MARKETS: Send In the Clowns, the Clams, the Mustaches El Gallo, 4546 Brooklyn Ave., East Los Angeles, (213) 263-5528 or (800) 65-Gallo. Open 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, including holidays. The sound of dough mixers that has echoed off the lofty ceiling of El Gallo’s workroom since 5 a.m. is finally quiet. Now, at 10 a.m., there are only rhythmic thumps and clacking rolls as head bakery man Nicholas Sosa and his crew hand-shape the nearly 4,500 pieces of pan dulce that the bakery will sell that day. Working at a long, high table, the bakers produce the whole gamut of traditional Mexican sweet breads. Some have cartoon-like forms and nicknames: Conchas (clam shells), payasos (clowns...
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La Moustache As anyone who’s ever played with a Woolly Willy knows, facial hair is fun. But none so fun as the mustache, that bold yet whimsical upper lip sprout with so many iterations. Originated by Persian horsemen in 300 B.C., as far as we’ve yet discovered, the mustache has long been the symbol for male virility and nobility, until it reached its current period of disgrace as a hipster accoutrement. But lately I have been wondering about the natural and biological history of what the French so aptly call la moustache. It would be 2,250 years before NASCAR caught up the mustache. For a stylistic statement occupying the narrow real estate between the nose and the upper lip,...
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Moustache Etymology The word "moustache" is French, and is derived from the Italian moustacio (fourteenth century), dialectal mostaccio (16th century), from Medieval Latin moustaccium (eighth century), Medieval Greek μοστάκιον (moustakion), attested in the ninth century, which ultimately originates as a diminutive of Hellenistic Greek μύσταξ (mustax, mustak-), meaning "upper lip" or "facial hair", probably derived from Hellenistic Greek μύλλον (mullon), "lip". History Shaving with stone razors was technologically possible from Neolithic times, but the oldest portrait showing a shaved man with a moustache is an ancient Iranian ( Scythian ) horseman from 300 BC. In Western cultures,...
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