(Roughly) Daily

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The earliest ancestor of the Kit Kat Bar was born in 1935, when a worker at the Rowntree’s factory in York suggested a snack that “a man could have in his lunch box for work.”  It was launched in September 1935 in the UK as Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp (price: 2 pence). The two-finger version was launched on May 15, 1936, then renamed “Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp” in 1937; after World War II, it became simply “Kit Kat.”  The name is thought to be a nod to the Kit-Cat Club, an eighteenth-century Whig literary club:

As the building had very low ceilings, it could accommodate only paintings which were wide but not too high. In the art world, such paintings became known as ‘kitkats’. It is therefore conceivable that the humble KIT KAT derived its name from paintings which has to be snapped off to fit into low-ceilinged rooms. [source]

In any case, while the versions sold in the UK and the US remain true to its milk chocolate-cover wafer heritage, Kit Kats sold elsewhere in the world have…  well, adopted local coloration.  “Fried Toast” (a young native of Washington State now living in Japan) has created a Flickr pool that’s a veritable field guide to Kit Kats around the globe: Kit Kats of the World.

Consider, for example, the Muscat Kit Kat…

Or the French Salt Kit Kat…

Oh so many more, here.

As contemplate cultural inclinations in confectionery, we might that it was on this date in  1585 that The Olympic Theatre was inaugurated in Vicenza.  The final masterpiece of Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance disciple of Vitruvius and surely the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture, the theater opened with a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.  The trompe-l’œil onstage scenery, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi to give the appearance of long streets receding to a distant horizon, was installed in 1585 for that first performance, and is the oldest stage set still in existence.

The stage of the Olympic Theatre

Detail: Scamozzi’s scenery viewed through the central arch

UPDATE:  Readers who enjoyed the amusing headlines featured in “All the News, Regardless of Fit”  might appreciate this (N altogether SFW) post at HuffPo… and the Twitter stream at The Media is Dying.