With things growing so fast, much work was necessary. But Pablo was very lazy. He liked to sleep, and he hated being out in the hot sun. Many times his father had to scold him before he would do any work. One hot afternoon he had to shake the boy hard in order to rouse him.
“You will get no supper until the hoeing is done!” he told Pablo.
So Pablo yawned and stretched, and went out to hoe the field. For an hour he did very well…but then he started to grow tired and sleepy. Sitting in the shade of a corn-stalk with his hoe and weeding knife at his side, he rested his head on a pumpkin. And in two minutes Pablo was asleep.
A WHOLE NEW WORLD
Pablo slept…and slept…and slept. And the cornstalk and pumpkin grew and grew. As the corn grew taller, the pumpkin vine became tangled around it and the pumpkin was lifted off the ground along with Pablo and the hoe and knife. But still Pablo slept.
The cornstalk grew taller and taller until no tree in the world could equal its height. It had produced many ears, and the seeds from some of them had sprouted and made still more ears of corn. Mean while, the pumpkin had become many miles thick.
When the Galileo spacecraft entered Jupiter’s atmosphere, it was traveling at 106,000 mph.
After a long time Pablo rubbed his eyes and sat up. What kind of world was this, he wondered. The ground was hard and yellow like a pumpkin. Corn was growing all around. He looked about him. His home was nowhere in sight. He couldn’t understand this, for it had been in plain view from the field.
He looked at his feet and saw that his trousers reached only to his knees. He couldn’t understand it—when he had put them on, they had come down to his ankles. His shirt-sleeves were short, too. His hair had grown down to his shoulders. Poor Pablo! He didn’t know what to think or do!
“How long have I been here?” Pablo asked himself.
MR. SPACEMAN
He was hungry, so he ate some corn. He cut off a piece of the ground, and it tasted like pumpkin! He was fond of both corn and pumpkin, so his hunger was satisfied. Then he began to grow cold. In his pocket he had a piece of flint rock; with it he started a fire, using some dried cornstalks.
A long, long distance away, down on the Earth, a little girl stood in front of her home. It was dark, and she was gazing at something high above her. “Mother! Mother! she cried. “There is a round, shining ball in the sky! Come and look at it!” Her mother came, and the two watched the strange sight.
GROUND CONTROL
“Why, there is somebody on it!” exclaimed the mother. “I can see his face! He has a stick in his hand!”
“Yes,” replied the girl. “He is building a fire. I hope he does it every night.”
“We must not expect too much, Daughter,” the woman said. “Some nights he may need only a small fire and on others no fire at all. On those nights there won’t be much light in the sky, or perhaps none at all.”
“But I am glad to see the nice light,” said the girl. “It will make the nights brighter.”
“Suppose we give our new sky-friend a name and look for him tomorrow night,” suggested the mother. “What name shall it be?”
After the girl thought a minute, she answered, “Let’s call him the Moon!” And so it has been called ever since.
It would take 20 new midsize cars to generate the same pollution as one midsize 1960s car.
SPOTTED DICK WITH A SIDE OF NEEPS
Why were the British roaming the Earth for centuries in search of empire? Maybe they were just searching for a decent meal. Here’s a taste of what they might have been running away from.
BUBBLE-AND-SQUEAK. A mix of mashed potatoes and chopped cooked cabbage flattened into a layer in a hot skillet and cooked until browned. Supposedly gets its name from the bubbling and squeaking noises it makes while cooking.
COCK-A-LEEKIE: Chicken soup made with leeks and a pound of prunes.
JELLIED EELS. Eels that are cut up and cooked for a short time; the juices exuded during and after cooking become gelatinous as they cool. Served with vinegar.
CHIP BUTTIE: It’s basically a french fry sandwich: well-salted “chips” drenched in malt vinegar (or brown sauce or tomato sauce) in between two slices of buttered white bread. Close relatives: the bacon buttie (strips of bacon with dollops of ketchup or brown sauce between slices of buttered toast) and the sugar buttie (white bread spread with salted butter and white sugar).
STEAK-AND-KIDNEY PIE. A substantial dish of lean beef, veal kidneys, onions, mushrooms, and seasonings topped with a beef suet pastry crust, steamed in a pudding bowl. It’s usually served with Brussels sprouts and new potatoes. (Suet is solid white fat.)
BEANS ON TOAST: Canned baked beans heated and poured over buttered white toast. Close relative: spaghetti on toast—canned spaghetti served hot on white toast.
TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE: Fried sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter, baked until the batter puffs up.
PEASE PORRIDGE. Dried split peas cooked until soft, then pureed with butter and eggs and steamed in a pudding bowl. It thickens as it cools, so leftovers can be sliced and fried in more butter. This dish has been eaten in England since the 1500s.
The last letter George Harrison wrote was to Mike Myers, asking for a “Mini-Me” doll.
STOTTY CAKE: Flat, round yeast bread with a firm crust and a dense texture, usually split in half and filled with eggs and bacon or ham, or with pease porridge. Stott means “throw.” According to legend, bakers would toss the baked breads onto the floor, and if they didn’t bounce too much, they were done.
