Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Also available in print on Lulu and Amazon^•.

When you’re procrastinating in units of years, you can get a lot not done. — Paul Graham (How to Do Great Work)

I’ve started work again on making sure all of my Gods & Monsters game books are available in print. The first new release is my “contrived example of game play”, The Order of the Astronomers. It’s a “story” that follows four of the example characters in the rulebook as they adventure through the introductory adventure, The Lost Castle of the Astronomers. The characters I chose for the fictional players to play are Charlotte Kordé (monk), Gralen Noslen (sorceror), Sam Stevens (thief/warrior), and Will Stratford (warrior).

The point of this book is that the characters make choices like players make choices. The world responds like an Adventure Guide would respond. Footnotes throughout the story explain the rules in play during that encounter or for that action.

The Order of the Astronomers, like all of the books I want to make available in print, has long been available as a free downloadable PDF and as a web page. Unlike the other books, however, it isn’t a rulebook. It’s an example of how the rules work. I wanted to do it first because I wanted to go through it and make sure the notes about the rules were correct. It is a basic introduction to the game. I refer directly to it in the introductory adventure:

“The comparison between the tactics of the Nazi storm troopers and our modern Antifa thugs is apt. It illustrates the time we now live in… the same unwillingness of decent Germans to believe the Nazis were a threat is the same unwillingness of too many modern Americans to believe the same thing about Antifa and the Democratic Party. Worse, we now have a large minority of Americans who support this violent behavior. To them, violence is wholly justified against those who disagree with them.”

“As he told us this story, what struck me was how similar my own experience has been. Time after time for the past four decades my liberal friends and relatives have refused to believe anything I say to them—always based on actual events—about politics and the growing corruption and bigotry within the Democratic Party. Like those decent Germans in the 1930s, these decent Americans find reasons to quickly dismiss what I say, without making any effort to find out if there is any merit to it…

“What I said was simply too unbelievable to be true, even though I had actually experienced it.”

Now available as an audiobook.

The Dream of Poor Bazin is now available as an audiobook on the Apple Bookstore. This is an experiment on my part, but also on Apple’s as near as I can tell. I had to do no more work than just approving the conversion; the reading was auto-generated by Apple using their artificial voice “Warren”, a “Baritone, American accent: Has characteristics typically associated with masculine voicing.”

Warren sounds like a typical pretentious but soft-spoken journalist of the NPR variety, albeit without the fake Brit accent. I’m not sure this voice would work nearly as well if The Dream of Poor Bazin weren’t a satire about pretentious journalists with delusions of public service.

I have not listened to the entire audiobook. I’ve only listened to the preview. Neither Apple nor Draft2Digital, who Apple is working with for this autogeneration experiment, have given me a free copy. I’m also afraid that if I listened to the book I’d want to re-edit the whole thing based on changes in journalism since I released the paperback in 2020.

I do not have time for that, and I also have a strong conviction that books are books of their time; re-editing them several years later can only diminish them. I can’t imagine re-editing It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees, and have put off republishing it for that reason. I immersed myself in a lot of folklore and Southern literature during the process of writing Yankees and I would not even begin to be qualified to edit it today. Even were I to try to replicate that immersion, it would be from a completely different perspective.

“Warren” is obviously a computer, but only barely so. It’s a little more deliberate than I’d like. It pauses at odd points and doesn’t treat commas as a human would, or at least as I would. That said, Warren is not at all robotic. It does a reasonable job of emphasis. It uses sotto voce mostly in the right places. It does not have quite the level of human understanding to know to emphasize “you are a Virginian” more strongly and “you are my son” more affectionately, but it does know that they need a different emphasis than the surrounding text. That alone is impressive.

You can tell by the phrase “more than 135 years” that this ad was placed in 1916 or thereabouts. Walter Baker updated their ad copy every year.

While general searches can provide a lot of information about a cookbook, specialized newspaper and magazine archives will also be helpful. Many old periodicals aren’t indexed in general search engines. Check your local library to see if you have access to online newspaper and magazine archives. My library provides access to newspapers.com, so that’s what I use. The Internet Archive has many old magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, McCall’s Magazine, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. These are especially helpful for looking up old advertisements, in order to see product packaging or design¹ and compare them to ads in the undated cookbook.

Advertising pamphlets regularly go through multiple printings and whether the year is included on a particular printing can seem completely random. This means that finding versions of a pamphlet on the Internet Archive can help you date that book even if your copy is not on the archive.

For example, The Quaker Oats Wholegrain Cookbook went through at least five printings. I have the fifth printing, listed as from 1979. The Internet Archive has two printings. One is labeled First Printing 1978 and the other has no printing number or year at all. That space on the back cover is blank. All three of the printings appear to be exactly the same other than that back cover line (or lack thereof).²

Why is there an undated version? Is the undated version at some point after the fifth printing when they decided they were never going to change it so why bother? Is it a zeroth printing, and the first printing is really a second printing? Or did they produce a printing after the first where they removed that line, and then added it back later?

The answer, of course, is “who knows?” But knowing that the first and fifth printings came out in 1978 and 1979 also means that the second through fourth printings came out in that range.

