Friday, October 31, 2014

A Jewish Esperantist in Washington

Profits and Esperanto
First, I’d like to note that as in 2014, October 31, 1913 was also a Friday. For this story (which has nothing to do with Halloween, if you want shocks, look here), that’s an important point, because the even happened at a synagogue. It should surprise no one that the group had its meeting on a Thursday night, and not during synagogue services. This is one of those rare stories of Jews and Esperanto.

It’s somewhat ironic, but even with the actions of the Esperanto community decrying the blood libel trial of Menahem Beilis, this seems to have been motivated more by a sense of progress than by specific solidarity with Jews. Although Hitler infamously predicted that the Jews would force everyone to speak Esperanto, there doesn’t seem to be that much in the way of Jewish presence historically in Esperanto. While today there are Esperanto organizations linked to various religious groups, there is no group specifically for Jewish Esperantists.

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The Museum Monstrosities

The horror! The horror!
And this isn't one of the freaky ones.
(It’s Halloween. What the hell.)

I haven’t found the ability to mix writing and traveling. Between spending my day doing tourism and writing in my journal at night, I find that there’s no other time for writing. Instead of blogging about my day’s experiences, the last time I travelled, I wrote up a series of blog posts (largely on Esperanto) several days in advance. But in a way, it was good to save writing about the Lausanne Museum of Zoology until now, October 31.

The museum is an a building that houses a number of collections, including a numismatic collection, a geology collection, and an archeology collection. The fine arts museum should have been there, but the collection is currently in storage, awaiting a new home. The museum is open and they have temporary shows, which makes me wonder why they don’t have their collection up, since the new building won’t open until 2017, but I assume they’re doing various behind-the-scenes sort of things, such as preparing new cases, and determining new arrangements.

You may find images below this point disturbing. You have been warned.


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Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Lady in the Boat — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 6

Phædria is said to
pilot a "Gondelay."
So here's an idle
gondolier.
I start this post with the now customary apology for infrequent writing. I’ve actually been doing a lot of writing, just not on The Faerie Queene. Likewise, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, though (once again) not The Faerie Queene. I’ve ben reading (a few pages every day) Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, which keeps making me think I should pull the Frank Kermode book of the same title out of storage. I’m certain Barnes knows of the earlier work, but whether Kermode’s criticism is somehow involved or just was too great a title to pass up, I don’t know.

Looking at my shelves of criticism, I see a few things that would make a good title for a novel, one way or another. Mimesis might have to be a science fiction novel, though I suppose a novel in which the protagonist is seized by doubts of inauthenticity (merely the simulacrum of a person) would work. If one were going to name a contemporary novel The Faerie Queene, would that lock the writer into high fantasy?

One thing I’ve noticed about The Sense of an Ending (the novel, not the work of criticism) is that Barnes does not spend a lot of time describing anything. He’s keeping any sort of visual information tamped down. Characters have come and gone without the slightest bit of description. Tall or short? Dark or fair? Thin or plump? Who knows? The same is true of the places the protagonist inhabits.


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Journalist Makes Bizarre Claims about Hacking

Yeah, it's the Google Private
Browsing icon again.
I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t address the recent news (that just came to my attention) about Sheryl Attkisson, a former CBS News correspondent who claims that the government has hacked into her computers, phones, and television. While I’m quite willing to believe that the government has insufficient qualms about spying without a warrant, in Attkisson’s case, I think her claims are utter bullshit (and that’s a technical IT term).

Oh, and she’s written a book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington. Thumbs up for the use of the serial comma in the title. No points for anything else that has been revealed from the book.

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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Is Facebook Advertising Malware?

Beware of Facebook pages
offering free apps
A current “suggested” post on Facebook claims that a “New Unique Patented Technology” will “Restore Old Photos in a CLICK!” And they’re giving this powerful software away. Now, remember, if you’re getting something for free, you’re the product, not the customer. Just what exactly is Facebook selling you for?

I can’t comment on the current iteration (probably because I commented on an earlier one), so I’m hoping that this post reaches as many people as possible (and not just because I love blog hits). The product is malware. It starts off with some really inconsistent marketing. The Facebook page calls the application “MacPhotoPro,” but the link takes you to a web page where it’s called “OldPhotoPro,” although the URL is macphotopro.com. (In the interest of revealing all, the full URL was: http://macphotopro.com/clp/1?sc=fbmacph&sn=Mac%20Photo%20Pro&ap=278470014&img_id=68738).


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Ido and the Socialists

A must-read!
After yesterday’s post about the early Socialist and promoter of Esperanto, I don’t want to leave you with the idea that all Socialists were Esperantists.[1] Some left-wing people favored Ido instead. The Ido Schism cut across political lines. Some ardent Idists were politically conservative.[2]

Though the Ido Schism is now forgotten by everyone except Esperantists and Idists, when it happened, it was in the news. Newspapers actually ran articles about the conflicts between the two. In the early twentieth century, many simply assumed that Esperanto would keep growing as it had. Sure, there were naysayers, but even in 1910 when the Esperanto movement was wondering about their failure to make a stronger showing in the United States after five years, scientists and diplomats were seeing a universal auxiliary language as both necessary and inevitable.


