Cahiers de hoummous: chickpea hummus?

MidLaw has warned — no, thundered! — that no good can come of using the term “hummus” to denominate dips made of foreign substances.  “Pumpkin hummus,” “beet hummus,” “sweet potato hummus.” Bah!

Well, the chicks have come home to roost.

MidLaw was at a fancy event in a hotel the other night. Fancy hors-d’oeuvres were served. Each separate offering was accompanied by a small card naming the dish. And there at the end, on the far side of the artichoke dip, was a bowl of what was labeled “chickpea hummus.”

Chickpea hummus?

If you do not label it “hummus b’tahini,” that’s OK. But this label said “chickpea hummus”. Might as well have said “chickpea chickpeas,” or “hummus hummus”.

Would you say “eggplant aubergines,” or “green bean haricots verts”? Bean wrap burrito.

One must hold the line — in large things and small.

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Brown shoes?

In the marketplace just now, brown shoes are an unmistakable fashion among young males.

Frank Zappa, where are you?

Brown shoes don’t make it
Brown shoes don’t make it
Quit school, why fake it?
Brown shoes don’t make it

Westtown BBall on ESPNU Monday

Westtown School v. IMG Academy, January 15 @ 5PM on ESPNU. Have hummus and pita at the ready (celery or carrot sticks optional). Which Westtown player going to Duke next year?

 

Cahiers de Hoummous: Yuletide hummus, a MidLaw tradition

In the spirit of the season, garnish your hummus with a sprig of holly. The dark green leaf, the bright red berry: they rest so well on a rich bed of beige. (Recipe for the beige: The MidLaw Hummus Way.)

But do not eat that holly. Remember: Holly is toxic and can cause death to small animals and little children.

Merry Christmas to all! And a Happy New Year!

A James Brown Christmas miracle — Merry Christmas Baby

I do not understand this Internet, but I say it is a Christmas Miracle when you can push a button on your computer and have James Brown’s Funky Christmas come right up, no charge.

(You are looking for track number 4, but don’t miss number 5 — well, all of them.)

As nearly as I can tell, thanks for this are due to Josh Jones, a writer, and musician based in Durham, NC, and to Open Culture, the best free cultural and educational media on the web. And, of course, to JAMES BROWN.

Let us rejoice and be glad.

Have a Soulful Christmas (Track 6).

Cahiers de Hoummous: The BBC leaps into the fray

Apparently, a recent Cahiers de Hoummous post here provoked the BBC. Last week, it published another one of those who-invented-hummus? articles. (For one of the best in the genre, see Church of the Chickpea.)

Demonstrating that the author had read that recent MidLaw cahier, the BBC article opened up with the fundamental axiom: “The recipe for hummus b’tahini (as the dish is named: ‘hummus’ simply means ‘chickpeas’), consists of chickpeas, tahini, garlic and lemon.” (No mention here of the possibility of pumpkins or beets.)

For 9 pages, it reviews the perennial hummus questions: smooth or lumpy? oil in it or on it? what condiments and accompaniments? Chickpeas, the BBC agrees, are some serious beans. They go back 10,000 years, it says. They are indubitably without peers among legumes. (With apologies to red kidney beans, chickpeas’ only real rivals among legumes are Edgecombe County peanuts. (Yes, Virginia, those nuts are legumes).) And, there is a not-to-be-missed discussion, mid-article, of the traditional practice of serving hummus in red clay bowls with raised edges. The hummus is whisked against the edges and mounded in a way that promotes good pita-dipping. The texture of the hummus (as between too liquid and too thick) is gauged by how well it mounds around the edge.

Inevitably, one supposes, the BBC asks “Who invented hummus?” But, was it really necessary? MidLaw put this old quarrel to rights long ago. Hummus originated in Greensboro at an indeterminant date, sometime in the last 10,000 years.

Along the way, this newest article also sets more rabbits running. Is hummus a Greek thing? (MidLaw has addressed this.) Did hummus actually originate in India or Nepal? (Admittedly, a new one.)

In the end, they found a guy in Haifa who shrugged (a sure sign of authority) and said:

It doesn’t matter where it’s from. What matters is the way it’s been co-opted and sold commercially in grocery stores in plastic containers. “That’s not hummus!” he said, tearing a piece of pita. “There should be a sign on that humus the way there is on “kosher shrimp.” It should be labeled “fake hummus”. There should be an international law.

