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Merit Badge Awardees (click for latest awards)
My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … Terry Steinmetz!!!
Terry Steinmetz (teryouth54, #3600) has received a certificate of achievement in Outpost for earning an Intermediate & Expert Level Disconnect to Reconnect Merit Badge!
“My girlfriend, Mindy, and I set up our glampers at a campsite that I built. We stayed out there for the weekend. We left everything behind and just enjoyed the outdoors. We sat by a fire every chance we could get. Played games. Looked at the stars, cooked over the campfire. It was just nice to be there without anything to distract us.
We felt so relaxed, got to share ourselves more, and came back so-o-o refreshed. Looking forward to doing this again in September.
I decided I needed a few days away after the hectic garden and canning season. So I packed up what I needed and went out to my glamper at my campsite on the back of our 40. I brought 2 books, a magazine, and some knitting. Ahh! I looked forward to just me, myself, and I—alone and peaceful. I spent 3 days and 2 nights, enjoying every minute.
I read both of my books and my magazine, took naps when I wanted, and did some knitting on a scarf as a gift for my son for Christmas. I was so happy to have a heater in my glamper, as the temps dropped into the 40s with cold winds out of the north! I cooked most of my meals by the fire, except for the last meal of homemade chicken noodle soup. It was wonderful to just be totally by myself and do some self-indulgence! I loved the experience, even the cold weather.”
The other day, I was talking to my granddaughter, Stella, and I said something about “cutting the mustard.”
She stopped me mid-sentence.
“What does that mean, Nanny? Cutting the mustard?”
(Picture me scratching my head.)
Cut the mustard?
What a funny saying.
This mustard?
Photo by Petr Pakandl via Wikimedia Commons
That mustard?
Creole mustard, photo by Mwaters1120 via Wikipedia
Hmmm …
I told Stella that the saying means, basically, “to be good enough, to do the job well.”
But I also told her I’d investigate the origins of “cutting the mustard,” be it wild-growing or a zesty spread.
What I found was a series of suppositions:
1. Both mustard plants and their seeds are tough to cut, making success a high bar.
“When mustard was one of the main crops in East Anglia, it was cut by hand with scythes, in the same way as corn,” explains Phil Pegum in The Guardian. “The crop could grow up to six feet high, and this was very arduous work, requiring extremely sharp tools. When blunt, they would not cut the mustard.”
2. Culinary mustard is often cut (diluted) with vinegar to make it more palatable, which, one might presume, indicates a job well done.
3. “Another supposed explanation,” proposes Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder, “is that the phrase is simply a mistaken version of the military expression ‘cut the muster’. This appears believable at first sight. A little research shows it not to be so. Muster is the calling together of soldiers, sailors, prisoners, to parade for inspection or exercise. To cut muster would be a breach of discipline; hardly a phrase that would have been adopted with the meaning of success or excellence.” Well, now we can check that one off the list.
“Whatever the coinage, the phrase itself emerged in the United States towards the end of the 19th century,” Martin continues. “The earliest example in print that I’ve found is from the Kansas newspaper The Ottawa Herald, August, 1889.”
The quote read:
He tried to run the post office business under Cleveland’s administration, but couldn’t “cut the mustard”.
Martin surmises that the use of quotation marks in the clip implies that the saying was familiar to readers and already used in common speech.
While my findings may not exactly cut the mustard, I hope they at least pass muster.
Stella will be the judge.
Old maps have a certain charm, don’t they?
Sea serpents, buried treasures, lands yet to be explored …
Map of the northern part and parts of the southern parts of the Americas by Abbot Claude Bernou, circa 1681, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
They stir a whisper of wanderlust, even in the heart of this happy homebody.
Similarly struck by historical maps, a statistician named Nathan Yau has made it his mission to recreate maps of my favorite country in the world (this one, of course!). Yau’s maps are updated versions of maps he unearthed in the original Statistical Atlas of the United States, which was based on the 1870 census.
While these maps aren’t the sort that feature X’s marking moth-eaten mysteries, they do contain an abundance of fascinating facts rarely recorded until the late 1800s.
Statistical Atlas of the United States, 1880, Popular Vote, Census.gov
“Up to that point, cartographers mostly made maps that captured physical features of the landscape: a river here, a city there, and so on. But the Statistical Atlas did something very different: It also mapped things you can’t see directly, things like crop yields, the prevalence of disease, the provenance of people,” explains Greg Miller of Wired. “It freed data that had been locked up in lists and tables and made it spatial.”
When he learned that recent U.S. Census Bureau budget cuts thwarted a plan to publish a new atlas from 2010 data (the last one was made in 2000), Nathan Yau was inspired to start scouring government websites for data so that he could update the atlas on his own.
“Ever since I found out about the Statistical Atlas of the United States, historically produced by the Census Bureau, it annoyed me that there wasn’t one in the works for the 2010 Census due to cuts in funding,” says Yau. “I got to thinking, hey, I could do that. And if I did, I wouldn’t have to be annoyed anymore. So I recreated the original Statistical Atlas of the United States with current data. I used similar styling, and had one main rule for myself: All the data had to be publicly available and come from government sites.”
He combed the 1870 atlas and made 59 comparable maps and charts (rather lovely to look at) that covered the same features, from annual rainfall to ancestry. The maps are available for your trivia treasure hunting at FlowingData.com.
In the Aug/Sept issue of MaryJanesFarm, “The Experiment” (on newsstands July 14), we led you here to my daily journal for a chance to win a free copy of the quilting book, Farm Girl Vintage, by Lori Holt.
Buy props used in MaryJane’s books and magazine!
5% of profits will benefit www.firstbook.org, a non-profit that provides new books to children from low-income families throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Here’s how:
MaryJane will post a photo and a description of a prop and its cost along with a few details as to its condition here: https://shop.maryjanesfarm.org/MaryJanesCurations. It’s a playful way to be the new owner of a little bit of farm herstory.