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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Socialist Esperantist Dies in Massachusetts

Charles Horatio Matchett,
Early Esperantist
(circa 1896)
The Wikipedia entry for Charles Horatio Matchett mentions nothing about Esperanto, noting that he was, however, on the first Presidential ticket for the Socialist Party (he ran for Vice President in 1892 and for President in 1896). The winning candidate in 1896 was William McKinley, who received 7,102,246 votes, while Matchett received 36,359 votes, totaling exactly zero electoral votes.[1]

There’s ample genealogical information on Matchett. He was born in Brighton, Massachusetts on May 15, 1843, the son of Charles and Clarissa Matchett. Charles was their second child; he had three sisters, Julia, Clara, and Louisa. He married Georgina Straw, a dressmaker in 1871. They do not appear to have had any children. On the 1910 Census, his status is listed as divorced. But on the 1930 Census, her status is listed as “widowed.” Charles Horatio Matchett died on October 23, 1919 in Allston, Massachusetts.


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Monday, October 27, 2014

District Attorney Declined to Prosecute Abominable Crime

The Crime-that-Cannot-Be-Named
From my point of view, when a district attorney at some time in the past declined to prosecute a sodomy charge, that was a good thing. It's a good thing that consensual sodomy can no longer be prosecuted. In October 1869, the Washington, D.C. District Attorney declined to prosecute two charges of sodomy.[1] My cursory research turned up that the accused were both well known to the authorities, with charge for various acts of assault or theft attributed to each of them. Further, the news reports made it clear that the two charged were black, and it seems that their alleged victim was as well.

The two were charged separately, but the alleged incidents were on the same date. Each, according to the charges, committed sodomy “upon” on Roy Washington, on August 23, 1869. I am assuming that the “upon” means that Mr. Washington was the receptive partner for either oral or anal sex.[2]


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Sunday, October 26, 2014

Musician Addicted to a Beastly Crime

Was it really that beastly?
This is one of those stories where I just want to find out more, but the documentary record just isn’t in a giving mood. This isn’t to say that I found nothing, but that it wasn’t enough to dig out anything other than his (likely) street address. Nor were the newspapers forthcoming with much other information.

The sentence in this case was certainly light: ninety days, suspended on condition of leaving town. Yesterday, I wrote that Elmer and Ellen Shaw were convicted to a year in prison for sodomy in 1917, but maybe North Dakota was tougher on sex in 1917 than Minnesota was in 1887.


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Saturday, October 25, 2014

Naughty Pictures Bring Worse Charge then Burglary

Probably not the Shaws,
but you never know (I've cropped out
the racy bits, sorry).
A North Dakota couple, Elmer and Emma Shaw, were arrested in 1917 on suspicion of burglary and in searching through their possessions, the police found photos of the couples. Now they were really in trouble. I haven’t been able to find any information on the couple’s arrest, or for that matter much information about them in general. I might have written this up earlier were it not for an error on the part of a compositor.[1]

The earliest reference I can find to this story is in the Bismark Tribune of October 9, 1907, but I didn’t find that one due to a typographical error (which I’ll explain in detail soon, since I keep harping on it). The article which actually came to my attention was in the Ward County Independent, of Minot, North Dakota, on October 25, 1917, and was titled “A Revolting Pair,”[2] referring to the Shaws.


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Friday, October 24, 2014

Esperanto and Blood Libel

The synagogue where Beilis's
funeral was held
“Blood libel” is the anti-Semitic claim that Jews use Christian blood in the manufacture of Passover matzah, which despite its utter absurdity persisted for many years.[1] The 1913 trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev (then within the Russian empire) was last such trial, and it has been noted that it was the only one backed by a central goverment. The Beilis affair was international news, since in most places the blood libel was a superstition that had been cast off in the Middle Ages.[2]

Even at the time, suspicion fell on one of the witnesses for the prosecution, Vera Cheberyak. In an article on the Beilis trial on October 24, 1913, the Salt Lake Tribune has a section headed “Evidence Against Vera.” Cheberyak was described in the paper as being part of a “gang,” later she was found to have had the victim, Andrey Yushchinsky, murdered because he found out about her criminal activities through being friends with her son (whom she also possibly killed). At the time of the report, the Czar’s case against Beilis was crumbling, and suspicion was turning to Cheberyak.


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Thursday, October 23, 2014

More Anarchists and Esperanto

La anarkiistoj estas ĉie!
If there were any doubt remaining that there was a broad use of Esperanto by the anarchist movements of the early twentieth century, here’s a third article on Esperanto and anarchists. I’m actually a little behind on this one, as it’s a rehash of an article that appeared in the Washington Times on September 6, 1908.[1] As I’ve been going through these articles, I’ve been stepping back in time, since the notice in the anarchist newspaper for Italian speakers in the US was in 1914, the Spanish anarchists in 1909, and now we’ve taken this all the way back to 1908.[2]

This could be the earliest association between Esperanto and anarchism, and though I passed on it when I first read it, the Perrysburgh Journal (of Perrysburg, Ohio) is giving me a second chance by running this abridgment of the article in its October 23, 1908 edition. The article had some legs, since I found it reprinted in three other newspapers with later dates.[3] As I noted, it seems to have been an abridgment of the Washington Times article, which was itself taken from an item in the Pall Mall Gazette.[4]


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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Divorce, Insanity, and Celery Tonic

Sometimes a story is a story.
The New York papers had a scandalous and salacious story in the October 22, 1889 papers. The whole story reads like something out of a Victorian melodrama. A perfumer enters a hotel room where his wife is with another man! The young man flees, and the perfumer drives his wife in a carriage to her father’s home. He wakes the old man, leaving him with the woman, saying, “There is your daughter, keep her.”

