Quality assessment:
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the planned points to reasonable length, from a writing plan which itself was rather light in substance.
Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the planned points to reasonable length, from a writing plan which itself was rather light in substance.
Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.
- 20170921T1922Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose, adding also some material on a Persian salad, and on Ryvita. - He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented version 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... , .
- 20170921T0300Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time and strength (he had suffered an attack of depression, delaying his work) to upload a fully polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this into coherent full-sentences prose by UTC=20170921T1600Z.
[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]
My latest scheduled day off, the Sunday which was 2017-09-17, was in various ways unexpectedly happy. I took a photo, uploaded to the top of this blog, to document a part of the day.
The left part of the photo records the fact that I received, to my surprise, the gift of an authentic Iranian meal. In the smaller of the two bowls is a dish of meat and beans, with strong spices (possibly including mint).
This unexpectedly happy experience reminds me of a similarly unexpected, and similarly happy, meal in Singapore, back in 1987.
In 1985, at the start of my two-year appointment, the National University of Singapore assigned me a two-bedroom flat, with balcony, on the far side of Kent Ridge from the University. My digs were in a big compound, or in Soviet-Estonian terminology mikrorajoon, of low-rise buildings once held by the British military (perhaps from some point in the early postwar era up to the 1960s independence of Singapore). Those various buildings, scattered on and beside lush lawns, were named after British victories and British defeats, with easily readable big-letter plaques near their various entrances. Fortunately, nobody had thought to remove the signage, which by the 1980s had become historic in a wonderfully Sir-Noël Coward, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen", sense. Somewhere in that compound of former officers' quarters was a "Quebec". (I do not know if its plaque was meant to refer to the offensive operation of 1759, in which the British prevailed over the colonial French (some of us will rather regret this), or instead to the defensive operation of 1775, in which the French and their new British rulers jointly prevailed over the incoming Americans.) I, however, lived not in "Quebec" - no matter how you interpreted that particular name plaque, "Quebec" did count, for good or ill, as a British victory - but in something less triumphalist, "Gallipoli".
I have never before lived, and I presume I shall never again live, in such a mixture of mild discomfort and colonial-era luxury as "Gallipoli" afforded to its four or six or eight (or thereabouts) flat-dwellers. Some of the windows in my particular flat, or perhaps my long balcony, overlooked a grassy slope leading down to the Singapore-Kuala Lumpur railway. My flat had two furnished bedrooms, one of them large. The flat had also a furnished sitting-dining room, and a kitchen, and a door to the front stairs, and a door to the back stairs. On those back stairs, perhaps across a small landing from my flat proper, was even a bit of Servant Accommodation, in the form of an "Amah Room".
From this it was, to be sure, evident how the unsatisfactory the departed British military could be in their attitude toward their locally recruited domestic staff. The "Amah Room" was equipped with an adjacent cold-water shower and classic-Asian porcelain squat toilet, and yet lacked hot water. Further, the "Amah Room" had no windows to the lawns outside,. Finally, what was bad to the point of horror was that details of life in this cramped "Room" had been open to immediate inspection by the supervising British household, since its walls were of mere wire mesh - making it in fact less "Room", in the accepted civilized sense of that word, than cage.
In this room-or-cage-or-prison-cell on my back stair there eventually lived a National University of Singapore engineering student, seeking accommodation, and happy enough to get it from me for free. Once he moved in, I largely ignored him, and he for his part kept a low profile - except that on infrequent occasions he would politely ask for permission to use my telephone, for chatting with his Mum, up in Malaysia. I did manage to learn that he was interested in microprocessors, and was doing some kind of project work with an 8-bit workhorse of the day, the Zilog Z-80.
So much for life on the back stairs.
One fine morning, on the other hand, at 7.40 or so, as I was preparing to rush off to the university, there came a knock from the more respectable front stairs. This visitor proved to be not an engineering student from Malaysia but a rather diminutive Malay lady, of an uncertain age and with a rather tottering English, equipped with an ancient letter of reference from the now-long-departed British military. (The British letter writer, in what some might consider a fussy spirit, said that whereas she was wonderful with children, she should on no account be encouraged to cook. Since her English was shaky, I think she was in the happy position of not having read that frank letter.)
