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That's literally just all that it is. One solid hour of a guitar being built.
Despite having precisely zero musical ability whatsoever, I find this video fascinating. I have watched it, admittedly in the background of doing other things, many dozens of times. It goes well alongside serious cranial work such as a schematic design being transferred to a PCB layout.
Which, of course, is a thing that I'm just starting into yet again. Here's where the design stands at present:
Location: Detroit (the part with no rules or laws)
Posts: 5,677
Total Cats: 800
On December 18, 1868, the first bicyclist was documented as riding on Detroit's streets. See road surface conditions for cyclists as they were documented in 1896 in this map from our collection. Published by The Calvert Lith. & Eng. Co., it shows color-coded roads paved in asphalt, brick, granite, macadam and wood.
Until i read this i had absolutely ZERO idea that roads were made with wood. And to be honest, it kind of makes me feel stupid i did not know this.
In early New England there were some roadways that used logs to cross swampy areas. Also, in Boston and other northeastern cities they would use wooden blocks in some areas instead of bricks because the wooden blocks were quieter than cobbles (horse hooves and wagon wheels). Didn’t last because they rotted quickly, duh.
Side note: It was common in the older New England factories to use wooden blocks (end grain up/down) soaked in creosote on the floors. Made for a fun time if you had a leaky roof after a big rain storm when the blocks would swell and an area of the floor would end up in a giant hump. I used to spend a lot of time in some of the old factories around Detroit and remember seeing the same thing in some of them.
The railroad factories in Hornell, NY are all oak wood post floors. 4x4 oak posts (almost 4' long) are sunk into a sand base. They can support insanely heavy loads (like railroad engines!) and last virtually forever.
Location: Detroit (the part with no rules or laws)
Posts: 5,677
Total Cats: 800
I've been in plenty of factories where the floors were made out of wood. In fact, some of the facilities of the very company i work for have wood floors. Now i'm more aggravated that i can't find a picture of said wooden floors.
But i did find this random video in my many terabytes of photos and videos graciously stored on the google servers. I must have been sloshed after spending a little to much time in the lobby bar.
But something about wooden roads just blows my mind. I just can't imagine an entire grid pattern of downtown and city streets made of wood.
Not a swampy marsh with wooden mats for heavy equipment. But full on permanent roads for every day use made of wood.
The Gradall factory in New Philadelphia, Ohio has a floor made of interlocking wood slats standing on end. It prevents machined parts from being damaged as easily when dropped.
Parents Used To Literally Mail Their Babies Because It Was Cheaper Than Public Transit
When American Parcel Post services launched on January 1, 1913, citizens suddenly found themselves with a revelatory new way of getting objects from point A to point B. And back in those days, "objects" often meant parcels in the form of unlikely entities like live chickens, bizarre medical supplies (such as cadavers), and even flesh-and-blood tots themselves. Yes, children were sent through the mail.
The history of mailing babies is whimsical rather than shocking, however: kids were always chaperoned to their destinations, not sealed up in boxes with breathing holes. In fact, most people thought of the process in terms of purely economical advantage: it was far cheaper to send one's child through the post than it was to buy him or her a train ticket-proper. Eventually, the practice was deemed inappropriate, and it gradually fell out of fashion, but not before some folks took full advantage of posting their progeny.
The First Baby To Be Mailed Was 8 Months Old
The first baby to be delivered via mail was one James Beagle, an eight month old who, at just under 11 pounds, was still technically under the weight limit that the postal service was imposing at the time. The child was mailed to his grandparents, who only lived a few miles away; so, fortunately for the tot, the journey was not arduous. (Indeed, sources claim that he slept most of the way there). According to the Smithsonian, James cost a mere 15 cents in postage – a "discount rate" if ever there was one. However, his parents also "insured" him for $50.00, which was no small charge back then. James's journey created a sensation, and it established a child mailing trend that would continue for several years to come.
Mailed Children Could Be As Old As 6
As postal-weight restrictions shifted and relaxed, older children began to be mailed, as well. (Though they technically weren't being sent as packages proper, so weight wasn't really an issue). In 1914, a four year old named Charlotte May Pierstorff was "delivered" via train to her grandparents, who lived about 74 miles away. The little girl's journey was widely publicized, and it charmed the public ... so much so that it inspired a now-legendary children's book,
"Luckily, little May wasn’t unceremoniously shoved into a canvas sack along with the other packages. As it turns out, she was accompanied on her trip by her mother’s cousin, who worked as a clerk for the railway mail service ... it’s likely that his influence (and his willingness to chaperone his young cousin) is what convinced local officials to send the little girl along with the mail."
All Sorts Of Bizarre Things Were Also Sent Through The Mail
If you can believe it, children were by no means the most bizarre packages being ushered through the postal system back in the day. As the Washington Post explains,
"When the parcel service began, all kinds of cargo showed up in the mail stream, including coffins, eggs, and dogs."
There were also a host of other questionable items being dispatched, like taxidermied animals, deadly and inadequately contained medical specimens (like the Smallpox virus), dead fish, and even buildings themselves, which were mailed to their destinations in crushingly dense blocks of bricks.
One Child Traveled A Whopping 720 Miles
The longest child-postal journey was undertaken by one Edna Neff of Pensacola, FL, a 6 year old who created a stir when she was "mailed" to her father in Christianburg, VA, which was 720 miles away. However, Neff's trip – primarily because of its exhausting length and distance – was met with criticism rather than whimsical amusement, and it ended up being a major factor in child-mailing becoming illegal in 1915.
Children Weren't "Packaged" In The Traditional Way
Children weren't exactly wrapped up like the standard box of Christmas gifts. Instead, as the Washington Post put it, they were "more like companions or well-swaddled bundles in the arms of their carriers." (In some cases, in fact, depending on the distance in question, they merely trotted along with the postman as he went on his route, and were "delivered" along with the rest of the mail).
