toucana

Shortly after the 2000 GWB v. Al Gore US presidential election, as the result hung upon endless recounts in Florida, and SCOTUS arguments about ‘hanging chads’ and ‘butterfly ballots’ - one sardonic bumper-sticker said “ DON’T BLAME ME - I VOTED FOR BOTH OF THEM !” Being ‘neutral’ isn’t an option when democracy itself is at stake - not if you value the freedoms that democracy confers. There was ample warning as to exactly who and what Trump was, and what sort of policies he would pursue if returned to office. The people who chose to stay at home, or closed their eyes and voted for Trump because they persuaded themselves they were voting for cheaper eggs, ‘’Palestine”, “Christian values” or "un-woke bathrooms" made a fully informed choice to vote for fascism, racism and Nazism IMHO. The killings in Minnesota are the latest chilling example of the “stochastic terrorism” inspired by Trump and his followers that many commentators warned of back in 2017 after the Charlottesville car attack in 2017 during Trump’s first term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack There is simply no excuse for not being aware of this - FAFO.

I was an art-house film projectionist who actually screened the 35mm prints of ‘Come And See’ by Elem Klimov on its UK release in 1986 - and yes it is horrific. The principal changeover point at the e/o reel 3 (where the projectionist has to watch for the c/o dots) coincides with the scene where a Nazi German Einsatzgruppen rounds up the population of a village into a church and burns them all alive by setting fire to it - almost unwatchable, (and I had to watch it many times). But there is one significant problem with your line of argument - the events depicted in that film take place in June 1941 at the inception of Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and sent a massive invasion force into Byelorussia (where the film is set) and on towards Moscow. Everyone else in this thread however seems to be discussing what happened inside Germany itself eight years earlier in 1933 ! i.e the process by which Hitler once elected as Chancellor, promptly subverted and overthrew the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic by neutralising the powers of the executive and the judiciary, and then installed himself in perpetuity as a Fūhrer or fascist dictator.

BREAKING NEWS ABC News2 Minnesota lawmakers in grave condition after apparent '...Two Minnesota state lawmakers were shot in apparent "targeted" incidents on Saturday that left them in grave condition, officials said.Do you still think that comparisons to Nazi Germany of the 1930s are "a little extreme" ? ETA - State Rep. Melissa Hortman, and her husband are both dead, Sen John Hoffman and his wife are in surgery.

Three weeks ago (back around May 24) a highly conservative American think-tank called MEF (Middle East Forum) published a report predicting that an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites would take place within “a matter of days not weeks” https://www.meforum.org/mef-observer/days-not-weeks-israels-imminent-attack-on-iranian-nuclear-sites This assessment was based on a convergence of factors including - reports from the Pentagon’s DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) that Iran could produce sufficient weapons grade uranium for a nuclear device within a week, and for another 15 within a month after that - a deadlock in the fifth round of US-Iran nuclear talks in Rome - coupled with an extensive war game simulation conducted by MEF during their conference on Thursday 22 May. The conclusions of this war game study include the following All of this now appears to be playing out in real time, but what is really sobering are some of the other predictions from this simulation. None of this will have come as any surprise to Washington. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff (who is in fact a realtor by profession) left the US-Iran talks in Rome quite abruptly at the e/o May just after the MEF war game simulation ended - supposedly due to his “flight schedule”; and within the last two days the Trump administration had begun an urgent withdrawal of US staff from a number of locations in the Middle-East. Israel under prime minister Netanyahu has clearly concluded that launching an all-out attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities along with a decapitation attack on their military leadership was necessary in order to deal with an “existential threat to Israel's existence". The problem is that war games - like all mathematical modelling exercises are only as good as the assumptions built into them at the outset.

