I’m on the road this weekend, visiting some of my old stompin’ grounds in Philadelphia and doing some other things. (So no livestream is possible today!) But I have some things I’m eager to share with you all when I get back home, involving the difficulties of having self-sufficient heat-up/cook methods while staying in higher-end hotels. It is very, very difficult because you can absolutely not create smoke.
I’m in a Marriot here in Philly, and there are probably 300 people or more staying in this hotel. The last thing on earth I can do is risk setting off the fire alarm in this building early in the morning. Can you imagine the resulting chaos that would ensue?
Instead of drinking the hotel’s terrible coffee, I want to be able to boil my own water for my own coffee that I have brought, enough water to have a cup now and to also brew plenty for my thermos for drinking throughout the day after I check out.
In preparation for this, I even brought a small, portable electric stove top that just plugs into the wall. As a backup, I have a small alcohol/pop can stove. I’ve been able to use neither one this morning. I’ve tried, and both are just too risky.
When I get home I’ll do a demonstration for everybody highlighting the problems I encountered with both things, and the ultimate solutions I arrived at.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
