Mimsy Were the Borogoves

There’s even a children’s book about how much of a foodie Jefferson was.

The Fourth of July celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Why not add a couple of Jefferson’s or his family’s recipes to your celebration?

If there were a patron of American foodies, it would be Thomas Jefferson. He famously designed and possibly built his own pasta machine after enjoying pasta on an overseas trip to Italy. He is credited with introducing such varied foodie delights to America as waffles, macaroni & cheese, and vanilla pods.

His ice cream recipe from his time in France is widely copied and possibly the most common example of the foods he popularized. As reproduced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s web site for Monticello, it is simple and likely very good, using cream, separated eggs, and sugar. It is churned using a “sabottiere”, which appears to be an early form of ice cream churn, a “sorbetière” in modern French.

And Jefferson didn’t just bring foreign foods to America. He also brought American foods to foreign lands. He considered the apples of France “vastly inferior to his prized Newtown Pippin from Virginia. So began a five-year mission to introduce his French colleagues to the great delicacies of his homeland.”

June 22, 2026, marks the fifty-first birthday of what was probably the longest-running gaming forum of its era, and probably well into the future. In the announcement for my personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book, I wrote, about publishing personal and family recipes:

The preservation of food culture would be better if everyone did this or something like it. I wouldn’t buy everyone’s paperback, but I would download a lot of PDFs.

“A few of my friends”, I added, “make their Word documents and text documents of family recipes available on request”.

I very specifically had Lee Gold of Alarums and Excursions fame¹ in mind when I wrote that. Alarums and Excursions started in June 1975 and ran up to and including April 2025, almost fifty full years. I contributed to Alarums and Excursions from at least April 2008 to its end, with The Biblyon Free Press. At some point I started including vintage food, that being my other obsession after gaming. The road to seeing Lee Gold’s recipes began when I reviewed the ca. 1955 Home Cooking Secrets of Charlotte in the April 2021 issue, A&E 545.

Lee replied in issue 546:

I could email you our Recipes files if you want to see them. One file is my transcription of my father’s mother’s recipes, given her by friends and relatives when she left Virginia for Los Angeles (June 25, 1895). Another is my father’s and my mother’s recipes. The third is Barry’s and my recipes plus those of some of our friends.

When I replied that “I’d love to see your recipe files”, she sent three documents:

1. Some Recipes of Howard and Judith Klingstein
2. Leonora Wise Klingstein’s recipe book
3. Lee Gold’s Recipes

All of the recipes in these files come from either her file of recipes from her parents (Howard and Judith Klingstein, the first file), from her grandparents (Leonora Wise Klingstein, the second file), or are her own recipes from, among other sources, friends in the science fiction and gaming community (the third file).

Alan Moore’s best works provoke a lot of thought about the human relationship with social and technological progress. When I wrote The Five Faces of V I was also reminded quite a bit about what I wrote in Our Cybernetic Future. I ended up cutting most of those references because they didn’t really touch directly on the comics. But there are some very important questions in that crossover. One is the concept of the singularity. The other is the mentoring effect of the existence of the United States—or the idea of the United States—as a world power. The two are heavily related.

Much of Moore’s vision of progress could be said to combine John Von Neumann’s optimism—that for every technological problem an answer will be found—with Norbert Weiner’s entropy-inspired pessimism, that there will be a lot of degradation along the way.

The article on the left is about sharks not getting cancer. This is Omni, after all.

As I go through old Omni magazines, I am struck by George Eliot’s dictum that history is adept at changing costume while remaining the same.¹

One of those “changes in costume” is how political correctness doesn’t just shape a conversation, it shapes policy. And like most forms of censorship, it shapes policy out of dangerous ignorance.

In today’s world of men beating up women and calling it “sports” there’s an argument about “who does it hurt” on one side and “now it’s turned deadly” on the other. But political correctness hasn’t just turned deadly today. Political correctness has always been deadly and often, just as it is today, it’s been deadly to the people it was supposed to help.

Political correctness will always be deadly, because it is specifically a form of speech control that denies reality. It reaches into scientific research and denies effective research. It bars some data from the scientific conversation—and these are, by their nature, usually going to be the most relevant data.

I recently ran across a darkly humorous news item in the November 1981 Omni:²

Gay Diseases

Two mysterious diseases are claiming the lives of homosexual men in several American cities and are baffling epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

“We’re calling it an outbreak of decreased resistance,” says CDC investigator James Curran, “and it’s very, very serious.”

…

CDC field-workers in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are hunting for a reason. Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious and most of the victims don’t know one another, epidemiologists suspect something in the gay lifestyle causes these ailments.

“Inhalant anesthetics, such as butyl nitrate, are one possibility, since many gays use them [to enhance sexual pleasure],” Curran says, “but so far we really don’t know.”

“Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious” partly due to it “claiming the lives of homosexual men [who] don’t know one another” scientists were looking to non-infectious modes of transmission. They were looking at things in “the gay life-style” rather than behavior. Things like “inhalant anesthetics”.

Logo for Disney’s Swamp Fox miniseries on Walt Disney Presents. The background represents “Frontierland” at the newly-created Disneyland.

If poetry and music were the main pop culture mediums of the nineteenth century, television was the pop culture medium of the second half of the twentieth. Francis Marion was in on television from the beginning. He had a television series, sort of, in the fifties. Walt Disney Presents: The Swamp Fox was based on the Robert D. Bass book Swamp Fox: The life and campaigns of General Francis Marion.

