Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. One of my favorite blogs out there, Ghost in the Machine, links to an excellent article in the Christian Science Monitor that speculates on what the Pilgrims actually ate in the fall of 1621. For starters, forget roast turkey with all the trimmings. What few people realize is that their "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner is the brainchild of a 19-century ladies' magazine editor, and that many of the foods associated with the holiday didn't become regular features of American cookery until long after the days of Myles Standish and company. Although wild turkeys may have been included in the fowl that the Pilgrims were by then regularly hunting, the main entree was very likely venison, courtesy of King Massasoit of the local Wampanoag tribes. Lobster and other shellfish were probably part of that first Thanksgiving table, as according to contemporary accounts lobsters were so plentiful that they'd wash up by the thousands along the Massachusetts coast after a storm, and until modern industrial times gathering mussels and clams in New England was simply a matter of walking down to the water and picking what you needed. Cranberries may have already entered the Pilgrims' diet, but not as the sugary sauce or relish that many now eat alongside our turkey, as sugar was an extremely expensive commodity, and not a regular part of the 17th century Pilgrim pantry (an interesting note: based on what we know about the cooking staples and equipment that the crew of the Mayflower did bring with them, food historians have suggested that the earliest colonial New England cuisine was more Mediterranean than Northern European, with an emphasis on grilled and roasted meat, the use of fresh herbs, and a reliance on imported olive oil until dairy cows and locally-produced milk and butter transformed the diet into something more like your classic "traditional" Northeastern fare). Potatoes weren't yet available, nor were there sweet potatoes, and while a variety of indigenous squashes may have been part of the feast, pumpkin pie was not, although it would not be long before colonial New Englanders would hollow out pumpkins, fill them with apples, pie spices, sugar, and milk, and bake the gourd whole.

For the first time in our five years together, my wife and I did not hit the road this Turkey Day. Since we're expecting our first child, due in April, we thought it was about time to start our very own family tradition, so we stayed home for the holiday and cooked up our own feast. Maria spent the day making gingerbread cookies, while I prepared what I hope will become our standard Bruno-Zervos Thanksgiving meal, all the while completely unaware of the above article, mind you. Here's a menu of what we ate:

Cranberry Salsa
Cranberries, Chipotle Peppers, Onion, Cilantro, and Lime Juice

Mashed Sauteed Butternut Squash
Squash, Onion, Olive Oil, Sherry Wine, Oregano, Red Chile, Salt, and Black Pepper

Baked Stuffed Lobster
Lobsters, Bay Scallops, Shrimp, Ritz Crackers, Butter, Onion, Tarragon, Parsley, Salt, and Black Pepper

I come from a fairly contrary family to begin with, when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner. The holiday meal of choice (not just for T-Day, but Christmas, Easter, and Flag Day as well) in my parents' home is Pork Roast with Baked Macaroni and Cheese, and has been since time out of mind. The roast pork I imagine is a Slavic thing, as pork is the New Year's entree bar none throughout Eastern Europe and my mother is Polish on both sides of her family, though I'll be damned if I know how the mac-and-cheese dish got into the picture. Every once in a while, my mother would try to rebel against our demented household tradition and sneak a mainstream feature like stuffing or cranberry sauce onto our table, but if ever she wanted turkey as part of the holiday meal, she'd have to roast one alongside the pork loin, or else meet with out-and-out mutiny from the Bruno males. Compound this upbringing with my wife's - she being the daughter of Greek immigrants, Thanksgiving never really had any special significance to them, although my mother-in-law was nice enough to cook a turkey for all the Thanksgiving dinners we've shared with them (by the way, turkey with tzatziki is absolutely fantastic!). So let's just say Maria and I were primed to try something new this year.

Dessert was a key lime pie. Completely un-authentic, from a food historian's perspective, but delicious nonetheless. Maybe next year I'll try baking a whole pumpkin...

