Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Gerri out there. And this is short stuff, California.

Here we come right back where we started from.

I love California, as you know. Mm hmm. It's I lived in L.A., but I love Northern California. I think Emily and I have designs on maybe even retiring there one day. Oh, yeah. Maybe there are people I don't know. I mean, somewhere in wine country would be just lovely.

Oh, man, that would be so nice. Now, I saw the soap one time called Santa Barbara and it looks real nice there.

Now, Santa Barbara is awesome. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it depends on what happens with with Ruby.

You know, we don't want to we've kind of pledge to follow her around. Oh, yeah. So I'm going to tell her how great San Francisco is, take her there a lot. So maybe she'll want to end up in San Francisco and then we can be nearby in Sonoma or something.

Yeah, I'm sure she's going to love that. She's really going to grow up to look forward to being really close to her parents for her whole life.

We'll see. She's getting a Republican in Michigan. Did you watch Mark my words? Yes. She does have a Detroit edge to her.

Nice.

So, obviously, Chuck, we're talking about California and where the whole thing got its name. And apparently no one fully knows. What we're going to talk about is a an interpretation that's been around since the 19th century, but it's pretty, pretty widely considered as the correct answer. But no one wrote down like this is what California's named after. And some earlier attempts to explain it is that it was derived from the Arabic word CALIFF as in Califate K, there's a Greek word called Cholo's.

That means beautiful.

OK, and then some people said, no, no, it's after Caliente, which means hot Infernus, which means furnace. So California is a hot furnace and everybody is just like, just go back to bed.

Yeah, it is rather lovely actually restart this day man. So there's this guy and I think that 1848 or 1856 who he was like an amateur historian, he wrote a paper saying, this is where I think California comes from.

I said, this is pretty good, man. Yeah, I think this makes a lot of sense. There was an author named Garci Rodriguez de Montalva of Seville, Spanish writer, who wrote a novel called A Man. I was doing so good, Amadeus de Gaulle or Amadeus of Gaul. And Amadeus was, I guess, sort of an action hero of the time. And the book was really big, so much so that Montalva wrote a sequel to the book featuring the son of Amadeus Las Vegas de Explanation or the exploits of Asplund.

Ian. And this is just sort of a setup of these books in a very kind of neat little factoid that lies within.

Yeah, like these two books right here. We're like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton all rolled together like they were Richton.

Huge. I've heard it like that. Is it. They were huge. Is it Crighton.

I've always said Crighton but I have to until just a minute ago. But I've heard it, I've heard it as Crichton let's say Michael Crichton about this.

Let's say Tom Clancy and Laura Ingalls Wilder mash together like that is the level of popularity that these books had in the in the early 16th century like 15 ten. I think that's right.

And so we mentioned the first one because the second one is where California possibly comes from or the name California comes from, because in Las Vegas, they Asplund in the the a lot of the action is the sacking of the town of Constantinople held then by the Turks, by a bunch of different countries and nations and armies sacking the city together as allies. And one of them is a group of basically Amazonian women who bear a striking resemblance to the Amazons that produced Diana Wonder Woman.

I thought the same thing. But in this case, these these women were led these women warriors were led by Queen Khalifa.

So Khalifa. Yeah, looks familiar. They're very strong. They had pet griffins and they fed men to these Griffins. So, yeah, their male offspring got fed to the Griffins.

Pretty cool story. I think it was like the scum manifesto.

That's right.

Which you can find in the book. Hmm. The stuff he should. No book that is. So he described the. Homeland, apparently, the homeland was called California, and if that's true, then that seems pretty straightforward to me, right? Yeah, it definitely does. But the interesting thing is that's not really the end of the story. There's a lot more to it. And this antiquarian basically said here's here's basically proof.

And I think, well, we'll take a break and then talk about that in a minute. How about that? Sounds good.

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So, Chuck, we were saying that in this book, Let's Sagasta Splenda and that they mentioned that Queen Khaleefa is from California, that's the name of this mystical land where there are all these beautiful clift's, the only medalled to be found. There is gold. And so the of the Warriors under Queen Khaleefa were like golden armor. And while they were flying around on their Griffins, it was just kind of like this mystical place, basically paradise on earth.

