Saturday, January 05, 2008

How much information can my head hold?

I've been learning stuff again, by my self this time, i've graduated from Baywatch teaching me stuff, to doing it all by my self, natural progression you'd think, an extention to 'Intellegent design' all you religious nuts might say.

I digress

San Francisco, San Francisco, where do i start, well with the name i suppose, start at the start.

It turns out the Bay got it's name before the city and the city name was changed to reflect this.
The city and bay are named after St Francis of Assassi

Someone in 1848 discovered gold in a sleepy Mexican village called 'Yerba Buena' and the population shot up to 30000 in 2 years, and the name of this village was changed to San Francisco, it would seem the Spanish were very holy fellows indeed and liked to go to places that had Saint names, Yerba Buena doesn't sound too holy, they fixed that one, onward christian soldiers!

Another problem they encountered, the west and east wasn't joined by a railroad, in step's 4 shopkeepers to finance this, they were known as the "The Big Four", the big 4 referred to themselves as the "The Associates".

The next problem was the gold rush, with a fortune to made in the hills, not too many white people were going to work on this railroad, announcing the arrival of Chineese.

Strange it would be the arrival of Chineese from er.. China that would make the railroad possible, and it turns out they were better workers too.

Hi Jinx in the club, Ruby Sky



In Australia when the gold rush was on, a lot of lighthouse men stayed at their posts when the goldrush was on, they were the most important people in the country as after sailing all the way from Europe, the last few kilometers were the most dangerous, so many ship's full of people sank, this was a time too when:

1, Not too many people swam, not too many wanted to get lessons from the fishes either
2, They were paying english people 10 pounds to go there, Irish got 50 lashes (good tricep's workout)
3, They needed to get the population up to 20 million for the country to work
4, It's not very encouraging to go if you think you might not make it

The Chineese stayed to work on the railroad, yipee!!!

Now to the Interesting stuff, Alma Spreckels AKA 'great grandmother of San Francisco'

It turns out after being poor for her whole life, she wanted a rich man, and she found one, she wanted to get married, he didn't, he had Syphilis, 5 years lated he married her (she must have did a fair bit of convincing) and then she took off to Paris to spend spend spend and live it up.
The guy she married was the heir to the Calafornian sugar company, and the term 'Sugar daddy comes from this pairing.

She didn't stop there, she built the biggest house in San Francisco, it takes up a whole block, now the writer Danielle Steele lices there, with her 48 cars parked out on the street, much to her neighbours frustration and the're not even good cars, all ordinary cars.

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