Mimsy Were the Borogoves

The word “signal-box” is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death. — G.K. Chesterton (Heretics)

Italian road safety campaign social media backfire—Wednesday, February 5th, 2025
Watch parked cars: Italian bicycle safety campaign: “tenere d’occhio le auto parcheggiate e usare il campanello per farsi notare”; bicycles; bicycle paths; bicycle lanes; traffic safety; road safety

Translation: “Keep an eye on parked cars, and use your bell to be noticed.” This should not be controversial, although I might quibble with the bell.

I’ve been reading Il Post lately, both to improve my very bad Italian and to gain a non-American, non-English perspective on the news of the day. Yet somehow I missed this article about a “scandal” in Lombardy until a friend brought it to my attention with the comment “This is funny.”

It is funny, and a very good example of why I avoid social media. In a virtual environment we lose any sense of reality. In this case, it appears that a local government was actually doing something substantive to keep pedestrians and bicyclists from being killed by inattentive drivers. It turned into a social media scandal because… it told people how to effectively stay alive rather than laying blame and letting them die!

I’m not going to translate the whole thing. It’s not worth the trouble and in any case my Italian is not up to the task. The title is The questionable campaign on street safety in Lombardy. The subtitle is:

È stata sospesa dopo molte critiche a un post che dava consigli ai pedoni per evitare di farsi investire, dando un po' l'impressione di colpevolizzarli

That is, in my rough Italian:

It [the safety program] was suspended after much criticism to a post that advised pedestrians on how to avoid getting hit, giving a bit of an impression of blaming them.

The thing is, that bit of blame is no more than saying that some pedestrians don’t pay attention to the possibility of dangerous drivers when using the street. I do a lot of walking when I travel, and this is demonstrably true. Judging from the campaign’s graphics, the campaign was not about assigning blame but about saving lives.

The Cult of the Cult of Gygax™—Wednesday, January 29th, 2025
Gygax: One equal to another: “This work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another.”—Gary Gygax, from the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.; game masters; Gary Gygax; Cult of Gygax

This is the semi-birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, to the extent that we can even know when the birthday was. It’s over fifty years old now, and we have already lost many of the pioneers of the game. Every year that goes by, we lose more pioneers and more players. With them go what in business we’d call the “institutional knowledge” they carried. That knowledge isn’t just about rules and rulesets, but about why these rules and rulesets were created. It’s not about a particular game but about the whole milieu in which the game was created.

I wrote about how the way that fans and readers interacted influenced early games in On a Cult of Gygax. But just as important is how and why the entrepreneurs did what they did. Take the best of today’s creators, your-favorite-osr-creator-here, and even if they never created their product they’d still be able to game. They could still play Dungeons & Dragons, or Traveller, or Tunnels & Trolls, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Villains & Vigilantes… the list goes on, and what each of those games have in common is that if their creators had never created those games, their creators would never have been able to play.

Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, Mark Millar, and even Ken St. Andre, were creating games not to market them but because they couldn’t play that kind of game without creating the game first. They were players before they were businessmen—and it showed in everything from how they marketed the game (marketing often came after playing) and in how they talked about the game.

It’s very strange to me, having grown up soaking in the free-form rules style of AD&D play, how attached some players are to a Cult of the Cult of Gygax™; and to complaining about a supposed hardline by TSR against house rules. My memory of that period, at least through the late eighties, is one of “make it your own”, advice straight from the rule books and from outlets such as The Dragon.

We always knew that Gygax and other TSR luminaries used different rules. And it made sense for them to do so even outside of a “make it your own” mentality: where could we expect new rules to come from, if not from the campaigns of the author and other employees at TSR? We assumed, and it appears to be true, that the people at TSR were gamers, that they played the game, too.

Which makes questions and answers like this one from Polyhedron far more understandable to me than to adherents of the Cult of the Cult of Gygax™.

My Year in Food: 2024—Wednesday, January 15th, 2025

I completed three food-related publishing projects this year. First, in July, I published the second edition of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods, my collection of recipes from Chicago’s television chef and IGA icon, Eddie Doucette. It includes an interview with his son, which I expanded for a more detailed post in September, He was the chef.

In August, I published my own personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book. It’s a compilation of recipes that I used to save by way of photographing them with my phone so as to have them available while traveling. It’s a lot easier to access now that they’re in PDF, ePub, and print form.

And finally, in October I started publishing facsimiles of the vintage cookbook pamphlets I’ve been writing about. The first to get this treatment was The Horsford Cook Book from 1877 or so. Also available: Mrs. Winston’s Receipts for 1876 and the ca. 1880 New Centennial Cook Book.