"Sir want part-time Amah?" she asked.
In 1985, at the start of my two-year appointment, the National University of Singapore assigned me a two-bedroom flat, with balcony, on the far side of Kent Ridge from the University. My digs were in a big compound, or in Soviet-Estonian terminology mikrorajoon, of low-rise buildings once held by the British military (perhaps from some point in the early postwar era up to the 1960s independence of Singapore). Those various buildings, scattered on and beside lush lawns, were named after British victories and British defeats, with easily readable big-letter plaques near their various entrances. Fortunately, nobody had thought to remove the signage, which by the 1980s had become historic in a wonderfully Sir-Noël Coward, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen", sense. Somewhere in that compound of former officers' quarters was a "Quebec". (I do not know if its plaque was meant to refer to the offensive operation of 1759, in which the British prevailed over the colonial French (some of us will rather regret this), or instead to the defensive operation of 1775, in which the French and their new British rulers jointly prevailed over the incoming Americans.) I, however, lived not in "Quebec" - no matter how you interpreted that particular name plaque, "Quebec" did count, for good or ill, as a British victory - but in something less triumphalist, "Gallipoli".
I have never before lived, and I presume I shall never again live, in such a mixture of mild discomfort and colonial-era luxury as "Gallipoli" afforded to its four or six or eight (or thereabouts) flat-dwellers. Some of the windows in my particular flat, or perhaps my long balcony, overlooked a grassy slope leading down to the Singapore-Kuala Lumpur railway. My flat had two furnished bedrooms, one of them large. The flat had also a furnished sitting-dining room, and a kitchen, and a door to the front stairs, and a door to the back stairs. On those back stairs, perhaps across a small landing from my flat proper, was even a bit of Servant Accommodation, in the form of an "Amah Room".
From this it was, to be sure, evident how the unsatisfactory the departed British military could be in their attitude toward their locally recruited domestic staff. The "Amah Room" was equipped with an adjacent cold-water shower and classic-Asian porcelain squat toilet, and yet lacked hot water. Further, the "Amah Room" had no windows to the lawns outside,. Finally, what was bad to the point of horror was that details of life in this cramped "Room" had been open to immediate inspection by the supervising British household, since its walls were of mere wire mesh - making it in fact less "Room", in the accepted civilized sense of that word, than cage.
In this room-or-cage-or-prison-cell on my back stair there eventually lived a National University of Singapore engineering student, seeking accommodation, and happy enough to get it from me for free. Once he moved in, I largely ignored him, and he for his part kept a low profile - except that on infrequent occasions he would politely ask for permission to use my telephone, for chatting with his Mum, up in Malaysia. I did manage to learn that he was interested in microprocessors, and was doing some kind of project work with an 8-bit workhorse of the day, the Zilog Z-80.
So much for life on the back stairs.
One fine morning, on the other hand, at 7.40 or so, as I was preparing to rush off to the university, there came a knock from the more respectable front stairs. This visitor proved to be not an engineering student from Malaysia but a rather diminutive Malay lady, of an uncertain age and with a rather tottering English, equipped with an ancient letter of reference from the now-long-departed British military. (The British letter writer, in what some might consider a fussy spirit, said that whereas she was wonderful with children, she should on no account be encouraged to cook. Since her English was shaky, I think she was in the happy position of not having read that frank letter.)
"Sir want part-time Amah?" she asked.
Being in a hurry to get to campus, I felt I needed a part-time Amah to the exact same extent that I needed, at that hurried point in the working morning, trepanning of the skull. Nevertheless, I kept my composure, taking the view that supplying what she was unexpectedly seeking of me might count for Good Karma - being in an adequately plausible accounting (so I hastily figured it) a type of Foreign Aid. So we quickly agreed on our commercial terms, with her compensation pitched by me 20 percent or 30 percent higher than the going local part-time (non-residential) Amah rate.
