Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 24

Fruit-Plants, Cheap Coconuts, and the Need for a Brilliant Editor

The kids are back in school this week and I am back in my little hidey hole in the basement where I churn out silly blog posts and the occasional book. It’s a big year for us. My oldest is starting high school. My youngest is headed to middle school. And I’m, well, probably going to pen the next great American novel or something.

Actually, I am pretty busy trying to get back into the swing of things, starting with some novel editing. If you’ve been following along with this blog for very long, you might recall I wrote what I refer to as a lost novel. It’s a long story (the “lost” part, not the novel, which is pretty average length), but basically, a publisher did me wrong and a book that was supposed to come out never did.

[image error]It’s possible that I should also spend some time cleaning up the hidey hole in the basement.

Fortunately, the lost book saga is nearly at an end. The rights will return to me early next year and I hope to release the book myself in February. And that means that right now, I’m spending a lot of time editing.

This is not as difficult as it sounds. Mostly I just have to read through the book for the 4,782nd time and acknowledge that I am incredibly lucky to work with a brilliant editor who calls me out on all my silly mistakes.

She’s also very kind. While I’m sure she rolls her eyes as she corrects my nineteenth dialog formatting error in the space of four pages, not once has she called me idiot, or even made me feel like she might. I really don’t know how she does it. I’d go cross-eyed and just start throwing in commas between every other word.

But that’s why I need a brilliant editor. Because sometimes I do that. And as small and inconspicuous as commas seem, they really do matter.

I recently stumbled on the story of a very important comma that once lost the US government about 2 million dollars. I realize that if you are a politician and not just a normal person, $2 million may not sound like that much money, so let me explain that this was in 1872. Really, that $2 million was more like $40 million in today’s money.[image error]

Okay, if you are a politician, you’re probably still not all that impressed, but to us regular folk, that’s a pretty pricy comma.

The problem started with a tariff act passed that year which specified that on August 1, 1872, the following imported goods would be duty-free: “fruit, plants tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

If like me, you’re not so great with commas, you might gloss over the fact that this list seems to suggest that all imported tropical and semi-tropical fruits are no longer subject to tariff. Since the previous tariff act placed a 20% tax on lemons, oranges, pineapples, and grapes, and a 10% tax on limes, bananas, mangoes, pomelos, and coconuts, this had people in the business of pineapple importation pretty excited.

[image error]William Adam Richardson, probably not the best Secretary of the Treasury the US has ever had, and definitely in need of a brilliant editor. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Then Secretary of the Treasury William Richardson was less excited as he explained the act contained a clerk’s typo and that the comma after fruit was meant to be a hyphen. It was fruit-plants, he insisted, that were duty free, and not bananas. The threat of litigation made him roll back his statement and it took two years before an angry congress managed to correct the mistake with a new tariff act. In the meantime, a whole lot of potential government revenue helped line the pockets of some grammar enthusiast pomelo importers.

I’m pretty sure none of my comma mistakes are going to cost me that kind of money. Then again maybe my potential book sales are more substantial than I think. Like A LOT more substantial. Just in case, I’m combing through my almost-found-again book at least one more time with the help of a brilliant editor who I’m pretty sure would also not let me get away with using the word “fruit-plants.”

Still Faster than Spit

Okay, okay. So I know it’s been longer than two weeks since I last wrote in this space. Yes, I did set the goal of posting every other week through the summer. Obviously, I didn’t make it. Instead, I have spent the last month or so enjoying summer with my boys, now twelve and fourteen. We’ve done a fair bit of traveling and playing and adventuring. Most recently we took a family trip up to Minnesota.

Having spent a little time earlier in the summer exploring New Orleans, where the mighty Mississippi River comes to its end in the Gulf of Mexico, we thought we might wander up to the start of the great river just so we could say we’d travelled its length.

[image error]Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a man who is not too proud to ask for directions. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Obviously we’re not the first to have searched for the headwaters. In the late eighteenth century, the Mississippi River determined the western border of the young United States and several geologists attempted to determine exactly where the river began.

That wasn’t a simple task. The source has been placed variously at Lake Pepin, Leech Lake, Lake Julia, and Cass Lake, because the Mississippi starts in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” many of which connect to one another. And just to confuse matters, every explorer who “discovered” the source took it upon himself to rename it, which makes tracing the history of discovery of the source of the Mississippi nearly as convoluted as the source itself.