STARGAZY PIE: A Cornish tradition, in which small whole fishes are arranged in a pie as if they were the spokes of a wheel—tails in the center and heads sticking out of the top crust all around the rim, presumably to gaze up at the stars.
NEEPS AND TATTIES: Mashed turnips and creamed potatoes, traditionally served as side dishes with haggis. Mashed turnips are also called bashed neeps. Neep bree is cooked turnips, butter, and ginger pureed with milk.
SPOTTED DICK. A dessert pudding made of flour, beef suet, currants or raisins (those are the spots), sugar, spices, and either water or milk. The doughy mixture is shaped into a cylinder, tied into a pudding cloth, and boiled for a couple of hours. Served with custard sauce.
PLUM PUDDING: There are no plums in this Christmas treat—it’s raisins, beef suet, candied fruit, breadcrumbs, almonds, and spices. It’s often served with brandy butter (butter, sugar, and brandy, spooned onto the warm pudding, where it melts).
JAM ROLY-POLY: Another dessert pudding. It starts with a dough made of flour, shredded suet, and milk; rolled out; spread with jam; and rolled up like a jelly roll. It’s then wrapped in cloth or foil and steamed for an hour. Nickname: “dead man’s arm.”
REALITY CHECK
Gas prices topped $4 a gallon in 2008, but on a per-gallon basis, it’s relatively cheap. Printer ink costs about $2,700 per gallon. A gallon of Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $48,640. And antivenom, used to treat snake bites, costs $567,000 per gallon.
Q: What was the Addams Family’s address? A: 0001 Cemetery Lane.
BANNED BOOKS
As publishers of books that are usually exiled to a certain room in the house, we have a keen interest in other books that have been shunned.
My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara. The 1941 novel about a boy and his horse, set on a Wyoming ranch, was taken off the sixth grade reading list in Clay County, Florida, in 1990 because it contained the word “bitch,” even though it was used correctly—in reference to a female dog.
A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein. Cunningham Elementary School in Beloit, Wisconsin, took this humorous poetry collection for children off the shelves in 1985 because one poem jokingly “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.”
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The powerful antiracism tale was banned from advanced placement English courses in Lindale, Texas, in 1996 because, for some reason, it “conflicted with the values of the community.”
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sp; The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. A parents’ group in Jefferson, Kentucky, wanted it taken out of school libraries in 1982 because all felt that stories about rock music could “cause our children to become immoral and indecent.” (The state board refused to remove it.)
Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare. Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Twelfth Night utilizes crossdressing for comedic effect. Because of that, a Merrimack, New Hampshire, English class was prohibited from reading it in 1996. The play, said authorities, “supports homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative.” (It was written in 1601.)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Written in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bestselling novel of the 19th century, and its harsh depiction and critique of slavery was a catalyst for the abolitionist movement in the 1850s and 1860s. Nevertheless, the Waukegan, Illinois, School District tried to ban it in 1984. Why? It uses the “n-word.”
The telephone was originally called a harmonic telegraph.
The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss. The children’s book about animals who die when their forest is destroyed was challenged by the Laytonville (California) School District in 1989 because it “criminalizes the foresting industry.”
Blubber, by Judy Blume. This children’s novel provides a valuable lesson with a story about a girl who participates in the constant torment of a classmate, only to have the tables turned. In 1990 a parent in Louisville, Kentucky, lobbied to have it removed from her child’s elementary school library because some characters in the book “behaved unkindly.”
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle. This 1962 fantasy novel was challenged in Anniston, Alabama, in 1990. A father objected to the book’s inclusion of Jesus Christ on a list of people who defended the Earth against the forces of evil.
Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell. Even though this classic novel is about a horse, in 1955 the apartheid government of South Africa banned the book because they thought the title alone might instill pride in black South Africans.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. The plot: During the Great Depression, a family flees drought and hard times in their native Oklahoma only to find backbreaking work picking crops for meager wages in Kern County, California. In 1939, just weeks after the novel was published, the real Kern County removed the book from its schools and libraries because it was a “smear” on the area.
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. The science-fiction book is set in a dystopian future in which people are controlled with mind-altering drugs and mindlessly engage in promiscuous sex. It was taken off of the high school reading list in Miller, Missouri, in 1980 because it made sex “look like fun.”
On New Year’s Day, German children wear a pretzel around their necks for good luck.
THE MERCENARIES
In July 2008, former British Army officer and admitted mercenary Simon Mann was sentenced to 34 years in prison for attempting to overthrow the government of the African nation of Equatorial Guinea. It made us want to know more about mercenaries in general—and this is what we found.
BACKGROUND
Mercenaries—foreign soldiers who fight for money rather than for a moral or legal attachment to a country or cause—have been employed by warring governments for thousands of years. History’s best-known wars, from ancient Greece and Rome to World War I and every war since, have seen “soldiers of fortune” on both sides—the practice was commonplace. It wasn’t until modern times that fighting and killing for nothing more than money—and the corollary, paying people to fight—has come to be seen as something immoral. The word “mercenary” itself has negative connotations. Most countries today have banned the use of mercenaries, but they do, of course, still exist. The following is a rundown of just some of history’s most intriguing and infamous soldiers of fortune, starting more than 4,000 years ago.