My Victorian maternal great-aunts in the Isle of Wight used to make a wonderful concoction called ‘Kashmir Chutney’ which they brewed up in a gigantic preserving pan filled with produce from the extensive fruit gardens around the house - following a hand-written recipe in a book that has been carefully passed down through the family for generations. This Kashmir chutney was basically an apple chutney with ginger which was served in a cut-glass decanter with a stoppered lid. I’ve only ever found one commercially available chutney quite like it, and that was Baxters Albert’s Victorian Chutney. Two other mustard related sauces that were popular in the Victorian era come to mind: i. Piccalilli (with many variant spellings) - is a mustard pickle that can be traced all the way back to a recipe from 1694 where it was called "Pickle Lila, an Indian Pickle" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccalilli ii. Horseradish sauce - which owes its unique flavour to the fact that when the root is cut or grated: Victorian cooks were fond of making Horseradish sauce from freshly cut plants to go with their roast beef. Back in 1856 this practice led to a memorable accidental poisoning in Dingwall Scotland, when a servant sent to harvest the plant in the herb garden accidentally brought back the root of Monkshood (Aconitum) instead. Three of the dinner guests at a party hosted by the provost of Dingwall subsequently died from aconite poisoning. https://www.fabledcollective.com/aconite-monkshood-wolfsbane/#google_vignette

I suspect it also may have had something to do with changing methods of manufacturing and dispensing sugar. Sugar cane was originally regarded as a very expensive ‘rare spice’ which could only be grown in warm climates. It wasn’t until the very end of the 18th century that the discovery of sugar beet enabled domestic sugar production in colder north European countries to begin. Round about 1875 Henry Tate acquired the UK patent rights for the manufacture of lump sugar which had originally been invented in Bohemia in the 1840s, and improved upon in Germany. At about the same time, improved methods of sugar-refining, notably the advent of centrifuge separation of sucrose from molasses meant that bags of loose granulated sugar became more widely and cheaply available. Instead of purchasing rock hard sugar loaves that had to be smashed to pieces with sugar axes and nips, then laboriously ground to a fine powder with a pestle and mortar; households could now relegate castor sugar from the dining table to the kitchen where it was increasingly used solely for baking purposes, and much less often as a table sugar.

Found a fun article - “The Science Behind Salt and Vinegar Chips” - which goes into the use of Maltodextrin and sodium diacetate in some detail: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-salt-and-vinegar-chips-tasting-brands-most-acidic I particularly liked this citation from "The English Housewife: Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to be in a Complete Woman", published in 1615 ! "To make dry vinegar which you may carry in your pocket, you shall take blades of green corn, either wheat or rye, and beat it in a mortar with the strongest vinegar you can get till it come to a paste; then roll it into little balls, and dry it in the sun till it be very hard; when you have an occasion to use it, cut a little piece thereof and dissolve it in wine, and it will make a strong vinegar." As a child I can recall buying packs of Smith’s ‘Salt ’n Shake’ crisps which contained a pinch of salt wrapped up in a twist of blue waxed paper (this would have been c. 1961). They were first introduced in the early 1920s, and allowed people to adjust the saltiness of crisps to their own taste.

There seem to be a least two popular DIY methods of creating a 'Salt & Vinegar' seasoning powder described in reddit threads https://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/comments/1vzi2c/how_do_i_make_vinegar_powder/ One involves mixing vinegar with maltodextrin, and the other involves the partial neutralisation of acetic acid with sodium bicarbonate.

On balance sugar does indeed seem to be the most likely answer. You can still buy a modern ‘six piece cruet set’ from amazon which contains 2 bottles for oil and vinegar, 2 shakers for salt and pepper, and a seasoning jar which “comes with a spoon and can be used to store sugar, rock salt, chilli pepper, sauces and much more” - (The sixth piece is the stainless steel caddy used to hold the other items) https://www.amazon.com/Vinegar-Pepper-Durable-Stainless-Bottle/dp/B07KYXBMZZ Not personal experience of handling it, but data sheets say:

I was quite sceptical in my OP about dehydrated vinegar powder being the missing condiment, not least because it’s hygroscopic and would quickly become soggy and lumpy inside a shaker when exposed to humid air - so I would hardly blame Exochemist for being dismissive about it too. Apparently quite a few people in both Hungary and the wider area of the old Austro-Hungarian empire insist that the third shaker in a cruet set was for paprika - (ground red pepper). https://www.reddit.com/r/nonmurdermysteries/comments/ismj11/salt_pepper_and_19thcentury_table_sets_feature_a/ Some of them also say that the third shaker had a hinged lid, and in central European restaurants at least, was often used to store toothpicks !

