The Hidden Carols of England

By: | January 9, 2014

While Shepherds Watched

People have been singing Christmas carols in the pubs in villages around Sheffield, in the north of England, for hundreds of years. They sing week after week and year after year. Each pub has a season; in one, Christmas carols start on November 11 and continue until the first Sunday after Christmas. Every Sunday afternoon, people pack into a pub and sing together.

On Tuesday folklorist Ian Russell gave a lecture at the Library of Congress about his work on what he calls the “hidden” carols of northern England, particularly those Sheffield pubs. Russell is the director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He’s been studying folk traditions in South Yorkshire—which includes Sheffield—and North Derbyshire for 40 years.

A pub carol sing isn’t a religious occasion. It’s secular caroling. There’s beer. Sure, they sing about the Messiah’s birth and Mary and so on, but the point of being there, Russell says, is the community. People go out of a sense of commitment to the group and to the tradition. You do it every year because you do it every year.

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A mushroom that smells like maple syrup

By: | January 8, 2014

Candy cap mushroomOn a Saturday afternoon visit to an ice cream parlour, I saw a flavour that looked absolutely disgusting: mushroom. Feeling unadventurous, I ordered chocolate instead. But my husband went for the mushroom, and it was delicious.

“It tastes like waffles,” the server told us. The ice cream was pale yellow, with a flavour more complex than vanilla and more mellow than butter pecan. I ended up stealing several bites from my husband.

The mushroom variety is the candy cap, renowned for its pungent maple syrup-like aroma when dried. Some people have compared the scent to butterscotch, fenugreek, or curry. One baker raved that it made her apartment smell like maple glazed donut bars and cinnamon. Continue reading →

How an internet quiz put me in my place

By: | January 7, 2014

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I am from nowhere.

Until my husband told me this — stated it as a fact, like “it’s raining” or “the sky is blue” — I’d never had a truthful answer to a question that has always given me pause: where are you from?

“You’re from nowhere,” Dave said. His words hit me like a punch in the gut. He’d meant it as a joke, a clever way of stating the obvious. To him, my lack of roots was a sterile fact. To me, it was a gnawing wound, a loneliness I could never shake.

As an Air Force brat, I moved every few years. Before settling in Colorado, I had lived in three countries and more than a dozen towns. I was born in Texas, but we moved on before I formed a single memory of the place. My earliest recollection is of landing at a military base in Greenland and wondering who would give that name to such an icy place. I remember the swing set outside my kindergarten classroom near the Air Force Academy and the blue swimming pool in Phoenix that summer before we moved overseas, but the first place that feels anything like mine is a tiny village in West Germany—a town where I’m now a stranger, in a country that no longer exists. Continue reading →

The First Hero: A Girl

By: | January 6, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, Michelle subverted the established cultural order by adopting her five-year old’s suggestion that Bilbo Baggins was a girl.  Most people applauded but some gnashed their teeth: don’t second-guess literature, they said, and if Bilbo is a hero and heroes are boys, then so be it.  But I have prior and inside knowledge of this very issue and will hereby share it.

7279453194_a55d2cd46c_zAshtoreth, Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna – a good first line for a poem.  They’re different names for the same ancient Near Eastern goddess.  Inanna is Sumerian and the oldest, five or six thousand years old, as old as writing itself when it was made by reeds in soft clay, and maybe older.  Inanna was the first of the great Campbellian heroes with a thousand faces – from Theseus and Orpheus, to Dante, to the hobbits Baggins and Luke Skywalker – who had a quest and went to the underworld, helped by divine and inhuman companions, and who returned.  In short, Michelle’s five-year old was right:  the first Bilbo Baggins was a girl. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 5, 2014

Girl_caressing_snailDecember 30, 2013 – January 3, 2014

Ann Redux:  You know how, if your sister is a biologist, you have to be a physicist?  This isn’t only competition, it’s also cooperation and as such holds the Recipe for World Peace — if only anyone would listen.

Cameron Redux: the Snail Apocolypse is upon her, also upon her closet doors, umbrella stand, and stucco walls; and Tom Hayden’s video, peerless though it is, doesn’t help.

