Saturday Night Mix

 

The Girls In Their Summer Dresses

When the weather turned Thursday and, 2 1/2 months early, summer seemed to settle on Los Angeles, I began to think of Irwin Shaw. Not because Shaw wrote much about Southern California -- although he did do some work here -- but because one of his early stories, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" felt momentarily apropos.

The connection, I'll admit, is a bit tenuous, because "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" is not about summer -- taking place, as it does, in November -- although it does involve weather that is unseasonably warm. Rather, it is about Michael Loomis, a husband with a wandering eye who looks over every woman on Manhattan's lower Fifth Avenue as he and his wife Frances take a Sunday morning stroll.

Originally published in the New Yorker on Feb. 4, 1939, the story has had a long life, probably because it is so taut and well-constructed: barely 3,000 words, mostly dialogue, taking place within the span of an hour or so. Its genius lies in its indirection, the way Shaw manages to withhold, until almost the very end, just exactly what's at stake.    read more:

Story here:

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.  read more:

3-D Wall Murals

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Wax Like a Brazilian

A girl's first bikini wax is much like her first kiss, in that (a) she always wants to tell the story of how it went down, and (b) no one else cares. But I'm going to tell you my bikini wax story anyway. It should be noted, as long as we're going to get intimate, that I am not really a terribly hairy lady to begin with. So the fact that I waited until I was 23 to even notice the existence of bikini waxes as a concept -- let alone get one -- speaks less to any prudishness on my part than it does to a simple lack of necessity. Plus I hadn't really dated anyone who did that gross thing where they say, "It would be cool if you wanted to go bare, you know; it could be fun for both of us." (Yay for dating guys who, on balance, managed to keep their considerable dickishness from spilling over into the pubic-grooming department!) But when I broke up with someone after several years together, one of my friends was like, "You should get a bikini wax. But make sure it's a Brazilian because otherwise why even bother." So I said, "Okay!" (because I was in one of those post-break-up phases where you say "okay!" to literally everything that is presented to you, no matter what), and I did.

At that point, the only person I knew who had ever talked to me about her Brazilian bikini wax was a friend from college who I ran into one day on the street when she was immediately post-wax. She described the experience as "not that bad," mostly because, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I had a glass of white wine first, and I hardly felt a thing." (This is a sentence that turns out to be astonishingly applicable to many things in life.) As a result of that, somehow I'd gotten it into my head that the pre-wax glass of white wine was a necessity, like you legally could not get a wax without it, which was going to be kind of a problem given that I had made a 3pm waxing appointment at a nail salon a few blocks from my office. The good news was that the walk from where I worked to the nail salon involved passing a liquor store, so when I ducked out for what my boss probably thought was an awkwardly late lunch, I went inside and bought a white wine juice box, which is a product I had not previously known existed. but in that moment felt like an actual gift from the hand of God.   read more:

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[ed.  After reading several articles this morning about the debris from the Japan tsunami eventually washing up on West Coast beaches, I realized I didn't know much about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Apparently it's so large and diffuse that there's an Eastern and Western component, and smaller subtropical convergence zones as well.  Millions of tons of garbage slowly circling in gyres, pushed about by large ocean currents]

by Thomas M. Kostigen, Discover Magazine

How trash makes its way to the garbage patch is pretty straightforward. When a plastic cup gets blown off the beach in, say, San Francisco, it gets caught in the California Current, which makes its way down the coast toward Central America. Somewhere off the coast of Mexico it most likely meets the North Equatorial Current, which flows toward Asia. Off the coast of Japan, the Kuroshio Current might swoop it up and yank it eastward again, until the North Pacific Current takes over and carries it past Hawaii to the garbage patch. These are the currents that make up the North Pacific Gyre. Moore says it takes a year for material to reach the Eastern Garbage Patch from Asia and several years for it to get there from the United States. Now multiply that one cup by billions of plastic items over years and years—actually about 60 years, starting after World War II, when we really began to make plastic products en masse.

Marcus Eriksen, Algalita’s director of research and education, has studied that connection between the increasing amount of plastic found in the ocean and the increasing amount of plastic produced: In 1999 there was 0.002 gram of plastic per square meter of ocean in the Eastern Garbage Patch, and as of 2005 there was 0.004 gram per square meter in the same place. In that same period plastic production in North America alone experienced double-digit growth, topping 113 billion pounds in 2006, according to the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council in Arlington, Virginia.