The antimacasser was introduced into this discussion as a different example of another object whose original function and role has been mislaid and forgotten over time - nothing to do with cruet sets. There are some entertaining online quizzes where viewers are challenged to identify up to 30 obsolete tools or artefacts from the past. I managed to get 28/30 in this particular quiz (missed #23 and #26). In a disturbing number of cases I'd actually used or handled some of these objects professionally !

On the subject of Pomade: One detail I hadn’t fully grasped until I did some more reading, was that pomade was used during the 18th century to deodorise and dress a wig, prior to applying a starch-based powder in order to impart a ghostly whiteness to the horsehair. This splendid 18th century French caricature by Carle Vernet shows the process in action. The owner of the wig is sat on a chair with the wig in place on their head - wearing both a protective apron and a conical face-mask. The hairdresser is blowing wig powder onto the wig with a ‘puff’ or brush whisk (they might also employ a miniature set of bellows). To limit any unwanted spread of powder, this procedure was carried out in a small ante-room set aside for this purpose known as a ‘powder room’.

The story of the antimacassar is quite interesting in its own right. It’s origin can be traced to the rising fashion for using Macassar hair oil which was first promoted by a London barber called Alexander Rowland in 1803 https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/tag/rowlands-macassar-oil/ According to this account, a need for this unguent arose directly from the demise of the wig in about 1795. The type of greasy ointment gentlemen now needed to slick down their hair was known by the French word pomade because it was originally made from apples (Latin: pomum). Rowland’s concoction was given the exotic name of Rowland’s Macassar oil because it was supposedly made from plant oils that came from around Makassar, a seaport on the island of Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies. In actual fact the principal ingredient is thought to have come from the Kusum (Schleichera Oleosa) or Ceylon Oak, a tree native to the Indian sub-continent. By the 1830s, housewives had begun placing decorative cloths on the headrests of armchairs to protect their upholstery from being stained and damaged by this ubiquitous hair oil. Macassar oil subsequently went out of fashion in the 1850s, but antimacassars which were often made in intricately crotched wool patterns had by now become fashionable and highly desirable decorative art objects in their own right. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2012/apr/02/brief-history-of-brylcreem

Mace is the fibrous outer casing that encloses a nutmeg seed, and is supplied in either whole ‘blades’ or as a ground powder. I think it can be used in very much the same way that nutmeg or cardamom is. There is a vivid description in Samuel Pepys’ diary entry for Thursday 16 November 1665 where he describes visiting the hold of a spice ship newly arrived from the Indies:

I well remember my mother making stewed fruit desserts of this type - gooseberries in particular. We didn’t have a sugar caster in our cruet set, but we did have one of those small silver mustard pots you mention with a smaller blue glass pot inside - and yes you mixed up the mustard with water. The history of the condiments found on an English dining table is quite interesting. The 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys mentions having a nutmeg grater on the table along with rosemary and mace dispensers to season meat dishes (they also put nutmeg into beverages). Some people say they have pre-WWII childhood memories of being told that only men were supposed to season dishes with black pepper, while women were only supposed to use the white pepper shaker - which sounds wonderfully prissy, but chimes with some other tales I have heard of social mores from that period. The Victorian era is not really that long ago. When I was 8 years old, I recall talking with my maternal grandfather who lived in Newport Isle of Wight, and he told me how his own 8th birthday party on 22 January 1901 had been abruptly terminated when news came down the street that Queen Victoria had just died at nearby Osborne House. A couple of days later my grandfather climbed a tree to watch the Queen’s funeral cortege go by, as her coffin was transported up the main road to Cowes to be taken over to the mainland on board the royal yacht.

