Category: Commentary (Page 4 of 27)

Commentary on most any topic.

A Brief History of Birthday Celebrations

October 2, 2022 / Phil / 0 Comments

The celebration of birthdays is common and taken for granted today. But the celebration of birthdays is a recent phenomenon, a product of the Industrial Age.

The Egyptians

There are instances of birthdays being celebrated since ancient times, but only by important people. The oldest known birthday celebrations took place in Egypt about 5,000 years ago. When a prince was made pharaoh, that moment was considered the transformation of a man into a god and was considered his “birthday”.

The Ancient Greeks

The ancient Greeks observed birthdays, not as a celebration, but because they believed that a spirit is present when each person is born, and that this same spirit was nearby around the same time each year. They also believed that a person was susceptible to evil spirits around the time of their birthday. Family and friends would gather and light candles to ward off the darkness, and make loud noises to frighten off evil spirits. Dates were not precise by modern standards because an accurate calendar had not yet been invented in Europe.

Birthday Celebration for Commoners

The Romans were the first to create holidays to honor famous persons, usually around the approximate date of their birth. The Romans were the first to create a birthday celebration for commoners but it wasn’t an annual thing. When a Roman man reached the age of 50, he was honored with a cake made with cheese and honey. Birthdays of women were ignored for another thousand years.

Birthday Celebrations Prohibited

For hundreds of years, the early Church frowned on the observance of birthdays. It was seen as a pagan practice, something done by pharaohs and heathens. Birthday celebrations were considered evil. Needless to say, the birth of Christ wasn’t celebrated either. Nobody knew the date anyway. From the information in the Bible one can guess it was during tax time in the Roman Empire, which was in the spring.

Common folk found this prohibition easy to abide by. Most didn’t know their date of birth. Common people didn’t have access to calendars and the modern Gregorian Calendar wouldn’t be invented for another thousand years. If a person was baptized, the Church would sometimes record the date, but such dates were approximate, like “the second week of harvest AD 532”. Nobody celebrated their date of baptism. Birthdays were not a thing.

Creation of Christmas

The Church’s ban on birthdays came to an abrupt end when it was decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus coincident with the ancient pagan celebration of Saturnalia.¹

The plan was to use the existing celebration of Saturnalia to recruit people into the Church. This is how the date for Christmas was chosen.

Modern Birthday Cakes

Turning the clock forward 1,300 years, the Germans came up with the idea of celebrating children’s birthdays with a birthday cake decorated with one candle for each year of life.²

This celebration, Kinderfeste, was only for young children. The idea of blowing out the candles and making a wish appeared at the same time.

The Industrial Revolution

Another 50 years brings us to the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, about 160 years ago. Several things happened that resulted in the popularity of birthday celebrations for all ages.

The most important change was that people began to have fewer children. Children were seen less as an economically valuable army of working hands and more as emotionally valued members of the family. More attention and emotional energy was invested in each child. Celebration of birthdays became important.

Before this time, the price of the materials needed to make birthday cakes, like sugar and butter, were expensive. Fancy cakes were something for the well-off. The Industrial Age brought prices down and birthday cakes became affordable.

Clocks and printed calendars became affordable and commonplace. People became more focused on time and dates because of the Industrial Age. For the first time, people began to work hourly shifts and needed to know the date and time to be at work, catch a train, and so forth. Education improved and common people learned to tell time and read calendars. People knew their birth dates. Doctors started to record the age of patients as an important parameter. Schools began to group students by ages. All of these changes and much more came very rapidly over a period of just 40 years.

Together, all of the factors above resulted in the widespread celebration of birthdays that continues today. Some people resisted, arguing that celebration of birthdays was self-centered, materialistic, and took attention away from God. But this didn’t become an important point of view.

⊂•⊃

Fun Fact: The Greeks were the first to put candles on a cake, but it wasn’t to celebrate birthdays. A crescent shaped cake was made and decorated with candles to honor the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, who was closely associated with the Moon. Blowing out the candles while making a wish was seen as sending a prayer to Artemis.

Donald Trump

September 27, 2022 / Phil / 2 Comments

Yes, I admit that I’m a sucker for good writing. I love it. Good wordsmithing can give me goosebumps like good music. Shakespeare and Mark Twain are two of my favorites. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is superb and considered by some to be the finest bit of wordsmithing in all the English language.

One fine example I ran across recently is an eloquent summation of my own sense and observations of Donald Trump and his followers. It’s so good I’ll just quote it (without permission) along with a link to where you can find more writings of this caliber.

Talented and well-practiced in every vice, a stranger to compassion or empathy, a liar and a cheat so complete in perfidy that he has elevated his dishonesty to hold it up as an ersatz oral principle, violent, so long as he can order someone else to do the dirty work, grotesque in body, graceless in action, in possession of a wounded self-regard so colossal as to smother any spark of grace, treasonous, not only to country, but to every ally he has ever had, the poisoned fruit and rankest flower of racism and contempt for women, and utterly devoid of shame for his oral and spiritual bankruptcy.
That is your leader. That is to whom you give your money. That is who you follow and laud. That is whose banner you willingly carry. Why? Because he is a mirror, not a lighthouse. You see yourselves in him. He is what you would be if you had inherited money and could shed the last vestiges of conscience and shame.
No, I do not “respect your choices,” nor do I admire your loyalty and dedication to this miserific, demoniac vision. You have demonstrated not only a lack of civic virtue, loyalty to the Republic and to the rule of law, but a willingness to engage in violence and sedition at his slightest expressed wish. And you will never, ever admit you were wrong. Because you see your dark, twisted, resentful dreams in him. And to renounce him is to renounce yourselves.
Advocatus Peregrini

More writings from the same pen, writings of many kinds, and from different authors can be found here:

WESTVIRGINIAVILLE.COM

Provisioning for Thanksgiving

September 15, 2022 / Phil / 0 Comments

Are you planning to host a Thanksgiving dinner? Do you know how much food to buy? Planning out a Thanksgiving dinner can be challenging. Since the Thanksgiving holiday is about plenty, you want to avoid running short. This can lead to making way too much food and eating leftovers for two weeks. Below are a few tips to help you.

