User:JosePhoenix/diff

History isn’t a very creative discipline. Teaching is. I think his habitual snarkiness keeps him from actually getting angry with people. Not in a creepy way, like some teachers, but in a nonthreatening way. He says things like “Romans would sleep with anything not moving away from them at the speed of light.” You know, his sense of humor is mostly separate from his snarkiness. “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they will kill you.” He’d kill me if I left that quote unattributed. That’s Oscar Wilde. Anyway, I think that’s how he gets away with it. That, or his mustache. I don’t think it’s a humor thing. I can’t think of mustachioed comedians, except perhaps for Groucho Marx (and his mustache wasn’t even real.) Maybe it’s a historian thing. Or big Russian bird’s-nest beards. His appearance is really a small part of his identity. He is defined mostly what he says, but a series of pithy comments does not a portrait make. Nevertheless, I must include one more. “I’m always a hit at dinner parties. The ladies love me. Their husbands don’t, but who cares about them?” Speaking of dinner parties, Chez Link heads up the Westminster Culinary Society. I’m not sure he ever cooks for his friends, but he has led the forces of the Culinary Society to glory in his pickelhaube. (Note: Dr. Link does not actually wear a Prussian military helmet to meetings. But sometimes I wish that he did.) Aside from the cultural themes of our Culinary Society meetings, he keeps his knowledge of history out of the food. Cooking demands an immediacy that history does not. History is full of abstracts. Even when presenting facts, dissenting viewpoints and interpretations make it very difficult to be sure of specifics. With baklava, on the other hand, there’s no two ways about it. There’s a somewhat worrying trend among people that know both Dr. Link and myself. They tend to tell me, unprompted, that I am “exactly like” or “will grow up to be” Dr. Link. This comparison does not offend me, though I wonder if it may offend him. I just think it overlooks a number of important differences, especially for those who say I am “exactly like” Dr. Link. For one thing, I could do without borscht. I do not own a dog, nor do I plan to. I have never heard the Ring Cycle performed (although, admittedly, I would like to). I do not even have a mustache. Maybe these commentators don’t see me as half a foot taller and sporting both a graduate degree and a mustache. Perhaps they just think we share some sort of acerbic wit. Whatever the reason, I don’t mind. There are worse things one can do than grow up to be Doctor Link.