Another important part of the Candlelight story line is the culinary tradition. Servants worked tirelessly to prepare elaborate dishes for the governor’s table.
“As you read through cookbooks of the time period, you start figuring out, Oh, so this is going to take a very long time,” says Matt Arthur, Tryon’s living history program coordinator. “We think a gelatin dessert is easy; it’s just a box of Jell-O and boiling water. Back then, they were boiling calves’ feet, going through a purification process, using bladders of freshwater fish and deer antlers. It took a long time to do all of that.”
Arthur considers any 1700s recipe that involves gelatin to be a “power flex.” Those dishes demonstrated to the governor’s dinner guests that he had enough servants to pull off such complicated recipes. Food was a way for people of stature to show how wealthy they were without saying it.
One of my favorite Kliban drawings: Barf Bold, a Decorative Typeface
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind. Source: Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine – The Public Domain Review
From today’s Pome poetry mailing list – “short modern poems for your inbox” – curated by Matt Ogle. This one really got to me:
Early Capitalism
they are perfecting the pillow
with which
you are being suffocated
now it sings to you
and shows you pictures
Joe Wenderoth (2009)
Big data in the age of the telegraph | McKinsey - from the age of the Big Railroads, the first organizational chart, looking like a flowering plant instead of a hierarchical chain of command
via: Ethan Molluck’s One Big Thing newsletter
When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C. - The New York Times: an archeological expedition following the trail of a talent who disappeared. So reminiscent to me of Vivian Maier.
Using ChatGPT to refactor a web site's manu structure
I used ChatGPT last weekend to help us revise the menu structures on our coho’s internal web site. I wrote out a detailed prompt, and then entered every page title on its own line, about 35-45 in total. In my prompt, I told ChatGPT to merge page topics, to rephrase them so they make sense to a less-technical audience, and to provide three examples of hierarchical menu structures, with at least one restricted to two levels.
We were pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Some of the AI’s groupings didn’t make sense, but many of them did. Using ChatGPT kept us from having to spend hours and hours on this exercise. Editing the AI’s work, recognizing what was good and what needed rethinking or special considerations, was much easier than doing it all ourselves.
We’re busy with other coho duties and our $dayjobs; I’m all for using a tool that gets us to the finish line quicker with less pain.
Abigail Pogrebin was one of the young adults who performed in the first production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” It was a famous flop, closing after only 16 performances. But the cast album was one of my most treasured recordings, it evokes powerful feelings among Sondheim aficionados, and it’s one of his most beloved scores – though the show itself never seemed to click.
The original cast reunited for a concert performance, and Abigail wrote a book about both experiences: as a young adult with the world wide-open to her and full of possibilities and as an older adult still unpacking that youthful gut-punching experience.
I highly recommend the documentary on that reunion performance, The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, directed by one of the performers.
This is a quote from Abigail’s memoir on the experience. 📚
