http://hotplate.com/herndonshollow/, http://herndonshollow.blogspot.com/

Herndon's Hollow, Caldwell, ID (2026)

10/15/2026

🍿 Thursday Tidbit

Popcorn pops because every kernel has a tiny amount of water trapped inside it.

And the kernel is essentially its own miniature pressure cooker.

Popcorn is a particular type of corn with an unusually hard outer shell, called the pericarp. That tough shell is one of the things that separates popcorn from the sweet corn we eat off the cob or the field corn grown for animal feed and other products.

Inside the kernel are starch and a small amount of moisture.

When you heat popcorn, that trapped water begins turning into steam.

Normally, steam would simply escape.

But the popcorn kernel’s hard outer shell is remarkably good at keeping it trapped inside.

So as the temperature rises, the pressure rises with it.

At the same time, the heat and moisture soften the starch inside the kernel until it becomes a hot, gelatinous mass.

Eventually, something has to give.

At around 356°F (180°C), the pressure inside can reach roughly 135 pounds per square inch—several times the pressure in a typical car tire.

Then the outer hull ruptures.

The sudden drop in pressure allows the water v***r inside to expand almost instantly. That expansion forces the softened starch outward, turning the kernel inside out as it goes.

The starch rapidly cools and solidifies into the fluffy white structure we recognize as popcorn.

And the whole transformation happens incredibly fast.

Researchers using high-speed cameras have found that the familiar “pop” isn't simply the sound of the hull cracking. Much of the sound appears to come from the sudden release of pressurized water v***r—somewhat like the pop of a ch*****ne bottle.

There’s even a reason some kernels stubbornly refuse to pop.

Popcorn needs the right amount of moisture inside the kernel. If the hull is damaged, steam can leak out before enough pressure builds. And if the kernel has become too dry, there may not be enough water inside to create the pressure necessary for a proper pop.

Those unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bowl even have a wonderfully appropriate old nickname:

“Old maids.” 😄

So every time you make a bowl of popcorn, you aren't simply heating up corn.

You're creating hundreds of tiny pressure vessels, building up steam until their shells fail and their insides expand into something many times their original size.

Which is quite a lot of physics happening inside a snack. 🍿

And considering Herndon’s Hollow has an entire collection of popcorn toppers, it seems only fair that popcorn itself gets to be the subject of a Thursday Tidbit every once in a while. 😉

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

10/11/2026

Most of us probably learned the basic story of Christopher Columbus with a rhyme that has survived generations of history classes:
“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Three ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—sailed west across the Atlantic under the Spanish crown, and on October 12, 1492, Columbus's expedition reached the Caribbean.

But the story of Columbus Day in the United States begins much later.
And surprisingly, the history of the holiday has nearly as much to do with Italian-American immigration and identity as it does with Columbus himself.

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, in what is now Italy, although his famous voyages were financed by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.

His 1492 voyage also wasn't the first time Europeans had reached the Americas. Norse explorers had reached North America centuries earlier.

What Columbus's voyages did help establish was sustained contact between Europe and the Americas.

That contact set in motion an enormous exchange of plants, animals, foods, diseases, technologies, people, and ideas between parts of the world that had previously developed largely apart.

Historians call it the Columbian Exchange.

And its effects are still sitting on our dinner tables today.

Foods from the Americas—including potatoes, tomatoes, corn, cacao, peppers, and many varieties of beans—eventually spread around the world.

Imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes.
Ireland without potatoes.
Switzerland without chocolate.

Meanwhile, wheat, horses, cattle, pigs, and numerous other plants and animals traveled in the opposite direction.

The exchange transformed agriculture, diets, economies, landscapes, and populations across the globe.

Its consequences weren't all beneficial. Disease caused catastrophic population losses in the Americas, while conquest, colonization, forced labor, slavery, warfare, and competition for land and resources accompanied the centuries that followed.

The world after 1492 would never look quite like the world before it.

But Columbus Day itself didn't appear until centuries later.

Beginning in the late 1800s, millions of Italians immigrated to the United States in search of work and opportunity.

And they weren't always welcomed.

Italian immigrants faced intense prejudice and discrimination. They were stereotyped as dangerous, inferior, or incapable of becoming “real” Americans, and anti-Italian sentiment sometimes became violent.

One particularly horrific example occurred in New Orleans in 1891.

After the murder of the city's police chief, a group of Italian immigrants was prosecuted. Following acquittals and mistrials, a mob stormed the jail and killed 11 Italian men.

