Soap

According to the Internet, ancient Roman legend states that in the Sapo hills overlooking the banks of the Tiber river, sacrifices were made on altars constructed of wood. The offerings were ritually slaughtered, their carcasses, on pyres, put to the torch, and a foamy mixture of boiled animal fat and wood ash lye dripped their way the river. People who washed their clothes in this part of the river found that they would somehow get cleaner, and that's where we get the name for 'soap.'

Whether or not the Etruscans were burning animals or humans above the Tiber river to please the gods in their animistic pantheon, if this 'legend' is real, or if a terrain feature in Italy known as 'Sapo' even exists is not relevant. In fact, it's more likely that ancient peoples were regularly using the acid and ammonia content of their own urine to clean their clothes (among other things such as tanning hides to make leather, making saltpeter, and bleaching things), and that soap evolved more from a byproduct of food or leather processing.

The facts, however, are simple enough: In order to make soap, one must render fat, skim the tallow and glycerin, and add lye.

Soap makes your body and clothes and car clean and natural soap is the best thing for your skin.

Soap was once called "the yardstick of civilization" by a great philosopher, and indeed, as the Roman civilization declined, so too did the use of soap, replaced instead with the lies of perfume.

Soap, being a relatively soft substance, would be damaged or destroyed in transit if it were not properly protected. Sturdy wooden crates, soapboxes, were designed to protect them on the trip from the factory to the storefront.

The soapbox was a piece of theatre before the invention of radio or any other mass-market media, back when political candidates and other orators had to be masters of stagecraft in order to get any attention at all. Many promises, half-truths and outright lies have come from the tops of many 'soapboxes,' but usually those were from persons seeking office. I, however, have no such axe to grind.

Therefore I promise the following:
This will not be a largely reactionary weblog, nor will it be an E/N site, nor a Livejournal. I will never write about issues I think ought to be handled at a local level, issues that concern fame and celebrity for the sake of fame and celebrity, or issues that ought to be utterly forgotten. I will never type in ALL CAPS, I will never use any hard to read font, typeface or color, and I will not suffocate the reader with endless links to useless tidbits of knowledge that would be better sought in a Google search.

You will not read about my day-to-day life, though you may be exposed to the rare great events therein.

I will instead issue to the reader things that I consider important to hear and necessary to know. I will present these ideas in an easy-to-read format, and do my utmost best to make them easy to comprehend, even to the layperson. I will erect a sidebar of daily links that are necessary for my media intake. I will address only the things on my mind and the issues that relate to America at large, or that the mainstream media have overlooked or slanted, and I will always do my best.

My name is Joshua E Jansen, and this is my soapbox.