Submarine in Limbo

U.S. Submarine Veterans, a 13,800-member organization of former submarine servicemembers, has asked Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus "that the United States Navy officially reopen the investigation of USS Scorpion (SSN 589)."

According to USA Today, "The Scorpion went down May 22, 1968, killing 99 men and foundering 11,220 feet underwater in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The sub carried two nuclear torpedoes and a nuclear reactor. A Navy Court of Inquiry found that year that 'the cause of the loss cannot be definitively ascertained,' leaving the sub's demise a matter of controversy for decades."

Inspired by the disappearance of The Scorpion, author John Wallace Spencer wrote "Limbo of the Lost: Actual Stories of Sea Mysteries," a book published in 1969 detailing strange disappearances, many related to "the Bermuda Triangle."

"More than a thousand people and over a hundred ships and planes have mysteriously disappeared in an area of the Atlantic Ocean that I call Limbo of the Lost," Spencer explains.

"Tragedies connected to this region continually occur without explanation, without pattern, without warning, and without reason."

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Review: Kit Carson

Best known today for his role in the tragic "Long Walk" of  the Navajos as Col. Christopher Carson of the First New Mexico Volunteers, "Kit" Carson was a mythical hero in dime novels of the 19th century and movie Westerns of the mid-20th century who fought savages, protected the virtuous and helped open the frontier.

This biography portrays the real-life Carson as Scots-Irish border man - a trapper, guide, hunter, soldier - shaped by his culture and his times. Rather than a stereotypic Indian killer, it argues that he matured intellectually and ethically as he grew older.

"A man of action rather than of a philosophical turn of mind, he performed duties that made a difference, for better or worse, for the people he lived with and worked among," David A. Remley explains.

Kit Carson

The Life of an American Border Man 

by David A. Remley

University of Oklahoma Press, 2012

Continued in ... Out of the Past
Portrait: Kit Carson
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Resting the Meatballs

A leading authority on the history of food, Massimo Montanari recalls making meatballs from boiled beef, cooked cardoons, parmesan, bread crumbs, eggs, salt and paper one evening and after shaping them and placing them on a plate, "Marina" cautioned:

"Now, before cooking them, let us leave them to rest for a few hours. That way they firm up and get thoroughly blended."

Montari associates the phrase "letting the meatballs rest" with the creative process in his mind.

"Ideas are the result of experiences, encounters, reflections, suggestions: many ingredients that come together and then turn into a new thought. Before that can happen, it is useful to let those ingredients rest, to give them time to settle, to become blended, to firm up. The resting of meatballs is like the resting of thoughts: After a while they turn out better."

~ Massimo Montanari

from "Resting the Meatballs"

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Marijuana - The Assasin Drug?

"Young people who indulged in the drug during the thirties [1930s] were well aware before they started that it was almost expected of them to rape a girl, to submit to the advances of a fellow user, to rob a liquor store or a gas station, to use an old woman's crutch with which to beat her into insensibility. The untitled leaders of today's generation of pot users advocate love, both political and social. They proclaim pot to be one solution toward this end and, when proclaimed in the proper manner to the users of pot, the drug indeed becomes the peaceful panacea that they are all assured that it is."

~ Jonathan Smith

The Mind Benders

Triumph News Co., 1967

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The Long-Legged House

"Yesterday snow fell all day and covered the ground. This morning, though the sun came up clear, the thermometer read four above - a good morning to sit in the warmth of the stove and the brisk snow light from the big window over the table. It is a morning for books and notebooks and inviting blank pages of writing paper.

"For people who live in the country there is a charming freedom in such days. One is free of obligations to the ground. There is no outside work that one ought to do, simply because, with the ground frozen deep and covered with snow, no such work is possible.

"Growth has stopped. There is plenty of hay and grain in the barn; the present has abated its urgencies. And the mind may again turn freely to the past look back on the way it came.

"This morning has been bearing down out of the future toward this bit of riverbank forever. And for perhaps as long, in a sense, my life has been approaching from the opposite direction. The approach of a man's life out of the past is history and the approach of time out of the future is a mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?"

The Long-Legged House

by Wendell Berry

Counterpoint, 2012

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Calamity Jane: Legendary Western Poverty

"Her career may offer the best case study of legend-making in the history of the American West simply because there was so little on which to build; she arrested no outlaws, robbed no banks, and killed no Indians. Instead, hers is a bleak story of poverty, alcoholism, and an unsteady domestic life. She worked as a dance-hall girl, prostitute, waitress, bartender, and cook; she lived with various men she called husbands and expressed affection for her children. Rather than displaying legendary ingredients, her life illustrates a part of western history not often told, the existence of the poor."

Calamity Jane

The Woman and the Legend

by James D. McLaird

University of Oklahoma Press, 2012

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Review: Let the Meatballs Rest

This is a collection of 100 brief essays discussing specific foodstuffs, their histories and how they have helped shape the human societies that include them in their diets.

Potatoes, for instance, were introduced to Europe in the 16th century but their bland flavor and "subterranean nature" made them unappealing. Only when other crops had failed and starvation loomed did farmers turn to widescale production of the easy-to-grow spuds.

Garlic, likewise, was once considered fit only for peasants. Eating such strong and foul-smelling food was a damning mark of poverty in the 10th century.

And eggplant, first brought to Europe by Arabs, was long associated with "the lower class and Jews." Yet the peasant cuisine that emerged from their use would later be co-opted by the upper classes.

Let the Meatballs Rest

And Other Stories About Food and Culture

by Massimo Montanari

Columbia University Press, 2012

Cover Art: Let the Meatballs Rest
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