Even After It Was Technically Illegal, Some People Still Mailed Their Children
Though the practice of mailing children was formally outlawed in 1915, restrictions were rarely enforced ... perhaps because so few people were in the habit of UPSing their offspring by then. Nevertheless, a handful of kids were mailed and delivered between 1914 and 1915; and by the time 1916 rolled around, the practice had ceased.
Mailing Children Was Generally Looked Upon Favorably
Since the image of the mailed child was largely a charming and quaint one, the practice wasn't seen as cruel and unusual by most people. Indeed, the paper mail seemed to have had more problems arriving at its destination on time: there are no records of any mailed children suffering mishaps in transit or not reaching their recipients as scheduled. By most accounts, the Postmaster General's decision to outlaw the practice really had more to do with possible legal ramifications down the line (after all, nobody wanted their child to end up in the "dead letter" office).
Postmen Were Sort Of Like Temporary Nannies
The early and mid 1900s represented a simpler, safer time For that reason, local postmen were often beloved figures who were widely trusted by the citizens they worked for. By most accounts,
"The mail carrier was considered a crucial part of communities—a touchstone with family and friends far away from each other, a bearer of important news and goods. In some ways, Americans trusted their postmen with their lives (and ... with their babies!)."
In other words, the mailman was right up there with the stork: both could be counted on to deliver the goods.
Classifying Your Child As "Mail" Meant Lower Rates
It was all well and good to be a rich kid who could afford to travel in a luxurious, first-class train compartment, but if you were a working-class child, things weren't that easy. That's why sending children by post was considered, by many, to be a sensible economic solution. In some cases, in fact, the deliveries even took place off the record. Many who knew and trusted their small-town postmen would simply ask them to escort their child from point A to point B, and the whole arrangement really wasn't all that different from giving a cab driver a few extra bucks to go the extra mile.
(Some) Humans Still Try To Mail Themselves
Think the days of human parcels are over? Not so. In 1980, one William DeLucia caused a scandal when he packed himself in an airborne trunk along with food and an oxygen tank, as the US Postal Museum explains it. Upon arriving/landing at his intended post office, "he climbed out, pilfered thousands of dollars’ worth of goods from the registered mail, and sealed himself back up."
Granted: these were the days before scrupulous airport security and state-of-the-art package screening. Nevertheless, DeLucia's plan was foiled by way of a mishap: he was arrested at the Atlanta airport "after his trunk popped open as it was being unloaded."
This one is more of a performance-art piece. I wish I could find a more lengthy article on it, but this short writeup does pretty much cover it.
Eggs of Faith
Performance & video
Commissioned by: The Window & Centre Pompidou, Hors Pistes
Actress: Marie-Anne Mestre
Camera & edit: Søren Dø
Paris, France 2016
Two egg vendors wearing aprons put up a stand on a Parisian sidewalk.
They appear to be selling ordinary household eggs, six for two euros. Closer inspection reveals that they are no ordinary eggs. Some are Christian, some Hindu, others are Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Taoist. The vendors insist that the eggs are identical – the only difference is that they profess different faiths.
A crowd gathers, curious to see what is going on. Some customers want to buy a mixture of eggs. Others want only certain eggs, rejecting others.
Some are left wondering how the eggs came to have a religion in the first place: did it come from the chicken or somewhere else?
From IEEE Spectrum, which is publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
WHEN NEW YORK CITY WAS A WIRETAPPER’S DREAM
Eavesdropping flourished after WW II, aided by legal loopholes, clever hacks, and “private ears”
BRIAN HOCHMAN 25 MAR 2022
Six months after a police raid revealed the existence of a massive illegal wiretapping operation in New York City, the movie
Wiretapper was rolled out to theaters across the country. Although based on a different case, the movie built on the growing
unease about eavesdropping triggered by the sensational revelations in New York
On February 11, 1955, an anonymous tip led two New York Police Department detectives and two New York Telephone Company investigators to an apartment on the fourth floor of a residential building at 360 East 55th Street in midtown Manhattan. In the back bedroom of the unit, the group discovered a cache of stolen wiretapping equipment that turned out to have direct lines into six of New York City’s largest telephone exchanges: PLaza 1, 3, and 5; MUrray Hill 8; ELdorado 5; and TEmpleton 8. The connections blanketed an area of Manhattan running from East 38th Street to East 96th Street, a swath of the city’s most expensive real estate.
“There wasn’t a single tap-free telephone on the east side of New York,” professional wiretapper Bernard Spindel remarked of the arrangement. (Spindel was in all likelihood the source of the anonymous tip.) News of the discovery made the front page of the New York Times a week later.
The midtown Manhattan “wiretap nest,” as the 55th Street listening post came to be known, remains one of the largest and most elaborate private eavesdropping operations ever uncovered in the United States. Subscribers whose phones were tapped at the time of the raid included a range of New York commercial interests, with assets both large and small: a modeling agency and an insurance company; an art gallery and a lead mining company; and perhaps most sensationally, two publicly traded pharmaceutical corporations with competing patent interests. (The two firms, Bristol-Myers and E. R. Squibb, were at the time locked in a nasty legal battle over the commercial rights to the antibiotic tetracycline. Evidence later revealed that representatives from a third firm, Pfizer, had employed the wiretap nest to spy on both entities, paying more than $60,000 in cash for the service.)
Burlesque artist Ann Corio was among the celebrities targeted by an illegal wiretapping operation in New York City in 1955.
Contrary to the popular image of the phone tap as either a technology of state surveillance or a tool of corporate espionage, the vast majority of the lines ensnared in the 55th Street operation turned out to be owned by private individuals. Some—like the burlesque artist Ann Corio, whose phone conversations were recorded in a dragnet search for incriminating information on prominent midtown residents—were the targets of blackmail. Others—like the New York socialite John Jacob Astor VI, who wanted someone to keep tabs on his wife—were involved in messy civil suits and divorce cases. By all accounts, the setup had the technical capacity to monitor as many as a hundred telephone lines at the same time. Between 50,000 and 100,000 individual subscribers were alleged to have been tapped over the course of fifteen months.
