Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
If you can make good biscuits, then you can make good sweet-potato biscuits. Substitute mashed sweet potato for a roughly equal amount of flour. Biscuit dough can easily handle a one-to-two ratio of potato to flour, and probably even one-to-one.
Your biscuits will be very tender.
Many kinds of bread, actually — both quick breads and yeast breads — benefit from some potato. I think of this as German thing, though I have had sweet-potato biscuits in African-American restaurants.
Apple’s Airtags aren’t very expensive. But probably the best way to justify their cost is their ability to track your luggage when flying. Yesterday’s updates of Apple’s operating systems introduced a new feature — the ability to share Airtag information with airlines, because Airtag owners usually know more about where their luggage is than the airlines do.
The Washington Post recently had a piece on how potentially helpful this is, given that airlines (yikes!) lose, damage, or delay 270,000 pieces of luggage each month.
For my recent trip to Scotland, I used two Airtags, one in my checked suitcase and one in my carry-on. My flight from Raleigh-Durham to Heathrow was delayed by 14 hours. The plane (a packed Boeing 777-200) had already been loaded and was ready to push back from the terminal when the pilot informed the irritable passengers that a mechanical problem was going to take hours to fix and that the plane “isn’t going anywhere tonight.” Everyone had to “deplane.” Most of us spent the night in the terminal, though some passengers made arrangements for other flights. For the luggage, this caused chaos. All the luggage was unloaded from the plane, and we were told to pick up our luggage at one of the carousels and re-check it the following morning if we chose to say on the delayed flight.
As the plane was loaded again, 14 hours late, I could see on my iPhone that my checked suitcase was on the plane, or “near me,” as the FindMy app says. The Airtags were useful again on the my train trip from Raleigh to Greensboro as I was returning home. Usually I would not check any baggage on a train, but I had arrived at the train station early and wanted to be rid of the big suitcase so that I could go out and scout for lunch. I would never have known that my suitcase went to Greensboro on an earlier train if the Airtags hadn’t told me.
Speaking of delayed and canceled flights, I bought trip insurance through American Airlines when I booked the ticket to London. The delayed flight meant that I missed my train from London to Scotland and had to spend the night in London. Using my iPhone, I hastily changed the train ticket and booked a hotel in London. I filed a claim on the travel insurance for reimbursement for the $149 that the London hotel cost. The insurance paid my claim in less than 48 hours!
The Boeing 777-200 being loaded at Heathrow for the flight to Raleigh-Durham
If you are a native speaker of English, then Scots is a language that you already 65 percent (more or less) understand. Totally aside from my interest in Scotland and Sir Walter Scott, I find that fact, from linguistics, fascinating. At first I conceived of Scots as just a dialect of English. But scholars see it otherwise, and now I’m convinced: Scots is its own language.
There is a second reason why the Scots language warms my heart (other than the fact that it is beautiful to listen to). It’s that speaking Scots has long been stigmatized in Scotland. To feel properly respected outside the places they grew up, people who grew up speaking Scots learn to “code switch” to standard Scottish English. This is very much like what happens with people, like me, who grew up where the Southern Appalachian English dialect is spoken. We learn to code switch to avoid stigmatization of the way we talk. Some of us can learn to mask our Southern Appalachian accents almost completely. Others retain traces that, to a careful ear, give them away. (More on that below.)
During my recent trip to Scotland, I made a pilgrimage to McNaughtan’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. It is a fascinating place, and, I think, the only seller of rare and antique books in Edinburgh. The owner is very knowledgeable and very helpful. I bought two books while I was there. I had them shipped home so that I didn’t have to deal with them as luggage. One of the books is The History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 4, from the Edinburgh University Press. I will write about that book later. The other is a translation of the New Testament into Scots, published in 1983.
To convince you that you already 65 percent understand the Scots language, I’ve included below an image from page 101. It’s Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 – 14, a section of the New Testament familiar to us all — the Christmas story. For comparison, I’ve also included the same verses from New International translation.
I suggest reading the Scots aloud, paying attention to the sound and phonetics. Most of it will be perfectly understandable, though there are some words you won’t recognize (though many are decipherable from context). I will list those words below.
⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.
Siccan a thing: Such a thing
Ilkane: Those of that ilk; that family
Haundfastit: Betrothed
Boukin gin: Very pregnant
Brocht: Brought
Barrie: A baby’s flannel coat
Heck: A slatted wood frame or rack
Hirsel: A flock of sheep
Uncolie frichtit: Extremely frightened
Liggin: Lying
Syne in a gliff: Then all of a sudden
Kythed: Appeared
Yird: Earth
⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.
The translator of this work was William Laughton Lorimer, a language scholar who taught Greek at St. Andrews University and who died in 1967. The translation was, of course, from the Greek.
Many people in Scotland are working to reverse the stigmatization of Scots. Sadly, Southern Appalachian English remains just as stigmatized.
