November 20th 2007: More Assorted Cambridge Happenings

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Lunch: S&S Restaurant
While walking to my intended lunch destination, I decided to try an alternate route and found myself in Inman Square. There I discovered S & S Restaurant, a Jewish deli, though its menu ranges a bit widely beyond that.	Part of the deli counter. There are diner-like dining rooms too.	Lunch of a toasted bagel with chive cream cheese, fresh fruit, and a potato knish served with chicken gravy. All were perfectly pleasing; I have no complaints, and that's saying a lot. The knish dough was lighter than I expected, but that's not bad, just different. Also, I'd never seen chicken gravy with knishes before. Nonetheless, it seemed to work.
En Route
Vivid fall colors along Washington St/Kirland St. Also notice the colonial house on the right.
Computer Lab
While accessing the internet in a computer lab, I couldn't help but overhear some students having fun shooting the breeze. (They clearly didn't do any work while I was there, despite open textbooks, printed journal articles, and the like.) One person claimed that the world is dividing between people who like sauerkraut and those who don't. Another conversation explored semantic and oral associations between maven, macher, and a brand of a men's shaver (mach). Later, they debated the water quality in various cities in California.
Lecture
Later in the afternoon, I attended a talk, "Informal Conversations on the Historian's Craft" by Robert Darnton. (Darnton writes popular history books.) In this talk, he discussed his life and how it's affected what he's done and his perspective on how one should do history. One of his major points, accompanied by an anecdote from his days at Oxford, was that one should tell the history, not explain the theory about why events turned out the way they did. His tutor at Oxford, after listening to him read an essay, in which the first half of the essay discussed the idea of causality, about why the French revolution occurred in 1789, asked, "Why don't you take down the scaffolding and leave the building standing?" Darnton's other major point involved being conscious of one's sources. He began his talk with a story about being a beat police reporter and learning to judge what is news. Apparently major crimes, when done to "(b)" victims (blacks), are not news and not worth reporting, but crimes done to "(w)" victims (whites) are news. Newspapers are selective. He said, "what's been printed or digitized is someone else's judgment--why limit yourself to only those documents?" (Plus, when examining physical documents, one finds things that aren't digitized, like notes on the back of a letter.) He wants people to go to primary sources. History is a "detective story." He cited Tocqueville as an example of what happens when one isn't conscious about where one gets information, claiming Tocqueville's thesis is a product of the ("C-series") documents he consulted. Had he consulted other documents, Darnton says he may have come to a different conclusion. Similarly, Darnton always admired a particular French revolutionary, but when he read some private letters he found out the revolutionary wrote some pamphlets to manipulate financial markets and thereby profit.
Dinner: Dudley House
We had some good shrimp scampi, good lamb stew (in an almost Japanese style curry roux), and okay beef with barley. Sorry, I forgot photograph the meal.