For the moment I’m only doing this for works from 1929 and earlier1. But that leaves many more to come in 2025 and up, so stay tuned to the food section of Mimsy Were the Borogoves or The Padgett Sunday Supper Club.

I continued preparing for the sestercentennial this year with a collection of 1876 recipes from a handful of cookbooks celebrating or benefiting from America’s centennial. I cannot overstate how much I recommend surprising your family and friends with a mashed potato pie in place of the more traditional sweet potato pie. There are a lot of dishes that have disappeared into our history that deserve restoration, and this is at the top of the list for me.

I also managed to restart my refrigerator cookbook revisited history survey with Montgomery Ward Cold Cooking from 1942. The Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest from 1947 is coming soon, and I have a few more tidbits up my sleeve to round out that trilogy.

My Year in Books: 2024—Wednesday, January 8th, 2025

The year started with an amazing collection of books from a trip to San Diego. I have so many books in my to-read pile that I don’t travel for book sales anymore, but if a book sale happens to be where I’m traveling… In San Diego I hit the La Playa Bookstore remodeling sale and the University Heights Library Sale. I also visited Verbatim Books, the Mission Hills Library Store, and Grace’s Book Nook. And of course I stopped at Coas in Las Cruces on the way out.

For a blackjack total of 21 books. Thongor in the City of Magicians, from Coas, kept me in reading material through New Mexico and Arizona. Post Captain, The John Wayne Code, Gracie: A Love Story, Lights Out, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader, Stella Fregelius, In Trump Time, Cyrano de Bergerac

“This plus your regular class load should turn your brain to tapioca in less than a month.”

I’ll have more to say about tapioca when I get to 2024’s Year in Food.

Network and The Running Man in 2025—Wednesday, January 1st, 2025
Truth hasn’t been popular: The Running Man: “Truth? Hasn’t been very popular lately.”; movies; Arnold Schwarzenegger; truth

We have just entered the second quarter of the 2000s, well past the years that The Running Man was set in. Just before Thanksgiving I happened to watch both Network and Running Man back to back. The only reason for this juxtaposition was that they were both “movies my dad might enjoy”—which he did. But watching them together over two nights like that, one of the things that struck me is that The Running Man could literally be a sequel to Network. Both are about the entertainmentication of the modern world, both feature television executives obsessed with viewing shares, both use violent criminals to achieve winning shares and increase already-winning shares, both are very much about the merging of autocratic government and a compliant news industry. Both are about the merging of news and government with entertainment.

In Network Faye Dunaway’s up-and-coming television exec successfully develops a series about armed bank robbers and murderers acting under cover of political activism. We never do find out what her heiress-kidnapping Liberation Army show is called. Someone jokingly referred to it as “The Mao-Tse Tung Hour” early in development and that’s what the executives and development team keep calling it through the rest of the movie.

The Running Man was much less expertly filmed than Network, especially when it came to cutting it for theaters. We can still see bits remaining of subplots or subcurrents that were removed late in editing or so late during production that related scenes couldn’t be altered.

Maria Conchita Alonso’s Amber was clearly being set up for a tense scene at the end in which she would have trouble remembering the uplink code for the broadcast network, something that needed exact timing as the revolution’s strike team took over the broadcast control room. They cut the remembering scene but not the memorization scene—the latter was necessary to explain Harold Weiss’s disappearance.

Cutting that scene was a surprisingly smart choice for a B-level action movie like The Running Man. It’s such a cliched bit that it mostly only works in comedies today, Army of Darkness being the most iconic but still evident in the modern century in movies like Scoop.

A more interesting cut is possibly Captain Freedom’s awakening. His speech at the end about a “Code of the Gladiators” comes mostly out of nowhere. It looks a lot like the culmination of a character growth that never actually happened. When we first see Captain Freedom, he’s a joke, almost literally a white Bojangles prancing across the screen to promote his parodic exercise show.

Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you’re ready for Captain Freedom’s Workout.

Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876—Wednesday, December 25th, 2024

Merry Christmas! As we move closer and closer to the sestercentennial in 2026, here’s a centennial-adjacent cookbook from 1876. While Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876 (PDF File, 5.1 MB) was, obviously, designed specifically for 1876, it had nothing to do with the Centennial. It was, ostensibly at least, an almanac. So there was one for every year, including 1876.

