Mimsy Were the Borogoves

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare in America: If you want single payer, you must believe in magic.

I’ve written a lot about how science is becoming indistinguishable from magic in the minds of so much of the beltway crowd and the anointed—and not in the good science fiction way. Science is not something to be believed in, like religion, or voted on like politics. Science is the scientific method, nothing else. To paraphrase Feynman, if it disagrees with the scientific method it is wrong. That is the only key to science.

Science is not legislating the value of π or calling a council of the wise. That’s religion. Science is acknowledging the ignorance of experts, not their expertise. Every time you hear about science being “settled” or about a “consensus”, what you’re hearing is little more than a cargo cult religion wearing a cheap suit of scientific trappings and buzzwords.

One of the worst places for this substitution of magic for science is in medicine. Without the scientific method, medicine will kill both directly, through action, and indirectly by inaction. Nothing illustrates the cargo cult in medicine as clearly as this meme about health care that I ran across last year on a gaming group. The text specifically called out Americans:

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare: An adventure specifically designed for American D&D players.

To someone who both plays D&D and has done some thinking about health care and health insurance, the accompanying image is both profoundly weird and revelatory. For those not familiar with D&D’s iconography, the image pictured under the text “affordable healthcare” is of a priest—a “cleric” in D&D parlance—using magic to heal a sick or injured character.

Not a doctor. Not a scholar. A wielder of magic. This is neither an appeal to logic nor for better science. This is a religious tract.

It isn’t in any way necessary or even likely that a D&D-related affordable health care joke has to involve magic spells. D&D has had non-divine, completely non-magical medicine since at least the advent of its fifth edition, which was well over a decade ago. The skill “Medicine (Wis)” is literally on every character sheet. It’s on the character sheet of warriors and rogues as well as of wizards and priests.

A Wisdom (Medicine) check lets you try to stabilize a dying companion or diagnose an illness.

Veteran’s Day, once Armistice Day, is this coming Tuesday. But the armistice that ended the Great War is not the only thing that happened on November 11 in our history. Among the most barbaric was the 1778 massacre by English troops at Cherry Valley, a village now in Otsego County, New York.

The Cherry Valley massacre is an obscure part of the American Revolution to anyone but the residents of Cherry Valley, who remembered it at least up to the release of The Patriot in 2000.

The English employed Iroquois—in this location, Seneca and Mohawks—in their attempts to quell the American rebellion. The Iroquois were paid to attack under the direct command of British officers as well as to attack independently of English control. In response mostly to those independent raids, Continental soldiers had destroyed several Iroquois towns, hoping to end the many raids that had come from them earlier in the year. All accounts that I’ve seen say that the Continentals destroyed lodgings and provisions—not people. The direct antecedent to the massacre, the destruction of the Iroquois villages of Unadilla and Onaquaga, had by all accounts been empty at the time of the Continental raids.

It’s movie time! A friend of mine has started a new movie channel on YouTube, and it promises to be a standout.

The wheat kernel explained by Vernice Rosenvall in Wheat for Man, 1975.

I was wandering through an antique store in Corning, Arkansas, when I ran across this marvelous manual for what I think is the original Rival Crock•Pot. The pamphlet is sadly not dated, not even with the year-like code that later Crock•Pot manuals would sport on the back cover. However, Rival’s version of the slow cooker was introduced in 1971.

What struck me about this particular printing of the pamphlet, however, is that it contained instructions for a “special Bread 'n Cake Bake pan”.

Our Bread ‘n Cake Bake pan makes a miniature oven of your Crock-Pot! It’s custom designed for marvelous, easy baking of cakes, breads, casseroles or baked potatoes… right in the Crock-Pot… Homemade breads give off that oldtime aroma and have that hearty taste. If you like yeast breads, the “batter” way is the better way. There’s no need to knead… and little waiting for dough to rise.

I of course immediately went to my usual vintage haunts looking for the “Bread ’n Cake Bake” and found one in great shape. It may have been easier nowadays than finding a two-pound coffee can suitable for baking. If you do want to go the full vintage route and use a coffee-style can, you might be able to use a not-quite-one-pound Cafe du Monde can, or a not-quite-two pound beans or tomatoes can.

