We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
22:15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said.
22:16 So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.
22:17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?"
22:18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?
22:19 Show me the coin used for the tax." And they brought him a denarius.
22:20 Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?"
22:21 They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's."
22:22 When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
This is about warm pasta dishes, not cold. Room temperature pasta dishes like Nicoise are nice - but that is from Nice, not Italy.
I do not care for a pasta dish as a meal. It makes me feel full and lazy. I don't mind the way the Italians do it - and the way it was intended - which is as a small plate tasty treat as a Primo. Maybe 4-6 forks' worth. That's a meal's carbs, because the Secondi usually doesn't have any. Just meat, with some vegetables in oil on the side.
Southern Italians eat pasta, but they don't eat much of it when they do. Maybe the equivalent volume of a potato. Lasagna (which is Southern Italian) is served as a small Primo. - a little 3-or 4-inch square.
Sicily is not big on pasta. They make a few classics, like with sardines or clams, but do more rice and couscous as primi. On the mainland, the further north you go the less pasta there is. They do more rice (esp. risotto), gnocchi, and polenta for their primi.
Anyway, an Italian meal with a primo and secondo - and wine or beer - is lunchtime, not supper. (Italian breakfast is typically just an espresso or a latte - cappuccino - with a biscotti. Suppers are light, like a soup and lunch leftovers.) Italians tend not be be fat and even the elderly women mostly tend to look pretty spry except for the ones who stay home all day cooking for their relatives because they taste things all day long.
I married into a family with some roots in Caserta (lots of ziti and spaghetti pasta down there) and I know the rules:
- When pasta is cooked al dente, you take it out of the pot with pasta-grabbers and dump it directly into the saucepan with the sauce. Then you mix it with the sauce with the heat on. You don't drain pasta.
- Depending on the volume of sauce you have made, you dump a cup or half-cup of the pasta water into the pasta-sauce mix, and slop it all together with the pasta-grabber (with the heat on). Enough pasta water to be right. Heat is on. The pasta water binds it all together and helps the sauce coat the pasta completely.
What is the ultimate pasta Primo? The festive Timballo. I have never had a slice of one, and probably never will have the chance because it's not a restaurant item.
Tomato sauces? Yuk. Cristoforo Columbo and his pals, in my view, wrecked Italian cooking by bringing the tomato back from Central America. Not to mention the Cultural Appropriation sin of putting the Mayan tomato in Italian food. But wait - the Italians stole pizza from the Greeks? And pasta from China. Is there anything that college kitchens will be able to feed the brats now? I mean, like, ice cream is Egyptian and yoghurt is Turkish. Let them eat gluten-free cake.
If President Trump or anyone even remotely close to his presidency, including his best friend from 2nd grade that he hadn't seen in 40 years, sought to meet with key Russian nuclear officials, in Moscow, just months before the federal government approved a very controversial deal handing Vladimir Putin 20% of U.S. uranium reserves, despite an ongoing investigation into Russian fraud, bribery, extortion and money laundering, it would be the only story played on a 24 x 7 loop on CNN and MSNBC.
You can be fat and very strong, but unable to hike a mountain vigorously for 6 hours. You can be a fast runner or swimmer but unfit in most ways other than cardio endurance.
To participate to the maximum in all that life offers or demands, we preach a doctrine of "Fitness for Life." This is not training for a specific purpose (ie a specific sport, pure strength, or aesthetics), but just to maintain or, preferably, improve fitness after age 30 or 40 or 50 or whatever for people with relatively sedentary (less than 5 hrs/wk of physically-challenging or strenuous effort - not walking). Balanced, general functional fitness for strength, endurance, and athleticism builds energy, attractiveness and sexuality, effectiveness - and the mental toughness that comes from the discipline of physical training.
First, some terms:
Conditioning, or Athletic Conditioning, usually refers to your overall athletic preparedness. "Conditioning" can focus on retrieving or building your speed, agility, endurance, muscle fitness, body composition, and the like. General conditioning-specific activities, like calisthenics, often just use body weight and some light weights with very high reps (20+), and no rest. Burpees, lunges, box jumps, ball slams, roll-ups, and step-ups are classic conditioning exercises but there are tons of them.
Cardio/endurance training is one compnent of the above. An hour of intense, no-rest calisthenics is powerful and exhausting cardio/endurance training, as is HIIT cardio. If you aren't short of breath, it's not "cardio." (It's not "exercise" either. "Exercise" refers to exertion.) For naturalistic HIIT, a tough tennis lesson where coach runs you ragged, or a basketball game.
Bodybuilding is an approach to balanced muscle improvement. It entails about 5 sets of semi-high reps (8-12) of 50-70% of your max weights, with only a minute rest between sets. Contrary to the sound of it, it's not primarily meant to look good at the beach (but nobody wants to look nasty with lots or all of their clothes off).
