Thursday, Dec. 9 -- Frozen Food Day

Clarence Birdseye was born on this day in 1886. He grew up to invent a method of deep-freezing food, and his name continues to adorn packages of frozen vegetables and other edibles in the grocery store.

Of course, his invention would have been useless if someone else hadn't invented the freezer, and if electricity hadn't become commonly available in most American households, and if there weren't a network of roads and railroads on which frozen goods could be transported even at the height of summer.

For me, this frozen food thing is a mixed blessing. You see, I love the taste of canned string beans. But frozen beans taste horrible to me. Nasty. Spit-it-out-now badness.

As a kid, I always thought this was because freezing the beans ruined them. But no. One day I tasted fresh green beans and they were just like the frozen stuff. It was the canning process that transformed the flavor -- from something I hated into something I liked.

(Fortunately, I later discovered haricot verts, a French variety of bean that tastes even better than the canned string beans. Fresh Market usually has haricot verts, and in the summer I grow them in my back yard, so I can have good beans whenever I want.)

And, of course, we can also freeze food ourselves. For instance, we've learned that it's a good idea to overbuy bread or rolls at Great Harvest Bread Company every now and then. We freeze the extras, so that if a week comes along when we miss our Friday bread run (the day they bake challah bread -- it's not just for Jews anymore!), we can thaw the freezer bread and be just fine.

Of course, you have to wait for frozen foods to thaw. And they never seem to thaw as fast as I want them to. Or evenly, for that matter. Ever open a package of frozen corn or peas, only to find that while the outside of the brick is hot, in the middle there's still a frozen lump?

OK, so maybe I'm the only one that happens to.

So many foods are sold in frozen form that it's hard to imagine what it was like when you could only get foods when they were in season -- or in canned form. Slaves to nature, that's what we were! So: Clarence Birdseye, I salute you. You changed the world. It made you rich, but it also enriched our lives.

Puritan poet John Milton was born on this day in 1608. He was active in the English Civil War between the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell and the forces of the King. Cromwell won, the king died, and John Milton went blind and wrote Paradise Lost.

The thing is, I studied Milton in grad school and the scholars who wrote about him were mostly kind of pathetic. They traced every book Milton ever read, or might have read, searching for influences and allusions. But they completely ignored the fact that Milton wrote Paradise Lost as a believer, and he wrote it for believers.

To Puritans, the fall of man in the garden of Eden was the complete explanation for all the suffering and evil in the world. We are fallen, and stand in need of redemption, which comes to us by grace alone, he believed. If you don't understand that, and remember it all the time while reading Paradise Lost, you have no chance of understanding the poem at all.

Nowadays, it seems that scholars and critics simply assume that writers are unbelievers. It's as if disbelief were the orthodoxy of our time. They seem shocked when a writer of fiction or poetry is revealed to be an ardent believer or practitioner of a religion.

I've had interviews with people who were absolutely shocked to realize that I not only grew up a Mormon, but that I still believe in God and Jesus and all that other religion stuff. "But you ... you seem so intelligent in your books," one of them actually said to me.

My answer: "Well, now you've learned something: Intelligent people sometimes believe in God. If you got out more, you might even find out that most people who believe in God are intelligent."

John Milton. Great poet. Ardent Puritan. But now I have a confession to make. I don't like Milton's writing very much. And I think it comes down to this: I think his writing keeps calling attention to itself, distracting from the story that he's supposed to be telling. To me, it's as if he kept getting up on stage in front of the actors and saying, "Did you hear how cleverly I worded that?"

But that's the great secret of literary studies. Just because a writer is great doesn't mean you have any obligation to pretend to like his work. It's just like any other field of work. Yeah, Wayne Gretzky was a great hockey player -- but that doesn't mean I would have liked watching him play hockey, because I don't like watching hockey anyway.

Milton was a great poet, but I'm not giving him another hour of my reading time. I've got other writers that I like better, and new writers whose work I want to explore, so ... Mr. Milton, you've had all of the time I'm going to give you in my whole life. But, congrats on being great, all the same. And happy birthday.

Friday, Dec. 10 -- Dewey Decimal Day

Melvil Dewey was born on this day in 1851, in a world where each library used its own organizing system -- often resulting in chaos.

One library might list all its "biology" books together in alphabetical order.

But which alphabetical order?

By author? How does that help?

By title? Ditto. In many libraries, the librarians held the system in their head. "You need a book that discusses western American lizards? I think Sceloporus g. graciosos is well treated in ... this book right here."

When Melvil Dewey grew up and got control of a library, he devised a rational system that any library could use. Every book was assigned a number. The first digits would assign it to a broad general category, like botany or astronomy or history. Then there'd be a decimal point, and after it you'd have all the divisions of that topic, and the subdivisions, and sub-subdivisions.

Then the books were shelved in numerical order. You could tell instantly where a book was supposed to be reshelved; and when you found the book in a card catalogue, you simply walked to the exact spot where that number was supposed to be, and there it was. Unless some bozo had neglected to return it.

