: "People, when they'd wanna ask for those numbers and didn't know the name, would ask for bebop."

Many bop pieces were played at the fastest tempos yet heard in jazz. Bop featured many-noted solos and unusual, quickly changing harmonies.

The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums, and piano. This was a format used (and popularized) by both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in their 1940s groups and recordings.

The famous jazz musician Miles Davis started out as a teenager playing bebop with Charlie Parker.

 

Below is Charlie Parker with (from left to right) Tommy Potter, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Duke Jordan, at the Three Deuces, New York, circa 1945

On April 25, 1955, the United Nation's commission on narcotics releases a report stating "definite connection between increased marijuana smoking and that form of entertainment known as bebop and rebop."

Even though bebop was difficult to sing, a few vocalists such as Sarah Vaughan had the necessary control and wide voice range. 

A biographical movie called Bird, about Charlie Parker, directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, was released in 1988. The film stemmed from Eastwood's enthusiasm for bebop. 

Source Songfacts

Beaver

The beaver is a semiaquatic mammal of the family Castoridae in the rodent order, noted for the building of dams. They are native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Beavers are the second-largest living rodents, after the South American capybara.

The beaver is usually about 76 cm (about 30 in) long. It stands less than 30 cm (12 in) high, and the broad, flat, scaly tail is about 25 cm (about 10 in) long. 

Flickr

They weigh 11–30 kg (24–66 lb).

Beavers have transparent eyelids that work like goggles and can stay underwater for 15 minutes. They swim at an average of 5 mph.

Beavers have orange teeth because they are made of iron instead of magnesium like other rodents. The iron causes the orange coloring in beavers’ teeth, makes the teeth stronger against mechanical stress, and makes them more resistant to acid.

They have four razor-sharp incisors for cutting and 16 back teeth for chewing. Their front teeth never stop growing.

They can cut down a 6in diameter tree in three minutes - faster than a human with an axe.

A beaver can fell up to 300 trees in a single winter.

BEHAVIOR

They live in family groups. Older offspring help look after the babies.

European beavers are faithful to one another but American beavers regularly cheat on each other.

Beavers are herbivorous, but in March 2013 a fisherman in Belarus died from his injuries after a beaver chomped on his leg when he tried to catch it, severing a major artery.

They eat reeds, leaves, bark, herbs, ferns, grasses, and water lilies.

Beavers dam stream and rivers with branches, mud and stones to create still, deep pools. This enables them to build a lodge for refuge during the winter.

Lodges made by beavers have two chambers. The floor of the first chamber is a few inches above the water level and is used to dry off after coming out of the water. The floor of the second chamber is above the first, and is used for sleeping and caring for kits (baby beavers).

A beaver's lodge and dam is the largest structure built by any animal.

The largest beaver dam known to exist is currently in Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada and measures 850 metres (2,789 ft) in length.

Beavers hate the sound of running water so much that they will build dams around speakers that are playing the sound of water running over rocks.

Pixiebay

BEAVERS AND HUMANS

When beavers lived in the wild, their flat, scaly tail led many Roman Catholics to class them as fish-which meant Catholics could eat them on Fridays.

Beavers have long been exploited for their fur, and for many years during the 18th and 19th centuries hundreds of thousands of beaver skins were exported to Europe from North America annually

As well as being hunted for meat and fur, beavers are also valued for a secretion from their anal glands called castoreum, which was used as a pain relief in medieval times. It’s still used in perfumes and as a food additive.

Protections have allowed the beaver population on the American continent to rebound to an estimated 6–12 million by the late 20th century; this is a fraction of the originally estimated 60–400 million North American beavers before the days of the fur trade.

Canada sent 50 beavers to into Argentina's Tierra del Fuego province in 1946 to help start a fur trade. There are now over 100,000, and they have devastated over 16 million hectares.

European beaver numbers fell to 1,200 at the turn of the 20th century but they have been reintroduced to more than 20 countries. In 2020, the total beaver population in Europe was estimated at over one million

Sources Daily Mail, Radio Times