I mentioned above that some traces of Southern Appalachian are detectable even in professional actors. For example, there is the tendency not to distinguish between “ken” and “kin,” and “pen” and “pin.” The actor Samuel L. Jackson, who grew up in Chattanooga, provides some good examples of this, especially in Star Wars.
Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him for forty years. Ken Ilgunas is one of my newer friends, fourteen years. I’ve listened to them at the dinner table a good many times, but listening to them in a podcast is even better.
Both are writers. They are of different generations, which makes their conversation even more interesting.
Here’s the link: Jonathan Rauch on the 2024 election, 1960’s Star Trek, and the magnetism of sociopaths.
Jonathan’s next book, to be published by the Yale University Press in February 2025, is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. My own tiny press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two of Jonathan’s books that were previously out of print, Denial and The Outnation.
Rolling into Greensboro from Charlotte. Click here for high resolution version.
If I had not during the previous two weeks spent quite a lot of time on trains in the United Kingdom, I would not have noticed that American trains are bigger and wider than the U.K.’s trains. Here in the U.S., I rode trains from Greensboro to Raleigh for flights out of the Raleigh-Durham airport.
I had mistakenly assumed that the trains that shuttle back and forth from Raleigh to Charlotte are Amtrak trains. A conductor set me straight, after I’d asked him if he knew when the passenger car that I was riding in had been built. He didn’t know, but he volunteered some interesting information about North Carolina’s trains. They are in fact operated by Amtrak, but they are owned by the state of North Carolina. A good many years ago, North Carolina bought some older locomotives and passenger cars from Amtrak, restored them, and put them back into service for in-state travel.
My excuse for being unaware of that is that I was living in California when North Carolina’s train project started. Plus, we no longer have any state or local news to speak of. But Wikipedia has the complete story, N.C. by Train.
Some Googling confirmed that trains in the U.S. are larger and wider than trains in the U.K. The American tracks are wider, thus the cars and locomotives can be wider.
The passenger car that I rode in from Raleigh to Greensboro was downright elegant, a classic, like riding in a 1956 Buick. Though I was unable to determine when the car was made, my guess is that it was at least 30, if not 40, years old. New York, here I come again, by train, hopefully early next spring.
Classic elegance — a passenger car restored for the North Carolina train system. Click here for high resolution version.
Walter Scott in his study, with a cat
Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford, is an enchanting place. I was not surprised on my visit to Abbotsford to see that he had cats, including a favorite cat, Hinse, whose portrait is among the many portraits in Abbotsford’s armoury room. I said to Ken that any writer who has cats is going to write about cats. I had no particular memory of cats appearing in any of the eleven Waverley novels I’ve read, so I had to do some research.
What I wanted was for Scott to be as much a cat person as Robert A. Heinlein, whose novel The Door Into Summer starts ands ends with a cat. Scott, it seems, was not as much a cat person as was Heinlein. But Scott’s The Antiquary has several mentions of cats.
If there is a character in Scott’s novels who is most like Scott himself, that would be Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary. Oldbuck has a cat. The cat is not given a name and mostly serves as atmosphere, sitting on a table in Oldbuck’s study the same way Hinse sat on Scott’s writing desk at Abbotsford, and sitting in a chair in Oldbuck’s dining room.
Washington Irving visited Scott at Abbotsford and wrote this about Scott:
While Scott was reading, the sage grimalkin, already mentioned, had taken his seat in a chair beside the fire, and remained with fixed eye and grave demeanor, as if listening to the reader. I observed to Scott that his cat seemed to have a black-letter taste in literature.
“Ah,” said he, “these cats are a very mysterious kind of folk. There is always more passing in their minds than we are aware of. It comes no doubt from their being so familiar with witches and warlocks.”
He went on to tell a little story about a gude man who was returning to his cottage one night, when, in a lonely out-of-the-way place, he met with a funeral procession of cats all in mourning, bearing one of their race to the grave in a coffin covered with a black velvet pall. The worthy man, astonished and half-frightened at so strange a pageant, hastened home and told what he had seen to his wife and children. Scarce had he finished, when a great black cat that sat beside the fire raised himself up, exclaimed “Then I am king of the cats!” and vanished up the chimney. The funeral seen by the gude man, was one of the cat dynasty.
“Our grimalkin here,” added Scott, “sometimes reminds me of the story, by the airs of sovereignty which he assumes; and I am apt to treat him with respect from the idea that he may be a great prince incog., and may some time or other come to the throne.”
⬆︎ Hinse
⬆︎ Oldbuck in his study
⬆︎ Oldbuck at breakfast
⬆︎ Abbotsford
⬆︎ And for the record, here’s a photo of Ken and me in a pub in Edinburgh, after we’d been to a lecture at the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.
Several years ago, when I first set up Apple Home, I saw it as one of those useless things that nerds do only for the entertainment of playing with gadgets. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s convenient, and it greatly adds to one’s security and peace of mind.
