by John Scalzi
Boswell (knowing Johnson has poor opinions of Scots): Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.
Johnson: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.
Zing! They spend the rest of the evening quarreling about actor David Garrick and other issues, and then Johnson, easily stomping Boswell's young and silly head, takes his leave. Notes Thomas to Boswell, with perfect ironic timing (he is an actor): "I can see he likes you."
But Boswell is not dissuaded. He calls on Johnson a few days later, and from there a friendship begins, one full of bickering, zany adventures in bars, and even an extended trip together to the Hebrides, a frosty island chain in the north of Scotland. Any screenwriter worth his salt would have concocted a mystery for them to solve while they were there ("Johnson and Boswell came for relaxation. They got framed for murder. Now they're fighting back...and this time, it's personal."). But mostly they just ate and drank themselves silly, and kept the blazing gunfights to a minimum.
But it was more than just friendship (and no, not in that way), since Boswell, unbeknownst to everyone at the time, was an inveterate diarist. For the next 21 years, until Johnson dies in 1784, Boswell commits every bon mot that passes from Johnson lips to memory, goes home and scribbles it down. Boswell's not merely a sycophant with a detailed memory: His diaries project a sense of documentary immediacy. You are there when Johnson whacks at Boswell when they first meet. You are there while Johnson deconstructs the literary lights of his day, from Alexander Pope to Colley Cibber (who between them had their own little literary tiff, of which we shan't concern ourselves with, except to say -- mrrrow, girlfriends. Just get yourselves a room, already). You are there when Johnson does just about anything, and Johnson comes through bigger than life and twice as natural.
Boswell's diaries are so good that Boswell himself ends up looking bad. When Boswell published his diary entires, first in 1785 with The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and then in 1791 with his magnum opus The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell makes Johnson look good in part by exposing his own weaknesses of personality as a natural part of the narrative. He was observing himself observing Johnson -- just the sort of thing Norman Mailer would do 150 years later, though Mailer wouldn't bother trying to pair up with another literary light (Mailer and his fists! That's the buddy team, pal!). This made people think that although Boswell's books were excellent, the author himself was something of an ass. It's not entirely incorrect (Boswell was a loud, messy drunk, among other things), but it's still mean.
Johnson and Boswell had their own separate lives independent of each other of course -- Johnson in particular, as he went some 54 years before even meeting Boswell. But the two are now indisputably tied together. It's Boswell's doing, of course (and good for him, as otherwise he'd be only a minor literary figure instead of the pre-eminent diarist of the 18th Century), but Johnson's reputation certainly didn't suffer out of it. Their relationship ended up making the both of them look good. And ultimately, that's what being a buddy team is all about.
Best Personal Hygiene Products of the Millennium.
Feminine hygiene products. Toothpaste and underarm deodorants are very well and good. But we don't bleed from the teeth and armpits five days every month.
This is a difficult topic for me to write about. There are several reasons for this, but primary among them is simply that I'm a man. Men are not mentally equipped to handle menstruation. I don't mean this in the sense that we all rush for the remote when the tampon ads are on television. Avoiding those ads is just common sense. No one should be expected to believe that any woman is that cheerful about tampons. It'd be like a man, wide-eyed and smiling, extolling the virtues of medicated, cottony swabs for testicular herniations.
No, when I say men are not mentally equipped to handle menstruation, I mean that there is no parallel in the male experience. Men simply do not bleed from their genitals on a regular basis. We can't even imagine it. Suggest to a man that his equipment should hemorrhage for five out of every 28 days, and he will instantly drop to a fetal position, clutch his tum-tum and scream for mommy (who, of course, would have no sympathy whatsoever). This is not to say that men can't grasp the concept of menstruation. We're aware it happens. It just fills us with a confused and holy terror, like Australopithecenes confronting the Monolith.
Be that as it may, it's just a physical process, and a messy one at that. Something had to be done. Or did it? The most amazing thing about feminine hygiene products is not what they do, but the fact that they weren't commercially available at all until well into the 20th Century. This is astounding to me; after all, the onset of human menstruation didn't suddenly occur in tandem with the rise of the radio. What were women doing before then?