If this were an 1889 play, there would be no hope of reviving it in 2014. But this story really happened. Well, it sort of happened. During this time, there were morning and evening papers, so before New Yorkers went to bed on October 22, 1889, they had heard both sides of the story. Or at least the beginning of the story.


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Cranberry Relish — Not Just for Thanksgiving

Cranberry relish
Fresh cranberries are in season, so it’s time to start making things with cranberries. The easiest one to make is fresh cranberry relish, which is so easy to make that there’s no reason not to, nor should you wait until you’re roasting a turkey to have cranberry relish. It would go perfectly well with just about any sort of poultry, including plain old roast chicken.[1]

If I may digress, I’m well aware that roast chicken scares some people, though I’ve never been sure why. It’s not pâté de canard en croûte,[2] and even that isn’t all that scary. Take a bird, throw it in the oven. Yeah, once you’re used to that, you can do things like put oil and herbs on the skin, you can truss it up, and so forth. In the end, it’s all just throwing a bird in the oven and letting it cook (I like a nice, hot 375° oven). And while it’s cooking, you can make cranberry relish in just a few minutes.


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Sassing the Computer Scammers

Deadly files. Secret files.
(Yeah, it's the Google private
browsing icon.)
I was doing a little maintenance on my Mac when the phone rang. Nothing major; a couple of screws on the bottom had worked loose, and I had decided to get them set properly. I had taken the further step of removing all the screws and blowing the dust out of my computer. It kept my hands busy.

Anyway, the phone rings and a woman with an Indian accent is on the line. She tells me that she is from Computer Support and Services. Then I knew it. It was one of those scams where they convince you to download a trojan and take remote access of your computer, in addition to getting your credit card number so they can run up hundreds of dollars of “support charges,” as they actually compromise your computer.

Their target, of course, are those people who are not versed in the workings of computers. Not me. But she had me on the line.


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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Fighting Fire with Fire — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 5

We're looking for fire imagery
Remember Acrasia? When I started this canto, my first thought was that Spenser had somehow forgotten her. The action picks up with the arrival of Pyrochles, whose varlet carried the shield reading “Bunrt I doe burn.” Just in case we didn’t get it from the name and shield, Spenser is quick to load on the words to remind us. Pyrochles is in “bright armes” off which “the Sunny beames do glaunce and glide,” and the sun throws forth “sparkling fire, That seem him to enflame.” And that’s just in the second stanza.

Pyrocles rides a steed that is “bloody red,” and that steed is soon going to be bloodier. Guyon is on foot, since he lost his horse in the second canto. Here we have a great moment of medieval warfare: a armored knight on horseback charging a swordsman on foot. Usually, the guy on horseback wins this sort of thing, but not in Canto V.


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The Professor and the Tax Collector

Did he learn it?
Samuel Schlenker, the Brenham, Texas tax collector in 1902 did not make a mark on the early Esperanto movement. He doesn’t show up in any of the early lists of Esperantists. But, given the paucity of prior reference to Esperanto in the Texas newspapers, Mr. Schlenker may have been the first Texan to come into contact with Esperanto.

As often happens in these early news items, the article leaves me with lots of questions, some of which are probably unanswerable. As the article notes, Mr. Schlenker received the book on Esperanto, “from his friend, Prof. R. H. Geoghegan.” Richard H. Geoghegan is likely the first English-speaker to learn Esperanto, and gave the first English version of Dr. Esperanto’s International Language.[1] How does a German-born tax collector living in Texas become the friend of an Irish-born linguist living in Washington State? When did their paths cross?


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Monday, October 20, 2014

Esperanto and the Spanish Anarchists

Are we  sure about this?
I recently wrote about the announcement of an Esperanto class for Italian speakers in a 1914 subversive newspaper, but it wasn’t clear why they were studying Esperanto. It didn’t have to be for anarchist or subversive politics (though it probably was). In general, the early Esperanto movement seems to have hewed to a progressive view, with many of its early members also being active in women’s rights, public health measures, and so forth.

The early history of Esperanto in Russia was marked by concerns that the language would be used to conceal forbidden political activity. And the Third Reich initially banned materials in Esperanto from coming into the country, later going on to ban any use of the language at all. (Which pales in the face of their seeking out and murdering descendants of L. L. Zamenhof).


