Jerry Ochs

Skip: Artificial intelligence isn't a threat to humanity. Natural stupidity is.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) April 9, 2019

Philip Spiess

And now, for those who love Scrapple, referred to above (Paul?  Jerry?  Myself!) -- no, not Scrabble, you idiot! (did someone mention "natural stupidity"?) -- I am pleased to pass on to the assembled masses the opening lines from the recipe for Scrapple, as put down in The Book of Corn Cookery (pp. 49-50), published in 1918 "to allow American women to help win the World War [I]":

"1 Pig's Head, split in halves . . . Remove the eyes and brains from the head; scald well the head and ears and scrape thoroughly.  When well cleaned put on to cook in plenty of water. . . .  This is very good for a winter breakfast."

[I would love to see the size of the average 1918 homemaker's pot that could hold the usual standard pig's head -- and "plenty of (boiling) water" -- and get away with it.]

Jerry Ochs

It was probably the same pot they washed the baby in, hence the old saying, "Don't throw the hog's head out with the bathwater."

Paul Simons

In accordance with this site's stipulation of strict neutrality, absolute non-partisanship concerning the national political debate, I will say that the Scrapple recipe Phil quotes is a remarkably accurate description of a politician. However I am not advocating cooking and/or consuming politicians. We have not yet returned to cannibalism, and even if we had, I hear they are not so much tough and stringy as they are fatty and tasteless.

Here is a far better choice, along with its inventor:

Jerry Ochs

If you are late for a cannibal banquet, you get the cold shoulder.. 
 

Philip Spiess

Jerry, what's eating you, anyway?

[Actually, your quip reminds me of the Greek myth of Tantalus, who insulted the gods by daring, on one occasion, to cook and serve up to them his own son Pelops.  Most of the gods were aware of the deception, and refused to eat the dish, but Ceres, melancholy and distracted by the recent loss of her daughter to the Underworld, was not paying attention and absent-mindedly ate part of the lad's shoulder.  In pity, the gods restored Pelops to life, and Ceres replaced the missing shoulder with one of ivory (or gold, sort of like the astronomer Tycho Brahe's nose).  Perhaps to avoid social embarrassments thereby, Pelops retired to the Grecian peninsula, which is still called the Peloponnesus in his honor.  (And you all doubtless remember what happened to his fond papa, Tantalus, in Tartarus, don't you?  It's a tantalizing tale.)]

Paul Simons

Summer Reading List - light reading, by the pool or at the beach.

Philip Spiess

I think the Emperor Commodus, who thought himself Hercules and a god, would be a better choice than Caligula for "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

Paul Simons

Aw shucks Phil I was trying, as the National Ministry of Blandness has requested, to obscure the name of this Caligula- or as you propose the Commodus-like madman but now I no longer can. Of course we are talking about El Paso mass murderer Patrick Crusius. Yes, his Latinate surname is the giveaway. That’s who you mean, right? Of course it is.

Jerry Ochs

Can you find the hidden meaning?

Synonyms for rumpus

Synonyms

ado, alarums and excursions, ballyhoo, blather, bluster, bobbery, bother, bustle, clatter, clutter [chiefly dialect], coil, commotion, corroboree [Australian], disturbance, do [chiefly dialect], foofaraw, fun, furor, furore, fuss, helter-skelter, hoo-ha (also hoo-hah), hoopla, hubble-bubble, hubbub, hullabaloo, hurly, hurly-burly, hurricane, hurry, hurry-scurry (or hurry-skurry), kerfuffle [chiefly British], moil, pandemonium, pother, row, ruckus, ruction, shindy, splore [Scottish], squall, stew, stir, storm, to-do, tumult, turmoil, uproar, welter, whirl, williwaw, zoo

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  Is it "an elephant, a bunny rabbit, and a penguin"?  (I omit the "umbrella and scissors" -- I shut up the umbrella, and I cut out the scissors.)

The hidden meaning is that the origin of half of these words, such as "rumpus" and "williwaw" (used, I believe, by the Scottish poet Robert Burns), is unknown -- hence, their meaning is hidden.  (And, by the way, some of these words are not quite "synonyms.")