It was finally in 1832 with the help of an Obijewe guide that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, evidently the only explorer man enough to stop and ask for directions from the locals who had identified the source long before that, found the once and forever, entirely indisputable source of the great river at Lake Omashkoozo-zaaga’igan. He swiftly renamed it Lake Itasca by taking a couple letters out of each of the Latin words for truth and head. It sounded pretty cool to him.

[image error]Lake Itasca, and some very slippery rocks.

Schoolcraft wasn’t wrong about that. He may, however, have been wrong about the once and forever, entirely indisputable source of the Mississippi River. Because four years later, a man by the name of Joseph Nicollet found a creek running into Itasca, which was, of course, named Nicollet Creek. That cracked open the debate again. It wasn’t until 1888 that a detailed survey was taken and Itasca regained its title since it turned out that the creeks running into the lake occasionally run dry.

On April 20, 1891, the Minnesota state legislature established Itasca State Park and now there’s a large brown sign that makes it very easy to spot the once and forever indisputable source of the Mississippi River.

[image error]I found it pretty easy to spot the source of the Mississippi.

Despite the sign, there are some hydrologists who even today insist the source is actually Hernando de Soto Lake because it is connected to Lake Itasca by underground aquifers. But nobody likes those people very much.

Every year about a half million visitors flock to Itasca to walk across the slippery rocks where it all begins. If you can’t count yourself among them, you can still enjoy a view of the headwaters via a super riveting live webcam. It’s also a great place to kayak, and some crazy, adventurous kayakers put in there to begin a 2,348 mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico. That is definitely not on my bucket list.

My family was happy enough to wade a bit, take a few pictures, and learn some fun Mississippi River facts that are posted throughout the park, including in all of the bathrooms. For instance, did you know that it takes a single drop of water starting in Lake Itasca, about ninety days to make the journey to the Gulf of Mexico? What that means then, is that if on the last day I posted to this blog space I had also spit into the Mississippi headwaters, that spit would still not have reached the Gulf of Mexico by the next time I posted. So, I’m still faster than spit.

 

A Super Historically Significant Tour of New Orleans

Hello from summer break!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I am going to do my best throughout these summer months to post in this space at least every couple of weeks. The last two have been busy. My kids are now eleven and fourteen, which means two things. First, they don’t really need me to entertain them all the time, but second, they do need me to drive them places. All. The. Time.

We’ve also been adventuring as a family when we can squeeze it in. Last week, we loaded up the family truckster and embarked on a quest to strike another state off the list for the kids by spending a couple days in New Orleans, Louisiana.

[image error]This museum is massive and still growing.

And this is the point at which any serious history enthusiast and blogger would impress upon you that the National World War II Museum in New Orleans is amazing and is well worth the trip. She’d surely mention the care with which a variety of perspectives on the war are portrayed though artifacts, interactive video, and personalized stories throughout the many visually stunning exhibit halls. She might even attempt to communicate the overwhelming emotional response visitors have to this museum, including shame, sorrow, joy, and pride.

But this isn’t that kind of blog. Instead, I’m going to write about cocktails.

Because after visiting the World War II Museum we decided to take a carriage tour of the French Quarter and learned from our wonderful guide that the Big Easy is also sometimes referred to as “the cradle of civilized drinking.”

If, like me, you’ve ever spent any time on Bourbon Street, then you might, like me, question the use of the word, “civilized,” but what is meant is that New Orleans considers itself the original home of the cocktail.

The story, as I heard it, involves a man by the name of Antoine Peychaud who in 1841, opened Pharmacie Peychaud in order to sell his special herbal remedy cleverly called Peychaud’s Bitters. Like Mary Poppins a century later, the druggist discovered that a spoonful of sugar can be helpful when getting people to take their medicine, especially when combined with water and spirits and served in an egg cup called in French a coquetier.

[image error]Now the site of Royal Pharmacy in the French Quarter of New Orleans, this is allegedly where the world’s first cocktail was mixed. Except it wasn’t.

With the increasing importance of the coffee house social scene throughout nineteenth century America, and the simultaneous discovery that without a large dose of cream, twenty-seven packets of sugar, and a Starbucks logo, coffee is actually kind of gross, Peychaud’s concoction in a coquetier became the cocktail. This, it turned out, was a much more entertaining beverage to enjoy with a gathering of know-it-all friends sharing silly stories from history.