New York City private investigator and attorney John G. “Steve” Broady was convicted as the mastermind of the 55th
Street “wiretap nest,” the largest illegal wiretapping operation ever to come to light in the United States. Broady paid
a high price: Besides being disbarred, he served the entirety of his four-year sentence in jail.
Four men were eventually indicted in conjunction with the raid on the 55th Street wiretap nest: John G. Broady, an attorney and private investigator; Warren B. Shannon, a freelance electrical technician; and Walter Asmann and Carl R. Ruh, two rogue employees of the New York Telephone Company. In the course of the ensuing criminal trial, Shannon, Asmann, and Ruh were all granted immunity in exchange for testifying against Broady, who emerged as the brains behind the operation. Broady ended up receiving an unusually harsh prison sentence—four years, twice as long as the penalty suggested by New York’s penal code. At the close of the proceedings the presiding judge broke custom by publicly chastising the principals in the case: “In my many years as a judge, I have made it a rule not to excoriate defendants when imposing a prison sentence. However, the public interest requires some comment concerning this case. Illegal wiretapping is a slimy activity, which directly and adversely affects our social and economic life. It cannot be condemned too strongly.”
The gravity of the response to Broady’s conviction only heightened the suspicion that there was more to the story than met the eye. A number of strange details from the early newspaper reports on the case remained unexplained at the end of the trial. The freelance electrician initially indicted for the crime, Warren Shannon, turned out to have been living in the apartment at East 55th Street for more than a year. Although he was at home with his wife when investigators arrived on February 11, no arrests were made, and no wiretapping devices were confiscated. When the NYPD returned to the scene a week later, much of the equipment used in the operation had disappeared.
Considering the size and longevity of the 55th street operation (established, sources said, in December 1953), it seemed possible that NYPD officials were aware of its existence prior to the February 11 raid. Had dishonest cops agreed to look the other way in exchange for the ability to shake down local criminals via wiretap? Such an arrangement would certainly have been consistent with earlier grand jury inquiries into police corruption in NYPD gambling and vice investigations. The fact that the case involved New York Telephone employees only reinforced this conjecture. Bell system linemen were long rumored to have had a hand in the city’s illegal wiretap trade.
According to journalist Ray Graves, the attempted cover-up of the 55th Street scandal was the American public’s first glimpse of “the ‘Big A,’ or The Alliance.” Writing in the July 1955 issue of Confidential Magazine, he identified it as “a group made up of corrupt cops, telephone men, and expert illegal wiretappers in the private eye racket…[that] deals in outright blackmail, selling information, and…does much of its work for big businessmen who want to get the jump on a competitor.” The midtown Manhattan tap nest was one of many private listening posts around the country (“Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Miami, and Washington all have wiretap centers comparable to the cozy set-up recently exposed in New York”), and the shadowy “Alliance” had a vested interest in keeping their workings under wraps.
The rumors of conspiracy and corruption now seem far-fetched. But at the time, the story was plausible enough to occasion internal handwringing among Bell system providers. In a company bulletin dated March 9, 1955, New York Telephone assured nervous stakeholders that there was “no foundation” to national reports that there was a “corrupt alliance between telephone employees, the police, and illegal wire-tappers.”
Conspiracy or not, the 55th Street “wiretap nest” was itself an unsettling image. That four men could set up shop in a midtown apartment, commandeer an array of stolen electronic devices, and tap into thousands of lines servicing some of the most high-profile addresses in New York City—the story seemed to confirm creeping anxieties about the invasive reach of modern communications systems and their susceptibility to manipulation and control.
Anthony P. Savarese, a member of the New York State Assembly, headed a commission set up after the discovery
of the 55th Street wiretapping operation to investigate the prevalence of illegal eavesdropping in the state.
To quell further public uproar, the New York state legislature in Albany appointed Anthony P. Savarese, an assemblyman with connections to the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, to convene an emergency joint commission on the illegal interception of electronic communications. Charged with cutting through the “miasma of hearsay” surrounding the tap-nest scandal and recommending corrective legislation, Savarese began his work in late February 1955. He filed a hotly anticipated preliminary report the following year. But the commission’s official findings only served to bolster the sense that wiretapping was more entrenched and pervasive than the national debates had made it seem.
According to the Commission’s March 1956 report, the 55th Street scandal was the product of a host of developments that had made the New York telephone system “vulnerable to tapping:” technological advances that made phone taps both easier to plant and harder to detect; corruption among state police officers and low-level employees in the telecommunications industry; and the unfettered expansion of the private investigation field in the years following World War II. Yet the Commission’s most enduring conclusion—echoed in later studies like Samuel Dash’s influential 1959 report The Eavesdroppers—was that any honest effort to curb illegal wiretapping in America would have to start at the state and municipal levels.
To be sure, the failings of New York state wiretap law were legion. A comprehensive court-order system had governed the phone tap protocols for New York law enforcement agencies since 1938. Although many policy experts considered the system a model for federal wiretap reform, the Savarese Commission discovered that judicial oversight was easy to circumvent, and existing criminal laws offered the state little room to prosecute police officers who chose to tap wires illegally. The foundations of New York’s laws against private wiretapping (i.e., wiretapping conducted by individuals acting outside of the state’s “sovereign authority”) were even shakier. The New York penal code prohibited any attempt to “cut, break…or make connection with any telegraph or telephone line, wire, cable, or instrument,” a clear sign that wiretapping without the written permission of a state judge was a criminal offense.
The problem was that the statute was written in 1892. Six decades’ worth of technological advancements had all but rendered it obsolete—so much so, the Commission noted, that almost every attempt to prosecute illegal wiretapping in the state of New York since 1892 had failed on technical grounds.
Eavesdroppers started using induction coils to tap into phone calls in the 1930s.
Here, technicians demonstrate the state of the art in 1940.
One major challenge to New York’s 1892 wiretap law, frightful for midcentury observers to behold, was the rise of what was known as induction wiretapping, a newfangled eavesdropping technique that didn’t require a physical connection to a telephone line. With the help of simple magnetic devices called “ induction coils”—essentially spare radio parts, available at most any hardware store—the induction method amounted, somewhat paradoxically, to a wireless wiretap. In the words of one electronics manufacturer, “Simply slip [an induction coil] under the base of a desk phone or lay on top of a ringer box of wall phones” and achieve “optimum results.”.
