I remember noting how back in 2008 through declassified CIA service records that gourmand, connoisseur and television cooking show pioneer Julia Child had served in the OSS—the Office of Security Services, the agency’s precedent incarnation, and being rather surprised but also cognizant that thousands of other women who weren’t celebrities had to maintain absolute silence on their early careers as well, which was surely an insult after being let go at the factories and laboratories once the crisis ended and being condemned to being merely house-proud.
Bea Arthur and Doctor Ruth Westheimer are in the same class as Child with many others surely to be disclosed posthumously. Until recently, however, I had not appreciated what Child’s war-time contributions were: the Smith College graduate and heiress volunteered for a duty assignment in Ceylon, and despite having not yet discovered her passion for kitchen chemistry, undertook to develop an effect shark-repellent. Aside from attacking overboard sailors and ejected airmen, curious sharks were thwarting Allied efforts to blockade Axis submarines in southeast Asia by getting themselves blown up by mines. Heretofore, the only known shark-repellent was the rotting carcass of another dead shark, which was not a very palatable part of one’s kit. Though not a perfect deterant (which even for its faults might be added to the quiver of current beach life-guard crews), Child’s team did manage to isolate certain copper-compounds that approximated the aversion of having a dead shark in the vicinity. Child married a fellow OSS staff member and were stationed subsequently in post-war France but with only her husband commissioned as an intelligence official. Going back to those tradition house-wifely duties, Child was introduced to French cuisine as sort of a transfiguring experience and became resolved to share this joy of cooking—plus the consumption, pairing of wine with meals—with a wider audience and worked passionately toward this goal rather than resigning into the background. Bon appetit!
Sunday 30 August 2015
bouillabaisse
dodona and di-oscuri
In one of its latest acquisition released for all, the Public Domain Review presents the 1898 illustrated ethnographical exposition on bird-watching in the Bird Gods by Charles de Kay with decorations by George Wharton Edwards. The book opens with a strong injunction against those who’d seek to preen their own image with furs, skins, plumage and big-game trophies, written at a time just after the herds of buffalo were wiped out in North America and about a decade before the passenger pigeon went extinct and goes on to address the cultural and religious connotations attributed to auguries in action and in their natural habitat.
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ฆข, ๐ง , antiques, environment, language, myth and monsters, philosophy, religion
fordlรขndia
Lensing the past giants of business and industry through the ephemera of the 1932 World’s Fair held in Chicago, JF Ptak’s Science Book Store captures the bombast and the scale of the pavilions’ instructive nature, especially for the apprentice public on the worshipful subjects of consuming and manufacture.
Before this grand showing, however, I learnt that there was another Fordlรขndia that predated the theme park by only a few years. Moralising industrialist and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, wanting to avoid market volatility with the chief suppliers of natural rubber for his car tyres (the British Malay Peninsula enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the resource) purchased a huge tract of land from the Brazilian government in the Amazon Rainforest to develop a rubber tree plantation and tyre factory. True to his cult of personality, Ford provided amenable American style dormitory housing for his workers but forbade any loose behaviour, no wine, women or song, on the campus. The native workforce were not drinking the Kool-Aid however and snuck away to the Island of the Donkey Boys in the evenings. Over the years too there were several strikes and all out revolts over poor working conditions and values that the Amazon Indians did not ascribe to. Fordlรขndia floundered for years, plagued with dissatisfied workers and early hints at the impact of deforestation and mono-cultures that made the yield less than expected, but was finally abandoned and returned to Brazil in 1945 with the advent of cheap synthetic rubber in circa 1945 (by competitor Benjamin Franklin Goodrich under contract with General Motors) spurred by the escalation of US involvement in World War II.
Saturday 29 August 2015
geoid projection
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐บ️, transportation, travel
5x5
camouflage: beautiful landscapes with human figures painted in
vitrification: a demonstration of 3-dimensional printing with molten glass
elementary: twelve occasions where Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes crossed-over
not from concentrate: a fascinating look at the Prohibition era wine-brick that saved the vineyards, via Nag on the Lake
social studies or regression to the mean
The brilliant Mind Hacks covers the landmark project that explores the reproducibility of classical experiments in cognitive science and psychology. The credence of the discipline, especially for some of the more dogmatic factions of academics and the public, is now hanging—not without controversy, on whether some of the foundational trials can be replicated with the same assuring results.
Thursday 27 August 2015
e at delphi or the power is yours
Such gifts were left in hopes of currying favour with the gods and to gain some purchase on their prophesy—one which promised to be duplicitous and if the question was not framed careful, they risked an ironic demise. Not every donation was precious in the traditional or artistic sense, however, and probably the most enigmatic token was a simple letter E carved into a wall of a temple. No one really knows its meaning but Plutarch—a contemporary and friend of the high priestess, a retainer of the oracle—speculates in a rather in depth dialogue about what it could signify. Called E at Delphi (which always made me think of some diner, Eat at Delphi’s), Plutarch’s work underscores the singular nature of this inscription, which appears alongside two other famous dictums—Know Thy Self and Everything in Moderation. The intent already unknown and a bit of a mystery for visitors to guess about, Plutarch’s characters debate suggestions that the E could be the Greek numeral five—maybe a station of the tour and ritual, the verb form Thou Art, declined as an exclamation, or a hale and hearty greeting (pronounced like “aye”) from the god himself.
Despite the elite nature of the site—certainly not open to all seekers and the opening hours were rather restrictive, requiring a Delphic sponsor, a citizen of the settlement that grew up around the oracle, and sessions were only held on the seventh day of the month, Apollo’s day, and during long Greek summer—the nine months out of the year when snowbird Apollo dwelt in Greece before retiring to live among the Hyperborei (maybe the Britons) and Dionysus wintered in Greece—the panhellenic nature of the spot that opposed local patriotism and cults that was otherwise politically pervasive for the Greek people was really novel and Delphi and its traditions functioned in a sense like a central bank, a repository of wealth that was universally recognised. Those walls no longer stand, but other relics from that treasury have survived, scattered, like the bronze serpent column now in the hippodrome of Istanbul, brought from Delphi (in probably a bad choice of war trophies, in a karmic sense) to commemorate an ancient victory of the Greeks over the Persians. Perhaps, though, the E is enduring as well, abiding in a mystery that is as cryptic as the advice of the Sibyl.
5x5
23 and me: รon magazine explores the ethics of genetic omniscience
used in a sentence: author composes stories taken from dictionary examples
huitzilopochtli, chutzpah: University of Connecticut fighting Hummingbirds
boondocks: a look at how language and culture define the Hinterland
catagories: ⚕️, environment, language, myth and monsters, travel