There are many reasons why I love to teach ancient Greek, but one of the best by far is the fact that every so often someone stumbles upon a forgotten manuscript or lost papyrus scroll and adds something new to the study of a so-called "dead" language. According to today's New York Times, 112 collected works of the Alexandrian Greek poet Posidippus of Pella, from the 3rd Century BC, have been discovered in the material used to mummify an Egyptian body a century after the poems were written (we're not the first culture to recycle - papyrus was sufficiently expensive that it was used over and over again, first as stationery, then as whatever was needed, like mummy wrapping). Posidippus wrote epigrams, pithy little poems kept intentionally short for inscriptions that gradually became their own established art form, and this recent find, aside from increasing his corpus of known material by a factor of five, sheds light in general on the rise of the epigrammatist in Greek literature. It's so exciting to imagine what else might be waiting to found out there- few people know that more than ninety-five percent of the literature from the ancient Graeco-Roman world was lost, and only known to us as footnotes or marginalia in some other long-dead author's text, making Classics more a field of filling in the blanks than anything else. Sure, we have Homer's works handed down to us intact (miracle of miracles!), but round up the tragedians and you will find that only ten percent of the total works of Euripides, Sophocles, or Aeschylus have survived the intervening centuries. Less than ten percent! Compound that with the knowledge that the "Big Three" of Greek tragedy were only a small fraction of the playwrights practicing their craft during the heydey of Attic drama, then afterwards, when tragedy spread to the entire Greek-speaking world, and you suddenly wonder how even the most learned professor can speak on the subject of this art form with any authority whatsoever. The same problem exists with every genre of Greek literature - we get a lot of hearsay from the ancient lit-crit crowd about what's good and what's not so good, but woefully little in the way of primary source materials, by which we might judge ourselves. Particularly maddening is the thought that there may have been authors just as worthy of our consideration as the ones handed down to us who simply didn't make the Alexandrian critics' "cut", for whatever reason. For instance, until now the surviving epigrams of Posidippus were all of a racy nature, leading Classicists to believe that erotic poetry was his thing. The discovery of this collection, with not one poem about love or sex in the hundred-plus collected works, shatters that assumption into a million pieces, and makes you wonder if the Hellenistic-age editor who gave us nothing but Posidippus' erotica just didn't have a dirty mind. Who knows how other future chance finds might change what we think we know about the ancient literature?

Just read: A Cook's Tour, by Anthony Bourdain. You may recognize the guy on the cover as the cranky host of the television program by the same name on the Food Network. Capitalizing on the unexpected success of his previous book, Kitchen Confidential, he decided to take a year off from his day job as the executive chef at brasserie Les Halles in New York and bum his way around the planet, in search of the perfect meal. He eats whole roasted lamb in the Moroccan desert, iguana tamales in Mexico, and still-beating cobra heart in Vietnam, and unlike your normal TV chef, who's never met a local dish he doesn't wax poetic about (because that's what the tourist board is paying him to do), Mr. Bourdain is brutally honest about what's good and what's bad along the way. I was surprised to find that his writing style is just as engaging and witty - if not more so - than his on-screen patter and voice-over commentary, and of course even cable television has to leave out all the best parts of a trip like this, such as his page-long rants about politics, corporate culture, and the other Food Network celebrities. If you love food, you'll be salivating the whole way through, but especially so during his stay in Vietnam, where you can close your eyes and stumble into the best meal of your life. Upon finishing the book, I had no choice but to hole myself up in the kitchen and cook up a batch of pho - the beef and noodle soup that is the specialty of Hanoi and considered the unofficial national dish of the Vietnamese people - for the wife and me. Though I'm sure it was a pale imitation of what you can get over there, sipping the spicy, beefy, limey broth made us think of warmer climes and fabulous future culinary escapades.

Just started: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. Mr. King often gets pooh-poohed by the reigning literati, I'm guessing more out of jealousy of his sales than for any bonafide critical reason, because he writes in a clear and unassuming style that most aspiring authors spend years and countless dollars in writing schools to attain. You may quibble with the subject matter (although I don't - I believe Stephen King is one of the few legimitate heirs to a rich American storytelling tradition whose practitioners have included Hawthorne and Poe, as well as many, many other less-known authors such as H.P. Lovecraft), but even if you do, you owe it to yourself to read some of the man's short stories and see if you don't have at least a minor change of heart.

I'm back, Jersey Exile Nation, and with both guns blazing. At last, it appears that my academic troubles are in the process of resolving themselves once and for all, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of my friend and former advisor at Boston University, Professor Stephen Scully. Steve is a rare bird, indeed, one of those classicists who didn't in the course of being ground through the mill that is the modern American academic-industrial complex forget what the Classics are supposed to be all about, a wellspring of humanistic inspiration for all time. With his help, the administrative obstacles hindering me from walking away from B.U. with both my pride and my diplomas simply vanished, and now instead of pulling out my hair about how to set right what had gone so far astray (hopelessly, I thought), I'm now actually contemplating what to do next. Now many of you out there probably don't browse through college catalogs and try on degree programs in your head the way I do almost every day, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that I'm positively giddy now whenever I think about my scholarly future. Yes, I am a geek. And proud of it.