It became one of the largest mass lynchings in American history and caused a diplomatic crisis between Italy and the United States.

The following year marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage, and President Benjamin Harrison encouraged Americans to observe Columbus Day.

For Italian-American communities, Columbus offered something powerful.

Here was an Italian-born historical figure who already occupied a prominent place in the American national story.

At a time when Italian immigrants were frequently being told that they didn't belong in America, Columbus became a way of saying:

People of Italian heritage have been part of this story from the very beginning.

Italian-American communities increasingly embraced Columbus celebrations as expressions of ethnic pride and American belonging. Organizations including the Knights of Columbus also promoted broader recognition of the holiday.

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day a federal observance.

Beginning in 1971, it was observed on the second Monday in October—the date we still recognize today.

Which makes Columbus Day an interesting example of how holidays can acquire meanings far beyond the event that originally inspired them.

Yes, its story begins with an Atlantic voyage in 1492.

And that voyage became one of the major turning points in world history, helping create lasting connections between continents and setting enormous cultural, biological, economic, and political changes into motion.

But the American holiday that appeared centuries afterward has another history layered on top of it.

It's also tied to immigrants who arrived in a new country, encountered prejudice and hostility, and adopted the Italian-born navigator as a symbol of their own place in America's history.

So there is quite a bit more hiding behind Columbus Day than:

“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” 🌎

It's a story of exploration, enormous global change, immigration, prejudice, identity, and eventually acceptance.

And like most history, it becomes considerably more interesting once you get past the rhyme.

Happy Columbus Day from Herndon’s Hollow!

10/08/2026

⏰ Thursday Tidbit

Before alarm clocks became affordable, some people were literally paid to knock on your window and wake you up.

They were called knocker-uppers—and yes, that was really the job title. 😄

During the Industrial Revolution, more and more people began working jobs that required them to arrive at a factory, mine, dock, or other workplace at a specific time.

That might not sound remarkable now, when nearly everyone has an alarm within arm’s reach.

But reliable alarm clocks weren’t always cheap or widely available.

So in parts of Britain and Ireland, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers could pay someone else to make sure they got out of bed on time.

A knocker-upper would make rounds early in the morning, stopping at the homes of customers and knocking on their bedroom windows at the agreed-upon time.

For windows on the ground floor, a short stick might do the job.

For customers sleeping upstairs, things got more creative.

Some knocker-uppers carried extremely long poles—sometimes made from bamboo—that could reach windows several stories above the street.

Others reportedly used pea shooters, firing dried peas at the glass until the person inside woke up.

And they couldn't just knock once and walk away.

The whole point was to make sure their customer actually got up, so a good knocker-upper might continue tapping until there was some sign of movement at the window.

Of course, the job raises an obvious question:

Who woke up the knocker-upper?

In some cases, they simply kept very different hours. Someone might stay awake through the night and make waking customers one of the final jobs before going to bed themselves. Others apparently relied on their own routines or early waking habits.

The profession became especially associated with industrial towns, where large numbers of workers needed to report for shifts before dawn.

Eventually, inexpensive and reliable mechanical alarm clocks became widely available, and the need to hire a human alarm clock gradually disappeared.

But not immediately.

Knocker-uppers survived in some places well into the 20th century because habits and occupations don't vanish the moment a new technology appears. If you already had someone reliably tapping on your window every morning, there wasn't necessarily an urgent reason to replace them.

Which means that within living memory, there were still places where getting up for work could involve hiring another human being to walk down your street with an enormous stick and repeatedly tap on your bedroom window.

And suddenly that obnoxious alarm on your phone doesn't seem quite so strange. 😂⏰

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

10/01/2026

♻️ Thursday Tidbit

“Sustainable” doesn’t necessarily mean “zero waste.”

That distinction can get lost sometimes, especially when sustainability is presented as though doing it “right” means eliminating every disposable item, avoiding all plastic, buying only certain kinds of products, and somehow fitting an entire year’s worth of trash into a mason jar. 😄

In reality, sustainability is a much broader idea.

At its simplest, sustainability is about whether something can continue over the long term without consuming resources—or creating environmental, economic, or social costs—faster than the systems around it can reasonably support.

Which means sustainability usually isn’t about finding one perfect choice.

It’s about finding better ways to use what we already have.

Sometimes that means choosing something reusable instead of disposable. Sometimes it means repairing an item rather than replacing it, buying something secondhand, wasting less food, conserving energy, or simply getting more use out of something before throwing it away.

And sometimes it means changing the way we buy things in the first place.

That’s where refill shops come in.