And while it does seem there is some truth to this one, like most silly stories from history, it has been a little embellished by carriage tour guides over the years. New Orleans is definitely the original home to many cocktails, including the hurricane and a bunch I’ve never heard of because I drink cocktails almost as often as I drink coffee (which is almost never).

[image error]There are a few other places in New Orleans well worth a visit.

The city is not, however, the originator of the word “cocktail,” which appeared in print in the US for the first time in New York as early as 1803 and , probably got its start in England where it had more to do with perking up the back end of a horse than it did with raising the spirits of a self-medicating New Oreleander New Orleanite New Orleanan citizen of New Orleans. The cradle of civilized drinking is also probably not the home of the original cocktail party, which according to Wondrich, might have been hosted by George Washington. But that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

Still that doesn’t stop the rumor that tour guides throughout the city work hard to perpetuate. New Orleans is even the home the Museum of the American Cocktail, where I suspect you can learn all about Antoine Peychaud. I wouldn’t know, because this history blogger spent most of her time at National World War II Museum. And it really was well worth the visit.

 

 

 

Why Hello There, Stanley (Woo Hoo!)

Since 1893 when Governor General of Canada Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley donated a silver challenge cup to be held each year by the champion hockey team in the Dominion of Canada, the oldest trophy in professional sports has been passed around, drop kicked, stolen, and accidentally left on the side of the road. What came to be known as the Stanley Cup has held flowers, cereal, and newborn babies.

[image error]Original Stanley Cup – Library and Archives Canada, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been through some design changes over the years and since 1926 it has served as the championship trophy of the National Hockey League.

And now for the first time it’s been hoisted by the St. Louis Blues. (Woo Hoo!)

I can’t claim to be a huge fan of the sport of hockey, but the excitement during the playoffs and the Stanley Cup finals has been infectious.

[image error]By Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1390419

St. Louis is celebrating. I’m celebrating. None of us has slept much. And we’ve all now listened to late season Blues victory anthem “Gloria” covered in 1982 by Laura Branigan, far more than anyone did in 1982 when it topped out at number 2 on the Billboard chart.

I am delighted for the players, the lifelong fans, and the little kids whose loyalty to their favorite hockey team has been forever sealed by an awesome season in which the very worst team in the league at the beginning of January became the very best team by the end. (Woo Hoo!)

And I’m so happy for my city that has had some rough years, but has drawn together in the last few weeks as a community longing for an improbable victory. I think I’m even going to buy a Stanley Cup Championship tee shirt.

Let’s Go Blues!

(I apologize for the little bit of foul language at the beginning of this video and in the linked video above. Everyone’s been a little excited around here.)

Having a Field Day

In 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson was just being a kid in Oakland, California. He was outside playing and had a glass filled with flavored soda water and a stirring stick. Then in a move that would surprise no mother ever, when it was time to go in, Frank left his concoction sitting on the ground outside for the whole chilly night. In the morning, the boy found that the contents of the glass had frozen with a great stir stick handle stuck down inside.

[image error]I mean, who doesn’t love a good Popsicle?

Through the years, Frank continued to make his frozen treats, delighting his friends, and eventually his children. In 1923, he sold his “Eppsicles” to the enthusiastic public at a park in Alameda, California. I imagine it was something of a stampede, because nearly a century later, Frank’s accidental frozen concoction, renamed “Popsicle” by his children, remains a staple summertime treat, adored by children and at least one PTA mom who has definitely put in her time.

Last week, in the final few days counting down to summer break, my youngest son participated in his last ever field day. And because he will officially be a middle schooler next year, this was my last field day as well.

I’ve written about Field Day before. It’s that most dreaded of events on the grade school calendar, when the entire day is dedicated to outdoor games I am convinced P.E. teachers dream up only to punish parents for the hours and hours of torture inflicted by their children throughout the school year.

[image error]By far my least favorite Field Day game of all time. Oh the knots! By Wolff83 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21406979

For years, I have filled water balloons, chased playground balls, and untangled lasso golf ropes. I have soothed hurt feelings, tracked down lost activity passports, and broken up arguments about who tripped whom in the three-legged race. All of this I have accomplished while holding sunglasses, water bottles, tubes of sunscreen and whatever childhood detritus emerges from a bulging pocket.

This year marked my seventh field day at this school, not counting the years when I volunteered on two separate days because I had a child in both the younger and older grades. I arrived early, hoping I might have a greater opportunity to choose which activity I would lead—hopefully nothing with complicated rules, or whining children, or the need to take off shoes.