Tiny, cheap, and almost impossible to detect in action, induction coils were in wide use in wiretapping operations of all sorts by the late 1930s, and nowhere more so than in New York. In part this was because the state’s penal code had explicitly defined illegal wiretapping as an unwarranted physical connection to a telephone line. As the Savarese Commission pointed out, it was impossible to bring criminal charges against wiretappers caught using induction coils when they never so much as touched the phone company’s equipment.
The 55th Street operation had relied on wiretapping techniques that were more primitive than induction. But the Savarese Commission went to great lengths to show that even simple wiretap installations were impossible to prevent and prosecute according to the letter of the law. For most of the twentieth century, both private surveillance experts and law enforcement officials mostly relied on what was known as the direct wiretap method. As its name suggests, this technique involved connecting directly to the circuitry of the telephone system, either by scraping away the insulation along the route of a phone line and appending an extension wire, or by attaching an amplifier and headphones to a telephone junction box, where multiple residential lines met and joined the system’s main frame.
Direct wiretapping was tedious work that became both more and less difficult to carry out in the postwar years. More difficult, because installing a direct wiretap required the ability to find the subscriber’s line and pinpoint the location where the tap wire needed to be connected. Identifying this location, known as an “ appearance” point or location, became increasingly difficult as the telephone system expanded its labyrinthine reach. By World War II, telecommunications providers had also wised up to security concerns, adding locks to the most obvious direct tap locations, such as basement junction boxes.
But direct wiretapping proved less difficult to carry out in this period for almost the exact same set of reasons. The sprawl of the telephone system also meant that communications hardware and infrastructure—and, more importantly, the employees who managed them on a daily basis—were impossible to oversee in their entirety. For the right price, the Savarese Commission discovered, anyone who wanted to find a line to tap could bribe a phone company employee for the relevant cable appearances, or even for direct access to the main frame, just as John Broady had when setting up the tap nest.
“90 per cent of all tappers today are old telephone company men,” reported William J. Mellin, a retired government investigator who claimed to have tapped more than 15,000 lines during his forty years of work for the Internal Revenue Service. Mellin’s estimate would have the ring of hyperbole if the Savarese Commission hadn’t come to the same conclusion.
What truly distinguished the Empire State in the 1950s—what made it America’s “ eavesdropping capital,” in the words of the privacy law expert Alan Westin—was yet another loophole in state wiretap law, one that raised doubts as to whether the sort of wiretapping that the NYPD discovered at East 55th Street was even illegal at all.
The loophole was the result of a curious court decision involving a Brooklyn businessman named Louis Appelbaum, who sued his wife for divorce in 1949. The evidence in the suit was partly based on telephone conversations that Appelbaum had permitted Robert La Borde, a notoriously prolific New York private investigator, to record on his home line. The presiding judge dismissed the divorce suit and went on to charge both Appelbaum and La Borde for violating the state’s wiretapping law. Both men were convicted. But an appellate court reversed the ruling in 1950, reasoning that telephone subscribers maintained a “paramount right” to tap their own lines.
The language of the appellate court’s opinion in People v. Appelbaum (1950) was unambiguous in its support for what would become known as “one-party consent” eavesdropping: “When a subscriber consents to the use of his line by his employee or by a member of his household, or by his wife, there is a condition implied that the telephone will not be used to the detriment of the subscriber’s business, household, or marital status…. In such situations, the subscriber…may have his own line tapped or otherwise checked so that his business may not be damaged, his household relations impaired, or his marital status disrupted.” For a resident of New York in the early 1950s—a man, most likely, because the gendered language of the ruling perversely implied that men had more claim on subscriber’s rights than women—it was entirely legal, under Appelbaum, to record any conversation made on your home telephone. It was also entirely legal to hire someone else to do it for you.
The Savarese Commission spent most of its investigative energy working to understand the effects of the Appelbaum decision, eventually coming to the conclusion that it had encouraged a “lively, active, and lucrative” private eavesdropping industry throughout New York State. According to the Commission’s March 1956 report, the case had thrown into confusion what was left of New York’s 1892 wiretap law. It had also created a growing market for an urban professional whose doings had long preoccupied studies of electronic surveillance nationwide: the wiretapper-for-hire—or, more colloquially, “private ear.” These were men (again: almost all were men) with a uniquely modern expertise. They knew how to tap any telephone, and they knew how to locate any telephone that was tapped. The tools of their trade were cheap, easy to use, and virtually impossible to detect in action. Appelbaum gave them license to bring their work, long maligned as dirty and disreputable, out into the open.
Among the committees set up to investigate illegal wiretapping after the sensational revelation of the 55th Street “wiretapper’s nest” in New York City
was one in the U.S. House of Representatives led by Emanuel Celler , a New York Democrat. On 3 May 1955, professional wiretapper Bernard Spindel
tartled Celler by playing back for the congressman recordings of his own recent telephone calls.
After 1950, in the words of the Savarese Commission, New York private ears were “immune practitioners in a nonhazardous occupation.” They went about their business as freely as plumbers, housepainters, and insurance salesmen.
Reliable facts and figures about the private eavesdropping industry that prospered under Appelbaum are difficult to find. The Savarese Commission conducted months of closed-session interviews to create a thumbnail sketch of the men who were offering freelance wiretapping services around the state of New York. Most were either proficient in electronics early on, tapping their first lines by the age of twelve or thirteen, or had received special technical training while serving in the military. Most had gone on to find paying jobs in telecommunications, law enforcement, or freelance private investigation, three professional fields that expanded dramatically after World War II. And in the course of their regular duties, most had the opportunity to discover that telephone lines were easy and lucrative to tap—easy and lucrative enough, in any event, to turn wiretapping into a dedicated career, despite the risks that occasionally came with it. In 1955, the year of the 55th Street scandal, private wiretapping contractors were reported to net as much as $250 per day in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The jobs with the most legal exposure commanded the highest rates.