The Dewey Decimal System spread like wildfire and it remains the rule today -- particularly because it can be infinitely expanded. Look on the back of the title page of every book you own, and chances are that most of them have the Dewey Decimal information already there.

It's not the only system. The Library of Congress uses its own numbering method and a few libraries follow that one.

Publishers and booksellers use the ISBN number (International Standard Book Number) to provide a unique identification for every book -- but that one is organized by nation and publishing company.

Dewey didn't stop with libraries. He was an advocate of American adoption of the metric system (we were the first with metric money, the last to hold out against metric everything else).

He advocated spelling reform, too -- as do I. Why are we cursed with one-syllable words like "through" and "though" and "thought," which hold the echoes of pronunciations we haven't used in five centuries? You can't divide them at the end of a line when you're working with narrow columns, and foreigners throw up their hands in despair.

Someday I'm going to persuade one of my publishers to let me spell them "thru" and "tho" and "thot" in my books. Then Dewey and I will be buddies in the afterlife -- because, of course, I'll be killed almost at once by spelling purists.

Emily Dickinson, arguably America's greatest poet, was born on this day in 1830. She was reclusive, mysterious, and frail in health. Cheap modern psychology might diagnose her as severely depressed and pathologically shy.

Seven of her poems were published during her life, but after her death her sister, Lavinia, discovered almost 2,000 more poems written on the backs of envelopes and other scraps of paper locked in her bureau. They were published gradually, over 50 years, beginning in 1890.

Because she used punctuation -- idiosyncratically -- like this with -- dashes wherever she felt like putting -- them, editors generally repunctuated and edited her poems. Only in the past few decades have they been available in their original forms.

Her poems include great passages like:

"Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed."

"If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain."

"Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye."

"Assent, and you are sane; / Demur, -- you're straightway dangerous, / And handled with a chain."

And here's a complete little poem, one of my favorites:

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

Read all her works at http://www.bartleby.com/113/ .

The first Grand Ole Opry broadcast took place on this day in 1927, bringing country music to millions and fame and wealth to the stars the show created.

Saturday, Dec. 11 -- International Shareware Day

On Shareware Day, take time to reward the efforts of thousands of computer programmers who trust that if we try their programs for free, and like them, we will pay for them.

Look at your PC or Mac and see if you're using any shareware. If you like it and use it, and haven't yet paid for it, write that check and send it to the creator of the program. Or if you have the stripped-down free version, get online and buy the full program.

Do that enough, and great shareware will keep on coming.

On my computers, I'm using the best wallpaper-rotation software I've found, WallMaster. Actually, I pay for WallMaster Pro on every computer I control, so I cycle through several thousand photos and artworks on my desktop, changing every ten minutes.

I also use Virtual CD, by H+H Software, a German company. It allows me to copy some CDs onto my hard drive so that they're present to allow commercial software to run properly without having to carry around the actual CD. I also use it to create CDs from overprotected music files; then I "rip" the virtual CD to create unprotected .MP3s, so I can copy them to the other computers I use without having to ask anyone's permission.

I also use NoteWhen, from PC Magazine's free utilities -- it creates sticky notes on my desktop, which I can hide or reveal at will.

Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader, Apple Quicktime and iTunes -- these are also provided free, and because of that they have become ubiquitous.

So yes, there are software packages that cost an arm and a leg. But there are also terrific programs that you can use for free. But if they have a payment option, go ahead and plunk down the money.

This is the National Day of the Horse. Horses aren't the only animals that have worked for us. We've reshaped dogs -- our first domesticated animal companion -- so thoroughly that their brains really have become more humanlike than the other canine species.

Oxen, camels, dromedaries, llamas, donkeys -- they've served us well, carrying our burdens, pulling our wagons and chariots, and, when needed, carrying us.

Horses, though, have a level of speed and strength that makes them the Porsche or Lexus of four-footed beasts. The trouble was, we couldn't use them to pull our carts for a long time, because of the way their bodies are arranged.

They carry their heads high, so we can't rest a yoke across their necks. We can't run a tight strap across their chests because we cut off their air. Not until we invented the horse collar, a rigid but padded frame that rides in front of their shoulders but doesn't put a bar across their neck or chest, were we able to use them to pull anything heavy.

Horses carried soldiers into combat early on -- but only archers could fight from horseback (that's what the "Parthian shot" was all about). If you struck at someone with lance or saber while going at full gallop, the impact would knock you from the horse's back.

It took the invention of the stirrup to give riders a way to brace themselves against impact -- basically, to give them a place to stand. Until the stirrup spread across Europe late in the first millennium ce, soldiers would ride horses into battle, then dismount so they could fight.

Then, in the 1900s, cars swept horses off the road. Not literally, of course. But cars were cleaner and cheaper to operate. You didn't have to feed the car when you weren't using it. The car might pollute the air, but it didn't poop in the street. The car didn't get sick. Horses found out what it felt like to be replaced by machines about the same time people did.