Then a miracle occurred. The school counselor responsible for checking ids, clearing background checks, and assigning tasks looked at me and asked, “Would you like to hand out Popsicles?”

[image error]Technically we did not hand out traditional Popsicles on sticks. These are less messy. And they come in blue flavor, which is evidently the favorite among the grade school crowd.

I was so stunned I could hardly speak. At first I only nodded, the glorious sensation spreading through me like glitter spilling across the craft table and cascading onto the floor. “Yes,” I managed to whisper at last. “Yes, I can do that.”

The only problem with Popsicles is that they melt, and so there is a narrow window for frozen treat distribution. Because of this, the children have to line up more or less all at once. Some might call it a stampede.

But we had a good system. The lucky mom assigned to popcorn duty (a parent of sixth grade twins who had certainly paid her dues over the years) was set up next to me. We suspended popcorn operations during the popsicle window so one of us could hand out the treats while the other marked off the Popsicle spot on each activity passport. We also cleverly convinced an unwitting student teacher to stand over the trashcan and help kids open their treats.

And then it was over.

There was no arguing. The kids were all happy to get a yummy frozen treat. I didn’t have to hold anyone’s water bottle, chase any playground balls, or frantically search for a wayward, wet sock.

[image error]Field Day can get all kinds of crazy.

Afterwards I helped the popcorn mom with her distributions and we chatted about how much we have loved our grade school with its dedicated teachers, talented administrators, and great support staff. Neither of us will miss Field Day.

After he was finished handing out treats to a sunny California crowd all those years ago, Frank Epperson filed a patent for his Popsicle in 1924. Soon, Frank’s accidental frozen concoction was one of the most highly sought treats on Coney Island and at Field Day, where after seven long years, this PTA mom finally caught a break.

 

School’s Out. Time for Dessert!

Finally, the last day of school is almost here. Originally students in our district would have been finished tomorrow afternoon, after a few fairly useless hours of turning in textbooks, cleaning out lockers, and signing yearbooks. They might also have watched a movie while teachers scrambled to input final grades.

[image error]Worth the wait.

By shortly after noon, the streets of my town would have been overtaken by roving bands of celebrating adolescents, joining in the chorus of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out as it blares from the overtaxed speakers in the dented cars driven by their older and luckier classmates. And it would have taken upwards of an hour to get through the line at the local frozen custard stand.

Thanks to long forgotten snow days, all that joyful chaos will have to wait until next week, but my kids are ready. Their teachers are ready. And even this mama, facing a long summer of chronically bored children itching for a fight, is ready.

Because sometimes when you’ve been stuck for a long time having to meet high expectations, follow stuffy rules, and continually set aside the things you want to do for the things you have to do in order to demonstrate all that you can do, you find yourself exhausted and it’s nice to just cut loose for a little while.

[image error]Kindred spirits Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt, a little underdressed here for a spontaneous night flight to Baltimore. By Harris & Ewing – Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt found that to be true. Never exactly the conventional wife of a president, taking a far more active role in politics than did her predecessors, Mrs. Roosevelt spent much of her life fighting to break from the expectations placed on her by others and demonstrating through tireless effort all that she and, by extension, all women could be capable of. I’m sure it was an exhausting job. And I’m sure sometimes she just wanted to have a little fun.

During a formal White House dinner party she hosted on the evening of April 20, 1933, she seized an opportunity to do just that. In attendance was her relatively new friend Amelia Earhart, another woman accustomed to breaking through societal expectations. As the two talked that evening, they decided that rather than eating dessert, they’d very much like to take a night flight to Baltimore and back.

The two of them, attired in their fanciest duds, rallied the other dinner guests and the whole party made its way to Hoover Field where they borrowed a plane for their flight of fancy. Because really, who is going to tell evening gown-clad Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt they can’t borrow an airplane?

The flight, covered in detail by the Baltimore Sun, was a success. All the dinner guests made it safely back to the ground, and yes, after the surprise adventure they did return to the White House for dessert. I imagine the atmosphere was looser and the conversation lighter.

I hope our summer break can be as rejuvenating and spontaneous. Maybe we’ll blast a little Alice Cooper and hop a flight to Baltimore wearing our fanciest duds. One thing I know for sure is that we will not be skipping dessert, even if it means waiting an hour in line at the local frozen custard stand.