The biggest names in the profession— Robert La Borde, John Broady, Bernard Spindel—tended to make their money monitoring telephone lines for New York businesses. Many more found work in the domestic sphere, helping to litigate civil and marital disputes.
John Jacob Astor VI was among the powerful people whose name was dredged up by the investigation into the 55th-Street wiretapping operation.
Shortly after returning from his honeymoon, Astor had filed for divorce from his third wife, the former Dolores Margaret “Dolly” Fullman, and was
thought to be seeking incriminating evidence against her.
The Savarese Commission discovered that divorce wiretapping was far and away the most common job for private eavesdropping specialists in the 1950s. Because New York divorce laws were “adversarial,” requiring one party to show fault in the other before the state could terminate a union, wiretap recordings that captured evidence of infidelity could have a dramatic effect on the outcome of individual cases. This was why John Jacob Astor VI had turned to John Broady—Astor believed that a wiretap would prove that his wife was having an affair with another man. The Savarese Commission found the arrangement to be surprisingly common. New York’s private ears tapped more lines to monitor cheating spouses than their counterparts in law enforcement did to gather criminal evidence.
The Savarese Commission’s report would inaugurate a new day for wiretapping in the Empire State—or so it seemed on the surface. In July 1957, after more than two years of legislative wrangling, policymakers in Albany added an amendment to the New York penal code that expanded the state’s definition of illegal eavesdropping to include both direct and induction wiretapping and levied hefty fines on phone companies that failed to report violations of the new law. The amendment also closed the Appelbaum loophole, prohibiting one-party consent eavesdropping and barring the use of wiretap recordings or transcripts in civil court proceedings. But when the Savarese Commission recommended tightening oversight of law enforcement wiretapping, police officials pushed back, and lobbyists in Albany eventually pressured the legislature to keep the state’s court-order system intact. The resulting compromise seemed to place New York law enforcement beyond the reach of reform.
The legacy of the 55th Street scandal in New York was thus mixed. By the end of the decade, it seemed as though both everything and nothing had changed. When Congress held exploratory hearings on “ Wiretapping, Eavesdropping, and the Bill of Rights” in the winter of 1959, ranking members of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights wrote to Wellington Powell, New York Telephone’s vice president of operations, to testify about the outcome of the wiretap nest case. In an official letter later introduced into the congressional record, Powell expressed optimism about the success of the Savarese Commission’s effort to curb illegal wiretapping in New York.
“The new laws have strengthened privacy of communications by providing new sanctions and by eliminating loopholes and administrative difficulties under old laws,” he reported. To bolster the new legal regime, New York Telephone had also “added more specially trained personnel to [its] special agents’ forces” and intensified “indoctrination and supervision concerning security practices.” But between the lines, Powell’s letter offered an ominous set of statistics that underscored just how unworkable the twin ideals of privacy and security were in the field of telecommunications. In Manhattan alone, the New York Telephone Company managed 75,000 terminal boxes. Those 75,000 boxes connected to more than 4,000 miles of cable, and those 4,000 miles of cable contained more than 3 million miles of telephone wire. The entire New York Telephone System serviced an estimated 7,900,000 handsets. In a communications network so unmanageably vast, preventing an isolated illegal act was nothing less than a Sisyphean task.
Federal agencies wouldn’t begin to face political consequences for the abuse of wiretaps in national security investigations until the 1970s. In the wake of the 55th Street controversy, state and municipal governments around the country likewise passed a flurry of wiretap reforms, many of which sought to prohibit the private use of electronic surveillance equipment. But at least in New York, the sense among those who knew best was that aggressive policy measures amounted to little more than sound and fury.
“You can’t legislate…against illegal wiretapping,” warned New York District Attorney Edward Silver. “They did it before there were statutes and they will do it regardless of what you do.” On the other side of the law, private ears like Bernard Spindel offered equally worrisome predictions about the spread of the wiretap trade in the face of new policies: “Never before have so many people been willing to pay so much to find out what others are thinking and doing. Never before have we been so capable of accomplishing these desires. Whatever legislation may be enacted…is already many years too late.” Futility was the order of the day. “Most experts believe that no matter what legislation is enacted, the unhappy outlook as of now is that wiretapping is here to stay and will increase,” Newsweek reported in an article on “The Busy Wiretappers” in the spring of 1955. The tumultuous decade that followed proved all of the predictions right.
A cama is a hybrid between a male dromedary camel and a female llama, and has been produced via artificial insemination at the Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai.[1] The first cama was born on January 14, 1998. The aim was to create an animal capable of higher wool production than the llama, with the size and strength of a camel and a cooperative temperament.[2]
As an adult dromedary camel can weigh up to six times as much as a llama, the hybrid needs to be produced by artificial insemination. Insemination of a female llama with sperm from a male dromedary camel has been the only successful combination. Inseminating a female camel with llama sperm has not produced viable offspring.[6][7]
The first cama showed signs of becoming sexually mature at age four, when he showed a desire to breed with a female guanaco and a female llama. He was also a behavioral disappointment, displaying an extremely poor temperament. The second cama, a female named Kamilah, was successfully born in 2002. As of April 2008, five camas had been produced.[8]
Iconic Soviet soda pop machines used to gather massive lines, but only offered one or two drinking glasses. However, that didn’t seem to discourage anyone.
Vending machines will always remain one of the symbols of the Soviet era. They could be found in airports, train stations, hotels, movie theaters, shopping malls and often in the street. Many, to this day, remember the price, as well as the taste. Their popularity was phenomenal. But they had something that would look completely out of place today: they offered only one or two drinking glasses.
One for all
It’s believed that the first ‘vending machine’ in the Soviet Union was used in 1932: “A Leningrad-based ‘Vena’ factory worker, Agroshkin, has invented an interesting machine. Using it, every store can now carry out its own production of carbonated water,” read a story from ‘Vechernyaya Moskva’ (“Evening Moscow”). By the start of the 1960s, more than 10,000 of these had machines sprouted up all over Moscow.
