History of the Day: 10/1

Today is World Vegetarian Day! So let's all celebrate and eat a vegetarian. By the way, for those of you who like the taste human flesh, but are worried about the fat content; now there's Hufu, the tofu product that tastes like people. Think of it as Soylent Green with an emphasis on the soy. According to the company it's:

The healthy human flesh alternative for cannibals who want to quit.

Yes, that's right, all you cannibals out there! The company promises you:

No more Friday night hunting raids! Stay home and enjoy the good healthy taste of hufu.

And, for the rest of us, who always wondered what the attraction of being a cannibal was, the founder told Samantha Bee of the Daily Show:

I think that a lot of the pleasure of eating the Hufu product, is imagining you're eating human flesh. For that moment, you can join the fraternity of cannibals... If you really want to come as close as possible to the experience of cannibalism, Hufu is your best option.

Today is also World Hepatitis Day! Which reminds me, there's something I've been meaning to tell you ...

90 years ago today, Arab forces under T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) captured Damascus. This surprising victory, and those that followed, inspired one of the greatest movies of all time. Speaking of the Middle East, I am reminded of a quote:

[Our people] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.

What? No, this is Sir Lawrence referring to the British involvement in Iraq in 1920. What did you think I was talking about?

E. B. White, author of such notable children's books as Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, died on this day in 1985. He lived during a period of economic uncertainty and international fear and unrest, much like our own. Reading his words can be a little disconcerting:

• I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
• Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
• As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the one thing left to us in a bad time.
• I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear.
• We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny...
• We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on "The Meaning of Democracy." It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.