Various things. As early as the second millennium BC, Egyptian women were fashioning crude tampons out of available materials. Polynesian cultures created "menstrual huts," in which women would retire for their interim. The "hut" concept is not exclusive to island paradises; similar huts pop up everywhere from the Caucus Steppes to New Guinea (New Guineans, incidentally, having a very complex and disturbing relationship with menstruation; among other things, the men in certain New Guinean tribes would practice genital mutilation, the aim being to imitate the menstrual flow. Women, that sound you hear is the soft thump of every man reading this falling to the floor and clutching his groin in sympathetic pain). Mostly, however, women made do, using natural sponges, rags or other absorbent materials. In the 19th century, reusable cotton pads came into existence, but, you know, ick.
Then World War I, and the discovery by nurses that a super-absorbent type of cellulose fiber designed to bandage soldiers also made an excellent menstrual pad (blood is blood). Kimberly-Clark, the makers of the cellulose bandages, decided to market the pads, and thus Kotex was born. And almost died, when it was discovered that women of the time were so mortified at the concept of asking their pharmacists for menstrual pads that they would rather go without. Finally, someone came up with the concept of the "honor box" -- A woman could discreetly go to a box, drop in a nickel, take the pad (in an unmarked box) and walk away as if nothing ever happened. Clearly this is a far cry from today, in which women are shown on television celebrating the existence of "wings."
Commercial tampons followed the introduction of the pads in the 20s and 30s, though there was some trial and error: Not only did the first tampons not have applicators (that wasn't standard equipment until 1936), some of them didn't even have strings. I'm cringing just thinking about it. The manufacturers were apparently also blissfully unaware of the bacterial danger of leaving a tampon in too long; the copy of one early tampon box notes that one wearer left hers in for 48 hours with no ill effects. One wonders if it was the 49th hour that killed her.
Not all feminine hygiene products were of such utility and usefulness. As with so many other products women use, some feminine hygiene products seem designed specifically to intimate to a woman that walking around in a natural state is tantamount to scaring babies and dogs. Specifically, I'm referring to feminine odor products, in which the menstrual order is played up to be the closest thing to raw sewage that ever came out of a person's body, and never mind the actual raw sewage located one orifice south.
One memorable 1948 ad shows a husband stalking out the door while the wife cowers in a chair, weeping. "Why Does She Spend Her Evenings Alone?" the ad asks. The answer: Because she's stinky. You know what I'm saying here (although the putative solution -- Lysol, of all things -- hardly seems much better; if ever there was a place for "minty not medicine-y," this is it). The irony of this is that in 18th Century France, for one, menstrual odor was thought to be seductive, 'impregnated with subtle vapors transmitted by the essence of life,' according to a commentator of the time. This assessment has to be tempered by the fact we're talking both about the 18th Century (as stench-filled a century as there's ever been) and France, a place full of underbathed people who
regularly eat cheeses that smell like gangrenous feet. Still, the point is yet in evidence: Normal menstrual odor is not nearly the worst thing to come out of one's body.
Odor products aside, feminine hygiene products allowed women more control of their bodies, and as an extension, more control of their lives. This is something to which most hygiene products don't aspire; most hygiene products merely make you cleaner. And while there's nothing wrong with that (quite the opposite, in fact), in the race for the millennium's best hygienic products, there's really no contest. So, three cheers for the tampon and the sanitary pad.
And now, you'll excuse me. I need to go and shiver uncontrollably for a couple of hours. I'm just a man, after all.
Best Condiment of the Millennium.
Mayonnaise. What, you thought I was going to give it to catsup? Catsup is vile stuff, I tell you -- originally made from fish brine. Yes, fish water. Enjoy that on your fries. These days in America catsup refers exclusively to the tomato variety (thus the lame "Isn't 'tomato catsup' redundant?" crack from the ill-educated posing as the ironic), but in the rest of the world, you'll find catsups made from mushrooms, oysters and unripened walnuts. And here you thought catsup couldn't get any worse.
