h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I probably shouldn't write after supper. After all, the digestive process isn't aided by the kind of thinking I do. Oh, well, the damage is done.

I seldom feel the urge to write letters to strangers - especially not famous strangers. They're more important than I am. It says so on the label.

Also, they don't give out their email addresses, for very good reasons. Lunatics who write on websites might actually use them.

So I'm putting this up as an open letter. Mr Colbert's crew might find it on google.

OPEN LETTER TO STEPHEN COLBERT

Dear Mr Colbert,

I'm a big fan of your work. I've been known to brag on you to the Brits. In fact, I've recently published the first Entry in h2g2.com's Edited Guide ('The Unconventional Guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything') devoted to you: A87789190. Most of the time, you're my kind of nutcase, and I stand by you.

The other day, your program made me sad. That sadness is still hauntng me, I felt I needed to mention it, and explain why.

On May 21, 2013, you reported that scientists had solved the mystery of the Irish potato famine by isolating the pathogen. I realise the situation cried out for some humour, and frankly, I liked the epidemiologist joke. But Michael Flatley's shirt, Lucky Charms, and potato clocks? Really? All the potatoes in Ireland had 'jock itch'? The whole thing could have been avoided with a can of Cruex? Ouch.

I'm not hypersensitive. I don't go around pointing fingers and yelling, 'Hey! That's politically incorrect! You take back what you said about my hillbilly ancestors!' (Probably all true, anyway, about the reason they left North Carolina. If only Nimrod hadn't shot that preacher, but then Nimrod was drunk...)

I LIKE Kinky Friedman. You can't be very sensitive if you like the Kinkster. My favourite bluegrass group are the Austin Lounge Lizards. They make fun of everybody, including the Southern Baptist Convention.'Paint Me on Velvet' is a classic.

The jokes about the Potato Famine made me sad, not offended. Not because the jokes were in poor taste, so much as the fact that joking in the face of all that death on the part of other people made me sad. It's not that I'd expect you to play waily tin whistle music in the background while intoning a verse of 'The Praties They Grow Small', or anything like that. And I know you had family in that tragedy yourself, so you must be aware of the pain the catastrophe left in its wake.

But consider that old song for a moment.

'I wish that we were geese, night and morn,
I wish that we were geese, then we all could be at peace,
To the hour of our release, eating corn.'

How sad is that? How horrible is it to think about a million people dying of hunger, and their last thought was that they wished they were geese? I wonder what they would have thought about that Lucky Charms joke.

Yeah, I know. People are still dying of hunger every day. And you do a lot to help, you really do, promoting high-level people who do good deeds. I don't begrudge anybody the humour that goes along with it.

It just made me sad to hear those particular jokes. Since I didn't think sad was what you were after, I thought I ought to mention it.

I'll keep watching.

Thanks for listening,

Dmitri Gheorgheni


PS The one about Hitler and the Hannukah card? Not so funny, either.

No-one does 'mortally offended' as funny as you do, Dmitri

* sneaks silently away from *

*drags in her Matt*

A nice joke about AIDS would have rounded the night off well.

Just as a side note did you catch this piece on Yahoo today? http://news.yahoo.com/mystery-irish-potato-famine-solved-140830483.html?.tsrc=_start

Not that it changes any of the suffering.

Some place I have a book about the history of the frigate Macedonian, that was captured in the war of 1812, She , or her replacement, was used to carry food to Ireland at the time of the famine.

The stories about the people trying to find something to eat, and dying along the roads, are truly hard to read.



F S

Nuh-uh. Just run with the AIDS joke. It's funnier.

Yeah, FS, that was the story that sparked the Colbert Report's 'jokes'.

This could lead to a fairly intelligent discussion of the effect environmental changes, such as a plant blight, can have on humna history.

Or not.

We now have a strong suspicion that the Salem Witchcraft Trials were sparked by a coouple of damp harvest years in New England, and a dependence on rye for bread. Damp rye grows ergot. Ergot can make your bread into an hallucinogen.

There's a terrific book by Hans Zinsser called 'Rats, Lice, and History', which we all read at uni. This reviewer compares him to Lawrence Sterne:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298258/

Well said, Dmitri. Satire often is more sad than funny. Sometimes Colbert hits it out of the park and sometimes he is just tasteless.

Potato blight is still a serious problem. I saw an interesting program about potatoes on Modern Marvels. I didn't realize how many famine aid agencies depend on dry potato flakes. They are so light weight, that they are relatively inexpensive to ship and store. And when reconstituted they provide adequate calories and a fair amount of nutrition.

Apparently Belarus consumes the most potatoes per capita of any country in the world, over a pound per person per day. And Americans eat French fries an average of 4 times per week. I eat them perhaps twice a year, so someone else is eating all of my spuds!

Yeah, who's eatin' all those taters?

Greek kids used to be crazy for fried potatoes. The reason was they didn't get them at home. I found out why when I tried. Olive oil will not get hot enough.

