June 2012
15 posts
Where'd all the Chop Suey go?
Chop suey (literally “assorted pieces”) is a Chinese dish consisting of meat and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery and bound in a starch-thickened sauce. Through the first half of the 20th century Chop suey was a prominent part of American Chinese cuisine. The profits from chop suey supported many Chinese-Americans through times of racism and oppression, sent their children to college, and energized competitive innovations in food and new restaurant practices that spanned the globe. Chop suey was in fact the entry drug for many who got their first glimpse of new food horizons.
Unfortunately, the age of Chop Suey is over. At some point Westerners decided it was to unauthentic, and shifted their attention to the now popular “Mandarin Cuisine” that includes such cultural classics as Lemon Chicken, Hot and Sour Soup and Kung Pao everything.
Chop suey is widely believed to have been invented in America by Chinese immigrants, but in fact comes from Toisan, a district of Guangdong Province (Canton), which was the home of many of the early Chinese immigrants to the U.S.
Despite its Taishan (Toisan) background, there are various colorful stories about its origin, which Davidson (1999) characterizes as “culinary mythology”: Some say it was invented by Chinese immigrant cooks working on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. Another story is that it was invented during Qing Dynasty premier Li Hongzhang’s visit to the United States in 1896 by his chef, who tried to create a dish suitable for both Chinese and American palates. Yet another myth is that, in the 1860s, a Chinese restaurant cook in San Francisco was forced to serve something to drunken miners after hours, when he had no fresh food. To avoid a beating, the cook threw leftovers in a wok and served the miners who loved it and asked what dish is this—he replied Chopped Sui.
During his exile in the United States, Liang Qichao, a Guangdong (Canton) native, wrote in 1903 that there existed in the United States a food item called chop suey which was popularly served by Chinese restaurateurs, but which local Chinese people did not eat.
The beginning of the end came in 1945 when the first major Chinese cookbook was published in America. Buwei Yang Chao’s “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” gave elegant and effective recipes, and completely disregarded chop suey. After the war, the mass popularity of chop suey led to a loss of glamour. Chop suey was now American, and when authenticity became the test, the shoe no longer fit.
The immigration reforms of 1965 meant that chefs from Hong Kong and Taiwan could come in greater numbers, and an audience of Chinese eaters soon immigrated with them. In 1972, Richard Nixon went to shake hands with Zhou Enlai in Beijing and got chopstick lessons. When the president ate Peking duck, the original set of American Cantonese dishes were erased from the menu. Thus the end of Chop Suey.
How Did America Get Its Dollar Bill?
During the opening year of the Civil War, 1861, the Union army ran gigantic expenses, far beyond the ability of the government to pay out of its meager tax receipts. So, Congress authorized President Lincoln’s government to issue $50 million worth of Treasury notes to pay soldiers and arms suppliers and the rest.
Early on, those notes were supposedly exchangeable for silver or gold. But it soon became obvious there was no way Washington could turn all of those notes into precious metals. So in 1862, President Lincoln’s aides created a new note, the “green-back,” in denominations of $5, $10, $20 and up, with an appearance not remarkably different from today’s dollar bills.
Greenbacks were significantly different from the 1861 notes. These earlier notes promised they were convertible into coins. The greenback simply said “This note is a legal tender.” It was fiat money - money because the government said it was money. It worked. People accepted greenbacks, even though the government would not exchange them for precious metals. The fact that the Union won the war almost certainly had a bearing on that.
The Economy of Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a leading world center of business, international trade, culture, media, fashion, science, sports, technology, and education, and has been ranked the third richest city and sixth most powerful and influential city in the world. As the home base of Hollywood, it is also leads the world in the creation of film, television, video games, and recorded music.
The contiguous ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together comprise the fifth-busiest port in the world and the most significant port in the Western Hemisphere, vital to trade within the Pacific Rim. The city is also the largest manufacturing center in the western United States with a focus on aerospace, technology, petroleum and apparel.
The Los Angeles combined statistical area has a gross metropolitan product of $831 billion making it the third largest economic center in the world, after the Greater Tokyo and New York metropolitan areas. If Los Angeles was an independent country, it would be ranked in between South Korea and the Netherlands as the 16th largest economy in the world.
From The Knight Frank Global Cities Survey 2011
The Generational Impact of Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton’s work involves children’s adventure stories, and fantasy. She is best known for her Noddy books, as well as the young adult serials Famous Five, and Secret Seven. The modern editions of her books are said to be written from a middle-class perspective, containing heavy morals and strong purpose. Interestingly, almost all of her texts have required heavy editing since the 1960s in order to keep pace with social norms and values.
Taken from a modern perspective Blyton’s original work is heavily prejudice in its presentation of class, gender and racial issues. The girls of her stories are confined to judgement of the their male counterparts, and almost all minorities and coloured characters are resigned to harmful and ignorant stereotypes.
In modern editions of her book The Three Golliwogs the Golliwogs names are Wiggie, Waggie and Wollie. In the original edition, as written by Blyton in 1944 the main characters are called Golly, Woggie and Nigger. Similarly disturbing are recurring colloquial statements like “black as a nigger with soot” that appear in several of her Famous Five novels. This type of language was one of the most obvious targets for alteration in modern reprints, along with the replacement of golliwogs with teddy bears or goblins.
“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. Unfortunately our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way. I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgements. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.”
—Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
Canada is the Best G20 Country to be a Woman
According to a recent poll by the Reuters Foundation Canada is leading the G20 pack when it comes to the best country to be a woman. There’s a huge disparity between the best and the worst countries in terms of health care, equality and ending gender-based violence.
Hydrogen Peroxide and You
Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a clear liquid, slightly more viscous than water, which, in dilute solutions, it appears colourless. The oxidizing capacity of hydrogen peroxide is so strong that it is considered a highly reactive oxygen species. Hydrogen peroxide is therefore used as a propellant in rocketry. In diluted concentrations hydrogen peroxide is also a useful and inexpensive bleaching and cleaning agent.
Here is a list of fourteen wonderful uses for Hydrogen Peroxide:
1. Whiten Your White Laundry
Pour in a cup of hydrogen peroxide into a washer load of white laundry instead of chlorine bleach and it will whiten your clothes. Don’t pour it directly on your clothes. It can fade out the color just like bleach does!
2. Sanitize Household Surfaces
Mix up a 50/50 solution of hydrogen peroxide and tap water and pour it into a spray bottle. Use it to sanitize your kitchen counter tops, clean appliances and help keep your kitchen germ-free.
4. Bleach Your Hair
Diluted H2O2 (between 3% and 8%) is used to bleach human hair when mixed with ammonium hydroxide, hence the phrase “peroxide blonde”.
5. Make a Homemade Tooth Whitener
Swish a teaspoon full of 3% strength hydrogen peroxide in your mouth for five to ten minutes every day. It will kill harmful germs and bacteria. It will also act as a homemade tooth whitener!
6. Help Houseplants Grow Healthier
Mix up an ounce of hydrogen peroxide into a cup of water and spray your houseplants with this solution. It will help your houseplants grow greener and more lush.
7. Clean Up Cuts
Hydrogen Peroxide is useful for disinfecting wounds and to stop superficial bleeding. It is also effective at treating fresh blood-stains in clothing and on other items.
8. Remove Harmful Pesticides From Fruits and Veggies
Pour a fourth of a cup of hydrogen peroxide into a sink of cold tap water. Place your fruits and veggies in the solution and wash them off well. Then, rinse each piece off with tap water and dry.
9. Clear Up Skin Acne
Use a clean cotton ball to generously dab straight hydrogen peroxide onto skin acne two or three time a day. The peroxide will dry the problem up in no time at all.
10. Remove Waxy Build Up From Your Ears
Tilt your head and use an eye dropper to put three or four drops of hydrogen peroxide into the ear that has the waxy build up. Let it set for several minutes. Then, use a syringe and flush your ear out carefully with warm water. Dry your ear with a soft, clean cloth.
11. Keep Your Pet Fish Alive
Laboratory tests conducted by fish culturists in recent years have demonstrated that common household hydrogen peroxide can be used safely to provide oxygen for small fish. Hydrogen peroxide releases oxygen by decomposition when it is exposed tocatalysts such as manganese dioxide.
12. Control Sulphide in your Wastewater Treatment System
Hydrogen peroxide oxidizes the hydrogen sulfide and promotes bio-oxidation of organic odors. Hydrogen peroxide decomposes to oxygen and water, adding dissolved oxygen to the system, thereby negating some Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD).
13. Remove the Smell of Skunk
Mixed with baking soda and a small amount of hand soap, hydrogen peroxide is effective at removing skunk odor.
14. Etch on Your Circuit Board
Hydrogen peroxide can be combined with vinegar and table salt to form a substitute for industrial chemicals such as ferric chloride, ammonium persulfate, or hydrochloric acid as a hobbyist’s printed circuit board etchant.
Turkey tries out soft power in Somalia
In a sprawl of plastic refugee shelters and mortar-blasted buildings in Mogadishu, a mud-caked Turkish engineering team monitors the drilling of a new borehole while their armed guards chat lazily under a tree, guns across laps. These government contractors are on the frontline of a huge Turkish development effort in one of the world’s most dangerous cities - one which U.N. agencies and international charities prefer to deal with from the safety of neighboring Kenya.
Across the Somali capital, a bombed-out shell after two decades of fighting, residents say Turkey has done more in eight months to shatter the perception that Mogadishu is a no-go zone than the international community has achieved in twenty years.
“Our government likes to help anyone in crisis so we came here without thinking anything,” said the lead engineer, Mehmet, who asked Reuters to use a pseudonym because government employees are not authorized to talk to the media without permission.
The retreat of al Qaeda-linked rebels from the city in August ended the daily street battles and shelling between the militants and African troops, and offered a rare chance to ramp up aid as a famine gripped central and southern Somalia. Some 500 Turkish relief workers and volunteers poured into Mogadishu’s bullet-scarred wastelands, unleashing a wave of humanitarian aid as the militants struck back with a string of suicide bombings and roadside blasts.
“Of course it is dangerous but we don’t think about those things. Inshallah, nothing has happened to us. If we are afraid, we can’t operate,” the engineer said.
Turkish flags - white crescent moon and star on red background - flutter in the coastal breeze and billboards marking out Turkish reconstruction projects dot the capital, where potholed streets are lined by rubble-strewn ruins and mountains of garbage. Turkey’s “Arab Spring” forays into Middle Eastern diplomacy, have drawn much attention on the international stage. Its launch into Africa, however, has gone little noticed by a world more focused on China’s involvement in the sub-Saharan region. A hotspot in the U.S.-led war against militant Islam, Somalia offers Ankara an opportunity to bolster its image as a soft power on the global stage.