Right.

And so when the Spanish showed up around the time that these books were at the peak of their popularity, we can assume that some of them would be familiar with this wildly popular work in the land of California that was described in it.Yeah, and they might have literally brought these books over the Spanish believed there's an area south in Southern California, kind of like as far south as you can get called Baja California. And I think that's actually Mexico. Right. Or is that part of California? It is.

Well, I think there's Baja California. And there's Baja Mexico, I think. OK, there's just like the border goes right through it.

As far as I know, I've never been down there. I always wanted to. But Emily and I were so broke when we lived in L.A. that we didn't do a ton of traveling throughout California. We did most of that since we've moved ironically. But Baja California, they thought was an island just like the island where Queen California or California lived in the novel. And so they called these European colonizers, called it California. They later learned that it was not an island.

Actually, it's a peninsula. And Baja means lower California. And then the upper part was named is Alta, California. Hmm. Not to be confused with what we think of as northern, northern and Southern California. It was literally like sort of what we think of as Mexico and just California. Yeah.

And so initially when they came upon Baja, they thought Baja was an island, not a peninsula. They didn't figure that out. So they didn't call Baja Baja California. They just called it California, because in the book, California was an island as well. Right. Right. But it wasn't until that expedition where they're like, oh, there's this thing just keeps on going that they came up with Baja California and Alta, California. And then also California just became California.

That's what everybody calls California now.

Right. But it gets a little more interesting, too, because the word California goes back supposedly even further. They think this book was written in 15 ten. But apparently the author of the book based part of it on the Song of Roland, which is a French poem written in the 11th century about Charlemagne in the 8th century.

And in this poem, Charlemagne List, a bunch of people that he expected to like combat him and come after him and rebel against him, including men of Africa. This is, in quotes, men of Africa and those of Californian Ricola Ferney.

Either way, Khalife are in California with the people in the Ozarks called California today.

Did you have you thinking of that joke for the first day, my friend?

It literally rolled my brain. All right. My tongue. Kudos. Thank you. Thank you, California.

So you've got Charlamagne worried about California and people say, well, what is California in this song of Roland? And it turns out that at the time when the song of Roland was popular, would you say the 11th century, 11th and 12th century, I guess. Yeah, 11 centuries when it was written.

OK, so people were very, very familiar with the town that was basically called California like they were he was referring to the author of the song of Roland, was referring to a real place in Watts today, Algeria, but at the time was considered the Barbary Coast. And there was a there were basically fortified settlements that were called generically colla or colored.

And they often would be they combined that word meaning like today, you call it like, you know, for Josh, if I founded it fortified town, this is virtually what what we're talking about here. And one of these particular places, actually, a very magnificent, seemingly wealthy place, was founded by a warrior named Bennie Hamad bin Hamad, not Bennie like Bennie. He'll be and I am honored. And he named he was followed by a group called the Bennie Efren.

And now we kind of start to ferry, get to the root of where California came from.

That's right. But Kella, I think Colores was just sort of a prefix for a lot of different places right at the time. The fortified town. It's like what we would say. Instead of thought they would, they said color. Yeah, so color if green, which could be sort of loosely looked at as maybe California, that actually crumbled in the 12th century after the song of Roland, not too long after the song of Roland was written.

Mm hmm. And I guess they think and what I don't see is the connection. I mean, do you think he lifted that all those years later for his book?

That seems a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, no, I don't know. I think so. This fame, this North African city color, a frien was very, very famous. Like in Europe, like the Europeans knew all about this. It was almost like like a city of gold almost. It was extremely wealthy. So it's entirely possible that it survived, you know, knowledge of this thing survived a few hundred years or kind of morphed into a generic term for like a paradise on earth.

So like this guy might have just grabbed this term, possibly without knowing its origin. But then what's interesting is that got morphed into the state of California and everybody forgot that origin, too. So it's basically a famous North African city was cited in the song of Rollan, which ended up in the last Sagasta as blondin, which ended up as the name for California, as far as we can tell.

I love it. I buy it. I do, too. I'm buying it. Big Talpiot twice on Sunday. And since I said that, everybody short stuff is out.

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