Mimsy Were the Borogoves

This was a relatively slow year for books. According to Goodreads, I read an even 100, but quite a few of them were cookbooks. I’ll be writing about them later in 2023 in Food. Fictionwise, I started the year with Jack Vance’s Eight Fantasms and Magics. You could hardly do better. Vance is a master of fantasy, and a pretty good hand with science fiction as well. Especially when his science fiction looks like fantasy.

The green light floods the planet, and I prepare for the green day.

I ended the year with Lee Gold’s marvelous fantasy Valhalla: Into the Darkness. Gold is the proprietor of the Alarums & Excursions roleplaying zine (of which I’m a part) and shows the true role-player’s dedication to accurate mythology. While the dead role-player who was the protagonist of the first book remains here, this book’s protagonist is an Internet-obsessed squirrel who lives on the world tree.

I sang as I ran, and I never got tired. I was inspired, rhymes blazing like fire. I can’t even begin to tell you what it was like. When I ran across a patch of ash honey, and the bees swarmed up and stung me, I cried out in joy, because I knew just how they felt.

If you enjoy weird fantasy with a fairy-tale bent that’s deeply rooted in real mythology, you will enjoy Gold’s series.

I read three sailing books toward the end of the year, although only two really count. I finally got around to reading Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander; while reading that in paperback, I also started up a new ebook, David Weber’s On Basilisk Station, the first of the Honor Harrington series. I had no idea when I started it that it was clearly either inspired by Master and Commander or by the same books that inspired Master and Commander.

I recently read Cynthia Hughes’s Due Process Denied. She’s not a professional writer, and in a book like this that’s a benefit. Her story about how she became involved with the January 6 prisoners runs the gamut from emotional to rambling to prayerful to humorous.

This is the kind of book that we need more of: inexperienced writers telling a story they’re compelled to tell because they have a unique perspective on an important event. Hughes experienced January 6 through her nephew-from-another-family who, like many, was allowed into the Capitol by the Capitol Police and was then arrested for it.

Unlike Julie Kelly, who does great work as a professional journalist, Hughes really is just an American who happened to see evil happen to someone she loves and decided to do something about it. Her Patriot Freedom Project grew from a weekly support chat for families of those held without bail to a fund for helping them survive the loss of breadwinners and jobs, as well as a referral service for helping them find lawyers and therapists. Many people lost both friends and family after the arrests.

She is obviously someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on in her country yet who wants to make a difference anyway. And by most accounts, she is making a difference.

Sometimes, among the concerted efforts to make it seem like President Trump should abandon his supporters, it seems like there’s a concerted campaign on the conservative forums I follow to fool people into thinking Trump has abandoned his supporters. I see a small number of unfamiliar posters claiming that he’s abandoned the January 6 prisoners, for example, despite him introducing and praising people like Cynthia Hughes at his giant rallies for all the world to see, despite him calling out the prosecutions as the witch hunts they are.

“We all saw this a mile away,” they write, so why didn’t Trump? Why didn’t he pardon all of his supporters who attended his rally?

But the fact is, we didn’t see this a mile away. We certainly didn’t see it less than two weeks away, which is what would have been necessary for a blanket pardon between January 6 and January 20. And it would have had to have been a big blanket. It’s not like there were signups for people attending his rally.

Presidents have pardoned named individuals for unspecified crimes (President Ford, pardoning Richard Nixon). Presidents have pardoned specific groups for specified crimes (President Carter, pardoning people who avoided the draft by moving to Canada).

On December 28 of last year, I posted A 1950 recipe calendar for 2023 and wrote that:

I’m looking forward to trying a new recipe from this calendar each month come January.

I didn’t use as many of these recipes as I would have liked. Life kept intruding, and new cookbooks kept beckoning. But I did manage to try July’s Banana Cream Whip recipe well after the Fourth, August’s Date-Peanut Butter Filling for summer guests, November’s Cranberry Ice Box Pudding for Thanksgiving, and December’s Fruited Peanut Butter Rolls for Christmas.

I remade October’s Bacon-Corn Fondue over the holidays, as I planned to do, although I didn’t use ham this time.

Given how few recipes there are per month, I do wonder how often members of the Hope Lutheran community brought the same dishes to get-togethers! Fortunately, making these recipes 73 years later I didn’t have to worry about someone else bringing the same one.

Independence Day’s Banana Cream Whip is such a lovely and simple recipe, I’m surprised it’s not in the Chiquita Banana Recipe Book.

