At first glance, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an alternate history where the point of divergence is implementation of the Slattery Report to settle Jewish refugees from Europe in Alaska in 1940. In our timeline, the opposition of both American Zionists (who preferred Israel) and anti-Semites (who preferred concentration camps) was sufficient to prevent Roosevelt’s approval.

In the book, the plan is accepted and millions of Jews are crammed onto Baranof Island (~20% of the size of Israel, depending on where you draw the borders). From that point onward, The Union‘s history continues to diverge with a nuclear strike on Berlin, American quagmire in Cuba, lack of Soviet chess champions, and a cartoon about a wolf chasing a blue rooster.

The constrained Jewish settlement in Alaska has a strained, but not quite Palestine-like, relationship with the surrounding Tlingit. The Union subtly mentions that, unlike in our timeline, the Tlingit won the “Tlingit-Russian War”. It gives significance to destruction of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post Fort Selkirk by the Chilkat Tlingit tribe led by Chief Kohklux.

But in our timeline, the Chilkat raid was led by Chief Kohklux’s father in 1852. Kohklux is notable because he later dictated the route from the village of Klukwan to Fort Selkirk, authoring the oldest native map on the West Coast.

Did Michael Chabon make a mistake by having Klukwan lead the party or is it significant? Would the Hudson’s Bay Company set up a trading post in the same location if the Tlingit won their war against Russia? And of course most importantly, how does the Tlingit victory lead to acceptance of the Slattery Report? (Is the US government using the Jews to disrupt a stronger Tlingit state the same way they created Israel to disrupt the Arabs?)

The old fashioned (often capitalized) is believed to be the first cocktail. The dry vodka martini is the most important cocktail of the late 20th century. Understanding the evolution from the old fashioned to the dry martini is History of Mixology 101.

I took a workshop on the martini from Solomon Siegel, bar manager at Veneto in Victoria. He covered from the martinez to martini, so I’m pretty confident about that. I’m fuzzier about getting to martinez (I really should read a book about this stuff), so there may be some missing links in this sequence:

1. old fashioned
2. Manhattan
3. martinez
4. “pre-prohibition” martini (Solomon’s term)
5. dry gin martini
6. dry vodka martini

For the lab portion of this course, students will mix minimal versions of each of these drinks: no absinthe, orange liqueur, orange bitters or maraschino, because none of these mutations made it from one species to the next in the lineage. Play around with different vermouth:spirit ratios and use of garnishes (approximately cherry to citrus to olive).

To get the crosslisted history credit for the course, the student must research why each step was taken. To get you started:

• 3 to 4 was part of a general trend toward less-sweet cocktails
• 4 to 5 was partially a consequence of the collapse of the bitters market during Prohibition
• 5 to 6 was accomplished by a massive advertising campaign by Smirnoff, including placement in James Bond films

I don’t have a lot of interest in high-brow culture. I don’t have strong memories of the operas my mother took me to as a child. But a modern opera is a unique enough phenomenon that I had to see Nixon in China for myself.

I’m a bit of a political history buff, but reading the Wikipedia page is not adequate preparation. My favourite scene was the meeting with Mao, where I had to work hard just to understand the references to the Cultural Revolution, never mind Mao’s sex life. The Third Act, about the characters’ private lives, went right over my head.

The minimalist music works exceptionally well with the enhanced singing voices. According to the program and reviews there were all sorts of references that make this music postmodern, but I missed them all. The basic repetition and drifting transformations make pleasing harmony with the repetition in the lyrics.

The kung fu – classical ballet hybrid dancing in the second act have some moments of shear brilliance, although most of the dancers fall into one or the other exclusive styles. The set design and lighting is very high-end, including projected rain that would have fit right in to the Olympics Opening Ceremonies.

The script feels a little uneven because Henry Kissinger is basically just an extra, without a solo to properly balance his counterpart, Jiang Qing (Madame Mao). (Zhou Enlai is actually Pat Nixon’s opposite: the way this works might be the neatest part of the whole script.)

I’m not sure who I’d recommend this to. You’d have to be really into listening to people sing and appreciate the minimalism of an opera plot. But your enjoyment would be higher the more you knew about the history.

Jack and The Tyee have both criticized the latest edition of How to Be a Canadian by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. It made me think about the book A People’s History of the United States (which I haven’t read and don’t plan to because I don’t care about the US). It’s a history of oppression in the US that looks at major national events and oppressive episodes from the point of view of the least powerful.

Apparently A People’s History is an invaluable teaching tool for critical American History. But from what I’ve read, none of the spin-offs (A People’s History of the World, in particular) are as good.

What do you get when you Google “A People’s History of Canada”? The historical TV series published by the government. It’s a nice project for teaching people the framework of Canadian history, but even a sometimes-rogue Crown corporation like the CBC can’t be expected to produce truly critical history.