A recent YT video by Joe Scott* refers to the odd phenomenon of how mundane items that are part of the fabric of everyday life can quite suddenly fall out of use, and their nature and purpose can become completely forgotten within little more than a generation. One of the examples he cites is popularly known as the ‘Third Condiment Mystery’, and was first mentioned by the American author Bill Bryson in his 2010 book “At Home: A Short History of Private Life”. https://nowiknow.com/the-mystery-of-the-third-shaker/ The essence of the problem is that well into the late Victorian era, silver cruet sets (like the one below) used to be supplied with three shakers and two bottles. The two bottles (which are technically known as the cruets) held vinegar and olive oil respectively. Two of the silver sprinklers contained salt and pepper. The problem is that no-one seems to be able to remember what the third sprinkler was used for ! You might think it would be a trivial matter to delve back into Victorian culinary literature like "Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management" (1861), or the sales brochures of companies that manufactured these cruet sets, in order to find out what you were supposed to put in the sprinklers. But in reality the truth is much more elusive, with many diverse explanations being offered by internet users citing family traditions, old journals, and even personal memories. Probably the best explanation can be found by recalling that the silver sprinklers in a cruet set were often known as ‘casters’ (also spelled ‘castors’) which may call to mind a household item known as ‘caster sugar’. Well into the early 20th century, sugar used to be suppled as solid ‘sugar loaves’ which had to be broken up and ground down with a pestle and mortar into a fine powder which could then be stored in a ‘caster’ i.e. a silver sprinkler, which was the third condiment in the cruet set, and was then used to sprinkle extra sugar on desserts. Alternative explanations offered are that the third condiment sprinkler was for black pepper (as opposed to white pepper), or that it was for dried mustard powder (which you mixed with vinegar), or that it contained dehydrated vinegar powder - (which seems unlikely, given that the cruet set already had a vinegar bottle.) *footnote - The Joe Scott video is one about the mysterious Gallo/Roman Dodecahedra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smYbNisW5yI

'Crusty Gnome' sounds about right ;-)

I spotted this inspired caption created by auto-generate on a LegalEagle YT feed about Harvard. It rather suits her don’t you think ?

One traditional way of introducing alien concepts into Mandarin Chinese is called a calque, which comes from the French word calquer meaning ‘to trace’ - i.e. a loan translation that imitates the structure and/or literal meaning of the original. One good example of this in Mandarin is the word 铅笔 qiān bǐ - ‘pencil’ The individual Chinese characters literally mean “lead writing-brush” because it is a calque on the English expression “lead pencil” - which is even funnier because pencils have never been made from lead ! https://www.pensunlimited.co.uk/blog/industry-news/pencils-a-little-tale/ Pencils have always been made with graphite cores (the word graphite comes from the Greek word γραφειν meaning ‘to write’.) The confusion seems to have arisen in part because the Romans used lead styli for writing, and some people once thought that graphite was a form of lead ore. There are numerous other mirthful examples of calques in Mandarin e.g. 火车 huǒ chē - train (lit. ‘fire chariot’) 电脑 diàn nǎo - computer (lit. ‘electric brain’) 外星人 wài xīng rén - space alien (lit. ‘outside star person’) 彗星, hùi xīng - comet (lit. ‘broomstick star) 犀牛 xīn niú - rhinoceros (lit. ‘sharp ox’) I’m not quite sure what a Mandarin speaker would make of a ‘gruntbuggly” though I suspect the characters chosen might include: 水 shuǐ - the water radical (in honour of its beautiful micturitions) 咕噜声 gulu sheng - grunt or gurgle 虫子 chóngzǐ - bug or insect