“Mrs. Winslow” was not selling a baking product. “Mrs. Winslow’s” had been putting out Receipt Books every year since at least 1863, in the service of selling Brown’s Bronchial Troches1 and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. They’re often classified as quack medicines but I’m not sure that they’re “quack” in the normal sense of the word. Judging from the ingredients and the advertisements in this pamphlet, they did what they were advertised to do.

Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup may not have been the best idea for quieting children suffering “the excruciating pain of Cutting Teeth”, but it probably did reduce the pain: it contained morphine. Most of the adult medicines promise to relieve coughs and sore throats, which they probably did. The products advertised in these almanacs, at least, do not appear to have promised a cure of the underlying ailment, only a refuge from the symptoms. Given the state of medicine at the time, they may even not have been the worst of contemporary methods of relieving such ailments.

The Master Kneels—Wednesday, December 18th, 2024
If I wash thee not…: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” Captioned over Jacopo Tintoretto’s “Christ washing the Feet of the Disciples, ca. 1575-1580.; Biblical; purification

The somewhat sporadic ritual where rich white liberals wash the feet of minorities has to be the weirdest bit of racism to come out of the compulsory racist teachings of the institutional left. In the first draft I had the adjective “unintentional” in front of “racism”, but any people who publish “white culture” posters that claim it’s white culture to plan for the future, use logic, and understand cause and effect probably understand very well what they’re doing.

It’s interesting to compare this bit of specious invocation of religion with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I have a dream speech. I have a dream only made sense to people who understood the Biblical references King was making, whether it be people who were themselves religious or people who had seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments as little as three years earlier.1

King’s speech, in other words, required knowledge of its listeners. This modern washing of the feet, in contrast, requires ignorance, at least if it’s going to be taken at face value. If you’re familiar with the event it’s drawing on, it doesn’t make any sense.

The foot-washing in the Bible that this modern foot ritual resembles was the Son of God washing the feet of imperfect man to cleanse them of their sins. The explanation that racists have made up for the ritual that if “even Jesus” can wash the feet of the apostles, surely we can wash the feet of those we’ve oppressed falls completely apart to anyone who actually goes back to the Biblical narrative it’s invoking.

But… it’s not “even Jesus”. It’s only Jesus. Unless the foot-washing goes both ways, this was not something that man can emulate, not without a lot of hubris, especially in the form it takes: it’s always the white liberal in these rituals taking the place of Jesus, and the minority is always the person getting their foot washed.

Jesus was literally washing their feet because he was better than them. Peter said, no way you’re going to wash my feet, I should wash your feet. Jesus replied, in effect, you’re dirty and I’m not. You are not worthy to enter my home unless I wash your feet.

Agnus Dei: Latin in the Catholic Mass—Wednesday, December 11th, 2024
Learn the Latin of the Agnus Dei: Learn the Latin of the Agnus Dei, over the Louis Niedermeyer sheet music.; Latin; Catholic Mass

My local Catholic church uses occasional Latin phrases during the Masses leading up to Christmas and Easter. Our pastor reasoned that (a) Latin is the official language of the Church, (b) it makes a distinction between the different seasons, and (c) it “draws us deeper into the mystery of the liturgy”.

This inspired me, on seeing an old Latin grade school textbook at a library book sale, to attempt to learn basic Latin. The book I’m using is Jenney, Thompson, and Smith’s First Year Latin from 1953. This is a very dense book; I’m currently about 19% of the way through it after several years. Had I been one of the students it was meant for back in the fifties, this would have been a lot of work to complete in one year!

I’m not going to talk about pronunciation. Textbook Latin and Catholic Latin are pronounced differently, and Catholic Latin tends to be pronounced at least slightly differently in different churches. My experience solely in American churches is that Catholic Latin basically follows the rules of Italian pronunciation. If you know those rules, follow them but pay attention to how your church might be doing things a little differently. If you don’t know those rules, just pay attention and you’ll get it. The most obvious difference between Italian and American pronunciations is that the “ch” sound is a hard “k” in Italian; the soft “c” of American English (receive, decipher) is pronounced as the American English “ch” (church, for instance…) and with basically the same rule: when the “c” is followed by an “i” or an “e”.

With all that out of the way, one of the simplest prayers sung or spoken in Latin during Mass is the Agnus Dei. Many Catholic prayers are titled by their first words in the original Latin. So the prayer that begins, in English, as “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary” is called “Memorare” because Memorare is the first word in the original Latin—it means “remember”. And the prayer that begins “Lamb of God” is called the “Agnus Dei” because those are its first words in the original:

    • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
    • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
    • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

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