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Sunday, October 19, 2014

Mr. Dibble and Esperanto

"Onklino Lajz" by Virgil C. Dibble
Virgil C. Dibble, jr. was an early Esperantist in South Carolina. While his involvement seems to have peaked in the second decade of the twentieth century (though I could be wrong), it is clear that he remained a user and advocate of Esperanto his entire life. He first promoted Esperanto in South Carolina in 1909, attended the Universala Kongreso in 1910, but by 1911 he had resigned his position in the Esperanto Association for North America.

The reference to him in connection with Esperanto is cryptic. He’s described merely as “Mr. Dibble, the representative of the Esperanto movement” (and in saying that, I’ve given you about a quarter of the item), which lead me to wonder, “so, who is this ‘Mr. Dibble’?”


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Saturday, October 18, 2014

Hit the Woman First — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 4

This canto tells of a
who could have used
a sword.
I return to my dilatory reading of The Faerie Queene.[1] I’d rather post these at intervals instead of rushing through because I “have to” finish a Faerie Queene post. Sir Guyon seems to have a knack for attracting all those who, for no readily apparent reason, want to attack a noble and virtous knight. The allegorical figures are just laying in for him.

In terms of narrative, this is somewhat strange, because as the canto opens, all he’s doing is looking for his horse (which Sir Braggachio made off with). Clearly, at some point, Sir Guyon and Sir Braggachio are going to meet. For that matter, the Book clearly has to end with Sir Guyon encountering Acrasia. but not yet.

Spenser starts us off with a brief (one stanza) digression on the difference between the low- and high-born, with the suggestion that the nobility are simply naturally better at some things, such as feats of arms and love of entertainment. Even horseback riding
seemes a science
Proper to gentle blood;
although Spenser doesn’t prove this. It’s ironic because our noble knight has lost his horse anyway, so it doesn’t matter if he’s naturally good at horse riding, given that he does’t have a horse. Then again, he would have had to dismount anyway to help the man he sees in the third stanza.


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Bolognese, the Right Recipe for Lamb Neck

Lamb bolognese.
Previously, I wrote about an attempt at braising lamb neck that didn’t come out with the right balance of flavors.[1] It didn’t stop me from using lamb neck, because I found that there was another dish where it worked nicely. The only problem is getting the meat off.

I often make a bolognese with stew beef. It’s convenient and quick. Many recipes call for ground beef (i.e. hamburger), but I find that the meat has been ground too fine, leading to a somewhat gritty texture. So, instead, I throw the cubes of beef into the food processor, pulse, and then I have my chopped up meat for the sauce.[2] If I’m up for a little more work, I do it with lamb instead.

Consider the lamb neck: meat, fat, and connective tissue wrapped around a funny-shaped bone. It’s actually a bit of work to get the meat off these things. But, on the other hand, it’s just the sort of meat you want to send into a bolognese. You cut as much of the fat off as you can, then clean the bones of as much meat as you can (there’s always going to be some left connected, but I’ve saved the bones for stock[3]).


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Friday, October 17, 2014

Esperanto and the Italian Subversives

Similar, but not Esperanto.
I don’t know what surprises me more: that there was an Esperanto group just for Italian speakers in New York, or that there was an Italian-Language newspaper in Vermont. It just doesn’t strike me as a place with a large Italian population. But they had the Cronaca sovversiva. Clearly with a name like “Subversive Chronicle,” this was a newspaper of the Italian anarchists of the early twentieth century. Sort of the thing you’d expect to see Sacco and Vanzetti reading.[1] The Library of Congress notes that the place of publication varied in its run from 1903 to 1920. No doubt when Lynn, Massachusetts became too hot for an anarchist publication, the editor packed off to Vermont.

We’ve have several threads here, weaving through the (unlikely) location of Barre, Vermont. Early on, Esperanto was picked up by the labor movement and to a degree it’s still there. The major Esperanto dictionary, Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (Complete Illustrated Dictionary) is published by SAT, the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, the World Non-National Association. They’re not just a dictionary publisher; their real goal is just what their name implies. Then there was the thought that in the near future Esperanto would indeed be the common tongue. So if you were an immigrant, why not learn Esperanto? And, of course, with the large immigrant Italian population of New York, why not give Esperanto classes in Italian?


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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Happy Ether Day!

Happy Ether Day!
If it was Ether Day on this day in 1908, then it must be Ether Day today! I stumbled across one reference, but had a hard time finding any other, though I did find a few. On October 16, 1908, the Palestine Daily Herald, of Palestine, Texas, reported on it, as did Washington Times on October 16, 1913.

What is this happy holiday and how do we celebrate it? It’s the anniversary of the first successful use of anesthesia, first done in 1846. Wikipedia points out the the chemistry challenged that the specific compound in question is dimethyl ether (CH3OCH3), and that ethers are a whole class of chemical compounds.[1]


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Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Mrs. Stoner's Doubtful Family History

Winifred Sackville Stoner, jr.
How skilled was she at
Esperanto?
Winfield Sackville Stoner, Jr. (also known as “Cherie”) was one of the early celebrities of the Esperanto movement, and although the Stoner family seems to have dropped out of Esperanto not longer they entered it, newspaper articles kept linking her to Esperanto. Her mother, Winifred Sackville Stoner was an education theorist, though other than teaching her daughter, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that she based her theories on any evidence. She did state that little Winifred’s accomplishments were not due to genius but to to “natural education” (that is to say, her mother’s doing).

