white paper hats
“Japanese brides wear white paper hats to assure marital fidelity and an absence of jealousy”
—Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.
A white feather
“A white feather worn by a Papuan native, identifies him as a hero who has killed a man in battle”
—Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.
White clay
“White clay in the shape of a snake, is placed outside a village by the Kaondes of Aftrica, to guard against malaria”
—Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, 27th series, November 1977.
a deck of fifty-two cards
“When the Chinese invented paper around 200 B.C. . . . the first uses they found for it were as writing material, money, and playing cards. All three applications spread along trade routes, especially to places where divination and gambling with straws, beads, and pebbles (called lots, as in lottery) were already common. Since card games could be made more complex than the casting of lots, they tended to appeal to more literate cultures. Once priests, scribes, and warriors took up cards, they were further disseminated, along with the means to produce them, via conquest. . . . Christian crusaders and Venetian merchants eventually brought cards back to Europe, where Spaniards and Italians began playing with forty-card decks, and Germans made do for a while with thirty-six. By the early fourteenth century . . . Persians had developed a deck of fifty-two cards arranged in four suits, each with ten numerical ranks and three hand-painted court cards. The suits were Coins, Cups, Swords, and Polo Sticks, emblematic of the officers providing a sultan’s court with money, food and drink, military protection, and sporting entertainment. As these and similar decks made their way to Italy, polo sticks became scepters or cudgels, which eventually turned into our clubs.”
—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.
standard playing cards
“By 1470, French card makers in Rouen had settled on the four suits we’re familiar with today. The church was represented by hearts, the state by spades, merchants by diamonds, farmers by clubs (which resembled more and more the clower they harvested). Earlier cards had been expensively hand-painted for the actual king and his court, but widespread demand among common folk soon led to mass production of uniform decks using woodcuts and stencils. Rouennais designers fashioned their court cards after historical figures. The king of spades was drawn to resemble David, king of the Hebrews, his sword modeled after the weapon he took from Goliath upon slaying the giant with a leather slingshot, which was shown lower down on his card. The club king depicted a stylized Charlemagne, the king of diamonds Julius Caesar, the heart king Alexander the Great. The four kings thus represent the Jewish world, the Holy Roman Empire, Rome, and Greece, the four main wellsprings of Western civilization. . . .
By the nineteenth century, as standard playing cards became double-ended, designers had to jettison the heraldry on the lower halves of the court cards. David’s slingshot disappeared, making his kingship more generic. Two images that survive are the orb of Christendom cupped in the left hand of the club king, and the three-belled flower, emblematic of the Holy Trinity, held by his queen.”
—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.
the ace, or one
“Some historians argue that the ace, or one, . . . made its counter-numerical switch from lowest to highest rank during the American and French revolutions, when it suddenly became possible for the merest commoner to become emperor, prime minister, or president. These days the ace represents whatever intangible force (such as God, Allah, aleph, I, the Arabic number one, or what physicists call a singularity) can overcome the most august human being.”
—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.
the brightest source of light in our solar system
“Except for the sun and the occasional thermonuclear blast, [Las Vegas] is the brightest source of light in our solar system. Its most famous drink, in fact, is the Atomic Cocktail—vodka, brandy, Champagne, splash of sherry. Gamblers enjoying them in the fifties were treated, by paying slightly more for their rooms, to views of Johnny von Neumann’s hydrogen bombs going off sixty-five miles north of town.”
—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.
the Black Book.
“Established in the days of Estes Kefauver and J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Book is simply a three-ring looseleaf binder holding mimeographed records and mug shots of the thirty-eight “Excluded Persons” barred for life from Nevada casinos.”
—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.
to “call a spade a spade”
“The ace of spades is as black and as bad as things get—or as good, in the sense that Rhett Butler, Adam Cartwright, John Shaft, or Achilles is good. The ace of spades also is real, the most real, in that our willingness to “call a spade a spade” shows us to be forthright, clear-eyed, realistic.”
—James McManus, from Positively Fifth Street, 2003.
a black cat
“I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat just crossed my trail.”
—Muddy Waters, as quoted by James McManus in Positively Fifth Street, 2003.