THE MEDJAI
Weni the Elder was one of ancient Egypt’s most renowned military commanders. Serving under Pharaoh Pepi I (2283 B.C.), he instituted many changes that affected Egyptian—and regional—armies for millennia. One of them: hiring foreign fighters to bolster his forces. Many were from Nubia, to Egypt’s south, and among them were the Medjai, seminomadic desert people revered for their fighting skills and their courage. Numerous sculptures, paintings, and engravings depict these distinctive fighters: dark-skinned Africans wearing short, skirtlike garments and carrying bows and arrows. For more than 1,500 years, the Medjai culture interwove with the Egyptian, so much so that during times of peace the Medjai stayed in Egypt, working as bodyguards for royalty. The word “medjai” itself even later became associated with a police force within Egypt itself. If you’ve seen the 1999 film The Mummy you’ve heard of the Medjai. They’re depicted as warriors that have been guarding the mummy’s tomb for millennia, since the ancient Egyptians first hired them to do so. (Except in the film…they’re Caucasian.)
A single silkworm cocoon can contain 360 yards of silk fiber—enough to cross 3 football fields.
JEWS FOR PERSIA
In the late 1800s, several ancient writings were discovered on the Nile River island of Elephantine in the south of Egypt. The “Elephantine Papyri,” as they’re known, were written in the 5th century B.C., when the Persians ruled Egypt. They tell of a community of Jewish mercenaries—and their families—living on the island. Exactly when they first got there is unknown. Some historians believe they may have been loaned to an Egyptian Pharaoh by an earlier king of Judea (part of modern-day Israel), perhaps as early as 700 B.C., and that they later remained as mercenary soldiers when the Persians conquered Egypt in 525 B.C. Several generations of the foreign fighters lived on Elephantine for at least 200 years as a well-established and respected class of citizen.
THE CELTS
Most people are probably familiar with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who led an army and several elephants across the Alps around 210 B.C. and almost conquered the Romans. What you probably don’t know is that at least 3,000 of his soldiers were Celts, better known today as ancestors of the British. Celtic people actually settled in numerous regions throughout Europe and Asia Minor starting in the 600s B.C. And wherever they went, it seems, they earned a reputation as some of the fiercest and wildest fighters in history. When they weren’t fighting for themselves they were often fighting for someone else for pay. That included ancient Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians in the Middle East; the Spartans, Macedonians, and other Greek city states before the Romans conquests of 146 B.C.; and very often the Romans (who, remember, they also fought against), until the Roman Empire fell, around 400 A.D.
Illinois is the only state that allows you to pay tollbooth fare in pennies.
THE CELTS, AGAIN
In 1259 Aed O’Connor, prince of Connaught in the West of Ireland, married a princess from the Hebrides islands of Scotland. She arrived in Ireland accompanied by 160 Scottish warriors who became known as the Galloglaich (pronounced “galloglas”), meaning “foreign young warriors” in Irish Gaelic. Organized, experienced, well equipped, and brutal, they and their descendants became a large and vital part of Irish armies that fought the English for the next 350 years. By the 1500s, more than 5,000 Galloglaich were fighting in Ireland. They were well respected and well paid: Records show that each soldier got 12 cattle per year, as well as food in the form of butter and grain. Commanders got even more, often including land, and many became wealthy and lived as Scottish lords on Irish soil. By the late 1500s, however, methods of warfare were changing drastically: Muskets and cannons were becoming more common, and the hand-to-hand combat the Galloglaich specialized in became obsolete.
THE REISLÄUFER OF SWITZERLAND
It’s ironic that the nation now known as a permanently neutral bastion of peace once bred some of the most organized and brutal mercenaries in history. From the 1300s through the 1500s, if you had a war to fight in Europe, you called the Swiss. Local cantons, now Swiss counties but then controlled by regional lords, kept large contingents of Reisläufer—“ones wh
o go to war”—ready to rape and pillage for the right price. Hire them, and your enemy would encounter a massive and deep column of men with pikes (thick, long, pointed sticks) and halberds (a combination pike and axe) who would put their heads down and rush into battle, slaughtering everything in their path. In 1515 the Swiss began their famous tradition of neutrality, and the days of the Reisläufer were over.
THE HESSIANS
Whom did the Americans fight during the Revolutionary War? The British, of course. And the Germans. King George III made deals with German lords to have German soldiers shipped to America to help fight the rebels. An estimated 30,000 German soliders made the trip, the majority from the region of Hesse, hence the name. One of the war’s most famous battles, in fact—the Battle of Trenton—involved Hessians: When General George Washington led his troops across the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 (picture the painting), on a sneak attack of a garrison in New Jersey, the soldiers he met were Germans—1,400 of them, commanded by Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall. Washington’s men won in a rout and more than 900 Hessians were captured. (The famous “Headless Horseman” from Washington Irving’s 1820 tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, was based on the tale of a ghost of a Hessian soldier from the Revolutionary War.)
It was just after the 1660s that the phrase “soldier of fortune” was born.
Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Page 24