The first machines gave out soda pop with syrup for 3 kopecks, or without for 1 kopeck. Your choice of syrup was ‘pear’, ‘barberry’, ‘tarkhun’ (tarragon), ‘cream-soda’, ‘kolokolchik’ (“bellflower”) and other flavors that either pointed to the original ingredient, or hid it behind a pretty name. In later years, Pepsi and Fanta joined the party, but were several times the price.
The vending machines functioned from May to September, and in winter, they would be locked in special metal cases. In the summer, lines were massive.
The following would usually happen: once it was your turn, you inserted the coin, selected the flavor, put the glass under the dispenser, got your drink, drank it right there in front of the entire line, and put the glass back. There was a special cradle with a grill underneath, allowing for the glass to be washed. You would have to turn it upside down, press down hard, and a modest water jet would spray it on the inside. (So modest you sometimes still saw lipstick stains!)
The machines would undergo periodic maintenance, which included washing the glasses out with hot water and a soda-based solution. But that didn’t happen daily.
The question, then, is: did the USSR ever suffer epidemics of infectious diseases as a result? And the answer is a big fat “yes”. A lot of them! However, in all the years of use, a link between the vending machines and the spread of infectious diseases had never been publicly acknowledged.
How dangerous was the glass really?
The truth is, the Soviet Union was not a place that often disclosed public health statistics to its own public. There had been epidemics in the past that there still isn’t data for. Such was the case with H1N1, dubbed the “Russian flu”: it traveled from South-East Asia to the Soviet Union in 1977, targeting predominantly young people, aged 20-25.
Glasses could easily have carried a virus. According to Elena Utenkova, Professor at Kirov State University’s Department of Infectious Diseases, “For example, there’s a risk of accurate respiratory infections - ARV, the flu. If the individual also has herpes that is currently inflamed, their saliva can carry the virus, which ends up on badly cleaned kitchenware.”
Unfortunately, in cases involving “ordinary” infections - such as the above ARV or the flu - no one would ever ask where the patient contracted them - be it just a shabbily cleaned glass, dirty hands, a contagious person nearby and so on. Meanwhile, the Soviet healthcare system never experienced anything that could be called an epidemiological crisis. In fact, it was considered by many to be the best in the world.
So, were the Soviet people even aware of the dangers? Some of them, yes. You could always see one or two people in the lines that always had their own glass ready. Others flat-out forbid their kids from ever going near a vending machine.
There were even silly urban legends, claiming that the glasses could give you syphilis. One of them had appeared during the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, when the country was flooded with foreign tourists. Someone spread the story that African-Americans, “who had syphilis”, would wash their genitals in the glasses at night. This tale - while absurd - was testament to health-related fears present in Soviet society, believes Aleksandra Arkhipova, head of the ‘Modern Folklore Monitoring’ research group at The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation (RANEPA).
Soviet fears of “aliens” made it easy to pin the blame on the spread of any illnesses on foreigners, while syphilis was always considered the most “inappropriate” of diseases. In this way, the vending machines had become known as ‘syphilizers’ - the perfect urban legend. This is interesting, given that hepatitis would have been far better fodder for the myth: unlike syphilis, you can actually contract it from a common drinking glass.
The end of an era
Nevertheless, it wasn’t epidemics, but the breakup of the USSR, that finally ended the epoch of the glass-based vending machines.
“In the 90s, the company ‘Torgmontazh’, that oversaw the installation and maintenance of the machines, simply abandoned them. The service system collapsed, and with it, the functioning of the machines themselves. Soon, they became obsolete, and you could buy carbonated drinks in every kiosk,” remembers David Gershzon, senior research fellow at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Refrigeration Industry - which was behind the development of the first machines.
Aleksandr Barannik, then deputy director of ‘Avtomattorg No. 3’, said back then that one of the main reasons for the disappearance of the machines was inflation: “The coin-processing mechanism is quite complex, and refurbishing it several times a year amid such rapid inflation would have been simply unfeasible.”
There is something about a French fry that begs to be dipped. Maybe it’s the fact that they’re shaped sort of like a finger, which is the ideal form for dipping. Maybe it’s that modern potatoes—at least those outside the Andes Mountains—are mostly neutral in flavor, and take to any combination of additions. Maybe it’s the external crispiness that cries out for a contrasting texture. There are dozens of well-known fry dips, all around the world, and they fall into several families—producing a web of unexpected global connections around the world. You never really know where you are in the world until you dip a fry and take a bite.
Before we get to that, let’s explore the much-disputed creation of this ubiquitous foodstuff. Potatoes come from the Andean region of South America, and Andean peoples have not only thousands of different varieties of potato, but also many, many ways of preparing them. In the pre-Columbian Andes, and even for awhile after European contact, the most common methods were boiling, roasting, and a freeze-dry method that produces a product called chuños. Deep-frying, and cooking in oil in general, is a relatively new thing for potatoes.
Cooking in oil has a long history in certain parts of the ancient world. There are mentions of frying in Apicius, a Roman cookbook with recipes that probably date back to the first century. Olive oil was the medium of choice in the Mediterranean, and was plentiful, but for most of the world, fat and oil were prized and expensive. Olives are unusual in that a simple press can extract their oil, whereas for most plants, you have to smash them, boil them, then quickly skim off the oil as it separates. It was expensive to render fat from animals, and both expensive and time-consuming to produce it from vegetables.
Outside the Mediterranean, up until the end of the Middle Ages or so, fat and oil were too important to be used simply to cook something else. They were treated more like meat: vital sources of calories, not something to be used to cook something else. Fat would be spread on starches like bread, or added to soups and stews. That started to change around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when new machines and methods for extracting oil emerged. Roll mills, in which two rotating cylinders press material between them, started to be used to efficiently squeeze oil from plant matter in 1750. The hydraulic press was created in the late 1700s, then solvents in the mid-1800s (though the first solvents were almost certainly not fit for human consumption).