As I’ve noted before, I’m inclined to disbelieve the elder Stoner’s claims, because much that can be checked turns out to be false. The woman had a genius for self-mythologizing. In August 1910, the San Francisco Call reported that Mrs. Stoner was the daughter of Lord Sackville-West, but that claim didn’t stand up to scrutiny. By October, her ancestry had changed.


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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Poetess’s Legacy to Universal Language

Eliza Pittsinger. California poet.
Could have benefited
universal language
It is safe to say that Eliza A. Pittsinger, a poet who died in San Francisco in 1908, is among the forgotten poets of California, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, she seems to have been something of a celebrated poet. She was born in about 1820 in West Hampton, Massachusetts,[1] to John and Mary Pittsinger. In 1842, she married one Professor Mayo[2] in Hartford, Connecticut. They separated and later divorced, with Eliza went back to using the name Pittsinger (if she ever used Mayo).

As early as 1862, Pittsinger had moved to San Francisco, where she described her profession as “poetess.” She had certainly established herself as a poet by this time, contributing a poem to the ceremonies for laying the corner stone of the New Pioneer Hall of the Society of California Pioneers, in July 1862. According to the Society of California Pioneers, this building was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Miss Pittsinger, was not a California Pioneer, as the term is reserved for those who settled in California before 1850, at which time she was still in Northampton, although the San Francisco Call described her as such in an death notice of her sister, in May 1907. At the time of Pittsinger’s death, the Call stated that she arrived in California in 1852.


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Monday, October 13, 2014

Building a Better Apple (for Pie)

Easier than you might think.
But the inside is the important part.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a cooking post. I’ve been cooking; I just haven’t been writing about it. Now I’m trying to make up for that. I’ve been meaning to write this one up for a while.

It’s fall and that means apple pie, right? I mean, who makes apple pie in March when the apple trees are (presumably) in bloom. I think you can find some apples at the supermarket year-round, but no one is convincing me that apple pie season extends much beyond the boundaries of Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

It’s almost obvious to say that there are two main players in apple pie: the crust and the apples. The crust part is easy. Either you find a reliable pie dough recipe or you go to the supermarket and buy some pie dough. I’m a fan of making my own dough, but let’s face it: the pastry shell is just a case for baking the pie in; people eat it, but the compliments come for the filling.



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Yosemite — the Plunge and a Late Update

Another update? Why did no one tell me?
Probably because I have the App Store set to automatically update my apps, I haven’t been too observant about the latest updates to the Yosemite Public Beta. Maybe they showed up anyway. During the weekend, I decided that we were clearly getting close enough to the official Yosemite launch to make it my main operating system.

I was kinda hoping that the App Store would let me simply jump the the end of things and go for Beta 4. No such luck.


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Saturday, October 11, 2014

A Linguistic Romance

Here's the wedding announcement.
The Pensacola Journal ran an item in their social column on October 11, 1908 announcing the engagement of one linguist to another. Mr. H. F. Sexauer[1] was a former resident of Camp Walton, Florida,[2] while his bride-to-be lived in far off California, for which Mr. Sexuer had departed some time previously.

The article mentions that Mr. Sexauer was “an accomplished linguist,” but research indicates that a career that suggests that he was an accomplished bullshitter. I don’t want to be nasty about someone who was an early Esperanto speaker, but the claims made in the article just don’t add up, and I have to suspect that Mr. Sexauer was to blame.


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Friday, October 10, 2014

A Braggart, A Horse, A Deceiver, and A Woman — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 3

This is actually Justice,
but you try finding pictures
of armed women.
I really should be more diligent about reading and commenting on The Faerie Queene. First, I want to get this done. Second, according to the blog stats, someone actually found a Faerie Queene post through a search. I hope he or she didn’t go away disappointed. So, I’m back. I've been somewhat busy lately, but I do want to continue to make time to get through the poem.

In Book II, Canto II, Sir Guyon tried to wash the blood off the hands of child of the couple who died due to Acrasia’s evil doings (in Book II, Canto I), but found that the spring they were near was too pure to allow itself to be contaminated with blood. It seems that the blood isn’t coming off by any means, because he leaves the kid with Medina (who doesn’t seem to have volunteered), and the kid’s hands are still bloody. But now he gets a name: Ruddymane, that is to say “bloody hands.” I’d wear gloves.


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Marriage Equality in Twenty-Nine States!

If not outdated, it will be soon
Now I’m playing games with the data; I’m just giddy. With twenty-nine states with marriage equality, we’ve got three groups of states. In the Northeast, we have Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina (Massachusetts goes first and gets bolded because it was first. And bold). In the Midwest, we have Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. And in the West, we have Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah (never thought that would happen this early), Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

If we want to link them all together, we could go with Montana, North Dakota, and Ohio. Starting with Montana, we could substitute in South Dakota and Kentucky. Or we could go for Wyoming, South Dakota, and (as before) either Ohio or Kentucky. I’d like to believe that Ohio was more likely, but the map at Wikipedia says otherwise.


