On an Island

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Daniel Defoe is officially credited as the author of 28 titles, but it is likely that he was the author of twice that, if one counts the pamphlets, essays, and other works he published under pseudonyms.

One of his titles keeps his name famous almost three centuries after he published it: Robinson Crusoe. Its full title on its publication in 1719 was longer (ahem): The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.
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Today in History: July 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Pickett’s Charge, the disastrous infantry assault that ended the days-long Battle of Gettysburg, took place on this date in 1863 in southern Pennsylvania.

Having failed to take out the Union forces on either flank, General Robert E. Lee decided to attack the center. General Meade, the leader of the Union forces, correctly predicted this, so he and his troops waited out an artillery barrage that was intended to take out the North’s cannons. The barrage was indeed launched, but it did not damage the Union’s emplacement.

The Confederate forces assembled a mile-wide line of over 12,000 soldiers and began to march towards the Union forces across an open field, who took dead aim as the line advanced. Within an hour, the field was littered with some 7000 Confederate dead or dying, and the Union accepted a truce to allow the survivors to collect the dead and wounded.
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I’m on Fire

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Cooking is not something that I—what’s the word?—ah, yes: “Do.”

One does not live to be 47 without finding some food here and there, so I have eaten a thing or two most of the days I have spent here, and I must have even prepared a meal or a few in order to have made it this far. And I was not left to forage in the woods behind our house when I was growing up; my mom is an excellent and health-conscious cook. Thanks to her early adoption of a low- and sometimes no-salt kitchen, my heart will probably continue beating long after the rest of me has permanently allowed all my subscriptions to lapse.

This is not to say that I do not remember eating or cooking; oh, I do. My cooking is not memorable, though, in either direction: tasty treat or sublime sludge. I almost envy the good writers who are bad cooks (not as much as I envy the non-writers who are good cooks), because at least something interesting comes from their culinary assaults on taste and decency.
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