You may have noticed that my recent posts have been suspiciously devoid of political commentary. Well, it's no accident. Recent events both at home and abroad have dispirited more than enraged me, and I wonder if Americans even want to wrestle with the life-or-death issues which have been thrust upon our collective plate. This month's elections do not provide an encouraging sign here, nor do recent House and Senate votes that overwhelmingly rubber-stamp our alleged President's increasingly unhinged agenda, such as the absolutely irresponsible 90-9 vote last night in the Senate to approve the "Homeland Security Bill", which will strip tens of thousands of unionized federal employees of their hard-won protections and effectively create a bloc of close to a quarter of a million jobs that the Executive Branch can dispense at will to its party faithful. Forget about making our country safer (we already have multiple so-called intelligence agencies, all of them already bloated and incompetent), this bill is a return to the Spoils System of yore - where the ruling party in Washington controlled who worked and who didn't in the federal government - and little more. But who really expected anymore from an administration whose idea of responding to the threat of al-Qaeda is to leave Osama bin Laden and his cronies alive and plotting in the wilds of Pakistan and turn our attention to a recalcitrant tinpot dictator and his pitiable arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction", most of which were at least partially-financed by our own government, back when Saddam was our buddy? Do we honestly need a whole other branch of the federal government from the self-proclaimed champions of "limited government", headed by an individual - Tom Ridge - whose brightest idea so far in his year-long tenure as Director of Homeland Security has been to color-code our fear? Where's the punchline here? Because I could really use a good laugh right about now.

There are other matters I'd love to discuss, local matters of free speech and the dangers of censorship right here in my own workplace, the World's Greatest University, but frankly I'm too worried about my job to do it (although I will link you to the relevant op-ed articles dealing with both incidents in the Boston Globe, here and here. I disgree strongly with the Globe editors on one of them, and agree with them on the other - I'll let you and campus thought police try and figure out which is which). That's what it's come to, ladies and gentlemen. I wonder what color that kind of fear is.

My supervisor returned today from an extended weekend in Southern California, bringing back with her two boxes of Original Glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts for our gustatory pleasure. If you have never sampled one of these torodial delicacies, then you are a much, much poorer creature for it, and I pity you. The best part - eight seconds in the microwave and a day-old Krispy Kreme tastes like the moment it was born, warm and chewy, dripping with its supersugary glaze, with not even the slightest hint of the aftertaste you get with other chain store doughnuts. My coworkers and I are guiltily eyeing the rapidly-disappearing stockpile of American manna, hoping that it won't be too long before that neon "HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW" sign will be blazing in a zipcode nearer to us, so that it won't come to this, man turning against his fellow man for just one more taste Paradise Here On Earth.

Best salad dressing ever - Yasou Original Greek Dressing, brought to you by Ulysses Foods in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Unlike most "Greek" dressings, which are a sickening goop of feta cheese, this stuff is the closest I've ever tasted to what Greeks actually put on their salads in the comfort of their own homes. It's heavy on the olive oil, with a touch of vinegar and herbs, as opposed to your standard off-the-shelf salad dressings which are seemingly nothing but vinegar. The Greeks have a faith in the taste of olive oil, and lots of it, that can be a little disconcerting at first to outsiders, but trust me, once you start eating your vegetables this way there's no going back, especially when you have quality olive oil on hand. Oliviers & Co. offers a fantastic collection of olive oils from around the Mediterranean, as well as sea salts, peppers, herbs, and other kitchen essentials for all you gourmets and gourmands. There's nothing better than ripping into a freshly-baked loaf of Italian or French (or, in our neck of the woods here in New England, Portuguese) bread and dipping it into a plate of olive oil imported from the Peloponnese region of Greece, such as O & Co.'s Mantinea and Avia. Heavenly.

While we're on the subject of intellectual property and that endangered noble beast we call the Public Domain, here's a little bit of ironic serendipity for you: the BBC World News reports that a 700-year-old fresco has been found in a church in Austria that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mickey Mouse, although art historians think that the water-damaged image might actually be that of a weasel (funny, some people feel the same way about Mickey and his creator, the Walt Disney Corporation). Now here's the kicker. The weasel fresco might look so much like Disney's beloved trademark that, strange as it sounds, it might invalidate the company's claim to it - since the likeness obviously existed centuries before Walt put ink to paper- and retroactively throw Mickey Mouse into the Public Domain. This would be just peachy, as far as I'm concerned, as Michael Eisner and the Walt Disney Corporation have been shamelessly courting the U.S. Congress for years, who in 1998 totally re-jiggered existing copyright laws to keep Mickey and the gang privately-owned and licensable likenesses, and probably would have again when the need arose. Many artists and writers have been intellectually shanghaied into supporting this awful piece of legislation, which was titled "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act", confusing the desire of the heirs (not the creators, mind you) of a body of work to profit from said work in perpetuity with the already-uncontested right of a creator to enjoy the fruit of his labor for his lifetime, and even then some. It's all well and good to want the recognition and compensation you as an artist or writer deserve, but it's another thing to deny future generations the ability to use your work as the wellspring of their own creativity. It serves the Rat right.

