There's something so innocently charming about this whole story, the idea of an aristocrat taking his pineapple down the street to impress his peers is ridiculously funny.
You mean like a tech bro marketing his social app and pretending he has a lucrative startup that pays actual money instead of nothing? That kind of ridiculous falsehood to impress peers?
Driving an expensive car with its muffler removed, so that you get +5 HP but also so that everyone in the neighborhood hears, and sees, your expensive car.
> I can't wait for the Tesla Roaster 2.0 to be delivered in volume (idem for its motorbike equivalent), so I can finally sleep with open windows.
If it's accelerating using cold gas thrusters (SpaceX package) it'll be extremely loud. Thankfully it'll probably only have 1-2 seconds of juice from the air tanks.
In terms of items which you would see associated with satirical depictions of wealth and waste, over sized bottles of champagne spring to mind, truffles and caviar too.
Except magnum champagne, truffles, and caviar are all available at grocery stores. To be equivalent to a 1700's pineapple, they'd have to be so difficult to acquire via import that growing your own, in an unsuitable climate, would be worthwhile.
I guess I was thinking of which flex would be equally absurd to future generations as the pineapple. Expensive goods have always been a “flex” but most expensive goods don’t become so widely available and affordable so quickly. 200 years ago a pineapple would’ve cost $15,000 and today pineapple can be bought by the neediest members of society using food stamps. I don’t think the same will be true of a Rolex in 2220.
In the nineteenth century, aluminium was more expensive than gold. By the twentieth it would be used for wrapping potluck dishes.
===
Montaigne was proud of his library, all manner of elites of their realistic portraits, and white sportswear used to imply someone else had to wash the grass stains out.
Expensive wines/liquors never stopped being a flex of wealth/status.
Luxury consumption has become much more diverse, so there isn't something as universal as the pineapple anymore. But if you spend time around it, you can feel it in the air.
It's funny to us now, because we are free from the social signals of that time but for those people it was serious.
Also, we have similar signals today. For example, a handmade Swiss watch signals for which you pay for months of a skilled artisan's work, all for something whose ultimate function you could replicate with a $20 watch.
In South Africa right now alcohol sales have been banned as part of the regulations to deal with covid-19 pandemic. This has led to the rise in popularity of the pineapple as it is used to make home made booze.[0]
Edit: In my head what I was trying to say was obvious. In hindsight it's not.
The practice started because text interspersed with long urls is difficult to read. It's a good solution, so everyone started doing it all the time. It's done in situations like this where it isn't strictly necessary probably because most of us are programmers and don't like making exceptions to a rule for specific circumstances. That's the theory I'm going with anyway.
I think zero makes sense as array indices when it refers to an offset as some kind. But I find it more intuitive for counters to start at one, in line with colloquial ('1st' and 'first') and mathematical usage.
I think it partly comes from Markdown which will convert links written in this style into inline-links with custom link text. HN doesn't actually support this style of markdown, but I believe Reddit does.
Markdown was created in 2004. Using footnotes for URLs likely goes back to near the creation of the web itself (1989~1991) -- not on web pages necessarily (but see Wikipedia for counterexample) but in plaintext discussions about web pages, such as in newsgroups.
It's similar to the way markdown allows for text decoration via asterisks (strong) and underscores (emphasis): people used such plaintext decorations long before any expectation that it could lead to more typical presentations such as bold and italic (italic and underline are grammatically interchangeable, and underscores approximate an underline).
Remembering that Markdown effectively started as a "discovered" syntax instead of an "invented" syntax.
```
Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email.
```
...at its core, Markdown was a codification of decades of habits found in README.txt files, and "footnote-style links" were unusual but relatively frequently used. They could be with numbers[0] or referring to a short abbreviation like [daring-fireball], and very likely the true origin was how a type-written page would have handled a footnote or reference.
It's a way to do hyperlinked text when true hyperlinked text is not available. Links in mid-text are really annoying, so we replace them with a 'footnote'. I agree it's a little bizarre when it's a single line of text with a single link, but it's just the same pattern.
The most accurate answer would be "HN started as a community of fans of Paul Graham's essays, and this is the syntax he uses in his essays, so this style was imported to HN and thrives to this day".