Beyond plastic degradation and its toxic ramifications, other refuse issues ensue. Twenty-mile castaway fishnets snare sea turtles, dolphins, and other animals, endangering their populations; birds mistake trash for food, eat it, and die; jellyfish get sick; gnarly junk washes back to shore—some of it hazardous waste. The Eastern Garbage Patch isn’t just a problem for those living in the middle of the ocean; it’s a problem for those of us who are landbound as well. 

Read more:

Then there's this.  Making lemonade from lemons, or in this case, islands from plastic.

also
NOAA's Marine Debris Fact Sheet
and this previous post on the effects of ocean-borne plastic

Nice Mussels

How to cook delicious mussels

OK, this is the fun part. Mussels have a flavor that's unmistakably oceanic -- salty, briny, minerally. They're not as saline or meaty as clams, not as clear and ringing as oysters, but they're a little earthier, a little down-and-dirtier. And they pair beautifully with anything you can think of that would do well with that salty, earthy bass note.

Earlier, I knocked on the combination of mussels with garlic and shallots, white wine, herbs and butter, but there's a lot to be learned in the basics. You have garlic and shallots (and usually butter or olive oil) as the aromatic base; an acidic liquid to help the steaming and to lighten the flavor; a bunch of fresh herbs towards the end of cooking to add a nice top note, and a finishing stir-in of butter to enrich the broth.

Using this framework, you can start improvising your way to limitless combinations. Basically, if you can imagine a bunch of flavors tasting good together, they will probably be good with mussels. Like a version with leeks or onions (aromatics), bacon (just because) and dark beer (liquid), and finished with a stir-in of crushed or ground nuts for more richness. (And maybe a final splash of malt vinegar or something if it wants a little brightness.)

Steamed mussels
This isn't a recipe so much as a basic method for steaming mussels; please do improvise with different flavor combinations, liquids, finishers, etc. Serve with big hunks of bread, crisp toasts, French fries, rice, pasta or whatever floats your boat. Allow about 1 pound of mussels per person for a main course, or half that for an appetizer.

Ingredients

• Aromatics, sliced or chopped, to taste (garlic, onion, shallots, ginger, lemongrass, chilies, bacon, salami, you name it. Just make sure it's tasty stuff.)
• ½ cup wine, beer, juice or whatever liquid you'd like (use more for a brothier dish, but the mussels themselves will release a lot of juice)
• 2 pounds mussels, cleaned (see above)
• Herbs, chopped (parsley, thyme, rosemary or others) or other delicate flavor additions, to taste (orange zest? A little more raw shallot?)
• Butter, cream, olive oil, ground nuts or other finishing touch to enrich the broth, to taste
• Lemon, vinegar or some other kind of tart flavoring, to taste, if your liquid isn't very bright
• Salt and pepper, to taste (mussels do tend to be salty, so this might not be necessary)

Directions

1. Grab a pan big enough to fit all the mussels comfortably, preferably with a lid. Get it hot over medium heat. Add a touch of butter or oil, and sweat or sauté your aromatics. When they're throwing off delicious smells, add the liquid and turn the heat up to high.
2. When the liquid is boiling, add the mussels all at once, cover the pan, and give it a couple of good, hard shakes. Peek under the lid after about two minutes to see how they're doing. Once they're open, they're cooked. Give the pan another shake, and another after two minutes or so, until all the shells are open. (If there are stubborn stragglers, way behind the rest, just ditch them. They might be dead, and you don't want to overcook the rest of the mussels waiting for the dead to make contact.)
3. Now have a taste of the broth. Season it with salt and pepper if need be, but here's a tip -- when you season, tip the pan and season directly into the broth, and stir it in to dissolve. (Just tossing salt into the pan might get a bunch of it tucked into the mussels' shells, and you won't be able to really tell how seasoned the broth is.)
4. Add your herbs, butter and/or other finishers. Stir or toss to combine everything and emulsify the butter to a creamy sauce, and serve right away.

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All Your Base Are Belong To Us

[ed. note.  man...I don't know how many quarters I dropped on this game in the 70's.  It will always have a special place in my heart]

In an exclusive excerpt from Harold Goldberg’s upcoming book, All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture*, the author tells the story of Atari’s genesis—and how a charismatic dreamer led a gang of merry nerdsters down a path that would ultimately revolutionize the way we play

DEPOSIT QUARTER
BALL WILL SERVE AUTOMATICALLY
AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE
—Instructions seen on the first Pong arcade game, September 1972

Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it.