A friend of mine just forwarded me this article, I'm assuming from the AP Wire:

A US journalist has reportedly been contacted by lawyers representing a former Rolling Stones member Bill Wyman over use of his name, which happens to be the same as the guitarist.

Journalist Bill Wyman, a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has written an article about receiving the letter, a copy of which is included on the newspaper's website. He wrote that the letter, from Howard Siegel, of New York-based Pryor Cashman Sherman & Flynn, threatened "legal action" over use of his name.

"Mr Siegel magnanimously allowed I could continue to use my own name if I could prove that I had come by it legally, and if I added a disclaimer to everything I wrote in the future, 'clearly indicating that [you are] not the same Bill Wyman who was a member of the Rolling Stones'," he added.

Bill Wyman's former Stones' colleagues are still going strong. The journalist said that having been a pop music writer for more than 20 years, he had worked effectively with Rolling Stones publicists in the past with no problems.

"I remember scarfing up some food next to Keith Richards backstage at a shed in the middle of Wisconsin with no legal repercussions," he said.

The journalist added that the former Stone was actually born William George Perks, and changed his name to Bill Wyman by deed poll in 1964, according to a book about him called Stone Alone.

"Me, I was born Jan 11, 1961. What I need now is a lawyer to ask Mr. Siegel that his client stop using a name I have claim to by several years," he said.

Pryor Cashman Sherman & Flynn were unavailable for comment.

Sheesh. If this is how things are going nowadays, I'd better keep my eyes open for a letter from Major League Baseball. Tom Bruno is the name of a former player who pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1978 and 1979 (before that he'd played for Kansas City and Toronto). I remember how weird it was as a kid to get baseball cards and find my own name in the stack. Little did I know at the time that I was violating the MLB's and Mr. Bruno's intellectual property rights! What a little felon I was! But like Bill Wyman, I would have a possible avenue of legal retaliation, if push came to shove - I was named after my father, also Tom Bruno, and whereas the St. Louis Cardinal Tom Bruno was born in 1953, my father was born in 1949. Maybe he and I should be sending a cease-and-desist to Major League Baseball, as a pre-emptive strike. Those are all the rage these days, so I hear...

p.s.- Whatever you do, don't try looking for a picture of the above-mentioned Tom Bruno using Google's image search. But if you do, in the name of all that is holy, do not look at this picture. That's not me on the far left, looking like a total dingbat. I deny everything.

Introducing the latest addition to the Bruno family. It's a girl!

Another daily dose of Greek wisdom-

Προs την Αναγκην ουδ' Αρηs ουκ ανθισταται

"Not even War can stand in the way of Necessity."

Courtesy of Sophokles. The quotation below from October 31st is the Socratic maxim, "Know thyself," although fans of The Matrix may remember it better as its Latin equivalent, "Temet Noste". I guess the Wachowski Brothers figured that the Roman alphabet would be a little easier on the eyes!

Hope everyone got a fistful of candy corn this Halloween. I had to teach on Thursday, but one of my students did bring in a whole lot of Russian chocolate. Considering I didn't even have to go door to door in costume for it, I guess I should consider myself lucky, since the fall here in New England has all but disappeared, and the past week has been positively winter-like, with nary a hint of Indian Summer to be found. I've never seen the leaves on the trees change color and then drop so quickly afterwards! Those brave children who did go trick-or-treating in our neighborhood were rewarded well this year, as our downstairs neighbors (who live for Halloween) transformed our triple-decker into a house of horror fit for a ghoul, ghost, or goblin, complete with a blacklit stairwell, spooky noises, and four bloated corpses hanging from the second-story porch. The folks downstairs always put on a good show, and last Thursday night was no exception, but the problem with our little Halloween theme park is that it tends to go up around Columbus Day and come down just in time for Thanksgiving. I already have problems with people who for some reason can't seem to let go of Christmas, putting their decorations out at the end of November and steadfastly refusing to remove one blinking light from their display until Valentine's Day, but now all of a sudden Halloween is beginning to creep backwards and forwards through the American calendar into another de facto "holiday season". I'm totally fine with the idea of corpses hanging off our porch for a week or two. Beyond that, however, and I start to worry. At least the downstairs neighbors aren't the sort of people whose idea of Halloween decorations is orange Christmas lights. I'll take stumbling up a blacklit stairwell festooned with glow-in-the-dark nasties, extra-large x-ray blowups, and a talking raven on the bannister that scares the living shit out of me every morning for another whole forty days over a house draped with Interchangeable Holiday Lighting (tm). Now that's a truly frightening thought!