On a related side note, this mostly once a week blog will become a mostly every other week blog for the summertime. As the pace of motherhood picks up for the season and as I work toward a novel polishing goal, I’m not sure I can maintain a weekly blog schedule. Also, this mama could do with a little summertime fun.

Gardening for Beer. Beer for Gardening.

Nearly four thousand years ago, someone living in what is modern-day Iraq etched into a clay tablet, instructions for making beer. Part recipe and part hymn to the Sumerian goddess of beer, the etching is the oldest written recipe so far discovered. And the one thing we can know for sure is that people have been making beer even longer than that.

Though the precise beginning of beer has proven tricky to pinpoint, researchers have found evidence of it from as far back as ten thousand years ago, around the time the human lifestyle began to shift from hunting and gathering to farming and domesticating.

[image error]In the late 1980s, University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Dr. Solomon Katz first suggested that the accidental discovery of beer might have even been the driving force behind that shift. Basically, he theorized that when humans left wild wheat and barley outside the cave to get wet, the resulting dark liquid, when mixed with natural yeast in the air, made early man overly confident and inclined to watch football.

Dr. Katz explained that it could have been a desire to find a stable production method for beer that drove humans to plant some seeds and stay a while, beginning the long tradition of plopping onto a barstool and drinking oneself stupid.

One observation that supports the theory is that in some of sites of the earliest Neolithic villages, researchers find plenty of evidence for the presence of grain, but very little for the cooking of it, indicating that beer may have predated bread as a grain-derived food source. Also, astute anthropologist that he is, Dr. Katz has pointed out that cultures all over the world have long gone to great efforts to obtain and produce mind-altering substances. In other words, people like beer, and probably always have.

[image error]Most of my friends seem to prefer a local-ish craft beer. I won’t argue with them.

Personally, I’m not a big fan. I might drink a beer from time to time when a social occasion calls for it, but I have never particularly enjoyed the taste and would almost always prefer a glass of wine or, more often, a Coke.

But I have lots of friends who really enjoy beer and do things like hold beer tastings and talk to each other using words like dry-hopped, cask conditioning, and adjuncts (which apparently does not refer to the part-timers in the English Department, who coincidentally, also tend to like beer).

These are generally the same friends who turn up their noses at a can of Budweiser and then roll their eyes at me when, at their insistence, I take a sip of their favorite microbrew and say something profound like, “Yep. That’s beer alright.”

So, even though it provided a great deal of nutrition and a safer way to consume water and was possibly a major catalyst that launched humans toward life as we know it today, I don’t have a lot of use for beer. Or at least I didn’t until this past week.

Much like our ancient forefathers thousands of years ago, I am a gardener. Also, like them, I mostly do it by trial and error and am not always good at it. This spring, as my baby plants have tried to push their way through the lush soil in my garden boxes, something has been nibbling away at them. The culprit, I believe, is the sowbug.

[image error]Technically, this is a crustacean. That likes beer. photo credit: Wanderin’ Weeta Big pillbug-3 via photopin (license)

Better gardeners than I may insist that these funny pill-shaped bugs are not my problem, but I have performed a pretty thorough study (meaning I Googled it) and have found that these little monsters, while not a problem for larger, established plants might just munch their way through tender young shoots. And apparently one way to deal with them is to get them rip-roaring drunk.

After carefully considering my pest control options for about five minutes, I decided to buy some beer. I went with a craft variety because I don’t know if, like my friends, roly poly bugs are beer snobs and my fresh green beans are worth it. I set shallow dishes of the stuff throughout my garden beds and waited.

[image error]There are bugs in my beer garden. And hopefully, eventually there will be vegetables, too.

It turns out, these critters like beer as much as our ancestors did and they will go to great lengths to get it. As their bar-haunting distant cousins drown their sorrows in beer, great numbers of the sowbugs just drown. I suspect the smarter ones are already trying to figure out how they can make more of it themselves in a sustainable, and possibly less lethal, way.

As I watch this seemingly innate drive for beer, I am convinced that Dr. Katz was onto something. Not every anthropologist agrees that beer was the greatest driving force for giving up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, citing things like climate change and population growth as other plausible explanations. Still, most admit beer may have been a factor. It seems then that gardening is for beer, and beer is for gardening.