A refill system doesn’t magically eliminate packaging from the entire supply chain. Products still have to be produced, transported, stored, and handled safely. There will almost always be some kind of packaging somewhere along the way.

What a refill system can do is reduce how many individual packages are needed to get a product into people’s homes.

Instead of buying another new container every time you run out of something, the same container can be filled again and again. One jar, bottle, or other reusable container might replace dozens of disposable packages over its lifetime.

Buying in bulk can also let people purchase the amount they actually need—which can help reduce another kind of waste: the half-used product that sits forgotten in the back of a cupboard until eventually being thrown away.

That’s part of what makes places like The Boise Refillery interesting.

The idea isn’t that walking through the door suddenly makes every purchase perfectly “green.” It’s that the refill model gives people another option: reuse a container, buy the amount they need, and reduce some of the packaging that would otherwise come home with them.

Herndon’s Hollow culinary blends and popcorn toppers already fit into that world, and we’re looking at ways to take the idea a little further in the new year. 🌿

One possibility we’re exploring is making some Herndon’s Hollow products available through bulk dispensers, allowing customers to refill their own containers rather than purchasing a new package each time.

There are still details to work out—and nothing is set in stone yet—but that’s part of sustainability, too.

It doesn’t have to happen all at once.

A small business doesn’t have to completely reinvent everything it does overnight to start looking for places where it can do something a little differently.

Sometimes the next step is simply asking:

What are we already doing? What could we reasonably improve? And what makes sense for the people actually using our products?

Because sustainability isn’t really about achieving some imaginary point where nothing is ever wasted again.

It’s about creating systems and habits that can work over the long term—and continuing to look for practical ways to make them better.

A change doesn’t have to eliminate all waste to eliminate some of it.

And when the same small change gets repeated hundreds—or thousands—of times, “some” can eventually become quite a lot. ♻️🌿

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

09/24/2026

👖 Thursday Tidbit

That tiny pocket on a pair of jeans wasn’t originally made for coins.

Or guitar picks.

Or the little collection of random objects that somehow ends up in every pocket you own. 😄

It was made for a pocket watch.

When blue jeans were first being produced as durable workwear in the 1800s, pocket watches were a common way for men to carry a timepiece. Wristwatches existed in various forms, but they weren’t yet the everyday standard they would eventually become.

A pocket watch was valuable, relatively delicate, and—if you were doing physical work—not something you wanted bouncing around loose in a large pocket with tools, coins, or anything else that might damage it.

So early jeans included a small, dedicated watch pocket tucked inside the larger front pocket.

Levi Strauss & Co. traces the feature back to its early waist overalls, the work pants that eventually became what we now call blue jeans. By the late 19th century, the little watch pocket was already part of the design.

Then everyday life changed.

Wristwatches became increasingly practical and popular during the early 20th century, especially around the time of World War I, when being able to check the time quickly without reaching into a pocket had an obvious advantage.

Eventually, the pocket watch stopped being something most people carried.

But its pocket survived.

More than a century later, clothing manufacturers still put that tiny pocket on jeans—even though most of us have never carried the object it was designed to hold.

And it’s not the only part of a pair of jeans with a practical origin.

Those little metal rivets at the corners of the pockets weren’t originally decorative, either. They were added to reinforce areas that were especially likely to tear when miners, laborers, and other workers stuffed their pockets with tools and supplies.

So a modern pair of jeans is almost like a little piece of 19th-century workwear history that we keep wearing without thinking much about it.

The fabric and styles have changed.
The cuts have changed.
The people wearing them have certainly changed.

But that tiny pocket is still there, waiting for a pocket watch that probably isn’t coming back. ⌚😂

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

09/17/2026

🐦 Thursday Tidbit

Crows don’t just recognize individual human faces—they can remember them for years and apparently tell other crows about them.

Researchers have tested this in a rather memorable way: by wearing masks.

In one long-running experiment, researchers captured and briefly handled wild crows while wearing a particular mask. The birds were released unharmed, but unsurprisingly, they weren’t especially fond of the face they associated with being captured.

Later, people wearing that same mask walked through the area without bothering the birds at all.

The crows noticed.

They scolded the masked person, followed them, swooped nearby, and recruited other crows to join in. Meanwhile, people wearing a different, neutral mask generally received much less attention.

But here’s where it gets especially interesting.

As the years passed, more crows reacted to the threatening face—not fewer.

Some of those birds had never personally been captured by the researchers.

They had apparently learned from other crows that this particular human face meant trouble.

