Mimsy Were the Borogoves

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.

Also available in print.

Tomorrow is Christmas, and have I got a gift for you! I was driving across Missouri when I found this tiny little 1916 pamphlet/book in a library sale’s discount box. And by “discount”, I mean anything in the box was ten cents.

The full title is Table and Kitchen: A Practical Cook Book (PDF File, 15.3 MB). It’s an advertisement for the Royal Baking Powder Company’s “Dr. Price’s Cream Baking Powder”. Dr. Price’s was a single-action baking powder, that is, it did not contain alum. It used only cream of tartar as the acid.

While the cover is wonderful my initial thought was to leave it. I’m not a huge fan of how recipes were written in that era. I’ve seen other baking powder cookbooks, and have not been impressed by them. Further, there was practically no cell service in the area, so I couldn’t look up whether the book had been scanned online or not yet. But at ten cents I decided I couldn’t leave it: its next stop would certainly have been the recycling bin out back.

When I got to the hotel that night, I discovered that (a) it was not yet available anywhere, which meant I would at least get a good blog post out of it, and (b) there were a lot of very interesting, if sparsely-described, recipes inside.

One particular aspect of these old recipes that annoys me is a tendency to use what I call reverse Polish notation, or, as my gamer friends would say, Hastur he who must not be named oh shit. I wrote about the same writing “technique” in A Vicennial Meal for the Sestercentennial and Table and Kitchen’s eggnog recipe is a good example of the form:

Egg Nog. —Six eggs well beaten (white and yolks separately), one quart milk, one-half cup sugar, one cup brandy, nutmeg. Stir yolks into milk, with the sugar first beaten with yolks. Add brandy, then whites of eggs. Whip well.

“…the best part of free health care is that death is always free. And fast. While it may take months to see a specialist, ‘the median wait time between first request and referral was 1 day’ for Canada’s free death health care system. Beat that or die trying.”

“There’s no medical problem that free government health care can’t solve by killing you. For free.”

“Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.”

“Five years after the election—when it is too late to rectify the crime, and never mind all the injury inflicted on those branded ‘election deniers’ for protesting this fraud—we learn the truth… Here you have more than 300,000 ballots illegally included in the tally, which is nearly 30 times more than Biden’s margin of (alleged) victory in Georgia.”

I’ve managed to acquire a few caches of early OMNI magazines, and recently read the February, March, and April 1980 issues. With a likely three-month lead time to publication, the essays and editorials in these issues would have been written in November or so through January. That is, at the very end of the seventies and the height of seventies malaise. President Carter was still president. While the Iranian hostage crisis was weighing on his presidency, there was as yet no obvious alternative to Carter in the Republican Party.

On January 1, 1980, Carter seemed more vulnerable from an opponent in his own party—Ted Kennedy—than from any Republican. President Reagan wouldn’t even start showing his strength in the Republican primaries until March. Like President Trump in 2016, candidacy would be treated as a joke until it wasn’t.

Emblematic of the era is a cartoon in the February issue showing a maitre’d controlling entry to a gas station. Under rationing and price controls, being able to both afford gas and have time to access it was becoming a class marker. That America was entering a period of decline was a widely spoken mantra in the beltway, and would continue to be until President Reagan’s new policies started taking effect in 1981 and 1982.

Most people in publishing and politics thought higher prices and higher unemployment—stagflation—was America’s inevitable future. They had no idea everything would change in just over one year when gasoline price controls would be rescinded and gasoline prices—along with prices for everything that relies on gasoline—would drop.

Tying into this seventies malaise was another surprise for me: a Thomas Szasz-like rant about the psychiatric industry that opened February’s “Continuum”¹—and seeing by the signature at the end that it was in fact written by Szasz! Everybody wrote for Omni. As I recall from reading one or two of his books, Szasz had a lot of very good points—obscured by a near-complete rejection of potential physical causes for mental issues.

“Christopher Ludwick was a true hero of the American Revolution. A German immigrant, he made his fortune in part by baking gingerbread in Philadelphia, and then used his baking knowledge, patriotic spirit, and all of his fortune to aid the American cause.”

Contributions to the 2026 Semiquincentennial are beginning to appear. Max Miller here accompanies a 1773 gingerbread with a short history of the amazingly patriotic baker Christopher Ludwick. He served under Washington both as a military baker and as a spy.

“Google is pushing a new stricter default for the Referrer-Policy header under the veil of privacy. Not only have they implemented this default in Chrome, they are also lobbying for everyone to configure it in their web servers… This article is a plea not to blindly follow suit by nailing shut the referrer header in every possible case, because that may do more harm than good.”

‘…it is an act of carpet-bombing the entire Internet with a measure that protects visitors only in a very limited set of situations, while in many other situations it only harms everyone in the long run. First the smaller websites because this new default increases their isolation, then the visitors who get jailed into a limited ecosystem of mainstream websites because the smaller websites die off or are hampered in their means to improve upon their content.

“I do not like this trend of the Web transitioning from what used to be a forum open to everyone, towards a collection of walled gardens, gated communities where everyone is utterly paranoid and sour, and expects to be exploited in every possible way if they don't sell their soul to a big tech company.”

Voting reform has been an 80/20 issue—or higher—for decades. But it’s a 1/99 issue in the beltway.

Trump voters are not Republican voters. For several months after November, it seemed that beltway Republicans and even otherwise-smart bloggers chose to ignore this. They seemed to think that Trump’s victory was a new era for Republican dominance. I didn’t understand this. Not only was there no evidence for it, there was a lot of evidence in that election against it.

Now that it’s becoming more obvious that Trump voters are not Republican voters, people are starting to write about it. But they haven’t yet progressed to asking why. Why did voters who do not identify as Republican—and may even disdain Republican politicians—vote for Trump? Because I’m pretty sure that many of the voters who voted for Trump don’t see themselves or Trump as Republicans.

Instead, they blame Trump for not trying hard enough to convince his voters to also vote for Republicans.

And the problem continues to be that Trump attracted a lot of blue collar voters who, unfortunately, are not likely voters and who also do not show up to vote for other Republicans. They like Trump, seeing him as a different kind of Republican who appeals to union hall Democrats, but they do not like other Republicans, and Trump has never been able to convince them to vote for other Republicans.

I don’t think he tries hard enough. I think he has to make the case, in a major national campaign, that it is absolutely necessary for Trump’s personal political fortunes that he doesn’t have a Congress controlled by “lunatic left-wing Democrats” impeaching him every five minutes like he did from 2019-2020.

This is beltway-class advice, not worthy of Ace. Ace misses two very important points in this summation. First, and most importantly, Trump owns no voters. Those voters aren’t his to command. He is theirs. Trump is the voters’ candidate, not the other way around.