Red Sox, White Sox and Red Stockings

The first openly all-professional team was the famous Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869-1870. They began as an amateur organization in 1866. But after the American Civil War, interest in baseball returned and the Red Stockings gained popularity as they went on road tour, known as "barnstorming." During their 1869 - 1870 "season" they went undefeated.

Nevertheless, they weren't making a profit and they were disbanded. But when the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, began in 1871, the Cincinnati Red Stockings regrouped in Boston, joined the new National Association and formed the Boston Red Stockings. (They eventually evolved into the Atlanta Braves.)

The influence of the Red Stockings is still felt in that nearly every professional team in Cincinnati since then has worn red as their primary trim color.

The National Association folded with the better teams and some new additions regrouping as the National League in 1876. One new teams was the Cincinnati Red Stockings who later was expelled from the league in 1880 for selling beer at games and playing games on Sundays.

A separate American Association was created to challenge (but not play against) the National League. The AA was considered the low class version because it had cheaper admission prices, offered alcoholic beverages, and had teams in working class "river towns" like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis.

A resurrected Cincinnati Red Stockings eventually shortened to the Cincinnati Reds and won the first American Association pennant. In 1890, the Reds were readmitted to the National League, and continue to play in Cincinnati to this day.

In the 1950s, "Reds" became a synonym for "Communist"and  they officially changed their name to the "Cincinnati Redlegs" with the logo altered from 1956 to 1960 to remove the term "REDS" from the inside of the C symbol. "Reds" came back in 1961 uniforms.

Cincinnati Reds Fan Shop

When Charles Comiskey brought his St. Paul Saints team into Chicago in 1900, an older team name of the White Stockings which was quickly shortened to White Sox by the press. In 1912, the team started wearing the first incarnation of its "SOX" logo on the shirts.

The team is often called the "Chisox" in headlines to distinguish from the other sox - the "Bosox" of Boston (although within their own hometowns they are often just "the Sox."

Chicago White Sox Fan Shop




In 1901, the American League club in Boston spent 7 seasons wearing blue stockings and was just known as "Boston", the "Americans" or the "Boston Americans" (because they were in the American League and there was another National League Boston team).

For the 1908 season,  the AL team shirts featured a red stocking across the front labeled "BOSTON" along with red stockings and white caps. Confusingly, the NL team also wore red stockings and  red caps with an old-English "B".

The now familiar "RED SOX" first appeared in 1912, coincident with the opening of Fenway Park.

Boston Red Sox Fan Shop

boston.redsox.mlb.com

cincinnati.reds.mlb.com 

chicago.whitesox.mlb.com

 

Urge Overkill

   

Urge Overkill is an alternative rock band, formed in Chicago, United States, consisting of Nash Kato (vocals/guitar), and Eddie "King" Roeser (vocals/guitar/bass guitar). Their cover of Neil Diamond's song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack became a hit in 1994.

Their first album since 1995, Rock & Roll Submarine, was released in 2011.

The name Urge Overkill comes from a line in the Parliament song "Funkentelechy" that says “from the makers of Mr. Prolong, better known as Urge Overkill.”

Nirvana

The 90s grunge rock band Nirvana is quite different from the Buddhist state of being they chose for a band name.

Nirvana was formed by singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers, the longest-lasting being Dave Grohl, who joined the band in 1990.



They started out with names like Skid Row, Pen Cap Chew, Bliss, and Ted Ed Fred. According to a piece in Rolling Stone, Kurt Cobain said Nirvana was chosen because "I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk rock name like the Angry Samoans."

In Buddhism, nirvana is the ethereal plane of enlightenment, reached when a soul has gained enough wisdom to free itself from the cycle of reincarnation.  Nirvana is that stillness of mind after the fires of desire, aversion, and delusion have been finally extinguished.

The word comes from the Sanskrit nir and vati and literally translates to "a blowing out," as in a candle. In shramanic thought, it is the state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is union with the Brahman (Supreme Being).