This is all to say that deep-frying, which requires a great deal of oil, is a mostly modern method—so french fries are a mostly modern dish. A common legend states that french fries originated in the Namur region of Belgium, where locals usually fried fish. One particularly vicious winter, the legend goes, their river froze solid, and so desperate and hungry locals cut potatoes into small, fish-shaped pieces, and fried those. That story comes from a 1781 manuscript wherein the author states that “this practice goes back more than a hundred years already.” But it’s incredibly unlikely that anyone was even eating potatoes in Belgium in 1681, let alone using wildly expensive oils to cook them.
Culinary historian Pierre Leclerq instead suggests that french fries—which he clarifies as being deep-fried, and not shallow-fried in a pan like home fries—probably came around in the mid-1800s, following the widespread availability of plant-based oils around Europe. They likely were first sold as street food in Belgium, France, or both. It’s also likely that the concept of deep-frying potatoes evolved independently elsewhere, too. After all, once oil was more affordable, why use its browning and crisping abilities on just about everything?
From there, the deep-fried potato—usually, but not always, in stick form—spread around the world. And so did its dips. Each fry dip is reflective of both local tastes and colonial conquests, new technologies and old traditions. The french fry is the medium through which you can see the parts that make up a modern culture. How you choose to flavor that most fundamental of snacks—deep-fried starch—says an awful lot about who you are. And it also shows how strangely interrelated world cuisine has become.
The state of the french fry dip in 2019 is wild: globalization has brought ketchup to the entire world, sure, but it’s also led to an almost impossibly large array of regional sauces and combinations. With that in mind, it doesn’t really make sense to break up the fry dips along geographic lines; the United States, dip-wise, has more in common with the Philippines than it does with Canada, for example. The world’s fry dips are better sorted by family.
The Creamy Family
This family of fry dips includes mayonnaise and its related sauces. Mayonnaise is, probably, an early-19th-century French version of aioli, which in its traditional egg-free form was found around the Southwestern Mediterranean and probably has its roots in ancient Rome.
Straight-up mayo is common as a fry dip in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands—perhaps suggesting it is a mother dip of sorts, though only one of several—and is widely used today all by itself. But there are dozens of varieties in this family, often much more exotic than a simple whipped white emulsion. Aioli or allioli—now often used as a shorthand for a garlic-heavy mayo sauce, though don’t tell that to the Spanish—is common on patatas bravas in certain parts of Spain. The Dutch make something called patatje oorlog, a dish of fries with, weirdly, both mayo and a peanut-y satay sauce. (It translates to “war fries.”) Remoulade, a mayo heavily seasoned with spices and often pickles, is common in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
Then there are the spiked mayos: curry mayo (again, Belgium and the Netherlands), fritten sauce (heavily mustard-spiked mayo, from Germany), and, well, many other Belgian creations. Here’s one called “Brasil sauce” which has mayo, pureed pineapple, and curry powder. Koen Smets, a behavioral economist who was born and raised in Belgium and replied to a very vague tweet on the subject, says, “Most chip shops have an array of sauces, rarely less than a dozen, and often more than 25.”
This particular family is rich, mild, and lightly acidic. These creamy sauces are a foil for salt—fatty, with an excellent consistency for dipping, but no overpowering flavor. Devotees might say that it accents, rather than muscles out, the flavor of the fry itself. Those devotees might also scorn lovers of the next major family, and vice versa.
“Ketchup” is a Malay word to describe a Chinese sauce consisting mostly of pickled fish. The word and vague concept of a sweet-and-sour sauce made it to the United Kingdom, where it was made with mushrooms, and then to the United States, where it was made with that most glorious of New World fruits, the tomato.
Where the primary attribute of the Creamy Family is its fat content, the Ketchup Family is sweet, sour, and sweet again. Standard tomato ketchup is ubiquitous in the United States but pretty widely available elsewhere, with minor variations in sweetness, sourness, and acidity.
Like mayo, ketchup has a curry-spiked variety, most associated with Germany, and particularly with Berlin street food, though it’s also popular in Denmark, the Netherlands, and, yet again, Belgium. But ketchup doesn’t have to be made with tomatoes. Modern ketchup, really, is a fruit puree kicked up with vinegar, sugar, and spices. In the Philippines, banana ketchup (often dyed red) is a common dip. In Belgium, a version of a South Asian pickle is also common—something like a very sweet relish. It’s not pureed, like tomato ketchup, but given its status as a sweet-sour vegetable, it’s at least a ketchup cousin, maybe.
Throughout Southeast Asia there are chili ketchups, to be enjoyed blended or separately, depending on the diner’s taste. McDonald’s in Thailand, for example, has “American ketchup” and “chili sauce,” the latter of which is described as orange and tangy.
Brown sauce, a United Kingdom favorite, is a little trickier to parse. It looks like gravy (more on that family later), but is fundamentally a ketchup: tomato base, with vinegar and sugar. What separates it from standard ketchup is the additions: dates, raisins, tamarind, or any combination thereof, along with spices, a bit like what Americans consider steak sauce.
The key attribute of ketchup and its relatives, I think, is sugar. Ketchup has about four grams per tablespoon—more than vanilla ice cream (also a pretty good dip for fries). Ketchup, like mayo, has some acidity and an excellent viscosity for clinging to fries, but no other sauce on this list is anywhere near as sweet.
The Vinegar Family
This one usually comes back to the United Kingdom and places where its influence is felt. Probably the most iconic, though by no means the only, accompaniment to fries (chips) in the British Empire is malt vinegar, made from fermented beer, which also tastes good on the fried fish that often accompany them.
Vinegar fries are also fairly common in Anglophone Canada, as one might expect, as well as South Africa, where the British colonial influence is also felt. But they have a rather unusual way to do it: the South African slap chip, or slaptjip. This dish consists of a fry that’s been slathered in vinegar and salt and then, bizarrely, covered and allowed to steam—softening the fry and essentially taking away one of the key attributes of a proper fry, its crispy exterior.