The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

The story goes this way. After designer Allan Alcorn made Pong’s circuitry and Ted Dabney crafted its case, a lowly sawed-off plastic milk jug was placed inside beneath the coin slot, to collect quarters. Pong was put in a truck and delivered to an anteroom in Capp’s that also included a pinball machine. Then the drunks played. Not only did they play, they lined up to play. Their egos wouldn’t take being beaten by a machine. They fed so many quarters into the slot that the machine jammed up. Then the bar’s usually genial manager, Bill Gattis, phoned Bushnell in a booming voice that carried the length of the bar.

It’s a wonderful creation story for Atari, but it might not be exactly true. Loni Reeder, Bushnell’s longtime assistant, claims the tale was a well-crafted myth. “The Atari guys (and I don’t remember if Nolan personally went over there along with the guys or not) went to Andy Capp’s and stuffed the coin box to the point that the machine wouldn’t work—then just sat back and waited for the bar to call to say the game wasn’t working.” Reeder says the fabrication was completely in keeping with Bushnell’s “carny” personality.

read more: 

* All Your Base Are Belong to Us

Oh My Sweet Carolina

The Pale King

Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace's desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King.

His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he'd been working on it. A lot of people did: a significant fraction of the American reading public had been waiting for a new novel from Wallace ever since 1996, when his monumental Infinite Jest reshaped the skyline of American literature. But she hadn't read it, and she had no idea how much of it he'd managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill. 

Nadell called Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown & Co. and Wallace's longtime editor. He flew out in January and started reading. As it turned out, there was a lot more than just that neat stack. "They brought me literally bins and drawers and wire baskets," Pietsch says. "Just heaps of pages. There was no order to them." He went back to New York City with a duffel bag full of them.

Pietsch spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15. If The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist.

full review:

via:
also
NY Times posthumous appreciation article:

Broiled, Sautéed, Roasted, Poached

The chart on the following page provides ideas for cooking 1½ pounds of white fillet, whether whole or cut into individual portions. None of these recipes take more than half an hour from start to finish; thicker pieces of fish will cook in 15 minutes or less, thinner pieces in under 10. You can tell that any fillet is done when it’s opaque and a thin-bladed knife meets little resistance when you use it to poke the thickest part of the fish.
Cooking white fish is easy. The hard part — besides figuring out what’s sustainable — is choosing the recipe.

1. BROILED

With Tomatoes and Capers 
Set rack 4 inches from heat source. Spread a broiler-safe pan with olive oil. Add fish. Mix 1 pound sliced tomatoes with oil and 2 tablespoons each capers and chopped red onion. Spread over and around fish; broil. Garnish: Chopped parsley and lemon wedges.
Tacos
Skip tomatoes and capers. Rub fish with vegetable oil and a mild chili powder; broil. Meanwhile combine 2 chopped cucumbers, 1/2 cup chopped cilantro, 1 minced hot chili and 2 tablespoons lime juice. Flake fish and serve in warm corn tortillas with cucumber salsa.
Caramelized Fish
Skip tomatoes and capers. Heat a little vegetable oil in pan; dredge fish in a mixture of brown sugar and (lots of) coarse black pepper. Broil carefully; fish will brown quickly. Drizzle with fish sauce. Garnish: Mint (lots), minced chili (optional).

2. SAUTÉED

Cornmeal-Crisped
Cut fish into 4 pieces and soak in 1½ cups buttermilk. Combine 1 cup cornmeal with 1 tablespoon chili powder. Put a large skillet over medium heat; add 1 tablespoon each olive oil and butter. Pull half the fish from buttermilk; drain, then dredge in cornmeal; cook until golden, turning once. Wipe skillet clean, then repeat. Garnish: Lemon and parsley or cilantro.
Classic Sautéed
Skip buttermilk, cornmeal and chili powder. Beat 2 eggs with ¼ cup chopped parsley. Dredge the fish lightly in all-purpose flour, then in egg mixture; cook in butter and oil in two batches. Garnish: Chopped parsley, lemon wedges.
Prosciutto-Wrapped
Skip buttermilk, cornmeal and chili powder. Lay 2 slices of prosciutto, slightly overlapping, on work surface; top with basil leaves. Wrap each piece of fish in prosciutto/basil, then repeat. Cook in oil only in two batches. Garnish: More basil.