It's also the standard format for non-pg essays, and published content. And, as hyperlinks aren't available in HN comments, this is the least disruptive way to insert text.
Specifically [1]-style footnotes weren't popular in the early days of HN, but everyone on HN used them. I guess today I see them a lot more all over the web.
I suppose charitable interpretations are just not an option, then?
Long links in the middle of sentences or paragraphs are annoying. Since HN doesn't allow hyperlinking, having a list of links at the bottom is the least disruptive option.
Inline raw links are annoying to read because either the link is properly constructed and just repeats the text leading up to it, or is a horrible mess of tracking GUIDs. Since most people aren’t going to click the link it serves more people to get the link out of the way.
As I'm writing a comment, I don't know how many links I will include. If I need to go back and edit it for the special case of N=1, that is additional effort.
I do not like the cluttered look of links interspersed throughout the text and it is not even clear that they provide value for most of the readers. This is why I prefer to collect them at the end, one per line for those who actually want to look them up.
They are essential, what do you think severe alcoholics would do without a supply of alcohol? Severe alcoholics are the ones that would potentially die from withdrawal.
I can't help but see a slight resemblance to the induced scarcity of certain Instagram famous houseplants such as a monstera albo variegata, for which buyers will regularly spend several hundred dollars for a tiny cutting in hopes of propagating one for themselves.
The lengths wealthy people go to outdo one another are just absurd. I heard a segment on the radio about the Atlantic salmon fly-tying community, who tie based on historic patterns that used ever rarer bird feathers.
Modern tiers are faced with a choice now that the birds that were rare then have become even rarer (or extinct): Tie with something else, or find a source of authentic feathers.
The segment was an interview with the author of The Feather Thief[0], who investigated the lengths one "enterprising" tier went to to acquire authentic feathers, destroying the historical scientific record for whole species in the process.
It seems insane that a fad of rich men from a long time ago becomes the obsession of a subculture of the larger fly tying community and that the result of that is a hole in the scientific record. It's enough to make you wish that folks would get obsessed with growing rare pineapples instead.
At least that's a unique human experience that countless numbers of our species have dreamed of doing one way or another. The same cannot be said of fly fishing.
And as a percentage of the population, I'd be willing to wager they're far smaller than the number of humans who've looked up at the sky and dreamt of what the Earth looks like from the cosmos.
I think we’re deviating a bit here. My point was that while most people might dream that, by and large going up there in space enabled by complex technology is in a few ways similar to asserting wealth via pineapples or large yachts or exotic cars. Yay, I got money, I can do it, look!
I think the point is that this is easily separable from money. If tomorrow, going to space became a pedestrian affair, available to all, a sizable chunk of this interested would still want to do it. The impulse isn't as status-driven as you describe it: wanting to see the Earth from space doesnt derive most of its value from being the only one that gets to do it. Compare it to seeing the Grand Canyon. Nobody goes there because they think it's a unique privilege. They pack in amongst the Midwestern tourists because the Grand Canyon is amazing.
Would they really? I bet most people wouldn't want to go into space. A lot of people can now bungee-jump, fly their own planes, fly in a balloon, paraglide, deep dive, yet how many do any of these things.
I've done a handful of these things, and they seem categorically different from being in space: even low Earth orbit _feels_ noticeably different from skydiving etc (I'm also making the assumption that it's safer than eg paragliding). I suppose we're just starting from different assumptions about what captures the imagination of the average person. At the very least, I'd be surprised if the average current spaceflight customer was more driven by status than by excitement about space per se.
If you asked any given person on the street whether they'd like to see the Earth from space, I'd be willing to wager serious money they'd be more likely to say yes than no, given that it were easily accessible and the money would be taken care of. Those activities you listed have quite a bit of money and time needed to do. But the desires are all absolutely there.
When you're talking about fly fishing, you're already selecting for {time to fish} && {unwilling to pursue the most efficient method of catching fish}. So it's not a leap to && {slightly crazy}.
I remember seeing fly fishing rights for sale on a stretch of the Spey - I think it was something like £40,000. Which I initially though was amazingly expensive.
Then I realised that just for one week a year!
Also, the statistics they provided suggest that each fish you caught would cost about the same as a cheap car.