Oh—I See What He Did There

Last fall, I had the opportunity to attend a writers’ conference for which the keynote speaker was bestselling author Tess Gerritsen. You might know her as the author behind the television series Rizzoli & Isles and several fairly brilliant medical thrillers that, if you are a fan of medical thrillers, you should probably read.

[image error]The very gracious Tess Gerritsen with Sock Monkey Steve.

She is a wonderful speaker and had many insightful things to share, including this one bit I am holding onto particularly hard at the moment. Bestseller Tess Gerritsen confessed that during the course of reworking nearly every project she writes, there comes a time when she no longer believes the story is any good at all. Of course, her point in sharing this was that sometimes you just have to put your head down and keep forging ahead.

I find myself at this point with my current work-in-progress. I suppose I might call it writer’s block except I don’t think that’s really what it is. I’m not having trouble coming up with ideas or even getting words on a page. I mean, I am mostly working on short story and essay submissions and not my novel, but I am writing. I’m even writing some things I’m pretty proud of.

But when it comes to this historical novel, of which I have plowed my way through a terrible first draft and have completed a good portion of a hopefully somewhat less terrible second draft, I’m kind of just having a hard time finding traction.

Writer’s block of all forms has plagued mankind probably since the first cave dwellers agonized over whether a bow and arrow or an antelope would better communicate the inner transformative journey of the central stick figure. Fortunately, the condition has been widely studied.

[image error]The bull is a bold and clever choice here. image via Pixabay

And no one’s research has yielded more fruitful answers than that of Dennis Upper of Veterans Administration Hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts, whose findings were published in the Fall 1974 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis. Dr. Upper titled his insightful paper “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block.’”

Other than the title, one footnote, and a single peer review response, the article is entirely blank. The footnote explains that findings in the paper had not been presented at a convention of the American Psychological Association. The review heaps praise on the concise nature of the article and recommends no changes, stating that the journal should find room for Dr. Upper’s fine work “perhaps on the edge of a blank page.”

The point of the “study,” of course, is that psychologists, if not always super helpful, are at least pretty funny. [image error]

But there is probably a lesson to be learned from the not-an-article, that really did appear in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, even taking up a full page, and not just the edge of one. The point, I suspect, is that leaving the page blank will clearly not solve the problem and, as Gerritsen suggests, there comes a time when you have to just put your head down and keep forging ahead.

Oh—I see what he did there. It turns out, psychologists, if not always super funny, are at least pretty helpful.

No News is Good News

On April 18, 1930, at 8:45 pm British citizens who gathered around their radios to listen to the BBC news segment heard the following: “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news.” That announcement was followed by fifteen minutes of piano music and, I’m guessing, a fair bit of stunned silence in living rooms throughout the country.

Can you even imagine a news outlet making such a statement today? And if they did, can you imagine how we, the consumers, would react? I suspect the very absence of news would be viewed as a story in itself. Other media outlets would likely report that the BBC was losing its edge and failing in its duty to bring the news to the citizens of the world. Pundits might jump in with their own form of criticism, loudly arguing with one another about the new role of the media in propagating the nonstories of the day and longing for the good old days of the 24-hour news cycle.

[image error]The news never stops. Even when it does. photo credit: San Diego City College 2018-0510-SDCCRTVFx010 via photopin (license)

Because we definitely live in a world driven by news. Whether it’s good, bad, fake, or irrelevant, it’s around us all the time, demanding our attention and affecting our mental health.

I’ve written about this before, about the need to occasionally take a little break, something I think all of us should consider occasionally doing. But I recently had a pretty lengthy experience doing just that.

I am not a strict adherent to the tradition of fasting from something during Lent. Still, this year, it occurred to me that I might have something in my life that I would genuinely benefit from giving up.

I chose, for forty days, to give up the news. I didn’t give up the news entirely of course. I’m on the internet a lot and I saw plenty of headlines. Also, scrolling through social media I occasionally spotted a story that had people riled up. But I tried very hard not to engage much with the stories I saw. I even entirely gave up my primary source of news, which for quite a few years has been talk radio.

[image error]Most of the time I really would rather listen to piano music. If only it didn’t make me sleepy behind the wheel. photo credit: San Diego City College 2018-0510-SDCCRTVFx008 via photopin (license)

For about two weeks, it was hard. Like really hard. I had this constant, nagging feeling that I was missing out on important discussions about important events that would dramatically shape the future of the world and how human beings relate to one another.