Does a popular critical history of Canada exist? If not, why doesn’t someone make one?

I recently heard about philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s criticism of Galileo (and by inference all science): Galileo did not have sufficient evidence to make a logical case for heliocentrism. Instead, he used “rhetoric, propaganda, and various epistemological tricks”.

At the time, optical theory was not advanced enough to explain how telescopes worked. So Galileo had to trust on faith that his instruments were measuring what he thought they were measuring. It’s not scientific, but Galileo was supported by a consensus of astronomers, including Jesuits.

Observations of planets do not distinguish between the Tychonic system, where the sun orbits the earth and all other planets orbit the sun, and the heliocentric system. The only way to determine if the earth is moving is by stellar parallax: the triangulation of stars from opposite ends of the earth’s orbit. Galileo predicted stellar parallax but it was not observed for 115 years*, so his theory was falsified until then.

In fact, under relativity it is impossible to determine whether the universe has a centre, so it is a theological rather than scientific statement.

The proper way to consider Galileo’s work is not as a scientific result, but a shift to a new paradigm: astronomy based on telescope evidence with no reference to scripture. You might find this more elegant, it might be better at landing people on the moon, but there’s no basis for saying it’s more truthful.

* And even then it wasn’t stellar parallax, it was the unpredicted steller aberration. Parallax wasn’t observed until 228 years after Galileo’s prediction.

This is a follow-up to Guns, Germs and Steel that could be called Just Germs: it’s not that the natives lost to the colonialists in armed combat, it’s that there were no natives left to fight by the time colonializing started in earnest. The colonialists waltzed into what was effectively a ghost continent. This created the myth of the Noble Savage, living in harmony with nature; the truth is that native civilizations were decimated to the point where they could no long manipulate nature.

Charles Mann is a journalist (Jared Diamond is a professor of physiology and birds) but the book’s research feels thorough and up-to-date: I haven’t found any major academic criticism online. The book itself is over 9000 pages long due to huge amounts of historical background. The background is quite interesting, but I think a lot of it could be cut without weakening the argument.

The first theme is why the Algonquians didn’t drive the Pilgrims into the sea. The unnecessary background is about Tisquantum, the Pilgrim’s Uncle Tom. As Mann tells it, his story is much more interesting and epic than Pocahontas and John Smith. (1491 should be optioned!)

The second theme is the pre-European colonializations of America by humans. The key question addressed here is whether the Indians are “responsible” for the extinction of most potential livestock and beasts-of-burden in America. There’s lots of interesting information in this chapter, but Mann doesn’t manage to give a definitive answer to the question.

The third theme is the fall of the Inca Empire. The Aztecs and Mayans get significantly less space, probably because they’re better covered in Guns, Germs and Steel and the Incas should have been better positioned to resist the Spanish: the Inca Empire is one of the largest continuous empires by latitude that has ever existed. The only two things that ever made it over the Andes are corn and disease and Mann is unfortunately unable to offer an explanation for why disease hit the Incas before the Spanish arrived.

The book is focused on the civilizations that one would reasonably expect to resist conquest. I was expecting the book to be about the state of America before colonialization. For example, James Douglas chose the location for Fort Victoria because he admired the natural rolling fields, which were in fact being slashed & burned for camas by the Songhees.

Communist China faced a similar problem to capitalist Canada: doctors don’t want to practice in rural areas. Mao’s solution was “barefoot doctors“: residents of rural communities trained in preventive medicine and basic primary care who work part-time as community nurses. Our currently evolving solution is based on taking nurses heavily trained in treating disorders and bribing them to work as primary health providers in rural communities.

Our model is pretty good within the confines of our medical system (nurses prescribing antidepressants!). But I think the barefoot doctor model could be complementary: push preventive medicine training the same way CPR is currently promoted.

I saw a few things this weekend repeating the urban legend that Valentine’s Day is the Christianization of the Roman orgy-holiday of Lupercalia. The legend usually goes like this: Lupercalia was the pagan holiday of casual sex; when the Roman Empire was Christianized, they dropped-in a replacement celebration of a saint martyred for performing illegal marriages.* This appears to be untrue on almost every count:

• Lupercalia was not a widespread pagan holiday, but a tradition in the city of Rome.
• Lupercalia was not about sex: men celebrated it by streaking and women celebrated it by praying for fertility; the Romans were pretty comfortable with public nudity, so these two aspects are not as closely connected as they would be today. (As usual, the pagans weren’t having as much sex as we’d like to believe they were.)
• There are a lot of Saint Valentines, but none of them have anything to do with love.
• Valentine’s Day didn’t have anything to do with love until the 1840s.

* Hmm, illegal marriages, what does that remind me of…