You get folks who just do it as a hobby (because it's not that expensive), die hard folks who live it (but aren't that wealthy), plus ultra-wealthy folks (who are generally jealous of the former!). I think it's the peace and tranquillity that attracts.
Add to that, that at least in the US, Trout Unlimited is without a doubt the most politically-connected pure sportsperson lobbying organization.
Apparently in the US there are about: 7M fly fishers [1], 9M skiers + snowboarders [2], about 3.2M SCUBA divers [3], 14M "active camping households" (3 or more times in a year) [4], and 48M hikers [5]. To pull a few outdoor activities, because I was curious.
Fly fishing feels more like bird-watching to me though: in that it's relatively easy and cheap to do, but not a thing you would ever do accidentally.
Hunting/fishing in Europe is traditionally something the landed gentry did and priced accordingly. It's all orders of magnitude cheaper in the US and Canada.
It very much depends on the type of hunting or fishing though - coarse and sea fishing is a very popular activity. Mind you - you can go fishing in some very nice spots for relatively small amounts of money:
Are Americans buying land in Scotland specifically for fly fishing? Not that I don't love visiting Scotland, it just seems unnecessarily expensive and far when Montana offers vast areas of (to my knowledge) world-class fly fishing without an international flight.
Yet the last time I watched an industrial fishing net unload they dumped about a ton of bycatch to the sea lions. They are pretty efficient at killing unwanted species.
>Unwanted catch is an issue both ecologically and economically. Animals that are discarded often die and cannot reproduce, impacting marine ecosystems. Bycatch can slow the rebuilding of overfished stocks, and place protected species such as whales and sea turtles at further risk. Bycatch of species like corals and sponges can cause damage to protected corals and to important fish habitat.
Was luck enough to get a tour of the bird's egg collection at National History Museum at Tring, and also see some of the huge number of "skins" they also had. We were there to donate my father-in-law's egg collection - which they only accepted because it had his collecting notes from 30's and 40's (illegal now to even have such a collection I think).
Anyway they did require passports to be presented when we arrived for tour, and said security was upped since someone had a tour and then came back and stole a significant amount of the skins.
Wealthy people who want to signal wealth display conspicuously expensive things, which pineapples once were. That’s obvious enough. Luxury beliefs are about expressing class, which is distinct from wealth though somewhat correlated.
In fact, signaling wealth, or signaling it crudely enough, often signals lower class.
Obligatory: "But you're leaving out women's historical involvement!"
"The Women of Fly Tying
OKAY BOYS, GET OVER IT: women have made some of the most important contributions in the fine art of fly tying.
By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying (The Whitefish Press), by Erin Block, is a celebration of the critical impact women have made on tying flies. Erin includes the work and stories of Dame Juliana Berners, Mary Orvis Marbury, Elizabeth Greig, Winnie Dette, Mary Dette Clark, Elsie Darbee, Helen Shaw, Megan Boyd, and Frances Stearns, along with modern tiers Sharon E. Wright (Sharon is a regular contributor to Fly Tyer magazine), Cathy Beck, and April Vokey.
Do you like a good mystery? Erin solves one by uncovering what ever happened to Sara Jane McBride, the famed fly tier who was also America’s first entomological fly angler.
Erin’s flies have appeared in Fly Tyer magazine, and we will have fuller coverage of her new book in a future issue of our magazine. In the meantime, congratulations to Erin for making such an important contribution to the literature on fly tying!
To buy a copy of By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying, go to www.whitefishpress.com."
Thank you for posting this. The figures, modern and historic, in the book were IIRC entirely men. As a bewildered outsider, I extrapolated from that, but I'm delighted to learn that this sport appeals to a broader audience than is represented in the book :-)
> The lengths wealthy people go to outdo one another are just absurd.
I’m not sure this is limited to wealthy people. I see plenty of non-wealthy people taking 5-year car loans that they can’t afford in order to purchase a luxury car.
Pineapple as status symbol; car as status symbol.
It might just be a human trait not dependent on wealth, like ostentatious male peacocks showing off their plumage.
