Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

Due to a family occasion, this will be my last post here until Tuesday.

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1. Sure, he was the Father of Liberty, but could John Locke cook up pancakes on the weekend? In case you were wondering, the answer is yes:

A collection of philosopher John Locke's papers at the Bodleian Library includes letters, accounts, poetry, notes on medicine and books, and recipes. When David Armitage posted this recipe for pancakes in the Bodleian collection on Twitter, I knew that I wanted to try it. These rich, nutmeg-scented pancakes are absolutely delicious.

Marissa Nicosia of Rare Cooking cautions against actually beating the eggs and flour for "a quarter of an hower" and it sounds like she might publish some of the other eleven recipes in the set after she gets an opportunity to see them.

2. Mississippi, of all places, gets favorable mention by the man who has visited eight thousand Chinese restaurants. Here are some excerpts from a BBC piece about the well-documented journey of a tax attorney from Los Angeles:

Though his food journey started as part of a search for his identity as a Chinese American, Mr Chan said, over the years it has become itself a chronicle of the rise of Chinese food and changing dynamics of Chinese culture in America.

Mr Chan isn't a typical Chinese food critic, and he insists he isn't even a foodie. He has no aptitude for using chopsticks, he said, has given up tea to avoid caffeine and adheres to a low-sugar, low-cholesterol diet.

And later:

The best place to find the most varied authentic Chinese foods in America is the San Gabriel Valley in LA, a Chinese immigrant enclave, he said, but for dim sum, San Francisco is the best bet.

He once had "unexpectedly good" chow mein in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which has a historic community of Chinese Americans dating back 200 years...

Part of my family is from the Mississippi Delta region, but it is only thanks to blogging that I learned either of this Chinese community or of the area's surprising abundance of good eateries. (via GeekPress)

3. Are reports that Latin is a dead language ... exaggerated? You might think so after reading A.Z. Foreman take issue with the fact that most classicists aren't very fluent at reading classical texts. (Every one of us, classics majors included, leaned on dictionaries during my college Cicero course back in the day.)

His provocative case that this shouldn't be so includes the following:

Take Msgr. Daniel Gallagher who worked for a decade at the Vatican Secretariat's Latin Office. Here's him delivering a lecture about the possibility of a manned mission to Mars in Latin. Here's Jorge Tárrega teaching one of Horace's most famous poems through the medium of Latin. Here's Justin Slocum Bailey talking about Aulus Gellius in Latin. If you want something literary, here's a lovely poem by Cäcilie Koch (AKA Caecilia) inspired by the discovery of the jaw-bone of a Neanderthal boy, and another poem by Alanus Divutius dedicated to the 9/11 victims. Here's a Latin Wikipedia article about special relativity. Here's a scene from Jurassic Park dubbed into Latin. Here's the Quomodo Dicitur podcast in which three people (not always the same people) have unscripted conversations about various topics in Latin. I could keep spouting these links till either I or you, dear reader, die of boredom. There are plenty of people who read Latin as easily as any "modern" language that they have acquired as adults. There are entire internet forums written in it. [links in original]

In the last paragraph, Foreman recommends a textbook to help one acquire the kind of reading proficiency he advocates.

4. Miss Manners proves fearless again, this time dispatching a question of ... cell phone etiquette ... with her usual humor and aplomb:

Miss Manners considers it a great advantage of etiquette that it does not notice individual behavior that does not affect other people.

The answer to this question then, might be paraphrased as, Do you feel lucky?

-- CAV