3. ROASTED

With Herbs
Heat oven to 475. Put 4 tablespoons butter in an ovenproof pan and place in oven to melt. Add 4 tablespoons chopped herbs (a combo is best — parsley, dill, basil, tarragon, thyme, etc.), then add fish. Roast, turning once. Garnish: The pan juices.
With Potatoes
Skip butter and herbs. Heat oven to 425. Toss 2 pounds sliced new potatoes with ¼ cup olive oil. Roast, turning occasionally, until brown. Add 1 tablespoon chopped sage and 1 teaspoon (or more) minced garlic. Top with fish and 2 tablespoons oil. Roast until fish is done. Garnish: Pan juices.
With Leeks and Bacon
Skip butter and herbs. Toss 4 sliced leeks and 2 ounces chopped bacon (optional) with ¼ cup olive oil. Roast for 10 minutes, then add 1 tablespoon thyme leaves and ½ cup white wine. Roast 20 minutes, then top with fish and 2 tablespoons oil and roast until fish is done. Garnish: More thyme.

4. POACHED

With Ginger and Soy
Put a large, deep skillet over medium heat; add 2 tablespoons vegetable oil and 1 tablespoon minced ginger; cook until sizzling. Add fish, ½ cup soy sauce, 1½ cups water, ½ cup chopped scallions, ½ cup chopped cilantro and a teaspoon rice vinegar. Boil, cover and turn off heat. Fish will be done in about 10 minutes. Garnish: Chopped scallions.
Curried With Zucchini
Sauté 1 chopped onion and 2 chunked zucchini in oil for 5 minutes, then add 1 tablespoon ginger and 1 tablespoon curry powder (or to taste). Cook for a minute, then add fish. Substitute 1 cup coconut milk for soy sauce and use 1 cup water. Skip scallions and vinegar. Garnish: Cilantro.
In Tomato-Fennel Broth
Skip ginger; use olive oil. When oil is hot, add 1 chopped onion and 2 chopped fennel bulbs; cook 5 minutes. Add the fish, a pinch of saffron and 1 tablespoon fennel seeds. Substitute 1 cup diced tomatoes (canned are fine) for soy sauce; use 1 cup water. Skip scallions, cilantro and rice vinegar. Garnish: Chopped fennel fronds.

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Home

Mistakes Were Made

A bitterly divided Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out a jury verdict won by a New Orleans man who spent 14 years on death row and came within weeks of execution because prosecutors had hidden a blood test and other evidence that would have proven his innocence.

The 5-4 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas shielded the New Orleans district attorney's office from being held liable for the mistakes of its prosecutors. The evidence of their misconduct did not prove "deliberate indifference" on the part of then-Dist. Atty. Harry Connick Sr., Thomas said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized her disapproval by reading her dissent in the courtroom, saying the court was shielding a city and its prosecutors from "flagrant" misconduct that nearly cost an innocent man his life.

"John Thompson spent 14 years isolated on death row before the truth came to light," she said. He was innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison and prosecutors had "dishonored" their obligation to present the true facts to the jury, she said.

In 1999, when all his appeals had failed on his conviction for the murder of a hotel executive, Thompson was scheduled to be put to death. But a private investigator hired by his lawyer found a blood test in the police lab that showed the man wanted for a related carjacking had type B blood, while Thompson's was type O.

In rejecting the judgment, Justice Thomas described the case as a "single incident" in which mistakes were made. He said Thompson did not prove a pattern of similar violations that would justify holding the city's government liable for the wrongdoing. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined to form the majority.

However, Thompson's lawyers showed that at least four prosecutors knew about the hidden blood test. They also showed evidence of other, similar cases in New Orleans in which key evidence was concealed from defense lawyers.

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Marching Into History

[ed.  I'd never seen this photo before.  It appears to have been taken moments before another picture; one that would become one of the most searing and enduring images of the Vietnam War ever captured on film]

Iconic photo here:

photo credit:

Not So Foreign Policy

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Shadow Play

Kumi Yamashita

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Adventures in Marketing

Name a snack food that's neon orange and makes a loud crunch when munched.

If you picked Cheetos, the nation's biggest producer of baby carrots wants you to think again.

Just in time for the battle over what's gonna be in millions of back-to-school lunches, Bolthouse Farms and nearly 50 other carrot growers today will unveil plans for the industry's first-ever marketing campaign. The $25 million effort sets its sights on a giant, big-spending rival: junk food.

The $1 billion baby carrot world — hit by the recession following years of growth — is taking on the $18 billion salty snack food industry by trying to beat it at its own hip marketing game.

more:

 Then there's this.