Fashion and status signaling happen in all kinds of ways, and always have. It doesn't have to be only the rich, just look at the status of sneakers amongst low-income Americans. People like to stand out just like animals might have ever bigger horns/peacocks/claws/colors to signal that they're a great mate.
The larger body of work here is called 'signaling theory' and you can see it apply equally between animal and human domains. Pineapples first started as honest signals because only the wealthy could afford them. But once people started renting pineapples they became a dishonest signal, until the economics finally made it crash into either a costly signal (you should know they're no longer in vogue) or a lack of information at all (today).
>the status of sneakers amongst low-income Americans.
Not to discount your point, but there are a lot of very, very wealthy sneakerheads. It isn't low-income Americans that pick up 10k worth of limited designer run sneakers on launch day.
There might be, but it doesn’t really change that it’s a big status signal amongst lower income groups. The wealthy might like them but 10k doesn’t even register as a wealthy signal.
It's consistent with the fact that no worthwhile crop grew in the dry tropical portion of Brazil until the 20th century. But it is really unsettling to think that pineapples are not natively tropical.
(But on a second thought, even today they do have the best pineapples there.)
"Piper Gilbert Kerr (with pipes) alongside a penguin, March 1904"
Much as I disapprove of wiki vandals, I think this is a harmless injection of light humour into yet another dreary badly mangled wikipedia article (not the topic itself, just the way that wikipedians slowly squeeze the life out the written word revision by revision).
One, there is a variety of pineapple (white pineapple) you can only get in Hawaii because it is too delicate to ship that really is tastier than what you find in U.S. supermarkets.
Two, this article doesn’t address the crazy urban rumor I heard years ago that people who place pineapple flags outside their homes, at least in the suburbs, are signaling that they are swingers.
It helps that pineapples are really delicious. Also, eating them is sort of a family project. Everyone observes the thing sitting on the kitchen counter like a little potentate, waiting for it to ripen. Then it must be sliced up in the best way to remove the horrible armor while saving every bit of the delicious flesh. All that work is worth it, though: unlike other labor-intensive fruit e.g. pomegranates they're big enough to flavor multiple meals. Pineapples seem particularly well-designed to demand the spotlight.
This is only because of modern refrigeration. In centuries past a pineapple, or any other tropical fruit was ripe by the time a pineapple made it to NYC or London.
The last sentence in the article mentions celery as a luxury good:
"No, they didn't. Dr O'Hagan says the truly wealthy then set their caps at another luxury and difficult-to-grow food. Celery."
Does anyone have a good link to the story about how celery became a luxury item? The obsession with pineapple as an exotic luxury makes at least some sense to me. But...celery??
I grew up in a city with a lot of Colonial buildings, and you'll often notice pineapples carved into them (above the front door, for example). My grandmother told me they symbolize hospitality, which Wikipedia confirms:
In architecture, pineapple figures became decorative elements symbolizing hospitality.
So I guess the story doesn't really end where the article does! I wonder how much revisionism is involved there: at the time they were actually carved into the architecture, were they intended to symbolize wealth? Or hospitality?
Here's a great example, it was actually the first result on Google Images for "newport colonial home". Scroll through the pictures and count how many pineapples you can find:
134 comments
[ 71.2 ms ] story [ 3229 ms ] threadI can't wait for the Tesla Roaster 2.0 to be delivered in volume (idem for its motorbike equivalent), so I can finally sleep with open windows.
Old habits die hard.
If it's accelerating using cold gas thrusters (SpaceX package) it'll be extremely loud. Thankfully it'll probably only have 1-2 seconds of juice from the air tanks.
Next up, flamethrowers on the front?
(founded in 1766, so they may have overlapped a bit with the pine apple...)
All of them have cheaper, equally functional equivalents, but people very conspicuously overpay for more than they need with all of them.
Cars, watches been the typical examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
[1] going for 1,2 M USD in 1963 (a 0,7 MIPS 48-bit machine). Figure at least an order of magnitude more in 2020 USD?
[2] p. 6 http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
====
In the nineteenth century, aluminium was more expensive than gold. By the twentieth it would be used for wrapping potluck dishes.
===
Montaigne was proud of his library, all manner of elites of their realistic portraits, and white sportswear used to imply someone else had to wash the grass stains out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7J7vXCf5w
Expensive wines/liquors never stopped being a flex of wealth/status.