Banana Cream Whip

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 1 hour
A 1950 recipe calendar for 2023
Hope Lutheran 1950 calendar of recipes (PDF File, 11.7 MB)

Ingredients

• 1 cup mashed bananas (2-3 bananas)
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• ¼ cup sugar
• ⅛ tsp salt
• ½ cup whipping cream, whipped

Steps

1. Mix bananas, lemon juice, sugar and salt.
2. Fold in whipped cream.
3. Chill.
4. Serve as is, with sliced fruit, or sprinkled with granola.

Enjoying the fruits of their Frigidaire.

Since writing Refrigerator Revolution I’ve picked up two other refrigerator cookbook/manuals, and I’ve written a script to scan cookbooks into PDFs. So besides covering three refrigerator manuals (1928, 1942, and 1947) in this series, I’ll also provide searchable downloads of them, so that you can see my sources for yourself.

1. Frigidaire, 1928
2. Cold Cooking, 1942
3. Norge Cold Cookery, 1947

The oldest refrigerator manual in my collection, and the inspiration for this series, is the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB). Like all three of these books, It’s both a manual and a recipe collection. It goes over the basic functions of the refrigerator, such as its dial for adjusting how quickly things freeze and how to defrost.

The Frigidaire book’s subtitle was “Prepared especially for Frigidaire Automatic Refrigerators equipped with the Frigidaire Cold Control.” That’s a very dry description of something you had to see to believe:

The primary purpose of Frigidaire Automatic Refrigeration is to preserve food. In this capacity it is today preventing needless food spoilage and safeguarding health in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the world. But there are many other services which Frigidaire offers.

The delicious frozen desserts and salads which may be prepared with the aid of Frigidaire, represent an entirely new application of the household refrigerator. To understand thoroughly how easily these frozen dishes may be prepared is to value Frigidaire above all other household utilities.

The language reminds me of early home computer manuals, promising a revolutionary appliance that will change the way you live. Like Andy Hertzfeld in Revolution in The Valley, the refrigerator is referred to as a subject without an article. Frigidaire, like Macintosh, is a person, not a thing.

Earlier this year I discovered the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s Boogie Woogie Christmas at a garage sale in Michigan. Their version of O Holy Night reminded me just how wonderful and inspiring a song O Holy Night is. And after a difficult year, how much it expresses the yearning and emptiness that celebrating Christmas both secularly and religiously can fill.

• • Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
  • Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

“A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices…” Some Christmases we need the opportunity for rejoicing more than others.

There are three verses, but in my experience, “O Holy Night” is almost always sung with only the first verse. Partly I suspect that’s because the second and third verses don’t scan very well, and in addition the third verse’s mention of slavery is viewed as somewhat outdated. The line wasn’t initially directed at American slavery: the original lyrics were French. They were written in after the French revolution, in 1843; my guess is that the slaves in the lyrics almost certainly referred to French citizens, no longer slaves of the King and other royalty.

The lyrics were translated into English by Bostonian John Sullivan Dwight in 1855. Dwight’s translation is very loose, but the original third verse’s “Il voit un frère où n’était qu’un esclave…” tracks very closely with Dwight’s “for the slave is our brother”.

I can find no evidence that Dwight was an ardent or even occasional abolitionist. He was a music critic and magazine publisher. He did, apparently, include “the music of black Americans” in his magazine when submitted. The 1855 volumes of his magazine, if the Internet Archive’s OCR is to be trusted, contain no mention of “abolition” other than one about “the abolition of the mock auction system” in the selling of concert tickets and another about the “total abolition of hymn books”. The only mention of “negro” is in reference to music.

He really did. He just had a different name for them.

I’ve quoted Thomas Sowell many times on this blog about the anointed, and how they believe that saying something is true is more important than whether it is true—that, in fact, saying it makes it true.

A few years ago in Illinois there was a Nazi running for office in a Democrat-dominated district. The district was pretty much one hundred percent Democrat, to the point where Republicans don’t even bother to run an opponent. So this guy told the State of Illinois that he was a Republican, in order to get on the ballot unopposed; Republicans pointed out that he was not, in fact, a Republican, but under Illinois election rules the Republican Party had no say in who ran as a Republican.

Illinois is also an open-primary state. This means that none of the people voting for this guy in his nearly 100% Democrat district were Republicans either.

In other words: this was not a Republican primary. This was not a Republican candidate. These were not Republican voters. And the candidate was not going to win in the general election against the official Democrat nominee anyway.

But the left wanted the Republican Party to take money from actual Republicans in Illinois to fight this guy. In order to fight an extreme Democrat in an extreme Democrat district, Democrats tried to force Republicans to spend money donated by Republicans to support the official Democrat against the unofficial Nazi, also supported by Democrats.