Well, okay, you say, but mayonnaise isn't any better. Off-white and pasty, it's an ill-flavored goo that's somehow managed to nudge its way into our food supply. Its provenance is unreliable; most of us know it's made from eggs, but we couldn't tell you the process, except to suggest that the eggs that are used to make mayo are being karmically punished. This is what you get for carrying salmonella in the last life.
And then there's the consistency: Not quite a liquid and not quite a solid. It's like humiliated gelatin. There's actually a scientific word for materials in this state -- thixotropic -- and mayonnaise shares this state with quicksand and drilling mud. And you wouldn't want to put either of those on your sandwich.
Granted. Mayonnaise can be a horrifying concoction. With the possible exception of headcheese (the normally discarded parts of animal carcasses, suspended in their own disturbingly sinewy aspic -- big in Scandinavia, which goes to explain the unusually high suicide rate) there is no single foodstuff as nauseating as warm mayonnaise. My gag reflex goes to DEFCON 3 just thinking about it.
And yet. Mayonnaise has a secret -- indeed even noble -- past. Like Eastern European royalty, ejected from their palaces by the glorious peoples' revolution and forced to live the remainder of their lives in genteel poverty in a New York hotel, hocking their jewels headpiece by brooch, their princelings attending -- the horror! -- public schools, mayonnaise has come far, far down in the world. There was a moment, not entirely shrouded in the mists of time, when mayonnaise was a celebrated sauce, and not just some glop designed to ease sandwiches through peristaltic motion.
The time was 1756. The place: Mahon, a city on the Spanish island of Minorca. The occasion: The capture of the city by the forces of Louis-Francois-Armad de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, and the expulsion of the hated English from that place (what were the English doing on a Spanish island? Hey, it's Europe). After a hard day beating the crap out of the English, Louis decided it was time to celebrate and ordered his chef to whip up a feast.
The chef decided to make a cream sauce for the meats he was making, but then discovered, to his horror, that there was no cream to be found. Sacre bleu! Showing the improvisatory spirit that can only be brought on by sheer panic, the chef grabbed some eggs and some vegetable oil, put them together, grabbed a wisk, and begun to pray. The result: Mayonnaise, named for the captured city. You decide whether God truly answered that prayer.
The French, perversely, celebrated the discovery, and used it for the basis of a number of sauces and dishes. Mayonnaise verte, with puréed green herbs. Sauce rémoulade, with anchovies, pickles, and capers. Chaud-froid, created when mayo meets aspic. Sauce aoli from Provençal, where the secret ingredient is garlic -- and love! It was the taste for aristocratic palates -- at least until those palates were severed from the rest of the digestive system during the French Revolution.
Mind you, even today, you can still find mayonnaise used for its first and most elevated purposes. But those moments are few and far between. Most mayonnaise will suffer a far more prosaic fate. Some will be tarted up as a salad dressing, perhaps Russian (so named because the first versions featured caviar), or Green Goddess. It's like mayonnaise in drag. There's no shame in it, though, and at least it's far better than being slathered on a Whopper somewhere on Interstate 10, where your fate is to be consumed in wolfing bites by a speed-ragged trucker who would think that Chaud-froid is that penis-envy dude, were he to think of it at all. Which he wouldn't.
Oh, yes, mayonnaise has pride. You think of it only as a thick, gummy paste designed to hold your Wonder Bread in place, but it's known better days. It was meant for finer things than to be a Belgian dipping sauce for french fries (really, what the hell is wrong with those Belgians?). It is painfully aware that adding a dash of paprika during a late stage of processing does not, in fact, make it a "mirace whip."
And yet, it suffers in silence, accepting your derision. It knows it's not your fault. The American educational system has no place for the secret history of mayonnaise. It's accepted its fate with dignity. Mayonnaise does not weep for what could have, should have been. It's happy just to do its job, quietly. Go ahead and use it in your macaroni salad. Sure, it's no lobster mayonnaise. But beggars can't be choosers.