Though the band had only three studio albums, Amazon lists 72 Nirvana "albums" starting with the band's first single, "Love Buzz", in November 1988 on the Seattle independent record label Sub Pop, and its debut album, Bleach, followed by their breakout release, Nevermind and finally In Utero.

On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head at his Seattle home.

Lady Gaga

The artist known as Lady Gaga was born as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was reborn with a name adapted from a Queen song.

Music producer Rob Fusari claims to have created the "Lady Gaga" stage name because some of Stefani's vocals reminded him of Queen's Freddie mercury. The Ga Ga comes from the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga". The song became attached to her and an inadvertent text message autocorrect created a "Lady Gaga" that Stefani decided was the stage name to use.

Another version of the origin story claims that the name resulted from a marketing meeting.

Either way, the word "gaga" entered the English lexicon in the early 1900s as a term for "crazy" or "silly." Though its origin is unknown, it may come from the French imitative gaga meaning "senile" or "foolish."

Today the word is most commonly used in the sense of deep infatuation, where going gaga for something is the same thing at "mooning over" it. Considering Lady Gaga's record sales and fan base, that meaning seems pretty accurate too.

Nymphs

Nymphs and Satyr
(William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873)

Nymph has at least three meaning in our modern sense.

The first use is in Greek mythology for a minor female nature deity. there were Celestial Nymphs, Water Nymphs, Land Nymphs, Plant Nymphs and Underworld Nymphs. They were not goddesses, but divine spirits who animate nature, and are depicted as beautiful, young nubile maidens who love to dance and sing.

They were loving and free and lived in mountains and groves, by springs and rivers, and also in trees and in valleys and cool grottoes. They could never die of  old age or illness, though they were not immortal.

Some of these young maidens were attached to a god, such as Dionysus, Hermes, or Pan, or a goddess, generally the huntress Artemis.

The word nymph is said to come from the Greek word νύμφη which can mean "bride" and "veiled" (suggesting a marriageable young woman) as well as the Latin nubere and German knospe with the sense of "swelling" (according to Hesychius, one of the meanings of νύμφη is "rose-bud").

Since these mythological nymphs were described as females who mate with men or women at their own volition, and they were outside male control, the term became attached to women who are perceived as behaving similarly.

The term nymphomania was created by modern psychology as referring to a "desire to engage in human sexual behavior at a level high enough to be considered clinically significant." A nymphomaniac is the term for a person suffering from such a disorder.

The word nymphet is used to identify a sexually precocious girl. The term was popularized in the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

The term became widely used by lay persons, often jokingly and shortened to nympho, and so the term "hypersexuality" was adopted by the medical profession in referring to males and females.

Certainly, these nymphs led to the use of nymphomania to describe the hypersexuality of of frequent or suddenly increased sexual urges or sexual activity.

Although hypersexuality can be caused by some medical conditions or medications, in most cases the cause is unknown. The International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization includes “Excessive Sexual Drive” and nymphomania as the term for females suffering from it. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) rejected a proposal to add sexual addiction to its list (the DSM) of psychiatric disorders arguing that labeling sexual urges "extreme" merely stigmatizes people who do not conform to the norms of their culture or peer group. Terms such as "man-crazy", "nympho" and "nymphomaniac" are not used as they "perpetuate the myth of female sexual inferiority and condemn the woman on moral and philosophical grounds."

Satyriasis is the term for males with hypersexuality. In Greek mythology, a satyr is one of the male companions of Pan and Dionysus with goat-like features (a goat-tail, ears, and sometimes a goat-like phallus) and according to legend, quite sexually aggressive.

Far less exciting is the term nymph used to describe the young of any insect that undergoes incomplete metamorphosis, like grasshoppers, termites, ticks and cockroaches.

Nymphs are born with many of the characteristics they will carry into adulthood, unlike moths and butterflies which undergo a full metamorphosis, liquefying and reforming with wings in the pupal stage.