Powerlifting is an approach designed to improve brute strength and power. This entails lower reps with higher weights, and more rest between sets. Often, out of shape newbies need a good period of powerlifting before shifting to bodybuilding. Experienced people often alternate between the body-building approach and the powerlift approach every few months to maintain muscle function.
All of the above play a role in general fitness.
I'll review our recommendations for people in half-decent health below the fold. Feel free to offer comments or critiques.
It's a real NYC expression of surprise, not for the effete. Can be good or bad surprise. It can also be used for sarcastic surprise, as in "Hillary fell down the stairs holding a cup of coffee? Oofah."
Ken Burns portrays the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the Vietnam War as pot-smoking, drug-addicted, hippie marauders.
Those with whom I served were anything but. They did not commit the atrocities alleged in the unforgivable lies John Kerry described to a congressional committee so prominently featured by Mr. Burns. The troops my brother and I were blessed to lead were honorable, heroic and tenacious. They were patriotic, proud of their service, and true to their God and our country.
To depict them otherwise, as Mr. Burns does, is an egregious disservice to them, the families of the fallen and to history. But his treatment of my fellow Vietnam War veterans is just the start. Some of the most blatant travesties in the film are reserved for President Nixon...
As the days grow shorter, my annual request that dawn, twilight, and night road walkers wear highly-visible or reflective clothing, or a reflector vest as in photo. Cheap, lightweight. Wearing a light is good too. I suggest both.
I do not want to hit you, but I might get close if you walk on a roadside dressed in dark clothing. That would be a bad thing for you and me. Please do not make yourself invisible. I have come too close to night walkers.
Poor Bjørn Lomborg. In the world of global warming, he's always been something of an outlier. An outcast. A heretic. A pariah.
Basically, both sides hate him.
He wholeheartedly believes in man-made global warming, thereby earning the eternal wrath of those Evil Deniers. On the other hand, he doesn't believe that we're all going to die in 2055 when Antarctica melts and sea levels rise 2,000 feet, thereby earning the eternal wrath of the Climate Catastrophists.
On the plus side, he believes that it doesn't hurt anything to reduce CO2 levels as long it doesn't — you know — destroy the world's economies, and I think we can all agree with that.
And that's the inherent problem with the Paris climate accords. It doesn't do much to reduce CO2, yet it does seriously hurt the richer nations' economies. I actually paid lots of attention to the accords as they were underway, and a surprising number of eco-warriors were saying the same thing. Of course, they were complaining that the accords weren't strict enough and that the richer nations should have their economies destroyed even more — but never mind those pesky details.
First off, just to set the tone, here's Mr. Lomborg on the Greg Gutfeld Show a few months ago:
Germany just shut down all their nuclear power plants because they were worried about a tsunami? What the hell?
A few years ago, I wrote an article on the Fukushima disaster that mentioned the same thing. Remember the event? A big earthquake in Japan and then a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuke plant to implode. Except that it wasn't a tsunami.
For further Lomborg videos, PragerU's YouTube 'Environmental Science' page is here.
So, let's hear Mr. Lomborg's formal presentation. This was done almost a year ago, so when he refers to "the president", he's referring to Obama.
If we generously assume that the carbon cuts for 2030 were not only met, which, itself, but would be a UN first...
The Clintons and their foundation raked in a cool $145 million in donations and "speaking fees" just from Uranium One- and Rosatom-affiliated donors while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was supposedly keeping all Clinton Foundation business at "arm's-length."
Crystal clear as only VDH can be. People are learning that, with Trump, you have to take the good with the occasional atrociousness. Best to ignore what he says, and just see what his admin. does.
I didn't know Tahiti was part of France.Never been to Tahiti, feel no desire to go. I am told the beaches are filthy with garbage, and I am not too fond of beaches anyway.
Not too much is left of the original castle or of the later palace. People were always renovating and modernizing these things, or else knocking them down. Dunnottar has been rebuilt to some extent for tourists. Lots of crazy Scottish history in it.
An old image of the castle below the fold, with some Dylan Scotland trivia too -
Well, as you know I love Maggie's Farm. I want to give back somehow. Consequently, I bring to your attention Collinsville, Connecticut. Formerly the home of the Collins Company, axe makers non pareil, it is a company town frozen in time right beside the Farmington river. Very picturesque, particularly at this time of year, and full of decent restaurants. And there is a museum there, full of Collins products. Heavenly.
I just bought three very old Collins axes on Ebay (not expensive) and will be restoring them into working instruments, Very satisfying!
This is about warm pasta dishes, not cold. Room temperature pasta dishes like Nicoise are nice - but that is from Nice, not Italy. 
Yes, 
Should Inclusive Restrooms
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As the days grow shorter, my annual request that dawn, twilight, and night road walkers wear highly-visible or reflective clothing, or a reflector vest as in photo. Cheap, lightweight. 
Dear Bird Dog,