Erik’s New Year’s resolution is to lose that extra bit around his middle, and takes inspiration from fighting elephant seals.  If they can haul their massive butts around for a minute or two, surely so can he.

Michelle thinks the internet needs a Corrections column — like, for instance, responsible newspapers — and begins with a list of her own errata.  My personal list includes spelling “Michelle” with one “l.”

Abstruse Goose conflates general relativity, Alexander Pope, and the USS Enterprise to arrive at a theory that’s pretty untenable and, he says, dangerous.

Think Like an Elephant Seal

By: | January 3, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in January 2014.
Big Sur

Welcome to the New Year! The champagne is popped, the drunken kisses made and regretted. The only thing left to do is to go back to work and see what 2014 is all about. Oh, except that one little thing: The resolutions.

That’s right, sober or not, last night you made a few promises and now it’s time to get started. Mine was to lose weight. I need to trim my spare tire – not a lot mind you, more like the obnoxious kind you find in the back of rental cars that look like they were taken from a bike shop. Though a tire nonetheless.

As a former 20-something rock climbing teacher, I still think that I have a built-in Teflon spray that keeps pounds off me. But as a current 30-something writer, I am finding this is less than true. Furthermore I hate training. Sure, I’ll do it – run, bike, swim, Wii – but it irritates me that I have to do it at all (unlike Christie and her crazy friends).

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Abstruse Goose: Little Knowledge = Danger

By: | January 3, 2014

drink_deep_or_taste_not_the_Pierian_springOk, so y’all know about how, in general relativity, gravity slows time.  Clocks closer to something massive and more strongly attracted to it run slower.  And clocks farther away and less attracted run faster.  I’d explain this to you in more detail but I’m busy.  Anyway, AG can use the different times on his different clocks in different rooms to map the mass and therefore strength of gravity in those rooms.

Also you must know that Star Trek’s USS Enterprise has this gravity warp drive which sort of  bunches space together and burrows through the folds so it can somehow seem to get where it’s going faster than the speed of light. I’m still really busy.  This may be possible.  It may have been done*.  But I wouldn’t bet on it, and neither would AG:  his kicker quote, “a little knowledge  is a dangerous thing,” and his secret caption, “drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,” come from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism: drinking from the Pierian spring confers knowledge.  The rest of that verse goes, “there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,/and drinking largely sobers us again.”  Meaning, if you’re going to learn something, for chrissakes learn  it.

AG has a mouseover that says, “THAT’s RIGHT!  Ice. Man.”  That one, I haven’t a clue and any suggestions would be deeply welcomed.

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*Translation  of the acronyms in that link, which I suspect is having its little joke:  NDA – Non-Disclosure Agreement; SBU – Sensitive But Unclassified; DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; MOU – Memorandum of Agreement; PAO – Public Affairs Office; JSC – Johnson Space Center; FOIA – Freedom of Information Act.  It’s like a poem, isn’t it.

http://abstrusegoose.com/372

I Regret the Error

By: | January 2, 2014

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Happy 2014, the year after The Year We Broke the Internet.

Last week, in a gloomy essay in Esquire, Luke O’Neil wrote that publications old and new have abandoned basic reporting—and worse, their basic concern for the truth—for the sake of speed and splash. “Big Viral, a Lovecraftian nightmare … has tightened its thousand-tentacled grip on our browsing habits with its traffic-at-all-costs mentality—veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned,” he wrote.

Big Viral is real—though the exact number of its tentacles has yet to be confirmed—and though it can be used for good or evil, its destructive potential is enormous. But juicy stories, real or fake, have always traveled faster than boring facts. They’ve always rewarded their tellers. They’re just traveling faster and further than ever before.

While Big Viral can’t be stopped, it may be possible to housebreak it. Journalists have suggested several excellent strategies for correcting viral errors, and clever apps such as Retwact help users chase down bogus social-media posts.

For such tools to work, though, we tweeters and retweeters need to learn—or relearn—some respect for the facts. And for that, journalism already has a pretty good hack. We just need to repurpose it for the rest of us.

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