The vinegar family is a curious one, as vinegar is, technically, a lousy condiment. The vinegar gets swiftly absorbed by the fry, meaning it can be difficult to taste if it rests for even a moment, and, of course, it tends to make a fry very soggy. The upside is a clean, crisp flavor, with no need to add fat or sugar, like the other families; just straight-up acid to counterbalance the oil.
The Gravy Family
Obviously the most famous member of the Gravy Family is the Quebec favorite, poutine, a mess of fries topped with cheese curds and brown gravy, usually a poultry stock thickened with flour or cornstarch. It’s salty, savory, and a little peppery. The American version of this is disco fries, most often associated with New Jersey, which replaces the cheese curds with shredded mozzarella. Gravies are essentially thick meat sauces, and in practice resemble a coating more than a dip.
There are other meaty sauces for fries, too, such as chili cheese fries in the United States, or poutine italienne in Quebec, which is basically bolognese sauce. These are all really more dishes than dips, as a proper dip should be served alongside the fries, rather than on top. But these variations are saucy and vital to understanding how fries are eaten. You might notice that these meaty fry dish–sauces are most common in cold regions. Surely there is a connection between the brutally cold Montreal winter and the desire to eat something truly decadent and ridiculous like poutine.
Interestingly, these are the only sauces served warm or hot; all the others are either room temperature or cold. This is mostly a technical issue; gravy congeals as it cools, which is pretty gross. Poutine
The Powder Family
Here’s where things get interesting. Heavily flavored powders that function like flavor-enhancing dips are common in Japan, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Sometimes fries are pre-spiced, like American “curly fries,” which are both curly and distinguished by a slightly spicy, paprika-tinted spice blend. Masala fries, from India, are like this, too.
In Japan, furaido potato are served with various powder seasonings and a bag; you add the fries and powder to a bag and shake the whole thing. Together they’re called furu pote, and common flavors include seaweed, butter soy, sesame, and more. Even McDonald’s sells them in Japan, as “Shake Shake Fries,” though a Japanese contact says that Wendy’s First Kitchen, previously known as First Kitchen prior to its acquisition by the American chain, is best known for its powdered fries.
The powder method is a highly efficient way to get bonus flavor onto a french fry. The powder is highly concentrated, so you don’t need much; it’s dehydrated, so it lasts forever; and because it’s dry, you don’t have to worry about soggification. On the other hand, you also don’t get any texture or temperature difference from a powder, but there’s no reason you can’t also dip a powdered fry.
It’s no particular surprise that the best-known powders come from Japan and India. Japanese cuisine is full of flavor-adding powders, including furikake (sesame seeds, seaweed, sugar, salt, sometimes other stuff) and shichimi togarashi (chili flakes, dried orange peel, sesame seed, ginger, seaweed, sometimes other stuff). Both of those, come to think of it, would be great on fries. India, too, is big on adding powders, in the form of spice blends, to pretty much any dish, from salads and popcorn to fried snacks and sandwiches.
The Outlier Family
There are various deep-fried potato-stick dishes around the world that don’t fit cleanly into these categories. The Bulgarian kartofi sus sirene is fries topped with shredded sirene cheese, similar to feta. In Peru, fries are sauteed with meats; lomo saltado is with strips of beef, salchipapas with, usually, slices of hot dog. Neither choice is really a dip, but both impart a great deal of flavor.
Then there’s the matter of reverse-colonial curry sauce, popular in the United Kingdom. It is made by frying garlic, ginger, onion, tomato paste, and spices before pureeing—like a Ketchup by definition, but it is not as sweet and is served hot, so it eats more like a Gravy. It offers something of both.
Deserving of special notice is Romanian mujdei, a garlic sauce that can be in either the Creamy Family or the Vinegar Family. The primary ingredient of this sauce is garlic, smashed in a mortar and pestle and mixed with oil (usually sunflower), sometimes with lemon juice or vinegar, and sometimes with sour cream. It’s simple, but still defies categorization.
Similar to mujdei is the Cuban mojo, made with crushed garlic, olive oil, maybe oregano, and citrus juice, most often bitter orange. But it is more likely to be eaten with a different fried starch, like yucca or plantain.
And finally, perhaps the greatest outlier of all. In Vietnam, french fries are often served with a side of butter and some white sugar. This is not so strange when you consider that fatiness is a defining trait of mayo and sweetness a defining trait of ketchup, and that just about every other staple food around the world can be eaten either savory, sweet, or both. Rice can be made into mochi or rice pudding; corn features in puddings and corn cakes; wheat can, obviously, be made into cake and about a million other treats. But the potato is hardly ever served sweet (Ed: A salty, crispy fry dunked in a cold, creamy milkshake is “chef’s kiss.”), though there’s no particular reason why. Hat’s off to Vietnam for just going for it.
I got one addition that I very much enjoy; greek yoghurt, either plain or with the addition of spices as well. Variants like tzatziki work beautifully as well.
When I was leaving school/first years of employment, in the small country town where I grew up, went to school and worked for some years before heading for the Big Smoke, Saturday morning was spent in the Paragon Cafe with the group that I hung out with, and invariably a milkshake and a cup of chips - evenly split between vinegar, tomato sauce (never heard of ketchup) or just salt, everyone had their preference. There we would discuss cars (because boys only), girls (because boys only), movies (and which girl you were going to take), and the Sunday night dance down at the church hall (and which girl you were going to take, or were going to try to 'crack on' to there. Innocent times, we were dreamers all!!! And the nice thing is that the survivors still keep in touch, even though we only need a single booth rather than a couple like back in the day.
Strangely this was a boys pastime, I don't recall what or where the girls were when this was going on, maybe they were down at the Radnor, a manifestly inferior establishment which we wouldn't be seen dead in. Although, if knew the girls were down there, perhaps ...
In later years the Paragon was recognised as a local institution, run by the same family for I don't know how many decades, they moved into the Radnor's premises (vindicated!!), and are still there today, probably 70+ years after they were founded by one of the early southern European migrants who came out after WW2.
12-14-2021, 07:18 AM
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