• “In Britain’s April elections, the usual fringe parties were in evidence—such as the Blackhaired, Medium-Build Caucasian Party—but the longest-standing alternative, the Monster Raving Loony Party, ran the most candidates. Its main platform this year was to tow Britain 500 miles into the Mediterranean Sea to improve the country’s climate. (Other years, platforms have included setting accountants in concrete and using them as traffic barriers, and putting all joggers on a giant treadmill to generate electricity.)
“Fifty other MRLP candidates made proposals such as requiring dogs to eat phosphorescent food, so pedestrians could more easily avoid stepping in their poops.”
—“The Edge” in The Oregonian, May 1997
The portrait of George Washington on the $1 bill was painted by Gilbert Stuart.
A YEN FOR EGG ROLLS
Do the recipes they serve at your local Chinese restaurant really come from China? Don’t bet on it. Here are a few food facts to munch on.
Today, Chinese Americans make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, but roughly a third of all ethnic restaurants in the U.S. are “Chinese,” and every supermarket carries a line of “Chinese” food.
NEW-FANGLED FOOD
It started with the Gold Rush of 1849. As thousands of “Forty-Niners” streamed into California in search of gold, whole boomtowns—including a tent city named San Francisco—sprang up to supply their needs.
• One merchant who set up shop in San Francisco was a Chinese American named Norman Asing (described by one historian as a “cadaverous but keen old fellow” with a long ponytail and stovepipe hat). He opened a restaurant called, “The Macao and Woosung” and charged $1 for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.
• It was the first Chinese restaurant on U.S. territory, and it was a hit with miners and other San Franciscans. Asing’s success inspired dozens of other Chinese immigrants to open restaurants, called “chow chows.”
MADE IN CANTON
Over the next three decades, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrated to the United States. By 1882—when Congress curtailed Chinese immigration—there were more than 300,000 Chinese nationals living on the West Coast.
• Most came from Kwangtung Province, whose capital city was Canton. So most Chinese restaurants served Cantonese-style food.
• In Cantonese cuisine, very little goes to waste: nearly every part of an animal that can be eaten is used in one dish or another.
• So, says John Mariani in America Eats Out, “‘Going for Chinese’ was considered adventurous eating for most white Americans at the turn of the century.” Typically, one food critic who ate in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1800s wrote that he was served
Yecch: About 15% of U.S. kids say they keep their Halloween candy for at least a year.
Pale cakes with a waxen look, full of [strange] meats…Then giblets of you-never-know-what, maybe gizzards…perhaps toes.
• “Before long, however,” Mariani writes, “Chinese cooks learned how to modify their dishes to make them more palatable to a wider American audience.” The result: Chinese-American cuisine, food that looked and tasted “Chinese,” but was actually invented in the U.S. and was unknown in China. Some examples:
• Chop Suey. No one knows for sure when it was invented, or how it got its name. The likely start: In 1850 a bunch of hungry miners busted their way into a chow-chow late at night and demanded to be fed. The chef just stirred all the table scraps and leftovers he could find into a big mess and served it. The miners loved it. When they asked what it was, the chef replied, “chop sui,” which means “garbage bits” in Cantonese. The dish remained virtually unheard of in China until after World War II; today, it’s advertised there as American cuisine.
• Chow Mein. A mixture of noodles and Chinese vegetables, probably served to railroad crews in the 1850s. From a Mandarin dialect word that means “fried noodles.”
• Egg Foo Yung. From a Guangdong word that means “egg white.” Translated literally, Egg Foo Yung means “egg egg white.”
• Fortune Cookies. Invented in 1916 by David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong noodle factory in Los Angeles.
“By the 1920s,” says Mariani, “Chinese restaurants dotted the American landscape, and a person
was as likely to find a chop suey parlor in Kansas City as New York, even though the typical menu in such places bore small resemblance to the food the Chinese themselves ate….Won ton soup, egg rolls, barbecued spareribs, sweet-and-sour pork, and beef with lobster sauce were all concocted to whet Americans’ appetites….To this day it is standard procedure for an American in a Chinese restaurant to be handed a 2-column menu written in English, while a completely different menu printed in Chinese will be given to a Chinese patron.
Note: Until the 1970s, Chinese-American cuisine was almost exclusively Cantonese. If you’re a fan of Szechuan or Hunan cooking, thank Richard Nixon. He opened the People’s Republic of China to the West in the ’70s…which brought us new Chinese cuisines.
