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By Micki Rosen, resident of Four Seasons Beaumont Did You Know? | Four Seasons Hemet Herald | SEPTEMBER 2017 | 37 DID YOU KNOW THAT SEPT. 25 IS COMIC BOOK DAY? In 1837 there came a small, seemingly inconsequential ,shift in the way stories were told. One Obadiah Oldbuck was drawn into existence as a series of sequential pictures with text captions. While Obadiah Oldbuck was considered to be the first comic, in 1933 the publication known as "Famous Funnies" is considered to be the first actual comic book. It was produced in the USA from a collection of comic strips that had appeared earlier in newspapers. While the term "comic" implies that the tone of these strips is always humorous, that couldn't be further from the truth. Comics have been used as a medium for telling stories of all kinds, including "Maus," which was published in the early 1990s and is about the Holocaust. DID YOU KNOW THAT SEPT. 22 IS WHITE CHOCOLATE DAY? Chocolate has been around a very long time. Its consumption as a beverage reaching back to 1900 BC by the Mesoamericans and was considered sacred to Quetzocoatl. So valuable was it during the Aztec Empire that it was used as a form of currency. It wasn't until Christopher Columbus visited the New World for the fourth time in 1502 that chocolate was brought back to the UK, and the rest is history. From that point until 1930 it was all the same color; that is when Nestle invented the "Milkybar." White chocolate was the result of separating the dark solids from the rich fat of the bean known as cocoa butter, a natural part of the manufacturing process but, instead of recombining them, the cocoa butter was left to shine on its own and has been a popular treat ever since. DID YOU KNOW THAT SEPT. 12 IS VIDEO GAMES DAY? The first video game ever created is thought to be "Bertie the Brain," an artificial intelligence designed to play Tic-Tac-Toe. Considering that Bertie was a four meter high machine built on vacuum tube technology, you can imagine it didn't get out much; in fact, it was disassembled after the Canadian National Exhibition where it debuted, and was never rebuilt. A year later a computer was built called "Nimrod." It was built and displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and designed to play a game called "Nim." From these humble beginnings things continued to build, first with cabinet-style games (the kind you put quarters in), and then into the first home video games and things kept growing exponentially. DID YOU KNOW THAT SEPT. 10 IS TV DINNER DAY? In the 1950s, Swanson produced the first successful frozen dinner, meant to be heated and consumed in a conventional oven in just 25 minutes. They were called TV dinners mostly because the metal tray they came in fit nicely on a TV tray. While the original offering was a simple Thanksgiving dinner, the options have come a long way since then. Swanson started including desserts in a fourth section of the tray sometime in the 1960s and there has been an explosion of options ever since, especially with the advent of the microwave oven. DID YOU KNOW THAT SEPT. 4 IS NEWSPAPER CARRIER DAY? It was in 1833 that 10-year-old Blarney Flaherty first picked up his load of papers answering an advertisement for the New York Sun that specified that "steady men" could apply. It was decided that Flaherty fit the bill, and it was soon after that his cries of "Paper! Get your paper here!" were first heard calling out across the streets of the "Big Apple." It's amazing to think about all of the people who were uplifted by this career as young boys. The likes of James Cagney, Albert Einstein, even Isaac Asimov and Martin Luther King Jr., had their start early in their lives carrying the local paper.

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