Empty Mansions is a book about wealth and the eccentricity wealth enabled. Bill Dedman became interested in this story when he learned of a mansion in Connecticut kept in pristine condition by a staff that had never seen their employer. He learned this was not the only magnificent home kept, but never visited, by this particular heir. His research led him to one of her relatives, co-author Paul Clark Newell, Jr., who provided his twenty years of research into the family: documents, stories, and many pictures that fill the book. (The EPUB book is 13,229 KB.) Continue reading
Author Archives: Ponderer
Humans Use Tools; So Do Alligators
“It’s the first time the use of a tool has been documented in reptiles, according to the study published in the current edition of Ethology, Ecology and Evolution.” cnn.com It seems the gators gather sticks on their snouts, then lie quietly in the water waiting for a hapless bird to try to perch. Lunging suddenly, the gator grabs the bird. They use the stick ploy more often during nesting season when birds are collecting sticks for nest-building.
Once, we humans tried to define ourselves as the animals that use tools. Then we discovered chimpanzees use tools, then that birds use tools. Now alligators. If we insist that being human is not a matter of degree, but requires a unique capability, perhaps we can say humans are the animals that compose poetry. That may work, at least until we understand porpoise languages. Continue reading
A Family History of the Soviet Union
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen
“This is a work of non-fiction, woven from family anecdotes and historical facts spanning ten decades”, the author’s note begins. Von Bremzen’s family was diverse, including Muslims and Jews, a Turkistan feminist, a preservationist at Lenin’s tomb, a dissident, and a spy.
The Soviet Union was also wildly diverse, a group of nations and ethnicities forced together: “Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the [1990s].”
Von Bremzen’s mother brought her to the U.S. at the age of 11, long before the fall of the Soviet state. They arrived in 1974 thanks to American-Jewish sponsors. Today she is a travel and cookbook writer who visits Russia and other former Soviet republics regularly. Von Bremzen decided to cook a meal to represent each decade of the Soviet Union and this forms a framework for her book. She heard family tales from her mother as they cooked together. Recipes for each decade are included in the back of the book, except for the 1940s, which is represented only by a war-time ration card.
Mother and daughter begin their cooking with the final decade of the czarist era. The main course is a fish dish: a rich, multi-layered pie of fish liver, sturgeon, onions, eggs, giblets, mushrooms, and dilled rice, all dripping with butter. Von Bremzen compares it to the Soviet version she remembered as a child in Moscow: a loaf of bread with a thin layer of ground meat or cabbage inside. This is typical of the book. Although organized by decade, Von Bremzen uses an informal, personal style and moves backwards and forwards through her own memories, family stories, and Soviet history. Continue reading
Indian Giver
Pbs.org recently posted an article that included this:
[A] strange old phrase, “Indian giver.” Surely the phrase bespeaks a problem of cross-cultural understanding. The earliest record of this expression dates to Thomas Hutchinson’s 1764 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony where a footnote explains that an Indian gift “is … a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” We still use this, of course, and in an even broader sense, we call those friends “Indian givers” who are so uncivilized as to ask us to return the gifts they’ve given.
Word Detective agrees, though the site dates the phrase to the early 19th century. The Phrase Finder cites 1765 for Hutchinson’s history.
Straightdope.com refers back to the PBS source and wanders into politics – Cecil is always fun.
Put a Sock in It
A recent article on theatlantic.com says “Throughout the ‘20s, records progressively became louder to take advantage of the proliferation of gramophones that had no volume knob. The phrase “put a sock in it” actually references cramming a sock into the horn of a gramophone to stifle the sound on louder recordings.”
A reader on The Word Detective asked about this phrase, writing that the gramophone origin “just sounds too, well, cute.” The Word Detective responded that “Several word-origin books … assert [the gramophone story] as established truth, which it isn’t…. the first print citation for “put a sock in it” found so far comes from 1919.” In that publication, the term was defined, which suggests it was recently coined. The Phrase Finder agrees.
Word Detective goes further, using the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, which “pegs ‘put a sock in it’ to early 20th century military slang use, and ties it, significantly, to another phrase popular at the time, ‘put a bung in it’ (‘bung’ being a very old English word for ‘stopper’ or ‘cork’ of the type used to seal bottles). Both phrases meant simply ‘stop talking’.”
What Changes Your Mind?
“When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.”
Edge.org
I ran into a couple neat web sites recently when I was looking into why people change their minds.
Kirstyevidence has a thoughtful list of reasons why scientists change their minds: http://bit.ly/NkfVAn Edge.org asked this very question of scientists and technologists a few years ago. The quote at the top of this post comes from their site. The answers are still interesting: http://bit.ly/N2E5yD
When scientists change their minds, they are applauded. Continue reading