Still, horses are noble animals, and riding a horse gives you a sense of partnership that no car can ever give. If you've never ridden a horse, go to a good riding stable; even one of their more placid animals gives you a notion of what top-of-the-line transportation used to be like.

And if you get serious about it, you can take lessons and learn to ride the more spirited animals. To ride a running horse -- if you know how to do it -- is glorious.

Of course, horses don't necessarily like you as their rider. The smart ones know that if they gallop under low-hanging branches, they no longer have to worry about some human on their backs.

Sunday, Dec. 12 -- Poinsettia Day

Joel Roberts Poinsett, the American diplomat who brought to America the Central American plant that is named for him, died on this day in 1851. Poinsett was a physician, a botanist, and an American statesman who served in Congress and as secretary of war.

On this day in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to the Florida State Supreme Court's attempt to steal the presidential election for Al Gore by allowing a selective recount of Gore-friendly districts in Florida to continue.

The Florida court had flouted their own state's laws in order to get the desired outcome in a national election. Even though the Leftist media painted the U.S. Supreme Court decision as "handing the election to Bush," all they did was stop the Florida court from illegally handing the election to Gore.

It all began with the news media, of course. Against their own announced rules, the TV networks called the election when the polls were still open in the largely conservative Florida panhandle, which (as expected) suppressed the vote in the most Republican part of the state. That's the only reason the election was even close enough for Gore to try to steal it.

Yet despite all the machinations of Richard Daly's Chicago-trained election-stealing squad, there was no recount that actually gave Gore a majority in Florida. Bush won the state, and deserved to have its electoral votes. The Supreme Court essentially said, You can't change the rules after the game is over, just because you think the wrong team won.

Monday, Dec. 13 -- Korean War Day

The islands now called New Zealand were first sighted by Europeans on this day in 1642. Captain Abel Tasman of the Dutch East India Company first sighted New Zealand, but was kept from landing by Maori warriors. In 1769 Captain James Cook landed and claimed formal possession for Great Britain. The Maoris later concluded that they had been right the first time, but by then it was too late to get rid of the English.

The Korean War came to a sluggish end on this day in ... 1991?

The largescale fighting ended in 1953, when a ceasefire was signed and POWs were returned. But officially the war was still ongoing, and both sides remained heavily militarized until the signing, 38 years later, of a treaty of "reconciliation and nonaggression" between North and South Korea, formally ending the war.

Recent events, however, show that whenever the clowns who have set themselves up as little tin gods in the North want to, the fighting can resume. Only now they have nukes.

Tuesday, Dec. 14 -- South Pole Day

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole on this day in 1911 -- what was a week before midsummer in that hemisphere. Amundsen was accompanied by four other men and 52 sled dogs. All five men and 12 of the dogs returned to their base camp safely.

A month later, Robert F. Scott's British expedition reached the pole on 17 January 1912. His entire expedition died on the return trip. This was neither the end of the British Empire nor the beginning of a Norwegian Empire. In fact, its significance was entirely social: Look, humans did this hard thing!

And it was a hard thing. The South Pole is the harshest environment on Earth. I guess that's why the aliens hid their giant spaceship under the ice there -- they knew we wouldn't find it and dig it up until it was too late.

Wednesday, Dec. 15 -- Bill of Rights Day

The first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, became effective following ratification by Virginia on this day in 1791. Until these amendments were added, the Constitution had been little more than the organizing document for the federal government; with the passage of the Bill of Rights, it also became the guarantor of freedom from federal overreaching.

Sadly, these rights only last as long as the courts and other branches of government respect them. The First Amendment, which requires that there be no law impeding the "free exercise of religion," is in the process of being moved into the dustbin of history. Going, going, ...

Davy Crockett premiered as five segments of Walt Disney's Disneyland show, starting on this day in 1954 -- arguably the first miniseries. It starred Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, a self-promoting Congressman who created his own extravagant legend and then died at the Alamo. The real Crockett never wore a coonskin cap, but the TV version did, and so kids all over America were wearing them for a while.

I can still sing the theme song: "Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, / Greenest state in the land of the free, / Raised in the woods so he knew every tree, / Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three: Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the wild frontier!"

That's pretty good, considering I'm working from memory -- and the show was broadcast when I was only three!

The movie version of Gone with the Wind premiered on this day in Atlanta in 1939. If you don't know why it premiered in Atlanta, you really need to see the movie or read the book. (The movie is good; the book is better ... but longer.)

In real dollars, GWTW remained the top money-making film of all time for many years. It also won an unprecedented eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Hattie McDaniel, who played "Mammy," won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar -- the first time an African-American actor had won or even been nominated.

African-American actors Ethel Waters (1949), Dorothy Dandridge (1954), Sidney Poitier (1958), and Juanita Moore (1959) were nominated, but the next Oscar win for an African-American was Poitier's Best Actor award in 1963 for Lilies of the Field, 24 years after Hattie McDaniel's Oscar.