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Zamenhof and Religion

He made a language and a religion.
This post is appropriate for today, because as I type this shabbat is approaching; I have a challah rising in the kitchen. It is also my 300th post, and since Esperanto is the most popular subject with the readers of my blog,[1] it’s fitting that the 300th should be about Zamenhof.

I’ve noted before that Zamenhof was involved in the early Zionist movement, although he was skeptical that a Jewish state could be created in Palestine. But let us be clear, despite the mistaken assumptions of George Macloskie, Zamenhof was not a Roman Catholic,[2] but a Jew. Yet, his own involvement in Judaism seems to have had a bit of complexity to it.


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Thursday, October 9, 2014

Boosterism for Esperanto

It might have happened.
The Albuquerque Evening Citizen gave over about a column and a half of its October 9, 1906 edition to an article on Esperanto by Silas E. Snyder. Snyder worked in both journalism and advertising; his article was connected with his role in promoting the Jamestown Exposition, the 1907 World’s Fair.[1] While Esperanto doesn’t immediately spring to mind when I think of the World’s Fair, maybe it should, since Esperanto played a role in the 1900 World’s Fair and the 1915 World’s Fair (although that hadn’t been the intention of the Esperanto movement).

Mr. Snyder slipped into his piece on Esperanto that “the Esperantists of the world” were invited to “meet in international congress at the Jamestown exposition,” just as a few years later Sinclair Lewis would seek to convince the Esperanto movement to hold their meeting in conjunction with the World’s Fair in San Francisco. I would lay a solid bet that when committees are organizing these things, they no longer give any thought about coordinating the Universala Kongreso with the World’s Fair.


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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Professor Teaches Esperanto at Start of Peripatetic Career

Esperanto: It's all the rage!
The Salt Lake Herald devoted an entire column to Esperanto in its October 8, 1906 edition,[1] noting that the language “is all the rage just now with linguists and students of ethnology the world over.” I’m not sure why it would be the rage with students of ethnology[2] (or even that it were), though it certainly garnered a lot of interest among linguists and other sorts of language experts. Their article cited two professors, with apparently nothing in common but Esperanto. In the early period, Esperanto did have a great deal of popularity among academics.

The article starts by mentioning that, George Wise, a University of Utah professor would be leading a group in the study of Esperanto. After a lengthy description of Esperanto, a sample, and a translation, we get to another professor, George Macloskie of Princeton University.[3] I’ll excerpt that too, since it makes a surprising (and inaccurate) claim.


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Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Esperanto at the League of Nations

We know how this ended.
The Taiban Valley News of Taiban, New Mexico had in its October 7, 1921 edition two columns of content that were almost identical to two columns which appeared later in the St. Johns Herald of St. Johns, Arizona on October 20, 1921. Certainly, by the end of October 1921, this news was a bit stale, and news items were probably provided as part of a packing with the surrounding (identical) advertisements.

The article mentioning Esperanto at the League of Nations is tucked in between articles on the attempts of a woman, “Mrs. Emma C. Bergdoll, mother of the notorious draft evader, Grover C. Bergdoll,”[1] to recover some property valued at $1 million, and the story of two young Nebraskans who determined that the best way to raise funds for a wireless set was death threats and extortion.

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Monday, October 6, 2014

Esperanto in 1907

Zamenhof
On Sunday, October 6, 1907, the San Francisco Call ran a full-page article under the title “Surprising Activity of Esperantists in America.” My usual practice has been to quote articles in part or full, but not to link to the actual pages on the Chronicling America website. However, since the article is so long and so full of interesting things, I will provide a link to the page, and I encourage you to go and read the whole thing if you are interested (as I am) in the early history of Esperanto.

I’m going to hit on some of the highlights of the article, noting things that caught my interest. Sadly, it’s hard to imagine a major metropolitan newspaper devoting a full page to Esperanto in 2014. I suspect that even if a Universala Kongreso were held in the United States (which looks unlikely), the newspaper in that city would probably give it scant attention.[1] The Call was doing this some time after the 1907 Universala Kongreso, which happened far away from San Francisco. At the time, there was probably not even an inkling of holding the Kongreso in San Francisco.[2]

The article makes an error. There are two dates which many Esperanto speakers make special note of. One is December 15, the anniversary of Zamenhof’s birth, called “Zamenhof-tago” (Zamenhof Day) and July 26, which was the day on which the Unua Libro was published. The Call makes a crucial typographical error and states that “Dr. Zamenhof regards December 5, 1878, as the birthday of his new language.” This is incorrect. They moved things up by 10 days.

The Call is referring to Zamenhof revealing his Lingwe uniwersala to his friends on his nineteenth birthday, on December 15, 1878. Ludovick’s father destroyed of this work, but Ludovick used this as a basis for his Internacia Lingvo of 1887, that is to say, Esperanto.

