Category Archives: History

Food, History, Security

The Compliance of Bagels

Leave a comment

A New York Times review of Bagel articles brings to light a rich history of compliance.

The definition of a bagel is an obvious start.

A bagel is a round bread, with a hole in the middle, made of simple ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.

I dare you to find a specimen that meets even a few of these seven rules of bagel-ness. A true bagel is few and far between. I further dare you to put on a QBA (Qualified Bagel Assessor) hat and ask a bakery….

But wait, there is more. The first reference to a bagel, by Jews living in Poland, also came from compliance.

It is found…in regulations issued in Yiddish in 1610 by the Jewish Council of Krakow outlining how much Jewish households were permitted to spend in celebrating the circumcision of a baby boy — “to avoid making gentile neighbors envious, and also to make sure poorer Jews weren’t living above their means.”

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s bagels.

And last, but not least, fast forward to the American bagel. It was tightly regulated by a union of New York bakers.

The rise of the bagel in New York is inextricably tied to that of a trade union, specifically Bagel Bakers Local 338, a federation of nearly 300 bagel craftsmen formed in Manhattan in the early 1900s.

Local 338 was by all accounts a tough and unswerving union, set up according to strict rules that limited new membership to the sons of current members.

Something tells me that a rule of hereditary bagel-making is not related to the quality of the bagel. Even if it was, it obviously did not work; today’s bagels do not comply with that or any of the above regulations.

History, Security

Science-fiction under Soviet rule

Leave a comment

A historical science-fiction exhibit in Prague illustrates how writing about the future was controlled and then relaxed under Soviet authority

“Unlike Western science fiction, which was more plot-oriented, Czech writers tended to be more oriented to ideas, and maybe moral issues,” added Ivan Adamovic, another curator at the show. It was not until the 1960s that they devoted more attention to action and gripping plots, he noted.

Pospiszyl also pointed out the emphasis on the positive posed particular difficulties in creating plot lines.

“It was actually quite a problem for writers and artists of that time to even find dramatic situations,” he said. “Because the future was supposed to be optimistic and great. They found a solution in ceding little pockets of capitalism that somehow travelled in time, or were rediscovered in the future.”

A more fundamental change also happened around the same time; when the party-line optimism was relaxed, a more critical look at the risks from technology became possible:

“It came in the second half of the 1960s, when people realised we would not reach communism within the 20th century,” Adamovic said. “Also they noticed that technological progress will not solve everything, as they thought before.”

History, Poetry

Thanksgiving History

Leave a comment

It is time again for a look at why we celebrate Thanksgiving. Although I have made a guess once or twice before in past years, this year I noticed Wikipedia has a greatly enhanced entry. They filed it under “Legacy” for Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (October 24, 1788 – April 30, 1879).

Right away you might wonder how a woman born in 1788 could be responsible for a holiday introduced by settlers. Ah, as I mentioned five years ago, Abraham Lincoln was the first US President to recognize Thanksgiving. Before legislation in 1863 supported by him, the only American holidays were Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday.

Hale had tried, without success, to get the four prior US Presidents to adopt Thanksgiving. Lincoln found her appeal suited a particular need ; he saw it as a chance to repair relations after the Civil War by bringing families together for a holiday.

It did not acquire the imagery of Settlers and Native Americans at the same table for another 70 years.

…presidential declarations of Thanksgiving made absolutely no mention of the Plymouth Pilgrims or a “First Thanksgiving” until Herbert Hoover’s proclamation of 1931. This revision was apparently due to a change from how Pilgrims (and Indians) were perceived. Depictions of the settlers in America before the 19th century showed violent confrontation with people they encountered. As late as the 1910s a typical Thanksgiving “Pilgrim-puritan” image is more likely to have suggested settlers were fleeing a shower of arrows and running to safety than sitting down for a friendly meal with the “natives”.

The original letter by Hale to Lincoln is also found on Wikipedia, under the section on her Legacy.

The letter does not appear on the Wikipedia entry for Thanksgiving. Perhaps even more disturbing is that the name “Hale” does not appear anywhere on the Thanksgiving entry. It appears instead in the Thanksgiving_(United_States) entry. My guess is that some people are intent on documenting Thanksgiving as an ancient festival. I think there is danger in confusing a distinctly American celebration with harvest festivals that have existed for thousands of years.

It is a wonder so few people think of Hale as the author of the American holiday Thanksgiving. A first-person account I read once from that period convinced me that many Americans thought it peculiar to adopt it as a holiday. They did not see a long history of harvest festivals in their past.

Instead, they reflected upon it as something the religious might celebrate in the East. I remember one diary by a girl who in 1863 talked about her family discussing their “first” Thanksgiving to support the US President despite reservations about Puritans. Wikipedia brings this up as a southern phenomenon, but I think that is incorrect.

In some of the Southern states, there was opposition to the observance of such a day on the ground that it was a relic of Puritanic bigotry

It was likely to be more nation-wide, as opposition to Puritans definitely was not isolated to the South:

Thanks go to Hale, I suppose, for her persistence and overcoming secular resistance and convincing Lincoln to create a national and secular Thanksgiving.

Hopefully her story will become a regular discussion topic at the dinner table. Despite the updates to Wikipedia entries for Thanksgiving history, and well-timed stories in regular press about Hale and Lincoln, she may remain more famous for her poetry:

Mary had a little lamb,
little lamb, little lamb,
Mary had a little lamb,
whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
Mary went, Mary went,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.

History, Security

The Lies in George W. Bush’s Memoir

Leave a comment

Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post has put together an excellent report called The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush’s Memoir

In the period during which Bush claims he was wringing his hands about whether or not to attack, he and his aides were instead intensely focused on building the public case for what was, in their minds, an inevitability.

Although they call out two lies “among the many”, it seems to me they may be two parts of the same lie. There is a hint in the above quote. Here are the two:

History is likely to judge Bush most harshly for two things in particular: Launching a war against a country that had not attacked us, and approving the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.

I call it one lie because it seems to be two phases of the same general issue. Approving war crimes is a second phase, directly related to Iraq invasion. In other words, the cruel and inhumane interrogation of prisoners in the US was intended to prove, through confession, that Iraq had in fact attacked the US.

In “Decision Points,” Bush describes the invasion of Iraq as something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. This is a flat-out lie. Anyone who paid any attention to the news at the time knew Bush was dead-set on war long before he sent in the troops in March 2003. And there is now an abundant amount of documentation, in the form of leaks, unclassified memos, witness interviews and other people’s memoirs to prove it.

While the US President pulled “questionable intelligence” and forgeries from others to justify the initial invasion, in the first phase, he later followed-up by generating questionable intelligence later through his illegal interrogation methods to complete the lie.

Whether you call it all the same lie or two “most essential, abhorrent, intolerable lies”, the memoir is a study in how this President seriously, and carelessly damaged National Security.

Cheney’s life since leaving office has given additional clues. It has been pointed out to me that his presence is always known because the civilian airports in some areas are shutdown and a giant SAM (surface to air missile) unit is stationed at the runway from touchdown until he flies out again.

Similarly, you can tell when Cheney goes fishing because two black military helicopters buzz an otherwise quiet countryside. I assume one helicopter is to deliver him to the exact spot in the river he prefers and the other is to stock the river upstream with fish that he likes to catch.

These men continue to exhibit a habit or removing themselves so far from reality — creating a coddled life with heavily-subsidized (by taxpayer) security blankets and cherry-picked yes men — that they probably will never understand or appreciate the damage that their lies do to their country.