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Heat and Light

by James Kingsland

It's 200 years to the day since the birth of Robert Bunsen, the German chemist famous for inventing the ubiquitous Bunsen burner. But Bunsen's scientific legacy is far, far more important than that – he was one of the most ingenious chemists of the 19th century, whose work led to the discovery of a new element, an antidote for arsenic poisoning and would one day provide clues to the constituents of stars.

For this modest, quiet man, the Bunsen burner was simply a means to an end. Bunsen and his faithful lab assistant Peter Desaga (surely the original Beaker?) needed a very hot, clean flame to pursue their main interest: the characteristic, brightly coloured light emitted by different elements when they are heated. Bunsen was the first person to study these "emission spectra" systematically.

Bunsen and his colleague Gustav Kirchhoff went on to split this light into its constituent wavelengths using a prism, in the process inventing a prototype of today's spectroscopes and founding the brand new scientific field of spectroscopy. They discovered that every element emits a distinctive mix of wavelengths that can be used like a fingerprint to identify its presence.

Bunsen identified the emission spectra of sodium, lithium and potassium. He also detected a previously unseen blue spectral line produced by mineral water which he guessed was being emitted by an unknown element. Having gone to the extraordinary length of distilling 40 tonnes of water to isolate 17 grams of the new element, he called it caesium, meaning "deep blue" in Latin. (As the radioactive isotope caesium-137 – with a half life of around 30 years – it's responsible for the deadly legacy of nuclear accidents like Chernobyl).

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Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage'

by  Robert Krulwich

So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together.

In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.
 
Both sides in the 1960s race to space knew these missions were dangerous. We sometimes forget how dangerous. In January of that same year, 1967, Americans Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside an Apollo capsule.

Two years later, when Americans landed on the moon, the Nixon White House had a just-in-case statement, prepared by speechwriter William Safire, announcing the death of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had they been marooned or killed. Death was not unexpected.

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Christmas Truce

During the First World War, drafts created the armies that were drawn from remarkably similar societies for the first time in modern warfare. Along the Western Front, on both sides there were industrial workers and farm laborers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. For Catholics, Protestants and Jews fighting for separate armies, they sometimes identified more with their religious brethren on the opposing side than with their fellow soldiers.

The soldiers, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians were equally irreverent about what they were supposedly fighting for. Over the longer period of trench warfare, a kind of ‘live and let live’ attitude developed in certain relatively quiet sectors of the line; war was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans. English pacifist Vera Brittain noted about a Scottish and a Saxon regiment that had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a lot of noise and an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. Robert Graves — in his pivotal memoir of the Great War, Goodbye to All That — recollected about letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: “Your little dog has run over to us, and we are keeping it safe here.” Newspapers were fired back and forth in the same fashion. Louis Barthas spent some time in a sector where the Germans and the French fired only six mortar rounds a day, ‘out of courtesy’.

Nothing symbolized this easygoing attitudes more than the informal Christmas truce of 1914, when opposing soldiers in many sectors joined together to sing carols, and exchange Christmas greetings and gifts. Soccer games were played in no man’s land with makeshift balls. Of course, there were some who refused to participate in the truce; among those was a German field messenger named Adolf Hitler, who grumbled, ““Such things should not happen in wartime. Have you Germans no sense of honor left at all?”

At Diksmuide, Belgium, the Belgian and German soldiers famously celebrated Christmas Eve together in 1914, drinking schapps together. One year later, ad hoc ceasefires took place again, this time in northern France. No man’s land was suddenly transformed into ‘a country fair’ as lively bartering began for schnapps, cigarettes, coffee, uniform buttons and other trinkets. More worryingly for their superiors, the soldiers sang the Internationale.

Yet socialist hopes that soldiers would ultimately repudiate their national loyalties for the sake of international brotherhood were proven to be futile. Christmas Truce was almost the last hurrah of a bygone era; as the war went on, mutual hatred grew, expunging the common origins and predicament of the combatants. War, too, has lost its mystique; soon, only fools would celebrate it or enter it with excited patriotic fervor. After August 1914, when thousands of red-trousered Frenchmen and white-gloved officers in full dress and plumes were decimated by German machine guns, France eschewed her pride and switched to neutral-colored service uniforms — the last world power to do so. Soon, there will be no more sabres and Sam Browne belts, no more centuries-old habits of chivalry, no more leaving civilians out of war.

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