Monday, December 20. 2021
Sunday, December 19. 2021
What is known? And does anybody really care anymore? Gauteng’s Omicron Wave Is Already Peaking. Why?
I think the News needs a new exciting topic. Weather is too dull right now.
Via ZH. It's hyperbole, but I get the point:
Luke 1:46b-55
1:46b "My soul magnifies the Lord,
1:47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
1:48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
1:49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
1:50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
1:51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
1:52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
1:53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
1:54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
1:55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."
Saturday, December 18. 2021
 A Field and Stream Classic short story: The Road to Tinkhamtown by Corey Ford.
A tearjerker: A man and a dog.
Some random norceria, cheese, bread, a glass of wine, and thou
 Why jeans have that tiny pocket
From Reading Franklin:
Long before he was a Founding Father, Ben Franklin was one of the most successful “influencers” (as we’d say now) in the American colonies. His Poor Richard’s Almanack was a multi-decade bestseller. In 1758 he summarized a quarter-century of Poor Dick’s wisdom in The Way to Wealth—a book that gave birth to the “self-help” genre and that remains in print today.
Frat house cannot hang its own Christmas wreath, university insists
Harvard Won't Require SAT Or ACT For 5 More Years
The Strange Career of Paul Krugman
The ACLU's Push To 'Cancel' Student Debt Shows How Far It Has Strayed From Defending Civil Liberties
Noble lies are a public health hazard
The New York Times still hasn’t apologized for its Russia Hoax coverage
Bay Area: 6 Black Men Were Responsible for 70 Attacks on Asian Women
San Francisco Mayor Declares ‘State of Emergency’ in Tenderloin District
On the BLM Crimewave: Has any movement been so throughly discredited more quickly by reality than “Black Lives Matter”?
December Sees Antifa Thugs (Finally) Going to Prison!
The Washington Post is looking for a hitman
Friday, December 17. 2021
The testimony of Steven Ijames, who is an impressive police officer, at Legal Insurrection from the Daunte Wright trial.
Fascinating.
Thursday, December 16. 2021
A quote from an academic via American Thinker:
My research sits between classics and modernist studies, but does not take the canonical form of that interdisciplinary research, i.e. tracking the genetic inheritances of an ancient canon of texts in modernist aesthetics. Instead I invert this impulse: I am interested in pursuing, on the one hand, the role of modernism and the canonization of modernist aesthetics in mediating the narrative category of the classical and the canon of ancient texts. On the other, I focus on the generative crisis that the classical, as a category whose signature gesture is a periodizing narrative of historical rupture, poses to the utopian aesthetics of modernist rupture as formalized in the shock of the new. My dissertation takes up these problems by targeting the longstanding interpretive structure in the reception of Euripides that has taken the ancient Greek tragedian to be preëmptively modern. It proceeds as a series of case studies in the 20th-century interpretation and adaptation of Euripides, looking to moments when the assertion of Euripides' modernity has proved generative for modernist, post-modernist and avant-garde aesthetics.
Wednesday, December 15. 2021
A good Christmas present for people who are interested in what birds are up to: The Bird Academy
It's from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, so it is serious.
I have never seen his movies, but most people have. Call me what you will, I just do not want those images in my brain.
This is good: Brutal and Unreformed—Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50
And other amazing holiday hot Hors D'oevres
Who decides?
At City Journal
Tuesday, December 14. 2021
In recent weeks, I have posted lots of Italian food in Italy.
Without wanting to be a food snob (I am not a "foodie" - I like burgers and pulled pork), I need to explain again that Italian-American food is not to be found in Italy. The latter is an invention mostly by immigrants from southern Italy who were trying to make do. They used lots of pasta to fill people up, same as they did at home. Not a bad invention.
But, for example, try a pizza in Italy. Inedible. A pizza in NYC can be amazing.
Depending on where you live in the US, "Italian" can mean entirely different things. Generally-speaking, the fancier the restaurant the better unless you love red sauce. I have made the effort to post some real Italian food here on Maggie's over recent weeks. Northern Italian I suppose. I avoid any tomato sauce. I can make southern Italian killer "pasta fazool." Even Mrs. BD says it's better than her Neapolitano grandmother used to make for her grandfather.
This does not really explain it: Italian-American cuisine
Since we are approaching Christmas, check out our old post about Italian Christmas Eve food. Fried baccala - great. The feast of the seven fishes. I can't find my own old link right now.
Monday, December 13. 2021
The Atlantic Oyster (Crassostrea virginica) lives from the Northeast US down all the way through the Texas coast.
They grow faster and larger in the south, and, in my view, are tasteless. In fact, they need to be cooked with something to be any good at all.
Our Wellfleet Oysters are the best in the world, raw on the shell. Some afficionadoes call it "merroir," like terroir with grapes: These oysters grow slowly in mostly cold water, are splashed twice daily with fresh water from the Herring River, and spend low tide in the air. A rare combination of things. They are generally not too large.
Due to demand, they are farmed now in commercial oyster beds, although my father-in-law and I have had some fun snagging a bag of them at low tide because there are still some wild ones. (Wear sneakers.) Don't go near the commercial beds or they might kill ya.
Blue Points are second best, but not perfect. The history of the Wellfleet Oyster
From a reader:
“It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.”
And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap.
“Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
John Steinbeck, from Travels with Charley
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Louis Prang, 
In the cream cheese fiasco of 2021
World's largest