Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Logo for Disney’s Swamp Fox miniseries on Walt Disney Presents. The background represents “Frontierland” at the newly-created Disneyland.

If poetry and music were the main pop culture mediums of the nineteenth century, television was the pop culture medium of the second half of the twentieth. Francis Marion was in on television from the beginning. He had a television series, sort of, in the fifties. Walt Disney Presents: The Swamp Fox was based on the Robert D. Bass book Swamp Fox: The life and campaigns of General Francis Marion.

The book was published in 1959 and Disney immediately made it into an eight episode miniseries for Walt Disney Presents. Francis Marion was played by Leslie Nielson, more famous today for his comedic roles. Marion’s girlfriend and later wife, Mary Videau, was initially played by Joy Page—more famous for a minor but pivotal role in the earlier Casablanca.

This Monday is Miracle Monday, the Earth-wide fictional celebration whose origin is Elliot S! Maggin’s wonderful Superman novel of the same name. Something has happened, something that could literally have been Hell on Earth, but Superman saved the world and everyone in it. Not through brute strength or even through his alien, super-enhanced intelligence, but through his innate goodness, his moral upbringing by Jonathan and Martha Kent. The people of Earth remember nothing of those horrible days. They don’t know why they feel joyful. They know only that they do, as if some horrible evil has been lifted from them.

Shortly before four in the afternoon on the third Monday in the month of May, the people of the city of Metropolis learned the meaning of joy. They had no explanation for this feeling, and there were gaps in their knowledge of what had gone on in their lives so far that day. It was as though they were all waking up, or at least opening their eyes, for the first time in an awfully long time. The first thing many of them saw was the red-and-blue figure of Superman drawing a line across their sky, and he became the symbol of their joy. It felt like a miracle, though none could say why.

Miracle Monday is a wonderful book, a fine companion to Maggin’s first Superman novel, Last Son of Krypton. Very few authors have fully recognized how the innate goodness of Superman is essential to his nature. Maggin is probably the best of that very small number.

I have Miracle Monday on my calendar to remind me to search my experiences over the last year for something worth blogging about on that day. It ought to be related to Superman or at least to superhero roleplaying or fiction. But since I don’t play superhero roleplaying games any more, or read superhero comic books—in both cases more through lack of opportunity than through lack of desire—I often skip over it.

I have, for a long time, been considering a complete rewrite of Men and Supermen, my own superhero game written and played throughout the eighties and nineties. While I play fantasy most often, superhero roleplaying is probably my favorite; from the moment I first played Dungeons & Dragons in 1980, I set my sights on a solid ruleset for gaming in a comic book superhero setting.

May 12, Tuesday, is the anniversary of the capture of Fort Motte by Patriot forces under General Francis Marion and Lieutenant Colonel “Light-Horse” Harry Lee in 1781. “Fort” Motte was in fact a plantation mansion commandeered by the British a year earlier. The siege, which began on May 8, is famous not for the siege itself nor for the famous military figures who took part but for the patriotism of its real owner, Mrs. Rebecca Brewton Motte. Mrs. Motte famously supplied the exotic arrows used to set the mansion on fire and drive the British out.

The siege was otherwise a fairly standard military operation, not at all the backwoods guerrilla warfare that General Marion was famous for. I’ve been fascinated by Marion ever since hearing a song about him in a library record back during the celebration surrounding the Bicentennial. We lived a few blocks from the local library, and I checked out Dallas Corey’s 1973 The History of the American Revolution several times to listen to it on our record player.

Also available in print on Amazon^• and Lulu.

Are you ready for the summer of Independence? Summer celebrations are always better with ice cream, and the no-churn recipes in The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Ice Cream Cookery^• are my personal favorites.

Since publishing my Ice Cream Cookery last year, I continue to try new ice creams alongside the old favorites. One was so impressive I’ve added it to the book. Last year for a gaming festschrift I went over some recipes given to me by Alarums and Excursions publisher Lee Gold. Her father’s Orange Cream Sherbet, made with oranges, lemons, cream, milk, and eggs, is very, very good.

This differs from the Lemon Cream Sherbet that debuted in the first edition more than in replacing some of the lemon with orange. It also replaces the gelatin with eggs, beating the yolks and whites separately. It enhances the citrus flavor by utilizing the peels of the orange and lemon as well. It is an absolutely wonderful sherbet, and would be great as the filling of an ice cream pie or cake. It’s not too shabby between two chocolate cookies as an ice cream sandwich either.

I’ve also made a minor change to the graphics. In its first edition photo, the Plombir Slivochnyi was somewhat eclipsed by a cheesecake from Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. I try to make these photos reflect how I actually use and eat the depicted foods, and I like ice cream with my cake. Even cheesecake. But I’ve now replaced the Plombir Slivochnyi photo with one that puts the ice cream up front.

The new photo is a bit self-referential: it features Ice Cream Cookery in the background! First edition, obviously. Further proof that I wrote this book so that I could use it. I hope that you find it useful too, but they are my favorites, and I use it to make them.