[Note:  "Kerfuffle" has been used so many times in this country since the imperious and controversial former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas P. F. Hoving, first used it in an essay in the New York Times in the 1970s, that it can hardly be described as "chiefly British."]

Oh, and my note above about Robert Burns:  Does anyone know why Robert burns?  (Because they're always "toasting him" in Scotland.)  [And if you haven't read some of Robbie Burns' pornographic -- uh, "erotic" -- verse, you aren't in the same academic milieu (didn't we just have that word up above not too long ago? -- cf. Posts #4234 and #4236) that I am (or was).]

Philip Spiess

But now, back for a moment to obscure and/or obsolete foods:

Referring back to the foodstuffs of my University of Cincinati Nursery School days, here are a few more foods that were served regularly:

Succotash:  Does anyone cook or eat this dish anymore (outside of the Deep South)?  I ate it as a child, but it was not my favorite (curiously, I can't stand anything made with fresh corn -- it tastes like sour milk to me; the one exception is fresh corn on the cob steamed in its husks in a true New England Clam Bake, namely, steamed for hours in seaweed -- but I love everything made with cornmeal -- like polenta, cornbread, spoon bread, etc. -- go figure).

Junket: I loved this Rennet-based dessert in Nursery School; can anyone even find it anymore?  (I can't, though my son was able to find rennet when he decided to make cheese curds to sustain his love of Canadian Poutine).

Prune Whip:  Yes, I have a recipe for it -- and, no, I've never made it (but I liked it as a child).

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

My thanks to Larry Klein who informed me of the death a year ago today of our classmate Alonzo Saunders. His obituary, which appeared in today's Cincinnati Enquirer, has been posted on his In Memory page. May you rest in peace, dear Alonzo.

Paul Simons

Thanks for the link to Alonzo Saunders' obituary Gail. Reading it is inspiring. About the timing - odd but better late than early.

Philip Spiess

What an impressive life story Alonzo has!  I will honor him and his many interests by "having two fingers of fine Bourbon neat, listen to some great [early] jazz, and [of course] get into a good book."

Laura Reid (Pease)

Impressive, for sure, as Phil says of Alonzo’s obit.  What a fascinating life.  I remember him fondly as being quiet, but kind and friendly.  What a loss, but I am continually impressed by our intelligent and interesting classmates.

Ira Goldberg

Gail, it’s a hard thing to be point person for sharing sadness with us. Thank you for being here and doing so with such grace. Be well, my friend. 

Jerry Ochs

What were you doing when you found out about the attacks on September 11, 2001?   I saw it on the nightly news because Japan is 13 hours ahead of NYC.

Paul Simons

It was around 7:00 AM or close to that in Bristol PA. I was getting ready for work. We had the TV on and saw the second plane hit. I thought I knew right then who it was, in general terms, and I was right. And they haven’t changed a bit. This world runs on oil and money. Evidently you can be awash in both and still need to commit atrocities.

Larry Klein

9/11 (2001) - a day one can never forget. I was on a consulting gig helping to streamline and run a small assembly line in the old Swallens bldg on Red Bank Rd.  One of the ladies on the line had her headset on and heard an announcement.  We grabbed a small TV from the breakroom and set it up where everyone could see it from the lines.  The usual constant chatter came screeching to a halt as everyone watched and tried to work.  Seeing the first tower implode in front of us was hard to watch, and then the second one came down.  We left the TV on all day. It was a long day.

David Buchholz

Breakfast in California.  My daughter was living and working in London so she called and said, "Turn on your TV."  It was a workday that didn't happen.  It was only later that day that I realized that my cousin Mary Jane Booth, the secretary to the president of American Airlines, was on the plane that went into the Pentagon.  We have been to NY twice since then to see the 9/11 memorial, an extraordinary and moving monument to the victims.  Like the Vietnam memorial, the names of the fallen are inscribed in the walls surrounding the fountains that occupy the towers' footprints.  Inside there is a room with stories and photographs about those who died sent in by family members.  You can see the stories and photos on a big screen in a theater.  There are boxes of Kleenex everywhere.  I took this image of the twin towers years earlier.