Another striking example of an ideogram-based writing system that decayed into a syllabary is the development of hiragana in Japanese from the middle of the Heian period (794-1185 AD). Japanese scholars had first begun borrowing Chinese characters intensively to study and translate Buddhist scriptures from the 5th century AD onwards, and adapted them in a number of quite ingenious ways: https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=honorscollege_anthro From the 9th century AD onwards, two different cursive syllabary systems had begun to develop out of simplified Chinese characters to cope with the awkwardness of writing certain Japanese grammatical particles. One of them called hiragana was referred to as onnade or ‘woman’s hand”, and the other known as katakana was called otoko moji or “mens script”. It was hiragana that came to be favoured for aesthetic uses in poetry and story telling at court, and two of the most famous works of classical Japanese literature were written at this time by female authors who made extensive use of hiragana - “The Pillow Book” (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi) by Shei Shōnagon, and “The Tale of Genji” (源氏物語 , Genji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu. This fragment of an early 12th century illustrated handwritten scroll version of “The Tale of Genji” shows just how cursive and far removed from Chinese characters the hiragana script had become.

There does seem to be a form of linguistic entropy at work whereby proto-languages progressively lose their ideogrammatic and pictorial features over time, and decay into syllabary systems and alphabets. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Hieroglyphic Egyptian. The earliest decipherable forms of this date back to the 28th century BCE (Second Dynasty). As the Greek name ἱερογλυφικός (“Sacred Carvings’ ) might suggest, it was written with a mixture of ideogram pictures, phonetic syllable elements, and determinatives, and is found in ancient Egyptian monumental carvings and stone inscriptions Two more cursive forms of written hieroglyphic developed over time that were better suited to writing the Egyptian language on papyrus - as opposed to carving symbols into stone. The first became known as Hieratic (Greek: ‘Priestly’, ‘Sacerdotal’) which was followed by the development of the Demotic script from about 650 BCE which was an even more heavily stylised and simplified form of cursive writing. Ideogram symbols continued to be used only in some special religious texts such as The Book of The Dead. Demotic was then displaced by a new form of Egyptian writing known as Coptic in which the older Egyptian glyphs were replaced almost entirely by the letters of the Greek alphabet. This process began with the reign of the Greek speaking Ptolemaic pharaohs in 305 BC. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler who died in 30 BC and spoke Koine Greek as her first language was said to have been the only Ptolemaic ruler who could speak and read ancient Egyptian. Thereafter Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, and with the growing spread of Christianity in the 3rd century AD, Coptic became the official liturgical language of the Egyptian church (and still is) - and it remains the language of the ancient pharaohs now spelled out in Greek letters. The famous Rosetta Stone found in 1799 which enabled modern scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs is a stele dating from 196 BC which contains three versions of the same decree by Ptolemy V Epiphanes written in Hieroglyphic and Demotic Egyptian, with a translation in ancient Greek at the bottom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

Just to make things even harder, when I first began learning Chinese at university back in the early 1970s, there was only one bi-language Chinese magazine widely available in the west which was called ‘China Pictorial’ (Ren Min Hua Bao - 人民画报). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Pictorial For ideological reasons, this was only printed in Chinese and Albanian at that time ! Because after the Sino-Soviet split and the start of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Albania was practically the only foreign country recognised by the PRC, and Albanian was the only officially sanctioned foreign language that could be taught in China - up until 1976 when Albanian leader Enver Hoxha split with Maoism. Which meant that budding sinologists like myself had to learn to read Albanian as well, just to read Ren Min Hua Bao in translation. I originally posted this thread in The Lounge because it wasn’t clear quite where it belonged. On reflection the topic seems to involve, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cultural anthropology. A speculative discussion of brain-area specialism in language learning seems to relate to what psychologists call procedural or implicit memory - the ‘how to’ type of memory that enables us to perform learned tasks, skills and habits without conscious thought. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/procedural-memory