Belgium is a major consumer of potatoes. And they're geniuses at cooking them.

It's a nutritious foodstuff. I'm not surprised about the potato flakes. They could be mixed with your dairy products, and probably have multiple uses, too.

I guess the reason Dmitri felt sad was that, in 1847, Ireland was a net food exporter.

Cuba is blessed with all sorts of natural riches, gold included, but was turned into a mono culture that almost exclusively grew sugar canes. When Europe found out how to make sugar out of beets Cuba's economy collapsed (more or less anyway).

For the last 100 years or so we have copied Cuba: We almost exclusively grow sugar beets here

This is a pity for more than one reason: For instance the soil is excellent for growing so much healthier stuff than sugar - like peas and beans for example - but because the sugar production is supported financially by the European Union this wouldn't pay off
A few years ago the EU finally decided to cut back on its financial support, so there is some hope, but I fear we still have a long way to go.

In short: We can ruin our economy all by ourselves, no blight needed.


(who thought this was going to be a debate about what you can or can't make fun of but notices the usual hootoo drift in progress )

My potato growing season is at an end, though one can, with difficulty, keep the plants going vegetatively till June, in the process, they burn themselves out so one gets no potatoes if they're not harvested in early May.

(The local growing season begins mid-August.)

Yield (for half a dozen 15 inch pots) was low, but since I'm growing only novelty types and primarily interested in producing seed, that doesn't matter very much, though it is nice having some stocks of still semi-sweet new potatoes for recipes that require them.

Got only one seed ball this season, and that was promptly devoured by a tomato hornworm before it ripened.




Other potato famine perspectives, the potato famine that hit Ireland was only the latest of a series of disastrous crop failures which had already almost totally wiped out their cereal grains production, for which the potato had become a stop-gap.

While Ireland was the hardest hit country in Europe, Switzerland was nearly as hard-hit, prompting a mass Swiss emigration to the USA.

Since the Swiss immigrated primarily through the southern ports and quickly dispersed and assimilated into the mainstream population, given the characteristic rural conditions, food surpluses and labor shortages of the antebellum south, there was little tendency for them to accumulate in urban inner city ghettoes as the Irish did in the north.

...and so it was that my patrilineal g'g' grandfather and g'g' grandmother met, both American born children of potato famine immigrants, respectively from Ireland and Switzerland.




...perspectives on sugar beets, mangel-wurzels, as the are also called...

Not bad at all in vegetables Julien, raw they have a flavor and texture like apples.

Not so good baked in a pie.

Cooked, they taste like any other beet.

They're a major agricultural produce item in Imperial County and elsewhere in California.

There's a sugar beet processing facility I occasionally drive by in Imperial county distinguished by the mountain of sugar beet fiber residue grown up on the site.

With refined white sugar I don't much care about the source, so long as its naturally produced, except for the number of carbons with attached water molecules in the carbohydrate chain.

With other kinds of sugar products, source can make a considerable difference.

That's interesting. I didn't know about the Swiss. But it makes sense.

There were Irish immigrants to the rural South as well, but as you said, they kind of blended in. I found anecdotal evidence in old books, though.

The only jokes people told about them were the jokes they told about anybody who came to the area new and didn't have much idea about local conditions.

I don't know where they came from, but when I was a kid in Memphis, our next-door neighbours were Scots, Irish, and Dutch - though how far back wasn't clear. We did have a fair number of people with Dutch names in Memphis.

I heard an interesting analogy recently that compared refined white sugar to cocaine, and not because it is addictive. Cocaine is pharmaceutical grade coca, right? The raw coca leaves have been used for thousands of years in the Andes without addiction or noticeable health problems. Likewise, refined white sugar is pharmaceutical grade sugar cane or sugar beets. And refined white flour is pharmaceutical grade wheat.

Ooops! Drift.

Chewing coca leaves is essential in high altitudes, my brother tells me. He's been there and done it a number of times and claims he never got neither high nor addicted.

Yeah. I just did a Guide Entry on that: A87789992

I agree with both of you. The problem is the supernormal stimulus.

Last I noticed, one could even get coca leaf tea in the USA, once licensed by former Surgeon General Koop, who didn't consider it dangerous, though he did consider refined cocaine extremely dangerous and kept in on the controlled substances list.

Number one hazard with coca leaf tea, it can and will produce a false positive in institutional drug testing.

Coca leaf tea is powerful stimulant, enhances respiratory function at high altitudes.

I would be terrified of modern medicine without cocaine derivatives like novocaine.




On the other hand, I could quite cheerfully see the opium poppy driven to extinction.

There are many much better pain relievers available and better preparations for the digestive system dsorders the drug is also used to treat.

On the other hand, infant death has been reported due to exclusive dependence on synthetic baby formulae without the nataural opioids found in mother's milk, or some reasonable facsimile.