The contemporary poet Jello Biafra said “I think there’s plenty of room, even in the most serious activist circles, for humor.”  It depends on the humor, of course.  For example, Laughlore.com’s “Top 99 Jello Jokes” includes “What do you call a jello that’s good at dancing?  A jelly dancer” and “What’s a jello’s favorite movie?  The Blob.”  Those are among the easiest to digest, but the story of jello itself is more amusing.  A loyal reader forwarded “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Jell-O,” an online article of unknown attribution that stated, “At one time, its key ingredient – gelatin – was difficult to come by, making any gelatin-rich dish a symbol of wealth and social standing …. Extracting gelatin back then was time intensive.  Cooks spent days boiling animal bones and byproducts, then straining the liquid before letting it set in its gelatinous state.”

 There’s even a “Jell-O Museum” in Le Roy, New York that claims that “Everyone’s favorite gelatinous treat was concocted in Le Roy in 1897.”  However, the Museum of Mostly Pudding (“A new digital museum that explores American culture in the 20th century via the pantry”) added that “American inventor Peter Cooper has a special place in gelatin history. After purchasing a glue factory in New York City in 1822, he developed the first gelatin dessert powder, which he coined ‘portable gelatin.’  He secured a patent in 1845 and attempted to market the product, but there was little interest. In 1895, Cooper sold his patent to Pearl Wait, a cough syrup manufacturer looking to dabble in desserts. (Wait’s wife May would name their product Jell-O).”  My money’s on Mr. Cooper, and I’m also pulling for Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology’s efforts to develop sustainable chocolate.  “Have Swiss Scientists Made a Chocolate Breakthrough?,” a BBC article by Imogen Foulkes from last August, reported that chocolate producers traditionally use only cocoa seeds, “leaving the rest of the cocoa fruit – the size of a pumpkin and full of nutritious value – to rot in the fields.”  Now the FIT researchers “have come up with a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit rather than just the beans and without using sugar” by including the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice, and the husk, or endocarp”. The “juice, which is 14% sugar, is distilled down to form a highly concentrated syrup, combined with the pulp and then, taking sustainability to new levels, mixed with the dried husk, or endocarp, to form a very sweet cocoa gel.  The gel, when added to the cocoa beans to make chocolate, eliminates the need for refined sugar.”

Now if only the Swiss would come up with a shmoo.  According to Wikipedia, “The shmoo (plural: shmoos, also shmoon) is a fictional cartoon creature created by Al Capp” for his Li’l Abner comic strip in 1948. The shmoo “created a fad that lasted into the 1950s, including merchandise, songs, fan clubs.”  The “naturally gentle” shmoo “resembles a bowling pin with stubby legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows, and sparse whiskers—but no arms, nose, or ears. Its feet are short and round, but dexterous.”  They multiply faster than rabbits, and “require no sustenance other than air.  Shmoos are delicious to eat and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself—either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or on a grill, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.  They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timbers, depending on how thickly one slices them.  They have no bones, so there is no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.”

In August 1948 Li’l Abner wandered into the forbidden “Vally of the Shmoon” and returned to Dogpatch with a pair of shmoos about the same time as a little-known, but important librarian discovered she’d been an FBI suspect. “The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project’s Secrets,” an Atlasobscura.com article by Michale Waters, described why Charlotte Serber was a historically significant librarian, and why she was abused by the Army and the FBI.  Her “husband, Robert, was a physicist on the project and Oppenheimer’s protégé. In 1942, before the Los Alamos project commenced, both Serbers lived in the garage over Oppenheimer’s Berkeley home … The New York Times described Robert Serber as ‘the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb.’”  Charlotte graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as a statistician, but she wasn’t a trained librarian.  However, the job had been refused by several librarians after they “took a look at the huge stack of technical reports from chemical companies, piled up ‘like a teepee,’ the classification of which would be her primary task.”. 

“In 1942, J. Robert Oppenheimer selected Charlotte Serber to spearhead the project in part because of her lack of librarian experience. He wanted someone who would be willing to bend the rules of cataloguing.   Being too much of a freethinker for the cataloging professor at library school, I can relate.  Besides facing a mountain of documents to classify and organize, Serber had to create and enforce security protocols to be followed by hundreds of scientists, which was challenging with Richard Feynman running around. When he came to Los Alamos before Charlotte’s arrival, physicist Feynman was concerned about security since all the scientists kept their research papers in locked filing cabinets.  Feynman had learned lock-picking from a professional and opened the padlocks on coworkers’ file cabinets, took the documents he wanted to read, and left behind snide messages from “Feynman the safecracker.” He included instructions on how to pick locks in his autobiography, “Surely You’re Joking, My Feynman!”

“Serber’s greatest challenge proved to be importing thousands of esoteric textbooks, journals, and manuals to a town that isn’t supposed to exist—without raising suspicion. To do it, the Los Alamos librarians ordered close to 1,200 books and complete backlists of 50 journals through an interlibrary loan program with the University of California at Berkeley, where Oppenheimer had previously worked. The books were first sent through a forwarding address in Los Angeles, where they would attract less attention. From there, all thousand-plus of them landed at a single P.O. box in Santa Fe.”  Serber also borrowed 4,000 current magazines, 1,000 popular books, and 100 books for kids from the local Santa Fe library It was all accomplished by Serber working 75 hours a week. Nonetheless, in “1943, the U.S. Army’s security team recommended that the Serbers be terminated, as they were ‘entirely saturated with Communist beliefs and all of their associates were known radicals.’”  They were retained by Oppenheimer vouching for them. and only learned of the Army’s attacks and the FBI’s surveillance in 1948.  They said she should be removed from the project due to her active support of the antifascists in the Spanish Civil War and her role as publicity chairman for the League of Women Voters.  By being named the official “keeper of Los Alamos’ secrets,” Charlotte Serber was the only woman in an official leadership position at Los Alamos, but she was also the only group leader not invited to attend the Trinity Site bomb test in 1945, with Oppenheimer claiming “he could not accommodate her because the Trinity Site did not have the proper ‘facilities’ for women.”

The twentieth century experienced two big Red Scares.  The first was spurred on by the communist revolution in Russia and social unrest in the U.S. and the rise of the labor movement.  The second followed WWII and was exacerbated by Senator Joe McCarthy’s shameless efforts to promote himself by scaring the populace with overblown assertions.  Those stressful periods are mirrored in the threats and stridency surrounding the coming national election but allow this old librarian to provide some bibliotherapy (“A form of supportive psychotherapy in which carefully selected reading materials are used to assist a subject in solving personal problems or for other therapeutic purposes”).  After Lucy Fuggle, the British author of Tolstoy Therapy, found that reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” helped relieve her chronic anxiety, she’s been suggesting therapeutic books to others for the past decade.  Fuggle and I recommend putting the world’s woes behind you for a while by settling down with a calming book.  She included “Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups” by Anna McNuff, “Nothing Much Happens: Calming Stories to Soothe Your Mind & Help You Sleep” by Kathryn Nicolai, and “The Collected Sherlock Holmes.”  Personally, I retreat to the 1950s with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries and to the 1660s with Samuel Pepys’ unexpurgated Diary that provide gentle intellectual stimulation while satisfying the urge for escape. As Julia Child said, “I, for one, would much rather swoon over a few thin slices of prime beefsteak, or one small serving of chocolate mousse, or a sliver of foie gras than indulge to the full on such nonentities as fat-free gelatin puddings.”