There is also a bit of irony in the article.
The man who received the greatest ovation at the congress, however, excepting, of course, Dr. Zamenhof, was the generous Marquis de Beaufront., the Frenchman who pushed the movement in France when it was in danger of total extinction; the man who, after working fifteen years upon a universal language of his own, recognized that Dr. Zamenhof’s system was better. Abandoning his own and casting away with it his private ambitions, the Marquis got behind Dr. Zamenhof’s language and worked whole heartedly for it. For this splendid sacrifice M. de Beaufront will always hold an honored place in the Esperanto world.
That “always” had another year left on it. The man who was applauded at the 1907 congress in Cambridge, England, was reviled at the 1909 congress (in Barcelona). This was the Universala Kongreso when the supporters of Ido attempted (unsuccessfully) to convince to Esperanto movement to adopt the reforms proposed by the creators of Ido. De Beaufront (who, as I’ve noted before, wasn’t actually a Marquis) did some wonderful things for the Esperanto movement in its early days, but subsequently became known only for his break with the movement.

The article also makes mention of the American Esperanto Association, which was formed in Boston in March 1905, preceding the better known Esperanto Association of North America, which would form at the Chautauqua meeting in 1909. The Call wrote that
The national society, or the American Esperanto association, as it is now known, was formed on March 16 of the same year at the home of Mr. Matchett, who organized the first society. The members of the two societies already in existence and other Esperantists residing in Everett, Medford, Brighton[3] and neighboring towns succeeded by united effort in placing the national association upon a permanent basis. They were soon joined by Esperantists and Esperanto clubs in other states.
It’s still a mystery to me why a new national organization formed in 1908. What was wrong with the old one? Even if they wanted new officers and a new structure, why not just continue with the 1905 organization? In the end, it seemed almost like a hostile takeover of the Esperanto movement, pushing the Boston crowd out in favor of those connected with publishing in New York.

The Call also notes that the New York society had to deal with those people who were “faddists,” who wanted to be able to say that they were Esperantists without going through the trouble to actually learn the language. Let that sink in for a moment, the thought that Esperanto was seen as such a marker of social status that people were willing to lie about their commitment to Esperanto. The Call notes that the New York group had to institute qualifying exams, quoting Dr. William Gray Nowell, the first president of the first national organization:
“They [the organizers of the New York group] worked for months trying to bring together a sufficient number of people who were willing to take up the new language. At first many joined for the purpose of saying they were Esperantists. As the charter member of the society did not desire faddists and curiosity seekers in the club, they added the following amendments to the constitution:

“’Every applicant for membership shall be required to pass an examination showing that he has a good knowledge of Esperanto grammar. Such examination shall be passed not later than six weeks after his admission to the society meetings. Not later than four weeks after the first examination he shall be required to pass a second examination showing that he is able to read intelligently Esperanto texts and to translate Esperanto sentences from his native language.’ “The adoption of thee amendments has resulted in only earnest workers become workers of the New York society.”
Finally, the article includes a list that is somewhat dull reading but comprises a large number of prominent American Esperantists of the early period. We have the usual suspects: Dr. Ivy Kellerman Reed, Mrs. Winifred Sackville Stone, and Dr. D.O.S. Lowell. It would take some time to identify them all, as it includes many lesser-known Esperantists. Many of the Esperantists listed are professors at various universities.

The article concludes with a short description of Esperanto, noting that
Dr. Zamenhof so simplified Esperanto that an ordinarily well educated man can use it in spoken or written form quite fluently in a few weeks and become a master of it in three to six months. To learn, say, French as well would take two to four years.


  1. Then again, when I’ve tagged along to cities with American Chemical Society meetings, the papers have no information about this, even though the conventions are many times larger than even the largest of the Esperanto congresses.  ↩
  2. It was held there eight years later, during WWI. It is the smallest Kongreso on record.  ↩
  3. All suburbs of Boston.  ↩

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Closer to Yosemite

Beta late than never
I’ve been a bad beta tester. Over the last month, I haven’t had much opportunity to use Yosemite. I’ve found myself needing to use apps that I did not want to bring over to the new operating system yet, and I had to repair a troubled Time Machine backup.[1] I downloaded Beta 3, and then really didn’t use it. Two weeks later,[2] I finally booted into Yosemite, for the first time since September 22.

As soon as the computer booted into Yosemite, it told me that Beta 4 was ready to download. It’s been out for nearly a week, but has received exactly no attention. While it was downloading, I checked the various Apple-centric blogs I read,[3] and none of them have a post up specifically about Beta 4.

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Sunday, October 5, 2014

Early Obituary for Volapük

It's all just memorization,
and by now you've probably
memorized this article anyway.
It was probably premature to declare Volapük dead in 1888. Volapük never had annual congresses, but there would be another (the last one) in 1889. Nor is it clear (to me) who it is declaring that “the Volapuk craze seems to have run its course and died,” as I can find no other references to its author, C. H. De Ligne. The piece originally appear ed in the Chicago News, and was reprinted in the Daily Yellowstone Journal on October 5, 1888.

The “Volapük craze,” as De Ligne put it, seems to have been at its height in 1888, although schisms were forming. The Phillipsburg Herald (Phillipsburg, Kansas) reported on the same day that “Spelin in the rival universal language to Volapuk.” With rivals forming, maybe De Ligne felt that the downfall of Volapük was already in the cards.