Best Thing to be Thankful For of the Millennium.
That you are who you are, where you are, when you are. You probably won't agree with this tomorrow, when you'll be just another schmoe traveling on the day before Thanksgiving. In fact, as you sit in your coach seat, breathing stale, dry airplane air and listening to the non-stop squalling of the angry, angry infant in the row directly in front of you, dreading the inevitable loss of your bags if and when your plane is ever allowed to land, you'll probably wish you were anyone else, anywhere else, anytime else. But you'll be missing the bigger picture. It's hard to maintain perspective when the horizon consists of a plastic tray lodged into the back of an airplane seat.
And the bigger picture is that you are doing just swell. Probably better than any of your ancestors at your age (even mom and dad), and certainly better than the vast majority of humanity as it has existed at any time. In the "Best Historical Era of the Millennium" segment, I argued that for the average human being, all historical eras were pretty much equal (and pretty much equally bad). However, I also pointed out that the average human being on this planet is a dirt-poor Chinese farmer. Chances are very good you are not he or she (very few dirt-poor Chinese farmers have an Internet connection).
It's true: You are not average. Well, maybe you are -- in the context of the United States and Canada (and let's throw in Western Europe and Japan, just to be fun). But that's being average for the top 10% of the world: Combined, US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe have 600 million people in them. That's exactly 10% of the world's population -- and the top 10% in terms of income, education, nutrition and health care, life expectancy, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. Being average in this group puts would put you in the 95th percentile for the entire planet. You're getting an "A" and you're not even trying.
And the fact is, you're probably doing better than that -- Internet access still correlates with better education and higher wealth, and all the fringe benefits that come with those items. Go on, admit it -- you're on top of the world! You big fat cat, you. Sure, sometimes you experience problems. Everyone does, even Bill Gates (and these days, especially Bill Gates). But I'd be willing to bet that given the choice between your problems and, say, starving to death in Eritrea because battling warlords won't let a UN convoy of People Chow get through to your village, you'd pick your problems. Even your issues are better than most everyone else's. You hardly deserve a hug.
What you are experiencing has been true for the top echelons of every historical era; by and large, life is always bett
er when you're well-off and educated. Be that as it may, even for the comfortable and thinking, this historical era is far better than any that came before it. Let me prove it by using a fine example of indolent late 20th-century fat slob and show the many ways he would be dead or miserable in any other age (I'll pick the 1600s, just for convenience, and assume more or less the same station in life). That 20th-century fat slob is -- of course! -- my own egregiously undeserving self.
First, naturally enough: Birth. All my mother's children lived to adult years, which certainly wouldn't have happened in the 17th century -- up until the dawn of the 20th century, one child in five was lost to infant mortality and childhood diseases. Of course, my mother would have had eight or so children instead of the three she had, because it was her duty and there wasn't any reliable birth control. Provided she lived long enough to squirt out that many kids; in those days, women died in childbirth in numbers that are nothing short of horrifying.
Fast forward to my tenth year, when I broke my leg (I had a fight with a car. I lost). I broke both bones in the lower right leg. They doped me up real good and set the bones. In the 1600s, of course, there was no anesthesia; in order to set by bones back then, five 200-pound men would have had to sit on my chest and extremities in order to keep me still while the doctor maneuvered the ones into place. In my break, aside from scrapes, the skin was unbroken; mildly lucky now, but back then, it would have been a minor miracle. Broken skin would have almost certainly caused the wound to get infected. Given the general hygiene of the 17th century (it was a festering pit) and poor state of medical technology, I would be a goner likely as not.
Jump again to my 18th year, when I slam my face into a door at college, snapping off the bottom half of my front tooth. I cursed my stupidity, and then went to the dentist to get the thing capped. In the 17th century, of course, there were no caps and not much in the way of dentists (they were often barbers -- the traditional red and white barber pole is a memory of those days, the colors representing bandages before and after dental surgery). I would be stuck looking like Jethro until the tooth rotted out of my skull. Which wouldn't have taken very long, since they weren't exactly selling toothbrushes down at the market.