The guy is a MidLawfarian.

Roll your own!

[A tip of the MidLaw cap to C.L. Dibble for the BBC referral.]

[Special Note: Be on the lookout for a reprise of MidLaw’s celebrated “Yuletide Hummus” cahier. It’s coming any day now in response to overwhelming demand!]

What lawyers are for: what Montaigne said: a respite from artificial intelligence, alternative providers, and accountants

Michel de Montaigne

Now is a time when great chunks of law practice are breaking away. Law work is going to alternative providers and artificial intelligences and accountants. Lawyers are challenged to get clear about what their core function is. What, if anything, do lawyers do better than machines and bureaux and accountancies?

“Advocacy” is an answer that comes back soonest and most frequently. “Managing uncertainty” is another. Often these come down to acting in the moment: functioning on your feet in courtrooms, boardrooms, and conference rooms. In those contexts, the unexpected can break out. When that happens, who are you going to call?

Artificial intelligence, quick as it is, can’t yet come into a room and take up the lists. Alternative service providers want stacks of documents and time to sift through them. Accountants want to classify and quantify. They want time and premeditation.

For now anyway, it’s still left to the lawyers to manage uncertainty — controversy — in the moment. Particularly lawyers in mid-size firms are called for that. They are the ones that get the most experience with it.

Michel de Montaigne, himself a lawyer in the middle market, was the brain scientist of the 16^th Century. He commented on the lawyer’s brain and on acting in the moment — and he distinguished between what he called “the mind”, on one hand, and “judgment”, on the other. His comments (in his essay Of Quick or Slow Speech) call to mind the work of his fellow (albeit modern-day) brain scientist Daniel Kahneman and Kahneman’s recent book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

In the gift of wit or eloquence, Montaigne said

some have facility and promptness, and, as they say, can get it out so easily that at every turn they are ready; whereas others, slower, never speak except with elaboration and premeditation.

[I]f I had to give advice regarding these two diverse abilities …, which seems in our time to be the profession principally of preachers and lawyers, the slow man would do better as a preacher, it seems to me, and the other better as a lawyer. For the former’s calling gives him all the leisure he pleases to prepare himself, and then his course is run in a straight continuous line, without interruption; whereas the opportunities of the lawyer press him at every moment to enter the lists, and the unseen replies of his adversary force him off his course, so that he must immediately take up a new line.

It seems to be more peculiar to the mind to be prompt and sudden in its operation, and more peculiar to the judgment to be slow and deliberate. But a man who remains completely mute unless he has leisure to prepare, and also one to whom leisure gives no advantage for speaking better, are both abnormal cases. They tell of Severus Cassius that he spoke better without having thought about what he was going to ay; that he owed more to fortune than to diligence; that it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and that his adversaries were afraid to goad him, for fear that anger would redouble his eloquence.

These two temperaments, thinking fast and slow, have their different characteristics, each its limitations. Reflecting on himself, Montaigne observes:

I know by experience this sort of nature that cannot bear vehement and laborious premeditation. If it doesn’t go along gaily and freely, it goes nowhere worth going. We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp, because of a certain harshness and roughness that labor imprints on productions in which it has a large part. But besides this, the anxiety to do well, and the tension of straining too intently on one’s work, put the soul on the rack, break it, and make it impotent; …

It is no less peculiar to the kind of temperament I am speaking of that it wants to be stimulated: not shaken and stung by such strong passions as Cassius’ anger (for that emotion would be too violent); not shocked; but roused and warmed up by external present, and accidental stimuli. If it goes along all by itself, it does nothing but drag and languish. Agitation is its very life and grace.

I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draw more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it myself. This its speech is better than its writings, if there can be choice where there is no value.

This also happens to me: that I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment.

There is insight here for lawyers who advocate and counsel and negotiate – and also some respite from the onslaught of artificial lawyers, alternative lawyers, and accountants.

Be the one who can bring surprise and uncertainty, but also be prepared to welcome uncertainty when it comes upon you. Lawyers are the ones who are best in the moment, but they must bring judgment in those moments. Maybe artificial intelligence will be able to do that one day; I can’t see accountants getting there.

Be the one who goes along “gaily and freely.” Be the guy who brings the hammer to a computer fight.

 

 

Cahiers de Hoummous: Pumpkin hummus? Pumpkus!