Upon starting her duties - these involved one day of cleaning and washing per week, and so I bought a modest washing machine when she started - Mrs S____ proved helpful to the point of becoming a lifeline. Without her, I would have been hard pressed to figure out how to deal with the unfamiliar tropics. Without her, in particular, I would not have known how important it is in a tropical colonial-epoch luxury flat with ceiling fans, as opposed to modern in-window refrigerating units, to air all the bed-linens, on a line strung along one's balcony, weekly - I think including even linens from storage. If my recall is accurate, I gathered somehow, with her help, that should you rashly keep your unused linens folded up in a closet in Singapore, in the absence of modern air conditioning, they are liable to grow mould.
Our happy relationship lasted right up to my 1987 departure from Singapore. At one point in our two years together, I was even invited to a wedding in Mrs S____'s family - bride and groom resplendent on a pair of thrones, as was the local Islamic custom; and an egg, or something similar, given to each guest in a gilt-wire frame, as again must have been the local Islamic custom. (I perhaps still have this frame, minus its (as I now think, edible) contents.) A little knot of Western guests, I among them, took in the joyous proceedings rather stoically, huddled together in the poker-faced resignation of Victorian anthropologists.
On the last day of her service, in 1987, Mrs S____ to my astonishment brought hot "tiffin", in a "tiffin carrier".
The Imperial jargon of "tiffin" seems to me to have spread widely enough, at any rate over the many outposts which lay east of Suez. Viewers of the film Carry on up the Khyber will recall Sir Sidney Rough-Diamond, on of course the Indian subcontinent, hastening to a meeting with a local potentate, "The Khazi" (here I quote loosely, and from memory, sorry):
Our happy relationship lasted right up to my 1987 departure from Singapore. At one point in our two years together, I was even invited to a wedding in Mrs S____'s family - bride and groom resplendent on a pair of thrones, as was the local Islamic custom; and an egg, or something similar, given to each guest in a gilt-wire frame, as again must have been the local Islamic custom. (I perhaps still have this frame, minus its (as I now think, edible) contents.) A little knot of Western guests, I among them, took in the joyous proceedings rather stoically, huddled together in the poker-faced resignation of Victorian anthropologists.
On the last day of her service, in 1987, Mrs S____ to my astonishment brought hot "tiffin", in a "tiffin carrier".
The Imperial jargon of "tiffin" seems to me to have spread widely enough, at any rate over the many outposts which lay east of Suez. Viewers of the film Carry on up the Khyber will recall Sir Sidney Rough-Diamond, on of course the Indian subcontinent, hastening to a meeting with a local potentate, "The Khazi" (here I quote loosely, and from memory, sorry):
Sir Sidney [to his wife]: Can't stop, darling. Urgent business. Must go to The Khazi.
Lady Rough-Diamond [misunderstanding him: although he is in Queen Vicky's diplomatic service, she is not]: Well, you should have gone earlier. We're all sitting down to tiffin. It's Very Rude.
In Singapore, a "Tiffin Carrier" was in 1987, and perhaps still is now, thirty years later, an imposing set of three or four or five (or so) metal canisters, accommodating enough rice for a family (with also multiple stews, such as stroganoffs or curries), and held together as a stack with a frame-cum-handle in suitably light metal. Mrs S____ had lovingly prepared a huge, hot, tiffin, and had packed its several components into the several canisters of her Carrier, and had then taken the bus from her own digs down to my digs. This was some considerable distance, amounting to possibly four or five or six kilometres.
At this point, it is necessary to add that the Singapore Archdiocese, at least in 1987, could be tediously strict. Mrs S____'s last day happened to be a Friday. For some local ecclesial reason, it was normally forbidden for Singapore Catholics to eat meat on a Friday. So the situation with her big, hot Tiffin Carrier could have played out badly. I hope I would have had the presence of mind to take the diplomatically correct decision - namely, to eat the various meat dishes from the Carrier in Mrs S____'s presence with boisterous relish, and then in due course to bring the matter up - I mean to say, to mention the matter - to the priest at Confession.
As extraordinary as this coincidence will appear to the reader, however, that particular Friday happened in formal ecclesial terms to coincide with the Feast of Saint Anne. We had been told from the pulpit, quite explicitly, at any rate in my own local parish, earlier in that week or fortnight, that it would be fine to consume meat on the Friday of the Feast.