Luxury consumption has become much more diverse, so there isn't something as universal as the pineapple anymore. But if you spend time around it, you can feel it in the air.
Also, we have similar signals today. For example, a handmade Swiss watch signals for which you pay for months of a skilled artisan's work, all for something whose ultimate function you could replicate with a $20 watch.
[0]https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/07/18/...
It's not a jab at the parent comment, I am simply interested if it's some kind of cargo cult, or I may be missing something here.
Edit: In my head what I was trying to say was obvious. In hindsight it's not.
The practice started because text interspersed with long urls is difficult to read. It's a good solution, so everyone started doing it all the time. It's done in situations like this where it isn't strictly necessary probably because most of us are programmers and don't like making exceptions to a rule for specific circumstances. That's the theory I'm going with anyway.
But seriously, footnotes keep the text cleaner.
But I digress :)
As for the footnote vs inline style I find ugly urls a distraction while reading and it's easy enough to match up footnote numbers.
It's similar to the way markdown allows for text decoration via asterisks (strong) and underscores (emphasis): people used such plaintext decorations long before any expectation that it could lead to more typical presentations such as bold and italic (italic and underline are grammatically interchangeable, and underscores approximate an underline).
``` Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email. ```
...at its core, Markdown was a codification of decades of habits found in README.txt files, and "footnote-style links" were unusual but relatively frequently used. They could be with numbers[0] or referring to a short abbreviation like [daring-fireball], and very likely the true origin was how a type-written page would have handled a footnote or reference.
[0]: http://example.com/ [daring-fireball]: https://daringfireball.com/
[1] footnote
Long links in the middle of sentences or paragraphs are annoying. Since HN doesn't allow hyperlinking, having a list of links at the bottom is the least disruptive option.
Trust me, there was many a laugh at ourselves about that one.
Edit: This is what happens when you don’t consider alcohol essential: https://allafrica.com/stories/202006020490.html
Modern tiers are faced with a choice now that the birds that were rare then have become even rarer (or extinct): Tie with something else, or find a source of authentic feathers.
The segment was an interview with the author of The Feather Thief[0], who investigated the lengths one "enterprising" tier went to to acquire authentic feathers, destroying the historical scientific record for whole species in the process.
It seems insane that a fad of rich men from a long time ago becomes the obsession of a subculture of the larger fly tying community and that the result of that is a hole in the scientific record. It's enough to make you wish that folks would get obsessed with growing rare pineapples instead.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44153387-the-feather-thi...
Absolutely agree with this. There are far better ways of flexing status on Earth than paying for a space trip.
(Said as a fly fisherman)
Then I realised that just for one week a year!
Also, the statistics they provided suggest that each fish you caught would cost about the same as a cheap car.
You get folks who just do it as a hobby (because it's not that expensive), die hard folks who live it (but aren't that wealthy), plus ultra-wealthy folks (who are generally jealous of the former!). I think it's the peace and tranquillity that attracts.
Add to that, that at least in the US, Trout Unlimited is without a doubt the most politically-connected pure sportsperson lobbying organization.
What you described is also true for skiing, scuba diving, mountain diving and any number of other outdoor pursuits.
Fly fishing feels more like bird-watching to me though: in that it's relatively easy and cheap to do, but not a thing you would ever do accidentally.
[1] https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2018-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/376710/active-skiers-and... [3] https://www.dema.org/store/download.aspx?id=7811B097-8882-47... [4] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170315005391/en/Cam... [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-h...
e.g.
http://www.glensherup-fishery.co.uk/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-47963208
NB Doesn't matter who owns it, we can still walk over it!
What's the most efficient method of catching fish?
Currently? Very large industrial fishing nets.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-bycatch...?
>Unwanted catch is an issue both ecologically and economically. Animals that are discarded often die and cannot reproduce, impacting marine ecosystems. Bycatch can slow the rebuilding of overfished stocks, and place protected species such as whales and sea turtles at further risk. Bycatch of species like corals and sponges can cause damage to protected corals and to important fish habitat.