American travelers’ favorite foreign cities: 1) London, 2) Paris, 3) Vancouver.
GO ASK ALICE
When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson met a four-year-old girl named Alice Liddell in 1856, he wrote in his diary, “I mark this day with a white stone”—which meant it was a particularly wonderful day for him. It turned out to be a pretty good day for children all over the world: Charles Dodgson became famous as Lewis Carroll…and Alice Liddell was the child who inspired him to write Alice in Wonderland.
BACKGROUND
• Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a deacon and professor of mathematics at Christ Church College in Oxford.
• He was also a poet and photographer who drew his inspiration from children—especially little girls. In fact, he chose teaching as a career because it left him time to pursue photography and poetry.
• In 1856, the same year Dodgson began teaching at Christ Church, a new dean arrived—Henry George Liddell. He had four children, and Dodgson quickly became friendly with them. He especially enjoyed taking them on outings and photographing the girls.
• The youngest, 4-year-old Alice, had a special relationship with Reverend Dodgson—perhaps because her favorite expression was “let’s pretend.”
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
On what he recalled as a “golden July afternoon” in 1862, Dodgson took the three Liddell girls boating on the river for a picnic.
• As they rowed lazily downstream, Alice begged Dodgson to tell them a story…so he made one up.
• He called his heroine Alice to please her. Then he “sent her straight down a rabbit-hole to begin,” he later explained, “without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.”
• Amazingly, he made up most of Alice in Wonderland on the spot.
SAVING A TREASURE
Alice liked the story so much that she asked Dodgson to write it down. He agreed. In fact, that night—as a gift for his favorite little girl—he sat up and wrote the whole thing out in longhand, adding his own illustrations. He called it Alice’s Adventures Underground.
In 1997, about one-third of American homes had computers.
• Dodgson had already decided he needed a pseudonym for the humorous poems and stories he’d been contributing to magazines. (He also wrote academic articles on mathematics, and was afraid people wouldn’t take him seriously if they knew he was writing nonsense rhymes.)
• He came up with the name Lewis Carroll by scrambling letters in his first two names, and used it for the first time when he signed Alice’s Adventures Underground for Alice.
A BOOK IS BORN
Fortunately for us, before Dodgson brought the handwritten manuscript to Alice, he happened to show it to a friend named George MacDonald, who read it to his children. If he hadn’t, Alice’s adventures might have been nothing more than a personal gift to one little girl. But the entire MacDonald family loved the story so much that they urged Carroll to publish it.
• After giving the original to Alice Liddell as promised, Do
dgson decided to take their advice. He revised the story, added to it, then hired John Tenniel, a well-known cartoonist, to illustrate it.
• The book was published in 1865 as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It became so popular that in 1871 Carroll published the further adventures of Alice, entitled Through the Looking Glass.
THE ALICE MYSTERY
Shortly after Dodgson presented Alice with the handwritten story, something happened that ended his relationship with the Liddell family. No one knows what it was. But the abruptness of the split has led to speculation about Carroll’s sexuality. Why was he so interested in little girls in the first place?
• In fact, however, there’s no evidence that his relationships with children were in any way improper. His biographers interviewed many of the women Carroll entertained as children and they always spoke of him with great respect and fondness. It’s more likely, say some biographers, that Carroll broached the subject of marriage to one of the Liddell girls and was rejected.
• At any rate, the lazy days of games and stories were over for Alice and Dodgson. By the time Alice received her copy of the published edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the author was no longer a part of her life.
Poll results? 13% of American men say they call their mothers every day; 32% of women do.
In 1926, Alice Liddell sold the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground to an American book dealer for $25,000. He resold it to a group of Americans. They took it to England and presented it as a gift to the British people in gratitude for their bravery in World War II. It remains there today, in the British Museum.
****
FAMILIAR FACES
Many of the now-classic characters in Carroll’s stories were easily recognizable to the Liddell children. For example:
The White Rabbit: Was modeled after Carroll himself. Like the rabbit, he was very proper, usually dressed in an old-fashioned formal black suit and top hat. He always wore gloves—no matter what the weather—which he frequently misplaced.
The Dodo: Carroll had taken the girls to a museum, where they were fascinated by a stuffed Dodo bird. He incorporated the bird into the story as himself because he stammered and his name came out as “Do-Do-Dodgson.”
