[Gennady] Yanayev, who was probably making sure the mark was still in place, was the worst sort of Party nonentity. He was a vain man of small intelligence, a womanizer, and a drunk. I'm not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia.
-David Remnick in
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
From
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination by Paul Freedman:
Legend has it that sharp Connecticut traders perfected the manufacture of imitation wooden nutmegs that were added to real ones, the fakery covered by the cunning artifice of their making and the powerful aroma of real nutmegs. The popularizer of this story was Thomas Chandler Halliburton (1796-1865), a Canadian judge from Nova Scotia, who wrote folkloric stories about Sam Slick, a Yankee peddler who sold nutmegs liberally laced with wooden fakes. The tale was so appealing that the state adopted the unusual sobriquet "the Nutmeg State," which says something about the admiration of business success over mere ethics (p. 124)...
From
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination by Paul Freedman:
According to the Koran, the fountains of paradise will be scented with ginger, camphor, and musk (p. 80)....The Christian Roman poet Prudentius (A.D. 348-405) described paradise as a place of balsam, spikenard, and "rare cinnamon" (p. 90)....