Both the Chinese and Japanese authorities pondered the idea of switching to using romanized scripts quite deeply at various periods. In China reformers such as Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen recommended such a move in the 1920s after the founding of the Kuomintang Republic. The Communist leader Mao Zedong did much the same after the PRC took control of China in 1949, but settled in the end on a scheme of script simplification and the creation of yet another homebrew system or romanization called Pinyin in the 1950s. The problem was always one of scale, along with the expense, and a sense of cultural loss. Another problem with Romanization confronting western students like myself who embarked on a degree in Far Eastern studies in the 1970s was the sheer number of competing romanization systems. There used to be a joke that whenever a new professor was appointed to a chair in Chinese, they were expected to spend their first year inventing a new method of romanizing Chinese, and the rest of their career campaigning for its adoption. In my first year alone, I had to learn legacy systems of romanization like the archaic Wade-Giles (which gave us ‘Peking’ for ‘Beijing’), then the more modern Yale University system, along with the bizarre Gwoyeu Romatzyh from 1926 (which indicates tones by internal spelling changes), the 1918 Juhin Fuhao phonetic syllabary (used in some Taiwanese dictionaries), together with the 1958 Pinyin system used in all PRC material. The latter is now the de facto standard for modern Chinese internet use and keyboard input systems. The difference between learning to how read Chinese characters, as opposed to learning how to write them (in a pre-internet age) was so pronounced that I used to wonder if two different forms of brain-hemisphere access were involved - left hemisphere for semantic recognition, and right-hemisphere for spatial reconstruction ? I spent a lot of time practising character tracing, and learning stroke orders and stroke counts back then, and part of the fun of doing the calligraphic exercises in Duolingo nowadays lies in rediscovering it all. The cursive writing issue has a lot of resonance with problems in Chinese relating to Cǎoshu (草书 - ‘grass script’) a form of impressionistic ‘speed calligraphy’ that can be almost unreadable even to people familiar with normal Hanyu because of its level of abstraction - e.g the word Cǎoshu itself written in the two forms:

Character amnesia is a recently coined term for an interesting problem that is troubling Chinese and Japanese speakers, namely a growing inability to reproduce and write out complex characters by hand from memory. https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ In Chinese the phenomenon has been dubbed tíbǐwàngzì (提笔忘字) which means “lift the brush, forget the character”. The problem has become progressively more acute ever since the advent of the modern internet and smart phone usage in China after the turn of the millenium. Chinese speakers typically use either a physical QWERTY keyboard, or a virtual equivalent (on pads and smartphones) to generate a Pinyin romanisation of what they want to say. The system software then generates a list of characters known as a ‘candidate gallery’ of hanzi that match the romanised input string. Users highlight/select the characters they want to use, and hit return to transfer the entire string to a document or email. With look-ahead style auto-correct and modern AI software at work under the hood, the process is fast and almost effortless. The only problem is that users no longer experience the kinaesthetic reinforcement of writing out the characters they are using by hand - stroke by stroke, and they progressively forget how to do so. Within the last week or so I have noticed that the Chinese language course on Duolingo has now for the first time introduced calligraphic exercises where students have to memorise and reproduce the exact stroke order, brush direction and stroke count of a complex character in order to score points. The really interesting aspect of this is that conventionally literate Chinese speakers (those who can recognise 4000 to 5000 characters) have not the slightest difficulty in reading Chinese characters, they simply can’t remember exactly how to write them. There is a growing fad on Chinese TV for National Spelling Bee type competitions such as ‘Chinese Character Heroes’ where young contestants have to write out the character forms correctly by hand. A recent Duolingo calligraphy exercise:

Solar panels or photovoltaic modules usually consist of a large number of individual PV cells which are interconnected both in series (to raise the voltage), and in parallel (to raise the current). The power output of the panel is then given by W = V x I . When multiple panels are connected together to form an array, they are usually connected in series, ahead of an inverter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel The diodes built into solar panels are blocking diodes that are intended to isolate defective or ‘shaded’ PV cells, and prevent unwanted reverse DC current flow into these cells which can produce localised overheating. This article explains the role of diodes in solar panels, and mentions that thermal imaging via drone cameras is an increasingly important part of maintaining solar panel arrays: The importance of this type of maintenance was demonstrated quite vividly only yesterday afternoon when the main St Michaels maternity hospital in our city had to be evacuated after an array of solar panels on the roof caught fire. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5ew654g32o