Food for thought, peppered with wit

Despite the historically laconic tone of encyclopedia entries, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas is chock full of sardonic passages that, loosed from the full entry, want not from context. m Although not until the 1920s at Bauxite (Saline County) did a defined Hispanic population appear in Arkansas, tamales spread into the state in the late 19th century. “The ‘Great Tamale War’ in Augusta (Woodruff County) decimated the town’s stray dog population.” — from “Food and Foodways” by Michael B. Dougan of Jonesboro. m “The July 12, 1934, issues of the Washington Post and The New York Times published accounts of [Helen] Spence’s death on the previous day, but the date of her birth aboard a houseboat on the White River near St. Charles (Arkansas County) remains a mystery.” — Denise Parkinson of Hot Springs on Helen Spence, an outlaw and folk hero who shot and killed her father’s accused killer in court. m “Born to the respectable center, he was a young man attracted to the margins.” — Robert Cochran of Fayetteville on folklorist Vance Randolph. m “According to Shaver, in 1932, while working on an assembly line at a factory, he developed telepathic abilities that gave him insight into ‘ malign entities in caverns deep within the earth.’” — C.L. Bledsoe of Ghoti magazine on Richard Sharpe Shaver, whose mystery stories published in Amazing Stories bolstered a circulation spike for the magazine. m “It was well known that local physicians rarely testified against a colleague .... Outside witnesses had to be imported, and of course — as in the case of Gambill v. Stroud — they could not be expected to know, for instance, that air conditioning failures in the operating room were a common local occurrence. The state Supreme Court’s reaction to these tactics in part was to return to the legal principle of res ipsa loquitur, or ‘the thing speaks for itself.’ Hence, in the ‘Blue Flame’ case of Schmidt v. Gibbs (1991), it was within the province of the jury to know that a patient was not supposed to catch fire on the operating table.” — from “Medical Malpractice” by Michael B. Dougan.