The Duck, Lory, and Eaglet: The Duck was Carroll’s friend, Robinson Duckworth, who’d accompanied him on many of the outings with the children. The Lory was Lorina Liddell, the Eaglet, Edith Liddell. The three sisters show up again in the Dormous’s story as Elsie (from L.C., Lorina’s initials), Lacie (an anagram for Alice), and Tillie (a family nickname for Edith).
The Mock Turtle’s Song: “Beautiful Soup” was a parody of one of the children’s favorite songs, “Star of Evening,” and the way they sang in their childish voices.
The Mad Hatter: Supposedly modeled after an eccentric man named Theophilus Carter, who’d been at Christ Church but became a furniture dealer.
In the 1600s in Europe, “fashion” wigs were often made of plaster of Paris.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ALICE
The Alice books are among the most quotable children’s stories ever written. There’s a gem on practically every page—and some passages are packed with them. In the 1st and 6th Bathroom Readers we included a few sections of Lewis Carroll’s work. Here are some more.
In that direction,” the Cheshire Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.” “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
*****
“It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole and yet it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one but I’m grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone, “at least there’s no room to grow up any more here.”
*****
“Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew, that were of the same age as herself to see if she could have been changed for any of them.
World record: On September 26, 1970, John Kenmuir licked 393 stamps in four minutes.
*****
“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I, I hardly know, sir, just at present at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”
“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.
“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”
“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel a little queer, won’t you?”
“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”
“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”
***
“The two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children.”
—Virginia Woolf
Hi, Mom
PRIMETIME PROVERBS
TV comments about everyday life, from Primetime Proverbs, by Jack Mingo and John Javna.
ON ROMANCE
“Gomez, I’ve been yours since that first day you carved my initials in your leg.”
—Morticia Addams,
The Addams Family
Emily Hartley: “Bob, do you love me?”
Bob Hartley: “Sure.”
Emily: “Why?”
Bob: “Why not?”
—The Bob Newhart Show
“We’ve come to realize that you can be in love without making others want to puke.”
—Michael Harris,
Newhart
ON BIGOTRY
“Look, Archie Bunker ain’t no bigot. I’m the first to say—look, it ain’t your fault you’re colored.”
—Archie Bunker,
All in the Family
ON WOMEN’S ISSUES
Game Show Host: “Complete this famous phrase: Better late than…”
Blanche: “Pregnant!”
—The Golden Girls
ON BEING WEALTHY
“If God had not meant for there to be poor people, He wouldn’t have given you all their money.”
—Minister addressing a
wealthy congregation, SCTV
“As my old Pappy used to say, if the Lord had more respect for money, he’d have given it to a better class of
people.
—Bret Maverick,
Maverick
ON WORKING
FOR A LIVING
Napoleon Solo: “Are you free?”
Illya Kuryakin: “No man is free who has to work for a living. But I am available.”
—The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
“I don’t have anything against work. I just figure, why deprive somebody who really loves it?”
—Dobie, The Many
Loves of Dobie Gillis
“My old Pappy used to say, hard work never hurt anyone—who didn’t do it.”
—Bret Maverick,
Maverick
When a waitress draws a happy face on a check, tips go up 18%; when a waiter does, tips rise 3%.
IT’S A MIRACLE!
They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Do you believe it? These people obviously do…In fact, they may be the proof.
THE GLASS MENAGERIE
The Sighting: A 35-foot-high image of the Virgin Mary on the side of a building in Clearwater, Florida
Revelation: In 1996, workers chopped down a palm tree in front of the Seminole Finance Company building. Not long afterward, a customer noticed a discoloration in the building’s tinted windows that resembled the Madonna. The discovery was reported on the afternoon news. By the end of the week, an estimated 100,000 people visited the site…including a Baptist minister who was ejected after he “condemned the crowd for worshipping an image on glass.”
Impact: The city set up a “Miracle Management Task Force” to install portable toilets at the site, arrange police patrols, and erect a pedestrian walkway over the adjacent road (Route 19) to stop the faithful from dodging in and out of traffic. “That’s the busiest highway in Florida,” one policeman told reporters. “You want to know the real miracle? Half a million people have crossed that intersection and nobody’s been injured or killed.”
STRANGE FRUIT
The Sighting: The words of Allah in a sliced tomato in Hudders-field, England
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Page 9