Beltway pundits like to ridicule Trump supporters for thinking he’s playing some sort of four dimensional chess when he clearly isn’t. Whether it’s the fight with Musk or ending Iran’s nuclear program, it’s all the same complaint: not only does President Trump not understand what he’s doing, his supporters think there’s a plan when there isn’t one, confusing random flailing with multi-dimensional strategy.

In fact, though, that’s not what I see most Trump supporters celebrating in Trump’s actions. Most Trump supporters appear to be grateful that the President plays mere two-dimensional or one-dimensional chess.¹

Most politicians and beltway pundits seem to be stuck in zero dimensional chess. When Trump announces some action in pursuance of some policy, such as that he’s going to raise tariffs against a country until that country decides to negotiate to reduce their tariffs against the United States, the beltway class yells that this is crazy.

And then when the President rolls those tariffs back when the country announces they’ll negotiate, the same crowd crows that Trump is walking back his actions, not that the actions resulted in the consequences the President desired.

The same thing happened only last week with Iran. Trump threatened Iran with specific consequences unless the Islamic leadership in Iran started negotiating, starting with a ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz. The beltway class yelled that he’s crazy. Iranian leaders came to the table, so he stopped the threats that he explicitly said were meant to bring about this result and the beltway class crowed that he was chickening out. They didn’t argue that he shouldn’t trust the Iranian leadership—or that he shouldn’t trust the Pentagon—or that the starting point of negotiations offered was a bad one or even that the ceasefire was likely to be measured in hours rather than days. For that you need to go to someone on the right, someone who has actually supported Trump, such as Mark Steyn. No, they argued that he was chickening out when he did what he said he would do.

It’s literal zero-dimensional thinking. There is no sense that policies have goals and that reaching those goals will affect policy. When a politician literally announces the goal of an action, and the goal is met and so the action is ended, this is crazy and incomprehensible to beltway “thinkers”. Who, to paraphrase Edgar Rice Burroughs, “do more talking than thinking”.

“This is going to get salty.”

“A lot of recipe writers and publications… present recipes in a way that they are very difficult to read. They put up roadblocks. They over-complicate them. They try to make something into something that it isn’t.”

Glen goes on a rant about a particular style of recipe-writing that also makes me laugh. It’s all about over-complicating things in ways that literally do nothing for the recipe. This particular cookie recipe hits one of them for me. He doesn’t talk about this in the video, but he does fix it in his altered version: it calls for unsalted butter… and then adds salt. I’ve pretty much stopped keeping unsalted butter on hand because every one of them seems to do this.

It’s why I put the note in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book about converting sodium content to salt.

If the recipe required clarifying the butter, that might make sense. But it does not. It requires browning the butter, which is the opposite of clarifying. So, this recipe calls for a 10½ tablespoons of butter (an amount worthy of Glen’s rant) and ⅜ teaspoon of fine salt (ditto).

Of the three butters I buy—the store brands at H-E-B, Randalls, and Trader Joe’s—each contains exactly 90 mg of sodium per tablespoon. That means 10½ tablespoons butter contains 2,362.5 mg of salt. This is less than a percent off of what ⅜ teaspoon is. It’s a measuring error.

You could make this cookie and it would be just fine by using normal butter and not adding salt. Literally, the author required unsalted butter and then added exactly the same amount of salt back in. Given that this is a modern trendy recipe, adding more salt not only wouldn’t hurt, it likely would make it even better.

As they say, watch the whole thing.

My dad remembers his parents renting freezer space in the local grocery store. They lived on a working farm and had to drive about five miles into town to access that rented space. Having that refrigeration space allowed them to store purchases and excess food. But it didn’t allow them to forego the daily trip to the market, because their refrigerated food was at the market.

With the 1927 introduction of General Electric’s monitor-top all-in-one system home refrigeration changed drastically, just as home computers would exactly fifty years later with the introduction of all-in-one home computers from companies like Radio Shack.

The story of home refrigeration happened slowly… and then quickly. It took place over hundreds and even thousands of years, depending on how deep you go. Here’s how Oscar Anderson, in Refrigeration in America, described the life of farmers in pre-refrigeration America:

Lyrics for “O Living Bread from Heaven” ca. 1872.

Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s Aurelia is used as the melody for a hundred songs, literally, and more. Hymnary.org lists 188 songs that use this melody. They range from soaring (The Day of Resurrection) to vivid (No Seas Again Shall Sever) to timeless (O God, the Rock of Ages).

It rings in the new year with Another Year is Dawning, guides us through the years with The Sunday Bells are Calling, and sings the year (and mortal life) out with The Year is Swiftly Waning.

It’s all the more amazing because it is, for church music, relatively recent. Wesley wrote it in 1864. He wrote it for John Mason Neale’s 1849 Jerusalem the Golden, itself a wonderful song with a wonderful history. Jerusalem the Golden is a very loose translation of a relatively few lines from a much older and much longer Latin satire, Bernard of Cluny’s 12th century De contemptu mundi.

Here, for example, are what I think are Cluny’s Latin lines which inspired Neale’s second verse as reprinted in The Invalid’s Hymn-Book:

My very rudimentary Latin says that this is a very loose translation. It’s really more of an inspired by than a translated from.