Then I realized, I wasn’t. Because any of the big stories, like the shootings in New Zealand, the fire at Notre Dame, or the bombings in Sri Lanka, managed to get through. And thankfully some other stuff didn’t. For example, for 40+ days, I had no idea what snarky tweets President Trump had sent out into the world, or what new candidate had thrown his or her hat into the Democratic presidential primary race, or what any of the Kardashians were getting up to.

And that felt kind of amazing.

For that forty days plus Sundays, my mind became a little less cluttered, my stress level became a little lower, and my perspective became a little bit healthier. It was like a great big mental cleanse. I thought I’d probably more or less stick with it by intentionally limiting my exposure to constant news.

[image error]Some news I can definitely live without. photo credit: Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer Kim Kardashian via photopin (license)

Then today I had to make a long, early morning drive. Because music tends to make me sleepy behind the wheel I turned on talk radio. I found out that former Vice President Joe Biden is now the twentieth person officially running for the Democratic presidential nomination and that President Trump has already tweeted snark about it.

Neither of these two pieces of information was much of surprise. It kind of seemed like there really was no news to report, at least not at that time of today. Or perhaps the news outlets I tuned in to just weren’t reporting on the most surprising or fascinating stories. I mean, I still don’t know what the Kardashians have been up to lately.

 

A Cough Drop for Edgar Allan Poe

In January of 1845, Columbian Magazine listed among its upcoming publications, a new story by Edgar Allan Poe called “Some Words with a Mummy.” The story finally appeared, however, in April of that year in American Review. People who care to know such things assume Poe pulled the story from the original magazine because he received a better offer. And, well, what writer wouldn’t do that?

Despite having a mummy at its center and being written by an author most widely known for his dark tales, the story is actually an example of Poe’s lighter work. If you haven’t spent much time with him since reading “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” in high school, then you may be surprised to know that he was also pretty good at being funny.

[image error]Can you even imagine? By jalvear – originally posted to Flickr as Mummy at Louvre, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7141759

“Some Words with a Mummy” is straight up satire, poking fun at the 19th century Egyptomania that had people decorating their sitting rooms with mummies and hosting unrolling parties with their closest non-scientist friends, just for kicks. And he doesn’t let the scientific community off easy, either.

In case you haven’t read it (which you can do here if you want), the premise is that a tired narrator blows off his early bedtime for a chance to attend a mummy unrolling at his buddy’s house. The gathered friends decide after poking and prodding for a little bit that they might as well feed some electricity into various slits they make into the desiccated body.

The mummy, named Allamistakeo, wakes up and informs them they’re all pretty rude. Then the story really gets going. After sewing up their new friend and giving him some ridiculous clothes to wear, the 19th-century gentlemen feel compelled to prove to their ancient counterpart that mankind sure has come a long way in 5,000 years.

[image error]EAP may not have been terribly photogenic, but he could be kind of funny when he had a mind to.

Allamistakeo remains unconvinced. He offers a reasonable counter for every ill-informed suggestion his hosts make, demonstrating their narrow grasp on not only science, but also history. The only thing that impresses the reawakened Egyptian at all is the throat lozenge.

That’s right folks, the best advancement humankind made in nearly five thousand years was the cough drop.

Of course, Poe’s fairly dopey narrator didn’t yet know anything about space travel or smart phones, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Allamistakeo, who had been as successfully placed into perpetual stasis as any sci fi character ever was, wouldn’t have been too impressed with those either.

This is actually one of my favorite stories of Poe’s. It’s absurd and clever and it makes me giggle, which is why I was particularly excited to discover I could pay homage to it in my own work about mummies.

My first (to be published) historical thriller Gentleman of Misfortune follows the story of an elegant swindler who steals a shipment of eleven mummies. My thief is invented, but the mummies are ripped from the pages of history and there was a point when they were located in the same city at the same time as Edgar Allan Poe. Talk about a fun cameo to write!

[image error]So many choices! What a time we live in.

My fictional gentleman got the opportunity to have a fictional conversation with the ripped-from-history Poe himself. As you might imagine, they talked about mummies. And lozenges.

It’s one of the lighter, more playful moments in a story that has a definite dark edge. I’d like to think that if Poe found himself suddenly resurrected, he’d enjoy it. But I doubt that. He was generally a pretty harsh literary critic. And like his Allamistakeo, Poe didn’t seem much pleased with his own age. I think it’s unlikely he’d be all that impressed by ours.

Still, I bet he would appreciate our wide variety of cough drops.