Explosives, hands down, by a wide margin. Most people aren't optimizing for pure efficiency though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_pulse_fishing
I do both: I trot bait when the river I fish is unsuitable for the fly.
https://youtu.be/xVnRHN2u5GM?t=321
Have you heard of "luxury beliefs"? [1]
[1]: https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...
In my mind, they have yet to live down the "Headless body found in topless bar" front page article.
https://nypost.com/2015/06/09/new-york-post-editor-and-film-...
Wealthy people who want to signal wealth display conspicuously expensive things, which pineapples once were. That’s obvious enough. Luxury beliefs are about expressing class, which is distinct from wealth though somewhat correlated.
In fact, signaling wealth, or signaling it crudely enough, often signals lower class.
Obligatory: "But you're leaving out women's historical involvement!"
"The Women of Fly Tying
OKAY BOYS, GET OVER IT: women have made some of the most important contributions in the fine art of fly tying.
By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying (The Whitefish Press), by Erin Block, is a celebration of the critical impact women have made on tying flies. Erin includes the work and stories of Dame Juliana Berners, Mary Orvis Marbury, Elizabeth Greig, Winnie Dette, Mary Dette Clark, Elsie Darbee, Helen Shaw, Megan Boyd, and Frances Stearns, along with modern tiers Sharon E. Wright (Sharon is a regular contributor to Fly Tyer magazine), Cathy Beck, and April Vokey.
Do you like a good mystery? Erin solves one by uncovering what ever happened to Sara Jane McBride, the famed fly tier who was also America’s first entomological fly angler.
Erin’s flies have appeared in Fly Tyer magazine, and we will have fuller coverage of her new book in a future issue of our magazine. In the meantime, congratulations to Erin for making such an important contribution to the literature on fly tying!
To buy a copy of By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying, go to www.whitefishpress.com."
https://www.flytyer.com/women-fly-tying/
I’m not sure this is limited to wealthy people. I see plenty of non-wealthy people taking 5-year car loans that they can’t afford in order to purchase a luxury car.
Pineapple as status symbol; car as status symbol.
It might just be a human trait not dependent on wealth, like ostentatious male peacocks showing off their plumage.
I think you mean 7-year car loans. Or a lease.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/654/the-feather-heist
The larger body of work here is called 'signaling theory' and you can see it apply equally between animal and human domains. Pineapples first started as honest signals because only the wealthy could afford them. But once people started renting pineapples they became a dishonest signal, until the economics finally made it crash into either a costly signal (you should know they're no longer in vogue) or a lack of information at all (today).
Not to discount your point, but there are a lot of very, very wealthy sneakerheads. It isn't low-income Americans that pick up 10k worth of limited designer run sneakers on launch day.
It's consistent with the fact that no worthwhile crop grew in the dry tropical portion of Brazil until the 20th century. But it is really unsettling to think that pineapples are not natively tropical.
(But on a second thought, even today they do have the best pineapples there.)
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/st-pauls-gold-pin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunmore_Pineapple
"the most bizarre building in Scotland"
Surely that award should go to the Scottish Parliament Building?
> Margaret Thatcher (left) and a pineapple
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scottish_National...
"Piper Gilbert Kerr (right) alongside a penguin, March 1904"
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scottish_National...
"Piper Gilbert Kerr (with pipes) alongside a penguin, March 1904"
Much as I disapprove of wiki vandals, I think this is a harmless injection of light humour into yet another dreary badly mangled wikipedia article (not the topic itself, just the way that wikipedians slowly squeeze the life out the written word revision by revision).
https://www.historichousehotels.com
Two, this article doesn’t address the crazy urban rumor I heard years ago that people who place pineapple flags outside their homes, at least in the suburbs, are signaling that they are swingers.
This is only because of modern refrigeration. In centuries past a pineapple, or any other tropical fruit was ripe by the time a pineapple made it to NYC or London.
"No, they didn't. Dr O'Hagan says the truly wealthy then set their caps at another luxury and difficult-to-grow food. Celery."
Does anyone have a good link to the story about how celery became a luxury item? The obsession with pineapple as an exotic luxury makes at least some sense to me. But...celery??
https://www.tastecooking.com/celery-was-the-avocado-toast-of... better article
https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/9/14868658/historic-colonial-n...
Try it next time you're visiting a historic place :)