The book was published in 1959 and Disney immediately made it into an eight episode miniseries for Walt Disney Presents. Francis Marion was played by Leslie Nielson, more famous today for his comedic roles. Marion’s girlfriend and later wife, Mary Videau, was initially played by Joy Page—more famous for a minor but pivotal role in the earlier Casablanca.

This Monday is Miracle Monday, the Earth-wide fictional celebration whose origin is Elliot S! Maggin’s wonderful Superman novel of the same name. Something has happened, something that could literally have been Hell on Earth, but Superman saved the world and everyone in it. Not through brute strength or even through his alien, super-enhanced intelligence, but through his innate goodness, his moral upbringing by Jonathan and Martha Kent. The people of Earth remember nothing of those horrible days. They don’t know why they feel joyful. They know only that they do, as if some horrible evil has been lifted from them.

Shortly before four in the afternoon on the third Monday in the month of May, the people of the city of Metropolis learned the meaning of joy. They had no explanation for this feeling, and there were gaps in their knowledge of what had gone on in their lives so far that day. It was as though they were all waking up, or at least opening their eyes, for the first time in an awfully long time. The first thing many of them saw was the red-and-blue figure of Superman drawing a line across their sky, and he became the symbol of their joy. It felt like a miracle, though none could say why.

Miracle Monday is a wonderful book, a fine companion to Maggin’s first Superman novel, Last Son of Krypton. Very few authors have fully recognized how the innate goodness of Superman is essential to his nature. Maggin is probably the best of that very small number.

I have Miracle Monday on my calendar to remind me to search my experiences over the last year for something worth blogging about on that day. It ought to be related to Superman or at least to superhero roleplaying or fiction. But since I don’t play superhero roleplaying games any more, or read superhero comic books—in both cases more through lack of opportunity than through lack of desire—I often skip over it.

I have, for a long time, been considering a complete rewrite of Men and Supermen, my own superhero game written and played throughout the eighties and nineties. While I play fantasy most often, superhero roleplaying is probably my favorite; from the moment I first played Dungeons & Dragons in 1980, I set my sights on a solid ruleset for gaming in a comic book superhero setting.

May 12, Tuesday, is the anniversary of the capture of Fort Motte by Patriot forces under General Francis Marion and Lieutenant Colonel “Light-Horse” Harry Lee in 1781. “Fort” Motte was in fact a plantation mansion commandeered by the British a year earlier. The siege, which began on May 8, is famous not for the siege itself nor for the famous military figures who took part but for the patriotism of its real owner, Mrs. Rebecca Brewton Motte. Mrs. Motte famously supplied the exotic arrows used to set the mansion on fire and drive the British out.

The siege was otherwise a fairly standard military operation, not at all the backwoods guerrilla warfare that General Marion was famous for. I’ve been fascinated by Marion ever since hearing a song about him in a library record back during the celebration surrounding the Bicentennial. We lived a few blocks from the local library, and I checked out Dallas Corey’s 1973 The History of the American Revolution several times to listen to it on our record player.

Corey’s album is a combination of short introductions and epilogues about the American Revolution, surrounding songs that highlighted various people and events. One of the songs on the album is The Swamp Fox. The name is evocative—and similar to that of the Marvel Comics superheroes I’d recently started reading about from the local grocery store’s spinning racks.

I didn’t yet own a cassette recorder, so I never recorded the album. I just kept checking it out whenever I felt like listening to it again, until I couldn’t find it anymore. It took almost fifty years to acquire a copy of my own. It is a marvelous album.

• • In Lexington
  • The center of revolt against the King
  • The colonists were trying hard to bring
  • An independent way of life to this, their promised land
  • It was there, in Lexington, they made their stand.

“The American war for Independence had begun.”

Corey sings of Lexington, and then of Bunker Hill, on into both the signing that we’re celebrating this year and the entire campaign of 1776, two hundred and fifty years ago. Then it’s off to Brandywine and Saratoga and into The Swamp Fox before Corey wraps up the Revolution by counting the cost.

In Corey’s telling, the Swamp Fox stands at the pivot of the Revolution.

Also available in print on Amazon^• and Lulu.

Are you ready for the summer of Independence? Summer celebrations are always better with ice cream, and the no-churn recipes in The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Ice Cream Cookery^• are my personal favorites.

Since publishing my Ice Cream Cookery last year, I continue to try new ice creams alongside the old favorites. One was so impressive I’ve added it to the book. Last year for a gaming festschrift I went over some recipes given to me by Alarums and Excursions publisher Lee Gold. Her father’s Orange Cream Sherbet, made with oranges, lemons, cream, milk, and eggs, is very, very good.

This differs from the Lemon Cream Sherbet that debuted in the first edition more than in replacing some of the lemon with orange. It also replaces the gelatin with eggs, beating the yolks and whites separately. It enhances the citrus flavor by utilizing the peels of the orange and lemon as well. It is an absolutely wonderful sherbet, and would be great as the filling of an ice cream pie or cake. It’s not too shabby between two chocolate cookies as an ice cream sandwich either.

I’ve also made a minor change to the graphics. In its first edition photo, the Plombir Slivochnyi was somewhat eclipsed by a cheesecake from Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. I try to make these photos reflect how I actually use and eat the depicted foods, and I like ice cream with my cake. Even cheesecake. But I’ve now replaced the Plombir Slivochnyi photo with one that puts the ice cream up front.