So on consuming last Sunday's unexpected gift of an authentic Iranian, or Persian, supper, I was at once transported to that memorable Singapore Tiffin Carrier from a Friday in 1987, on the so-providentially coincident Feast of Saint Anne. Although Persian and Straits Malay culinary traditions are bound to differ, to my untutored palate the respective experiences, in 2017 and 1987, were identical, and identically delicious.
****
I proceed now to the other half of my photo.
On the right half can be seen the McIntosh apples which I purchased from the local downtown-Richmond Hill farmers' market a few hours before the surprise of the Iranian supper - in fact from the same table as I showed toward the end of my posting from 2017-09-11 or 2017-09-12, under the heading "Toomas Karmo quoting also Pius XII: Theology of Farming, and Our Local Farmers' Market".
Upon checking with Zach at the Sunday table, I was able to confirm that his McIntoshes were of known provenance, having in fact come from his own landlord's orchard.
What was chiefly important about them (and can already be guessed from their appearance in my photo) was their freedom from chemical manipulation.
It is one thing to spray or coat fruit, as a cosmetic measure, with fungicides and other "preparations". One might recall the late, unlamented 1930s German Reich, where food could be remarkably artificial - the seeming sausage, pastries, and butter at tiffin in August-of-1939 Berlin, for instance, I gather being in reality liable to be Präparate from codfish - das Präprat, die Präparate, I think; and ich präpariere = "I am preparing/am concocoting." (I gather from the dictionary that one can also say ich präpariere in the anatomy lab, upon slitting the frog's abdominal musculature with scalpel, as formaldehyde fumes rise from one's nasty little wax tray.)
One might recall also the term препарат, or "preparation", in classical administrative Russian. It has, for instance, been suggested that Uncle Joe got polished off by some colleagues in March of 1953, with a warfarin препарат. Included in, or even central to, the operation may have been a cosy little tiffin-for-five, at which Uncle Joe had as his table companions Beria, Bulganin, Khrushchev, and Malenkov. Part of the suggestion is that people were getting a bit worried over Uncle Joe, feeling that he might be now rashly contemplating a war with Uncle Sam: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/world/new-study-supports-idea-stalin-was-poisoned.html?mcubz=3. (The 2003-03-05 New York "Old Gray Lady" scribe, Michael Wines, cites historians Vladimir P.Naumov in Russia and Jonathan Brent at Yale.)
It is a different, and in the opinion of some of us a preferable, thing to grow apples without "preparations", or препаратн, at whatever cost to the appearance of the fruit. When the farmers' market closes down after 2017-10-01, some of us will therefore be awaiting its spring-of-2018 return with impatience.
****
My story about Sunday has a small
sequel. On Wednesday evening, I was unexpectedly given a cold Iranian
salad, the remains of which proved specially delicious at Thursday lunch when combined
with an avocado pear and two slices of rye crispbread:
This is the bread sold in our local WalMart, here in Richmond Hill, Ontario, under the brand name "Ryvita". Here is what I find printed on the package:
INGREDIENTS:
WHOLE GRAIN RYE FLOUR, SALT.
CONTAINS: RYE.
There are also a few lines of legal boilerplate as a supplementary "MAY CONTAIN:" list. The list indicates that there may be trace quantities of oats, wheat, sesame seeds, and soy. Those minute quantities, however, surely do not belong to the bread recipe, but instead reflect the varying uses of machinery in the factory - the packaging indicates that this is somewhere out in Bedfordshire - as different products come off the production line.
The so-short "INGREDIENTS:" list shows Ryvita to be a bakery equivalent of Zach's McIntosh apples. Here, as with his apples, we have food free of препаратн. It is of course environmentally irresponsible for Ontario consumers to buy food baked in Bedforshire, and shipped over the Atlantic with much emission of greenhouse gas. But if all that goes into the product - so delicious with a Persian salad - is rye flour and salt, it must be possible even for clumsy, ageing, autistic, depression-afflicted, and visually impaired people, like me, to try baking it themselves. I now dream of small environmentally responsible experiments, at first just with electric oven, and with a little bag of rye flour from the fancy-cereal shelf at one of our local big-box stores, misleadingly named "Food Basics". If I make any progress over the coming months, I would hope to report it on this blog.
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]
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