This is part of why we have such a dysfunctional political system, and why third parties have such a hard time taking hold. They have to defend themselves in venues they aren’t part of and have neither candidates nor voters in.

The Democrat’s plan was a win for hate. Either the Republicans raise a Nazi’s profile by competing against him, or the Democrats raise a Nazi’s profile by promoting him as a Republican.

When it was pointed out that raising his profile at all was a waste of money, because the guy wasn’t going to win, the Left claimed that there was money “earmarked for the Republican party’s race in that district”—a district and a contest that Republicans had never competed in before and hadn’t planned to compete in now—and that money would go to waste if it wasn’t used.

That’s a purely leftist notion: there is money in the air and we need to spend it now! Or it’s gone! There’s no reason to save it for a contest where it matters, or move it to a contest that matters. Effectiveness doesn’t matter, spending money is what matters. Money that isn’t spent doesn’t exist. Money that’s saved doesn’t exist.

Just looking at this brings back my very reasonable fear of static electricity.

I’m not a big fan of the continued miniaturization of computer parts, nor of the transformation of computers to appliances. These trends make weekend tinkering a thing of the past, much in the same way that modern cars make garage mechanics impossibly difficult. Surface mount devices are far more difficult to solder, and require special tools beyond merely a soldering gun.

But my dislike of them doesn’t change that they increase reliability and decrease cost. Everything in life is a trade-off. One of my long-standing complaints with tech bloggers, from the introduction of the iPod to the expectation that no-one has a computer more than a year or two old is an inability to see that time saved is a very important feature.

Last October, one of the bloggers I follow snark-announced the next Apple CPUs. His biggest complaint:

With all variants of Apple’s CPUs the memory is soldered onto the CPU module. You can’t upgrade it, ever.

Two days later, his Top Story was:

Seems to be a loose connection inside my laptop. That's why the problem is intermittent. It can probably be fixed, I think I’ll just turn it into a Linux server and stick it on a shelf, and take the other laptop (better screen and CPU but 16GB of soldered RAM) and use that as my Windows system.¹

I’m not a big fan of soldered RAM either; but I’m comfortable—mostly, I still have an irrational fear of static electricity—opening up my computer and replacing user-replaceable parts. Most people are not, and for good reason: every time you open it up, you increase the chance of screwing something else up.

But everything is a trade-off, and soldered RAM is a good example of that. Loose connections have plagued home computing since the beginning, and soldered parts vastly increase connection reliability. This is especially true for any device that’s going to be dragged around a lot, such as a laptop. Soldered RAM that comes loose is a manufacturing defect that justifies a replacement computer. User-serviceable RAM that comes loose is… just what user-serviceable RAM does. That’s the whole point, that the RAM can be removed.

I was driving from Texas to San Diego after a blowout near Sonora when the basics of this poem began to bubble up from the tar beneath my wheels.

Are you authorized?

• • Drive not into smoke
  • Nor brave standing water in the road.
  • When lightning flashes, seek not a shading tree,
  • Nor stand amidst the wide and waving plain.
• • Hitchhikers may be dangerous
  • There is no tolerance for speed.
  • The bridge across the gaping earth
  • Ices before the road.
• • That which pursues you
  • May be closer than it appears.

As you read this I’m probably on the road again, so this is my gift to you as you also travel to family and friends this Thanksgiving holiday—or as you reminisce about Thanksgivings past.

The title comes from a story told by a police chief while I was researching The Dream of Poor Bazin. I was in a small town in Louisiana, and trying to find a nearby ghost town. It was a real ghost town, in that it had been overgrown so much it was invisible, and this was before ubiquitous GPS mapping. I did have a map, but all of the roads supposedly leading into the ghost town were labeled “unnamed road”… and unless I was in the wrong place, they were also overgrown to the point of invisibility.

So I went into the nearest non-ghost town thinking I might find a local history section in the library. The library turned out to be closed, but the library was in the same building as the post office, so I thought I’d ask whoever was working there when the library would open.

The post office, while open, was unattended. However, the town hall was also in the same building, so I walked over and asked the ladies at the front desk if they knew anything about that ghost town, or where I might find more about it.

“Oh, you need to talk to our police chief!”

And the chief of police came out from a back room—the police department was apparently also in this same very small building—heard what I was interested in, and immediately dropped everything to give a tour of the ghost town. He was a local history buff, and even loaned me a relatively rare book about the Nightriders.