Young crows can learn by watching their parents and other members of the group, while adult crows pay attention when other crows sound the alarm. In other words, information about a potentially dangerous person can spread through the local crow population.

And they don’t forget quickly.

Research has shown that crows can retain those associations for years, recognizing a face connected with a bad experience long after the original encounter.

That ability makes a lot of sense when you consider how crows live.

They’re highly social animals, and knowing which humans, predators, locations, or situations are dangerous could make the difference between surviving and making the same mistake twice. Learning from another crow is even better—you get the warning without having to experience the danger yourself.

So when several crows suddenly start yelling from the trees as someone walks past, it may not be meaningless bird noise.

There could actually be a neighborhood crow story behind it.

And apparently, once you’ve earned a starring role in that story, recasting the villain may take quite a while. 😂🐦‍⬛

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

09/10/2026

📚 Thursday Tidbit

For a surprisingly long time, books didn’t have page numbers.

Today, page numbers are so ordinary that it’s hard to imagine a book without them. We use them to find our place, make an index useful, cite a source, or tell someone exactly where to look.

But for most of the history of the written word, they simply weren’t necessary.

Ancient texts were often written on scrolls, where the idea of a numbered “page” didn’t really apply. As bound books gradually replaced scrolls, scribes still copied books entirely by hand—and there might be only a handful of copies of any particular work.

Even when books did contain markings, they weren’t necessarily the page numbers we recognize today. Scribes and early printers sometimes numbered the individual sheets, sections, or gatherings used to assemble a book. These markings were primarily there to help the person making the book put everything in the correct order.

Then printing changed everything.

After movable-type printing spread through Europe in the 1400s, books could suddenly be produced in much larger numbers. Instead of every copy being individually handwritten—and potentially a little different from the next—printers could produce many essentially identical copies of the same text.

That made something new possible:

You could tell another person where, exactly, to find something.

Page numbering began appearing more regularly in printed works during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, although printers experimented with different systems before the familiar numbered-page format became standard.

And once page numbers existed, other things became much more useful.

Tables of contents could point to specific pages.
Indexes could direct readers to individual subjects.
Scholars could refer other people to a particular passage.
Readers could stop at page 127 and know exactly where to begin again.

It was a tiny addition to the book itself, but it changed the way information could be organized, shared, discussed, and found.

And it’s a good example of how technology often develops.

The printing press gets remembered as the revolutionary invention—and deservedly so—but inventions also create dozens of smaller problems that people then have to solve.

Once you can make hundreds of identical books, someone eventually has to figure out a better way to say:

“It’s in there somewhere.” 😄📖

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

09/07/2026

For most of us, Labor Day means a three-day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, one last cookout, and maybe taking advantage of a few sales.

But the holiday itself is much older than you might expect.

Labor Day has been a federal holiday since 1894.

Its story begins even earlier, during a period when American industry was growing at an extraordinary pace—but the people doing much of that work often paid a steep price for it.

In the late 1800s, factory and industrial workers commonly worked extremely long hours. Twelve-hour days weren't unusual, six-day workweeks were common, and workplace safety protections were nowhere near what we expect today.

There was no federal minimum wage.

There was no standard 40-hour workweek.

There were few of the workplace protections that Americans now tend to take for granted.

And as industrialization expanded, so did the American labor movement.

Workers organized for better wages, shorter hours, safer working conditions, and greater influence over the conditions under which they worked. One of the movement's most famous demands was simple:

Eight hours for work.
Eight hours for rest.
Eight hours for what we will.

Against that backdrop came the event generally recognized as the first Labor Day celebration.

On September 5, 1882, thousands of workers marched through the streets of New York City in a parade organized by the Central Labor Union.

It wasn't a paid holiday.

Many of the people participating actually gave up a day's wages to be there.

The march was followed by speeches, music, food, and festivities—a combination of public demonstration and community celebration that helped establish the character Labor Day would eventually take on.

The idea spread.

Cities began holding their own celebrations, and states started officially recognizing the holiday. Oregon became the first state to establish Labor Day as a legal holiday in 1887, and several others soon followed.

Then came 1894.

That year saw the Pullman Strike, one of the most significant labor conflicts of the era.

Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company near Chicago went on strike after wages were reduced while rents in the company-owned town remained high. The dispute expanded when the American Railway Union supported the workers by refusing to handle trains carrying Pullman cars.

Rail traffic across much of the country was disrupted.

The federal government intervened, federal troops were deployed, violence followed, and people were killed.

It was in the midst of this extraordinarily tense period between labor and government that Congress passed legislation establishing Labor Day as a federal holiday.