I also rewatched Jacques Pépin’s wonderful Heart & Soul cooking show.

“I can’t advise you to start drinking heavily,” said Johnny Depp as John Belushi in Fear and Loathing on Saturday Night, “but it’s always worked for me.”

This year I started experimenting with old-school drinks from three sources. From matchbook covers I discovered the very nice Gin Rickey: ice, gin, lime juice, and soda water. At New Braunfels in October I picked up The ABC of Cocktails, a 1957 collection of similarly-abbreviated drink recipes, and discovered the Bee’s Knees: honey, lemon juice, gin, and ice. Both are marvelous, refreshing drinks. I recommend adding rosemary, but it’s wonderful either way.

From Barimetro, the sliding drink recipe card of the Hotel Las Brisas in Acapulco, I discovered the Bourbon and Vermouth Manhattan, flavored with bitters and a red cherry. As well as a very dry Martini: 1-½ ounces of gin with 1/16 ounce of dry Vermouth. Quite good with a good gin, such as The Pianist.

And therein lies a story. I’ve never been a fan of gin, but it is useful to keep on hand for certain drinks. Especially now that I’ve discovered the above three cocktails. Last year or the year before I discovered The Pianist, and it’s the first gin I’ve really liked. So, when I ran out at the end of the year—due mainly to discovering these three wonderful gin cocktails—I went to get more… and discovered it’s been discontinued.

Being as I am not a gin connoisseur I just bought the next interesting one on the shelf, Shiner gin. It’s not a bad gin and like The Pianist it’s from Texas. But it highlighted that I really do prefer The Pianist to random gins off the shelf. So I went back online and started searching area liquor store web sites to see if anyone still had it in stock.

The book year for me began in earnest over Valentine’s Day travel in San Diego—and on the way to it. Driving through west Texas and El Paso I listened to Mike Rowe’s interview with Nikki Stratton about her grandfather, Donald Stratton, and the book he wrote with Ken Gire about being on the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I’ve long been aware of a Stratton on board the Arizona. While I’m pretty sure we’re not related it did of course interest me. So, when I happened to see Don Stratton’s All the Gallant Men a few hours later at Coas Books in Las Cruces, I couldn’t resist buying it.

To Donald Stratton, the attack on Pearl Harbor mirrored the September 11 attacks, and he lamented that the lessons we learned on December 7 are being forgotten. One of those lessons is a question: “Am I worth dying for?”

To paraphrase Kevin Smith, the Arizona wasn’t even supposed to be there that day. It had been involved in an accident and stayed in place for minor repairs. It accounted for “nearly half of all the Americans who died that day”.

We were so young, those of us who enlisted—eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old… If we were not quite men on December 6, by midmorning of the 7th we were.

It’s an incredible story. He covers not just the morning of December 7, but also his recuperation back home in mid-America and his return to the United States Navy to finish out the war.

Though I may have left Pearl Harbor on a stretcher, I had returned on a Destroyer. I had recovered my strength, as had my country.

While in San Diego I picked up a book at the big monthly University Heights Public Library sale that was to occupy my time on and off literally up to the end of the year. I began reading Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Il Dolore in March while traveling in and around Barcelona. I finished it this morning as I write this post, New Year’s Eve, 2025, making it my “last review of the year” according to Goodreads.

Also available on Amazon^• and Lulu.

I hope you have great plans for this summer! This New Year marks a great milestone in American history: Independence Day 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In celebration, for the next eight months, through the summer picnic and reunion season, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club will feature even more recipes from our 1976 and 1876 celebrations, and from 1796.

I have collected most of the recipes from my last three Independence Day posts into a small cookbook, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery (PDF File, 7.0 MB). The book also includes a handful of recipes I’ve tested since those posts, and from the same sources. It collects bicentennial, centennial, and vicennial recipes, the latter from America’s first native cookbook, the 1796 American Cookery. That’s three centuries of American independence: the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The Battle of the Kegs, as depicted in John Gilmary Shea’s 1872 A Child’s History of the United States.

You may know Francis Hopkinson as one of the less-prominent signers of the Declaration of Independence. But he was much more than a Founder. He was also a poet. I’ve included his wonderful “For a Muse of Fire” in The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery, which will be the next post in this series. And— he wasn’t just a poet: he was also a satirical poet. This Sunday, January 5, marks the 248^th anniversary of the battle that provided him his finest hour as a writer. If there’s a second thing that Hopkinson is remembered for, it is his darkly humorous account of The Battle of the Kegs in rhyme.

Accounts differ in minor points, but sometime around January 5, 1778, David Bushnell—who had previously made the first combat submarine—released gunpowder-filled kegs onto the Delaware River near Bordentown, New Jersey. His hope was that the kegs would explode on contact with British ships patrolling the harbor.

Most sources say that the plan was performed with the knowledge and approval of General Washington. Presumably, then, there was more to the plan than “gunpowder-filled kegs randomly floating down the river”. The kegs are often described as “contact mines”. The few accounts that describe how the mines were to be ignited describe the fuse as a flintlock fuse.