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Apples! CGP Grey Style

2012-10-26 · Hank · watch on YouTube · History & curiosities · curiosity idea

Taking up CGP Grey's claim that his style of video is hard to make, Hank tells the history and biology of apples: their Kazakh origin, Johnny Appleseed's seedling orchards grown for cider, grafting, and the McIntosh apple behind the Apple Macintosh.

What is said

00:00:00 — Greeting; YouTube's Education Summit and CGP Grey's claim that his style is hard; not those apples

  • ★★ In the description Hank writes that when he told Grey to make videos more often, Grey said it is really hard and told him to try; he did, found it extremely hard, and jokes he hasn't stood up in 'like two days'. (playful) — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank attended YouTube's Education Summit recently and met many educational YouTubers, including CGP Grey, of whom everyone agrees the world needs more. — 00:00:02
  • ★★★ Grey told Hank that making videos in his style was very hard, so Hank makes this apple video to prove he can. — 00:00:14

00:00:28 — Apples: Kazakh origin, oldest pie recipe, first cultivated fruit tree, 'apple' as generic word for fruit, Greek myths and apple throwing

  • ★★★ Hank says almost every apple anyone has eaten descends from wild apple trees in Kazakhstan, so apples are immigrants rather than 'American as apple pie'. (hedged) — 00:00:35
  • ★★ Hank says the oldest known apple pie recipe was written in 1381. — 00:00:44
  • ★★ Hank says apples may have been the first cultivated fruit tree in human history. (hedged) — 00:00:49
  • ★★ Hank says that until the 17th century the word for apple in Old English and Latin was a generic term for all fruits (berries excepted, nuts included), making ancient texts ambiguous. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank says apples feature heavily in Greek myths, especially about beauty and sexuality, and throwing an apple at a young lady was a way of saying you fancied her. (playful) — 00:01:20

00:01:34 — Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman): seedling nurseries, required fruit trees, heterozygosity and grafting, apples for cider

  • ★★★ Hank says Johnny Appleseed, unlike Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, was a real person: John Chapman, a businessman, nomad and missionary who crossed the American frontier in the early 1800s supplying apple saplings. — 00:01:38
  • ★★ Hank says many American settlers were required to plant fruit trees on their property as a sign they were improving land they had claimed. — 00:01:54 · United States
  • ★★★ Hank explains apples' extreme heterozygosity: a seedling's apples taste nothing like the parent's and are by default terrible, so good apples are cloned by grafting buds or limbs onto rootstock. (hedged) — 00:02:11
  • ★★★ Hank says Chapman planted seeds rather than grafts, producing terrible-tasting apples nobody minded, since apples were mashed and fermented into hard cider, water being distrusted for dysentery. (playful) — 00:02:32

00:02:57 — The cosmic lottery of a good tree; John McIntosh's 1796 tree; the McIntosh apple and the Apple Macintosh; sign-off

  • ★★ Hank says farmers who found a tree with tasty eating apples won a kind of cosmic lottery and often got rich selling grafts and apples. — 00:02:57
  • ★★★ Hank says every McIntosh apple descends from one tree Scotsman John McIntosh found on a farm in Canada in 1796. — 00:03:10 · Canada
  • ★★ Hank says the McIntosh apple inspired the naming of the Apple Macintosh, the kind of computer he is editing this video on. — 00:03:24

Humor (significant)

  • Hank explains that 'apple' was the generic word for every fruit, though berries had their own word. — 00:01:09 > «but nuts? apples.»
  • Hank says throwing an apple at a young lady was a way of saying you fancied her. — 00:01:27 > «as long as you didn't throw it too hard.»
  • Apples were fermented into booze, first because everyone had seen dysentery and no one trusted the water. — 00:02:54 > «and second because, well, booze»
  • The McIntosh apple inspired the name of the Apple Macintosh computer. — 00:03:30 > «which some how happens to be the kind of computer I'm editing this video on right now»

Threads in this video

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