[Wherein MidLaw reprises a holiday favorite cahier from Christmas past.]

They speak to me at Christmas time of pumpkin hummus.

It is the get of the multi-culture. Some at this season reprise even the beet fallacy.

Look it up. There is no plural of hummus.

Hummus is of chickpeas.

Rightly, we contest dried versus canned chickpeas. And then we conclude that either can do. And avidly, we pour into our food processors other pulses, other beans, and other vegetables to mash them up. But those are not hummus. They are dips and pastes and sauces. That must find their own names.

Anything else is the theft of a word that is the property of the chickpea. Chickpeas, garbanzo beans, ceci nuts, sometimes also known as Egyptian peas, Bengal grams, and Kabuli chana: they own hummus.

You may flavor your hummus as you will. After all, you are not choosing a plastic cup on a supermarket shelf. This is MidLaw. You are rolling your own. Radical self-determination is the essence of MidLaw Mind.

So, roasted red peppers are fine. A soupcon of vinegar from time to time perhaps. Frankly, pumpkin spice sounds a bit effete, but OK. For flavor. That’s up to you.

But do not take a simple and sturdy word that has stood for millennia. It does not belong to you. “Hummus” comes from the Arabic word meaning “chickpeas.” It does not mean pumpkins.

Pumpkus?

CHRISTMAS NOTE: The single question that MidLaw receives most often is, “What is your recipe for hummus?” Longtime MidLaw readers know that hummus culture is a journey, not a destination. Lifelong learning is at the core of MidLaw Mind. Revelation is continuing. Still, in recognition of the season and feeling the onset of winter, MidLaw will bring back key hummus-recipe-and-tips links for an upcoming holiday special. You must return to MidLaw for the holidays.

“Blast the prejudice that puts women down as only fit to be men’s playthings!”

We are at a cultural moment.

Sexual boundaries seem to be the “acutest issue” of the moment.

These are not new questions to North Carolina. This moment is not the first.

In Greensboro in 1878, Quaker editor David Swaim thundered in Greensboro’s leading newspaper: “Blast the prejudice that puts women down as only fit to be men’s playthings!”

His conservative counterpart, former Supreme Court Justice and founder of the UNC Law School, William Horn Battle rejoined: “No Southern lady should be permitted to sully her sweetness by breathing the pestiferous air of the courtroom.”

They were arguing about whether women should be permitted to practice law.

The issue was joined in Greensboro and taken to Raleigh. Leading North Carolina legal figures of the day took up the question: Albion Tourgée, William Horn Battle, Richmond Mumford Pearson.

It is the story of Jamestown native Tabitha Holton who became the first woman lawyer in the South.

A circular published when Holton died proclaimed:

The power of thy genius has broken the iron bands of brutality which had been rivited [sic] for ages upon thy sex. No more can the barbed shaft of prejudice and envy reach thee in thy eternal repose.

First in all the Sunny South to claim, and obtain, the full rights of womanhood

Tabitha Holton’s story is fabulized here. Her victory, which upset the custom and practice of centuries, was, in the end, based on merit. Opposition based on her status as a woman failed to stand against her unquestioned merit as a lawyer.

 

Cahiers de Hoummous: Hummus, an old-fashioned Thanksgiving tradition, and celebration of differences

MidLaw was the first to suggest that hummus may have originated in Greensboro.

And, just as there are those who may disagree, there may also be those who disagree that the traditional centerpiece of an old-fashioned North Carolina Thanksgiving Dinner is a big mess of hummus with pita bread and all the trimmings (drizzled olive oil, toasted pine nuts, parsley, za’atar, smoked paprika, boiled eggs, and sumac).

MidLaw does not shun or reject those who have a different point of view. The essence of The MidLaw Way is to welcome differences with respect, a willingness to listen, and openness to learning something new.

There are many traditional family hummus recipes and celebrated regional differences — such as those between Eastern NC hummus and Piedmont hummus. Along The MidLaw Way,  “there are countless paths, each with its own landmarks, its own route.”

MidLaw gladly welcomes differences and is grateful for them in the great American tradition of Thanksgiving. (Was it the Native Americans or the Pilgrims who brought the hummus to the first Thanksgiving?)

And in that grand spirit, MidLaw wishes a Happy Thanksgiving to all its readers, worldwide!