Nancy Messer

I was at the dentist getting my teeth cleaned.  I was hearing second-hand what was going on and it wasn't very clear what happened.  This was the first day of my vacation.  When I got home I immediately turned on the television to see what was happening.  I spent the entire week in front of the television totally amazed that such a thing could occur.

Philip Spiess

As I recall, my son, who was ten, was home sick that morning, and so my wife, Kathy, had stayed home from her work in downtown Washington (I was the at-home parent at the time).  Thus all three of us, my wife, my son, and I happened to be home when we would ordinarily have been in either downtown Washington, D. C., or close to it.  My wife and I were intermittently watching "Good Morning, America," and suddenly I said to my wife, "There's something wrong with this picture they're showing; that plane isn't going in the right direction!"  And, as we now know, it was not; for whatever reason the TV cameras were on that plane at that time; it sliced through the first tower, and we knew something dreadful was happening.  Then came the second plane -- and we could almost guess what was about to happen -- though we were not sure why.  I called my folks in Cincinnati (they were both still alive at that time) and said, "Turn on the news -- we're under attack!"  Then here in Washington the cameras suddenly had pictures, taken from an angle in Lafayette Square to the north of the White House, showing black smoke rising from beyond the Old Executive Office Building.  "My god," I said to my wife, "I think they've hit the Corcoran Gallery of Art!"  Of course, it was the Pentagon that had been hit.  Still watching the television in unbelief as to what was happening, we suddenly got a call from our next-door neighbor, a Korean lady who worked for the World Bank; she was hysterical.  She had been going in to work past the Pentagon when it had been hit.  I gave her instructions on how to get back home to our neighborhood by routes that I knew would not be closed down by emergency vehicles.  And so we watched the TV, as I'm sure the rest of you did, all day.

Macy's Department Store, which, of course, does the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, had already produced its annual Macy's Snow Globe for the year, showing New York City with the "Twin Towers" prominent and the parade marching around the globe; my wife's aunt procured one for us, and we get it out annually and play it.  Also, the "Museum of Jewish Heritage -- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust" on the Battery in New York was the one museum worst hit by the debris and poisonous fallout of the collapse of the "Twin Towers"; in our graduate Museum Studies program at The George Washington University (where I was a professor at the time), we had a seminar session on what it took for that museum to deal with the aftermath of the fallout.   

Chuck Cole

I was scheduled to attend a conference in Oxford, UK beginning on 9/12, and had spent 9/11 and the few days before hiking in the Cotswolds with a friend.  We arrived at our small hotel about 4pm to check in and the man who met us at the front door asked us if we knew what had happened.  We quickly found out and spent the rest of the evening watching the TV with those at the hotel (in the bar) who quickly became our support team.  I went off to the conference the next day and discovered that about half of those coming from North America would not be able to get to the UK to attend the conference.  We decided as a group to have the conference anyway since no one from far could travel home anyway.  It was a very surreal week.  My host at the conference arranged for some of us from the US to move into the apartment within the College hosting the conference so that we would have a telephone and TV (no computers or cell phones yet).  

He even arranged for some of us to gain access to one of the other Colleges at Oxford where there was a TV that could receive CNN (gaining access to the TV room of another college is almost unheard of at Oxford).  What a strange week it was.  My flight home was scheduled for the first day that planes flew again.  The security at Heathrow was unbelievable.  I was asked probably five times many details about where I had been and what I had been doing.  Many armed guards all over the place (rare in the UK).  When no planes were flying, I wondered if perhaps war would break out and we wouldn't be able to travel for weeks or more.  

Ira Goldberg

I was called out of a meeting by Gwynne on the phone. A TV reporter suggested a small plane had hit the first tower. Moments later, the harsh truth became clear. “Our country is under attack,” were words my wife spoke in a way I’ll never forget. I went home to be together and begin the traumatic days and years ahead. Suddenly, I looked at people differently. We were united in sorrow. But, nothing like that which victims’ families endured.