A few months ago, I replaced my two 15-year-old thermostats with smart thermostats. I anguished over the cost — about $650 — but I soon realized that I’d made a good decision. The heat pump works much better now. Temperatures in the house stay at the exact level at which the thermostats are set, rather than wavering two or even three degrees higher or lower that the thermostat’s setting. The new thermostats are much better at knowing when to use the heat pump’s electrical coils when it’s so cold outside that the compressor is inefficient.
But, best of all, I can see what’s happening at home when I’m away from home. On my recent trip to Scotland, I was away from home into early December. There were several nights when the temperature was as low as 18F, cold enough to freeze water pipes in an unheated house. Using the Apple Home app on my iPhone, I could see the temperature upstairs and downstairs in the house and confirm that the heating system was keeping temperatures above the 50F setting.
I have several electric heaters, the type that look like small radiators, both upstairs and downstairs. I can turn them on and off from anywhere. If I leave home and forget to turn them off, then Apple Home turns them off for me, with a trigger called “when the last person leaves home.” It’s also nice to have Apple Home turns some lights on when WIFI sees that my iPhone has arrived in the driveway, with the trigger “when anyone arrives home.” Some things are on timers. Apple Home turns on some lights in the morning and makes sure that certain things are turned off at bedtime.
The WIFI light bulbs and WIFI switches that work with Apple Home aren’t all that expensive. And of course the Apple Home system is a built-in part of the Apple ecosystem. To make it work, one needs an Apple device that is always at home and always plugged in — either an Apple TV or an Apple HomePod.
While a tsunami of healthy, hilarious, and ever-so-understandable schadenfreude broke out in social media after the shooting of a predatory health care CEO, the punditry scolded us and clutched their pearls, warning us of the dangers of political violence.
But 48.36 percent of the population — those who didn’t vote for Trump — are not as deranged as the 49.97 percent who did. Having lived through years of MAGA political violence, the glorification of MAGA political violence, and the return of a MAGA criminal to the White House with a cast of MAGA goons having a net worth of $340 billion, at least 48.36 percent of the population can distinguish between political violence that serves justice and political violence that serves fascism and oligarchy.
I have argued in the past that, as Putinization comes to America, there is a limit to what Americans will put up with. If the people of South Korea, Belarus, Georgia, Peru, Slovakia, and even Russia will take to the streets in a heartbeat because they hate being kicked around, then Americans, in a country born out of violent revolution, will take to the streets in half a heartbeat. The grassroots political instincts that MAGA tapped and perverted to serve fascism and oligarchy are just as present in those who hate fascism and oligarchy. The CEO shooter reminded us of that, and no doubt terrified those who will do everything possible to retain for themselves a monopoly on violence.
So, mystery shooter, whoever you are and wherever you are, you’re obviously the hero and inspiration that a lot of people need right now. The punditry, clutching their pearls in their corporate gigs, would have us believe that all political violence is equally bad. No it isn’t, because of the difference between justice and injustice. It’s safe to assume that that neutralized CEO, indirectly, out of corporate greed, caused the premature deaths of tens of thousands of people. We can confidently say that he deserves our contempt, even if saying that he, or anyone, deserves to die is farther than we want to go.
They’ll probably catch this guy and make an example of him. But if they take him alive, we’ll get to hear why he did it. America’s CEO’s, and those who are preparing to Putinize America, won’t like that story one bit, because it probably will be a story about predation, exploitation, and the greed of the powerful. And it probably will be a story about one of the many powerless people who died because of it, someone whom the CEO shooter loved.
The Discovery, which made an expedition to Antarctica 123 years ago, is now a museum in Dundee.
I’m in London now for the flight back to the U.S., but I’ll have more photos after I’m at home on a proper computer.
The Royal Pub, Edinburgh
The pubs alone justify a trip to Scotland. The lack of pub culture, as I often have complained, is one of America’s worst flaws. Pubs are a social glue, and America is increasingly an unglued kind of place.
Edinburgh pubs can be very grand. Village pubs are small and cozy, almost always with a fireplace. Pub food will be fairly inexpensive and a touch rustic — soups, roasts, pies, and vegetables such as potatoes and broccoli, treated well.
Ken and I had a long afternoon in Edinburgh, looking at old publications and some first editions in the National Library of Scotland, which is an archive, really, since the items in the collections can be fetched and inspected, but not checked out.
After that it was a lecture at the Sir Walter Scott Club of Edinburgh, with wine and canapes after the lecture. It was a delightful group of people, most of them my age. My questions about cats in Scott’s novels stumped everyone I asked. I’ll have a post on Scott’s cats after I get home.
While waiting to catch a train at Waverley station back to East Linton, we had some ale at the Royal Pub. And I admit that, back in East Linton, we had one more slosh (Scotch, this time) by the fire at the pub in the East Linton Hotel.
The Crown pub, East Linton
French onion soup and a cheese scone, the Crown pub, East Linton