President Grover Cleveland signed it into law on June 28, 1894.

By that September, Labor Day was officially a federal holiday.

More than 130 years later, we're still observing it.

Of course, the American workplace has changed enormously since those first Labor Day marches.

Many of the things workers were fighting for in the 19th and early 20th centuries eventually became ordinary parts of American working life: limits on working hours, child-labor restrictions, workplace safety standards, minimum wages, overtime rules, and the widespread expectation of a weekend.

Those changes didn't all happen at once, and they certainly didn't happen simply because Labor Day appeared on the calendar.

They came through decades of legislation, negotiation, organizing, strikes, court battles, political fights, technological change, and shifting expectations about what work in America should look like.

And Labor Day itself was created to recognize something much broader than any single profession or industry.

It's a day honoring the contributions of American workers.

The factory worker and the farmer.

The teacher and the construction worker.

The nurse and the mechanic.

The restaurant worker, truck driver, grocery clerk, tradesperson, small-business owner—and, yes, the postal worker who may very well be enjoying the rare Monday when the mail isn't going anywhere. 😂📬

The jobs have changed considerably since workers first marched through New York in 1882.

But the basic idea behind the holiday hasn't.

America was built, and continues to run, because millions of people get up every day and go to work.

So enjoy the cookout.

Enjoy the last unofficial weekend of summer.

And if you're lucky enough to have the day off, enjoy that too.

After all, having some time away from work is rather fitting for a holiday born partly from the fight for workers to have more of it. 🇺🇸🛠️

Happy Labor Day from Herndon’s Hollow!

09/03/2026

🧊 Thursday Tidbit

Water does something rather unusual when it freezes.

Most substances contract as they get colder. Their molecules slow down, move closer together, and the material becomes denser.

Water follows that pattern too—up to a point.

Then, at about 39°F (4°C), it starts behaving differently.

As water continues cooling toward its freezing point, its molecules begin arranging themselves into a more open structure. Once it freezes into ice, that structure takes up more room than the liquid water did.

In fact, water expands by roughly 9% when it freezes.

It doesn’t sound like much, but that little bit of expansion is powerful enough to burst pipes, crack containers, break apart pavement, and slowly split rocks.

It’s also the reason you really shouldn’t put a completely full, sealed bottle of water in the freezer. The water may only need a little more room—but it’s going to try to make that room whether the container cooperates or not. 😬

But the really interesting part is what that expansion does in nature.

Because ice takes up more space than liquid water, it’s less dense.

So it floats.

That seems perfectly ordinary because we’ve seen floating ice our entire lives, but it’s actually a remarkably important property.

When winter temperatures drop, lakes and ponds begin freezing at the surface. That floating layer of ice then acts as insulation, slowing the loss of heat from the water beneath it.

The water below can remain liquid even while the surface is frozen solid.

If ice behaved like most solid substances and became denser when it froze, it would sink.

More water at the surface would freeze.
That ice would sink too.
And the process could continue downward.

Lakes in cold climates could freeze far more extensively, making winter survival considerably harder for the plants and animals living in them.

So one of water’s strangest little quirks—the fact that it expands instead of contracts when it freezes—is also one of the reasons life beneath a frozen lake can carry on through the winter.

Sometimes the things we consider completely ordinary are only ordinary because we’ve never known the world to work any other way. 🧊

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

08/27/2026

🧾 Thursday Tidbit

The @ symbol wasn’t originally created for email.

Long before it showed up in email addresses, it was used in accounting.

It stood for “at.”

So instead of writing something like:
7 items at $2 each

It could be written more compactly as:
7 items @ $2

That usage dates back hundreds of years.

It was a simple way to shorten common phrases in trade and record-keeping—nothing special, just practical.

For a long time, it stayed that way.

Just a symbol used occasionally in bookkeeping, invoices, and notes.

Then in 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson needed a way to separate a user’s name from the computer they were using.

He chose the @ symbol because it wasn’t commonly used in names… and it already meant “at.”

User at computer.

That one decision turned a relatively obscure symbol into something used constantly.

Now it shows up in email, social media, usernames—everywhere.

But it started as nothing more than a shorthand in accounting.

A small, practical symbol… that ended up everywhere.

💬 Check the website for up-to-date ordering details.
🛒 Order: hotplate.com/herndonshollow

✍ Blog: herndonshollow.blogspot.com

🛍 Culinary blends & popcorn toppers available at The Boise Refillery
(10530 W Fairview Ave, Boise)

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