He (my assumption) seems to be wrong about several things, but I’ll let De Ligne have his say first:

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An Egalitarian Volpük

Charles Ezra Sprague
Charles Sprague, the chief Volapükist in the United States[1] was clearly delighted with one decision of the 1887 Volapük congress in Munich: they dropped a pronoun, specifically, the second person formal. From Sprague’s report, most people were content with the second person in singular and plural forms.

I've glanced at other Volpük materials by Sprague from the same time period. While an advocate for Volapük, he was certainly unsparing in his criticism. By 1889, he was questioning Schleyer's use of umlauts (pointing out, for example, that even Germans didn't make a distinction between i and ü). Thus, without the umlaut, the name of the language would be pronounced the same if it were named "Volapik." Sprague would later offer the postmortem for Volapük in the American press.

The article ran in something called the Home Journal, and then reprinted in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette on October 5, 1887. They liked it so much that they used it two days later in the Fort Worth Weekly Gazette of October 7, 1888.

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Friday, October 3, 2014

A Dictionary for Esperanto

I'm envious.
I want a number
Esperanto was, in a way, born with a dictionary, which is not too surprising for a planned language.[1] Also not surprising is that the dictionary is a fairly modest one of about a thousand words. Zamenhof knew this was inadequate and set forth procedures by which new words could be added to the language. The initial word list, the Universala Vortaro, takes the form of a root, followed by the word in French, English, German, Russian, and Polish.[2]

This was handy if you wanted to look up an Esperanto word and figure out its equivalent in one of the other languages (typically, your own), but wasn’t so good if you wanted to look up a word in your own language and find out what it was in Esperanto. In 1908, Joseph Rhodes answered that need.


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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Young Professor Leads the Esperanto Meeting

And how many were
at the meeting?
When the Los Angeles Herald published a letter from Val Stone in July, 1906, they had no way of telling that he was only about thirteen years old. But, when a few months later, they reported on a meeting, you might think that they’d get the idea. Except, of course, there is another possible explanation, one that I think is certainly true.

On October 2, 1906, Val Stone makes his second appearance in the pages of the Los Angeles Herald, and this time gets referred to as “Professor Val Stone.” The article gives no hint that the professor in question isn’t a real professor at all, but instead someone who is probably still in school. Once again, there's an assumption I'm making about how this article got into the Herald.

The main focus is on a set of Esperanto post cards, which actually are somewhat interesting. If they still exist, they’d be a prize for an archive.

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Zamenhof and Spelling Reform

Surprisingly lukewarm on
phonetic spelling
First, I should note that the spelling reform movement referenced in the title was for the English language, not Esperanto. A spelling reform in Esperanto would be a vocabulary reform, since all the words are phonetic. If you know how to pronounce Esperanto and you see an unfamiliar word, you will know how to pronounce it, even if its meaning is wholly obscure. (Specialized terminology would be a good example of this. Anything you might call a “whatchamacallit,” someone else has a real name for.)

Zamenhof had been asked to give his opinion of the Simplified Spelling movement, which at the beginning of the twentieth century had some really high powered support. Wikipedia notes that the funding for the Simplified Spelling Board came from Andrew Carnegie, and supporters included the president of Columbia University, Mark Twain, and even Melvil Dewey. But the most prominent supporter was the Theodore Roosevelt, who put the power of the presidency behind it.


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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The Unhappy House of Medina — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 2

The Knight of the Dish
(Is that shield a pink triangle?)
Back to The Faerie Queene. I’m still trying to finish a canto each day (although I’m beginning to contemplate taking the weekend off). I keep giving myself these writing assignments for the blog, but they can get in the way of other things I need to write and do. It feels really good to be sitting at the computer and writing. It feels really good to be reading an Elizabethan poem and jotting down my thoughts on it. Can I stand this much pleasure?

One of the pleasures of the text is that it is a tough one. This is tougher than reading an uncorrected Shakespeare text. Part of the problem is that the edition I’m using has really bad layout. In order to get two columns of text, long lines are often wrapped (in a bracket) either above or below the line they continue. Total pain. Probably adds to the confusion.


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A Strange Delusion

A sad story. Am I bad for wanting
to know more?
Perhaps one of the saddest things about his story is that it ended up in the newspapers at all. Still, I can understand why the newspaper ran the following story. It was just too tempting. It’s pure voyeurism. I’m going to simultaneously disapprove of it and write it up anyway. I’ll feel guilty later. But this is why newspapers run tittilating stories, right?

The short version: A woman, who had been married only a few months, went insane. Feel free to read on. This appeared in the San Francisco Call on October 1, 1912.

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A Diva For Esperanto

La Esperanta kantistino
The first question raised is “just what is an electrical congress?” Why would a woman be singing at an “electrical congress”? Think Consumer Electronics Show, turn-of-the-century style. In 1908, municipal and household electricity were new and there were demonstrations of the wonderful, modern things you could do with electricity. But if you’re going to do an exhibition, you might want some entertainment as well.

The reports on the 1908 Electrical Congress in New York City make it clear that the local Esperantists saw this as an opportunity for promotion, and they were behind Mme. Rhodes singing at the Congress. There isn’t a lot of information about the oddly-named Sedohr Rhodes, but there is something. She had her moment as a diva, though it does seem that by the time she sang at the Electrical Congress, her career was over.


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