Despite its no-nonsense name, Pancake Week inspires many to share in its eccentric nature. There is a small town in England, Olsney, which has been holding its Pancake Race every year since early 1445. According to the lore, it began when one Olney housewife was cooking the family’s traditional Shrove Tuesday pancakes from a very **simple pancake recipe*. The church bell began to ring, calling the townspeople to service, and this woman was so anxious to be on time for church that she ran outside still holding her skillet with her pancakes in them. This momentous event is reenacted in the town’s annual Pancake Race. The contestants all line up with their skillets in their hands and wait for the pancake bell to ring. They then must toss their pancakes into the air, catch them in their skillets and race off four hundred yards to the church. When they get to the finish line, they must toss their pancakes again. When the race is over, everyone attends church services and then enjoys a community party where they eat, no take a guess, pancakes.
November 1, 2011
Any Excuse to Eat a Pancake
The Emergence of Hip Hop Music
There are a lot of genres to popular music. In the fifties, jazz transformed into rock and roll and Rhythm and Blues. From their, music evolved to the point that rock and roll of the fifties would almost be considered nursery rhymes by what is considered to be rock by today’s standards. Rhythm and Blues would evolve too with the most significant offshoot being the emergence of rap and hip hop. Hip hop contains a lot of elements of both R & B and Rap, but it tends to be less about the spoken word than rap and more about the sounds and music associated with it. Hip hop acts dominate popular popular music charts these days with many young people citing Hip hop as their favorite form of music. Hip hop has come under a lot of criticism from traditional music lovers, but so did rock and roll and just about every other form of music.