Dead Man's Hand

Wild Bill Hickok (1837-1876) died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, then a gold-rush town in the Black Hills, Dakota Territory. The game was five-card stud and Wild Bill held a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights, all facing up. In the hole, he held the two of spades, according to a writer who interviewed eye witnesses.

The man who shot Wild Bill used a Colt .45 at close range. The shot went through Wild Bill's skull and cheekbone and hit another player in the wrist. The shooter, Jack McCall, was most likely avenging a petty insult Wild Bill had made to him earlier.

Wild Bill carried a Smith & Wesson No. 2 revolver, which, of course, he had no time to draw before he died. He had not drawn in a gunfight since his own friendly fire killed his deputy in a shootout in Abilene in 1871.

McCall was acquitted at his first trial in Deadwood, but made the mistake of bragging about the murder some months later. He was arrested and convicted at a second trial in Yankton and hanged for his crime. McCall could not use double jeopardy as his defense, because his first trial had been held in Dakota Territory, which, according to the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, was not U.S. land, but belonged to the Lakota Sioux.

Regrettably, this is not the first "dead man's hand" we know of. The first dead man's hand might have been played in Illinois forty years earlier, but, within ten years of Wild Bill's death, his gained ascendancy as the definitive dead man's hand. The shootout is still reenacted on summer evenings in Deadwood, South Dakota.

The Queen's Gingerbread Men

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), displaying a wicked sense of humor, loved to surprise her courtiers and visitors with gingerbread men made in their own likenesses.

In the kitchen, the queen's baker cooked together honey, bread crumbs (as flour), pepper, sometimes saffron to give a red color, and ginger. He pressed the dough into hand-carved wooden molds and let it dry so that he could pop the cookie out of the mold with one good whack against the table. Since the dough was already cooked and he did not add leavening or bake it, the cookie retained all its detail. (Today, with modern gingerbread cookie recipes, we get the Pillsbury Doughboy, as far as detail goes.) Then he decorated it with white icing and highlighted it with gold leaf.

Now the Greeks and Romans used ginger in cooking, and we know this because we have records. For instance, the Roman government taxed ginger when Arab traders brought it across the Red Sea from its native China and India to the port at Alexandria. When Rome fell, usually dated to Alaric the Goth's Sack of Rome, 410 AD, ginger was no longer traded.

The Crusaders (our erstwhile Jihadists) brought ginger and other spices back to the West in the eleventh century. Monks were the first to make gingerbread. Later bakers took over the work, and the first bakers' guild we know of comes into existence in 1162 in Pontoise, France. By 1415, gingerbread bakers on the Continent formed their own guilds.

In London, bakers formed guilds as early as 1155, but gingerbread bakers did not become a separate body. In 1569, Queen Elizabeth united the white-flour and brown-flour baking guilds to form the Worshipful Company of Bakers.

Although gingerbread cookies had become popular "fairings" (that is, treats sold at fairs) and street novelties, they were originally molded as scenes from Bible stories and later as secular images of all kinds. Elizabeth was apparently the first to think of molding them into portraits, or maybe I should say caricatures, of members of her circle.

Unfortunately I have not spent hours and days in a wonderful, possibly (in my imagination) bookwormy and musty old British library, but have rather done my usual research: dilittantish-ly poking around the web until I come up with a story that rings true to me.

But just imagine Elizabeth's delight as one of her hapless suitors or a wily diplomat from France or Spain has to bite his own head off in order to consume his treat.



Today's gingerbread men.

This image, which was originally posted to Flickr.com, was uploaded to Commons using Flickr upload bot on 18:52, 9 May 2008 (UTC) by Themightyquill (talk).

Compare and Contrast

The first time a teacher told me to compare and contrast, I thought, "But that's redundant, because comparing is contrasting."

And, sure enough, the Webster's entry for compare shows this for the second definition:

"[T]o look at (two or more things) closely in order to see what is similar or different about them or in order to decide which one is better."

The etymology of the word is simple, too. Our word compare came into late Middle English in the 14th century, from the Old French comparer, from the Latin particles com (with) and par (equal), to find the similarities and differences in things that seem equal.

So, lesson learned. Teachers, you need only tell your students to compare. Students, question authority and think for yourself.