I’m a retired engineer. I switched to the food preparation business ten years ago and can’t help but bring my engineering mindset with me. I study and learn every technique I can and study the chemistry of cooking. While I frequently cook things that I make up on the spot, for anything serious I like to have numbers and measurements. Below are some numbers you can use.

A Thanksgiving Spread

Turkey: 1 pound of bird (uncooked) per person, and you will have leftovers.

Dry mix stuffing like Stove-Top: 1 ounce dry mix per person

Potatoes for mashing: 6 oz (raw) per person or 3/4 of a large potato

Sweet potatoes: 6 oz (raw) per person

Canned cranberry sauce: 4 oz per person

Pie: 1 piece per person

Butternut squash: 7 oz (raw whole squash) per person

Brussels sprouts: 2.5 oz (raw) per person

Green beans: 4 oz (canned) per person

Extending the Above to 40 Persons

To extend the above numbers, multiply by the number of guests and round up to the next package size. Thanksgiving usually involves a lot of baking. If you try to prepare all the food on Thanksgiving day, you’ll need several ovens. Remember that cooking the turkeys will occupy your oven(s) for much of the day. Prepare as much as you can the day(s) before and reheat it.

Of course, you don’t have to do all of the items below. Just pick the items you think your guests will like. You don’t have to do squash and sweet potatoes, or offer three different vegetables. These are just examples.

Turkey: 40 pounds. So four 10 pounders, three 14 pounders, etc.

Dry mix stuffing: 40 ounces dry, so seven boxes. A lot of people go heavy on stuffing and it’s cheap and easy, so having extra won’t hurt. I’ve found the in-house brands like Walmart are just as good as the big name product and cost half as much.

Potatoes for mashing: 240 ounces raw. So 15 pounds of russets, peeled, cooked, mashed, and prepared as you like with milk, butter, salt, pepper, garlic, etc.

Sweet potatoes: 240 raw ounces. So 15 pounds prepared as you prefer.

Canned cranberry sauce: 160 ounces, so ten or twelve 14 oz cans. These could be split between cranberry jelly and whole cranberry sauce. Some people like one and not the other.

Pie: 40 pieces. For big pieces you’ll need seven pies, smaller pieces, 5 pies.

Butternut squash: 280 oz raw whole squash (17 pounds)

Brussels sprouts: 100 oz raw (6-1/4 pounds)

Green beans: 160 oz (canned), so ten or twelve 14 oz cans. When cooking raw whole beans, I figure six beans per person. A pound of raw beans is 35 to 40 beans. For 40 guests you need to cook about six pounds.

Conclusion

You can save money by buying larger cans. In supermarkets, verify that the larger container is actually cheaper. Many times I’ve seen a gallon jar of mayonnaise or other product priced higher than buying the same amount in several smaller jars.

Larger towns have stores that sell wholesale foods to churches and other organizations, and sometimes to the public. Here you can buy Number 10 cans (institutional size) that contain around 115 ounces, and save even more money.

“Fine as Kine” not “Finest Kind”

November 23, 2021 / Phil / 4 Comments

“How are you today?”
“Fine as kine!”

“Fine as kine” is a common expression in the State of Maine. Those who are not from there often hear it as “finest kind”, “fine as kind”, “fine is kind”, or something similar, which doesn’t make any sense.

The word kine is an Old English word that means cattle. The expression “fine as kine” has a nice ring to it and it implies “in good health” or “strong as an ox”.

The word kine appears rarely in English literature. However, one of those cases is the King James Bible. Avid readers of the King James Bible would be very familiar with the word kine because it appears in 20 different verses of the Old Testament:

Genesis 32:15 Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine, and ten bulls, twenty she asses, and ten foals.

Genesis 41:2 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.

Genesis 41:3 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.

Genesis 41:4 And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.

Genesis 41:18 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow:

Genesis 41:19 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness:

Genesis 41:20 And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine:

Genesis 41:26 The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.

Genesis 41:27 And the seven thin and ill favoured kine that came up after them are seven years; and the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind shall be seven years of famine.

Deuteronomy 7:13 And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

Deuteronomy 28:4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

Deuteronomy 28:18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

Deuteronomy 28:51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.

Deuteronomy 32:14 Butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape.

1 Samuel 6:7 Now therefore make a new cart, and take two milch kine, on which there hath come no yoke, and tie the kine to the cart, and bring their calves home from them:

1 Samuel 6:10 And the men did so; and took two milch kine, and tied them to the cart, and shut up their calves at home:

1 Samuel 6:12 And the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh, and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left; and the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of Bethshemesh.

1 Samuel 6:14 And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Bethshemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone: and they clave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a burnt offering unto the LORD.

2 Samuel 17:29 And honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of kine, for David, and for the people that were with him, to eat: for they said, The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in the wilderness.

Amos 4:1 Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink.

Now you know.