To top it all off, the very first recipe for homemade bread in the Bread ’n Cake Bake section of this manual was for a graham flour bread. Grandma’s “Dark” Bread incorporates “½ cup whole wheat or graham flour” into the dough. I’ve been experimenting with graham flour this year, so it seemed the perfect place to start.

It was so good, I haven’t made any of the other breads in this section yet.

Graham flour is not readily available today. Most recipes—even this one—suggest using either graham flour or whole wheat flour. However, whole wheat flour is not quite the same thing. Graham flour is literally the whole flour. Whole wheat flour is more of the flour than white flour, but not the whole flour.

And of course I used the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts to create a MIDI file and then GarageBand to make a slideshow of the Revolution.

One of the most enduring stories about the American Revolution is that of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. It was the beginning of the end of the revolution; all that was left were long negotiations for a peace treaty. As the British Army left the field on October 19, their band showed their confusion and dejection at having been beaten by a bunch of wild colonial boys by playing the then-popular song “The World Turned Upside Down (PDF File, 560.9 KB)”.

I thought it would be kind of cool to do the music for “The World Turned Upside Down” using the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh. I didn’t know the song’s lyrics or its melody. All I knew was its title and the story of its use.

It turns out practically no one knows it. “The World Turned Upside Down” may be the most famous song in American history that practically no one knows. I’m not the only person who has noticed this. While I was searching for period sheet music, I ran across Dennis Montgomery’s similar observation on American Revolution.org:

Various songs, and the history of the songs, that made the Revolution—sometimes decades later.

“He gave his eyes… for cornbread.”

This is a very easy cornbread and a very easy use for pumpkin parts. There is no boiling or baking the pumpkin to prep it before using it. Just grate it like carrots. This recipe is in fact a slight modification of a carrot cornbread recipe from the El Molino Best cookbook. El Molino is itself a great cookbook with a great California-style cornbread.

I included the El Molino cornbread in my own Traveling Man’s Cookery. It’s a relatively sweet cornbread because, while it contains very little added sugar, carrots themselves contain quite a bit of sugar. It’s why some people choose to make carrot pie instead of pumpkin pie: it means less processed sugar. I’m not in that camp, but I do like the sweetness that carrots add to cornbread.

Pumpkins are not nearly as sweet as carrots, so this Halloween version is not nearly as sweet a cornbread. I switched out the brown sugar for molasses—preferably, sorghum molasses—to give what sweetness there is in the bread a hint of autumn.

Another syrup that ought to be great with pumpkin and cornmeal is maple syrup. So if you don’t have a source for sorghum molasses, or just don’t like it, consider trying maple. As a last resort, brown sugar will be fine, too. Brown sugar has molasses in it. Depending on the manufacturer, brown sugar is either sugar before the molasses has been (completely) removed, or white sugar with molasses added back in.

Serendipitously the color of pumpkin is much like the color of carrots. The orange in each case combines very pleasingly with the yellow of cornmeal. But given that foods as different as carrots and pumpkin taste great in this recipe, you could probably use any squash or root vegetable that you enjoy.

Zucchini would be the canonical choice in the area I grew up. I suspect it would produce a more green cornbread. You might even play that up by adding some herbs. Whatever herbs you enjoy with zucchini ought to be great in zucchini cornbread.

Also available in print.

This is the second of four addendums I’ve queued up to my three-parter revisiting the refrigerator revolution. That series was originally meant to cover 1928, 1942, and 1947; the latter just barely predated the modern near-universality of home refrigerator ownership. But as I delve deeper into the origins of the home refrigerator/freezer era, it is becoming almost literally the bottomless pit of fascinating fridge finds!

There is always something more interesting just around the corner. While wandering an antique mall over the 2024 Thanksgiving holiday, I ran across this 1927 General Electric refrigerator manual (PDF File, 22.3 MB). It looked interesting, but (a) it was unpriced, and (b) it was missing at least one page. It also wasn’t the first printing, which meant I’d need to do some research anyway before buying it.