The game of Whist & Chocolate houses
Wow. So this post started out as just me linking to the Gutenberg.org archive of 'Hoyle's Games Modernized' from 120 years ago but it took me down an entire rabbit hole. The book covers the rules for such classics as Chess, Draughts (checkers), Cribbage, Baccarat, Whist, and more. But it's Whist, specifically from the mention in the Preface below, which captured me.
It is significant of the respect in which Hoyle was held, that his Laws of Whist, with some slight alterations by the habitués of White's and Saunders' chocolate-houses (the then headquarters of the game), were accepted as the final authority from 1760 till 1864, when the basis of the present code, settled by the Turf and Portland Clubs, was adopted in their stead.
Did you catch it? Did it jump out at you too?
Chocolate houses?
Is that a euphemism? Nope. Not at all.
Okay, well, yes--sort of.
My first Googling took me to this entry from the "Museum of Hot Chocolate" which briefly discusses the "Chocolate House Phenomenon" in London. But it's a quite sparse on detail.
In 1657 London's first chocolate shop opened in Queen's Head Alley, Bishopsgate Street, and was advertised in The Publick Adviser as being run by a Frenchman. This innovation was evidently very popular because chocolate houses sprang up around the city, and later in Bristol and Bath.
In 1675 King Charles II issued legislation to suppress coffee and chocolate houses, which he believed were “hotbeds of sedition”, although this was withdrawn within days.
So King Charles was worried men hopped up on cocoa beans were planning his downfall? Color me intrigued!
Further searching yields an entry on Atlas Obscura about the "The Rambunctious, Elitist Chocolate Houses of 18th-Century London." Well before I was interested, but now you have my attention!
These chocolate houses are the origins of the modern Gentleman's club. Places where men gathered for debauchery, gambling and MOST sinister - chocolate.
As painted by William Hogarth as part of his 'A Rake's Progress' here is #6 in the series, "The Gaming House" portraying the life inside one such chocolate house.
And from these dins of iniquity emerged the game of Whist. What is Whist? It's quite similar to Hearts which so many of us learned thanks to Windows having it pre-installed. But rather than avoiding taking tricks, the goal in Whist is to take tricks - another differentiating factor is that it is commonly played in teams.
Here's a brief explanation of the rules:
Chocolate really is the greatest thing ever, to give us so much joy in various direct and indirect ways.
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Aspartame is in the news - WHO says it's a carcinogen, FDA says it's okay
TLDR: Diet Coke and other diet drinks are probably okay as long as you aren't going far above normal consumption.
At a news conference in Geneva, Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at the WHO, said that concern was only for "high consumers" of diet soda and other foods containing aspartame and said that IARC had simply "raised a flag" for more research to be done.
Dr. Mary Schubauer-Berigan, a senior official at IARC, emphasized that "it shouldn't really be taken as a direct statement that indicates that there is a known cancer hazard from consuming aspartame."
As an article in Science notes, "Other substances classed as 'possibly carcinogenic' include extracts of aloe vera, traditional Asian pickled vegetables, some vehicle fuels and some chemicals used in dry cleaning, carpentry and printing. The IARC has also classified red meat as 'probably carcinogenic' and processed meat as 'carcinogenic.'"
Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, also has concerns about how well the possible effects of aspartame have been studied. He says the problem is twofold.
"It's difficult to do studies in free living populations to get a great estimate of how much people actually consume," he says.
Another challenge, Hu says, is that in the case of rare cancers such as liver cancer, which the WHO specifically noted, researchers need "hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions of people to be followed and to obtain sufficient statistical power to get reliable answers."
The aspartame focus has been largely on low-calorie diet sodas, but what about its use in other beverages?
"If you put two packets of sweeteners into your coffee or tea, I don't think that's going to be a problem for the vast majority of people," Hu says.
For Tuft's Mozaffarian, despite his concerns, he says that for someone who can't break a soda habit, it's still better to drink the diet variety. "We know that high amounts of regular soda is really, really bad for weight gain or obesity or diabetes for risk of heart attack events."
"So ... yes, better to switch to diet [soda]," he says. "But it's even better then to switch from diet to unsweetened sparkling water."
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