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.
I thought it might be interesting to go over a few food combos that sound just terrible when mixed together, yet go great together when a third food is involved.
This will be one of those famous "user participation" posts you read so much about in Blogger's Digress. As we did in Bag O' Links, I'll add any additions left in the comments to the list ASAP. The rule is, two of the foods have to evoke a "Yuck!" when mentioned together, but go perfectly well when a third food is introduced.
Probably the classic is ketchup and grape jelly, or any kind of jelly or jam. Can you imagine eating a bite of jellied toast, then tossing a spoonful of ketchup into your mouth? Yuck! Or eating some french fries with ketchup, then suddenly eating a teaspoon of grape jelly? Uck-yay!
Then you'll be sitting there eating some scrambled eggs with ketchup, and halfway through the chew you'll take a bite of the jellied toast, and there's your ketchup and jelly. And, amazingly, they go perfectly together because of the scrambled eggs.
And there's another small anomaly in the same meal. Would you mix ultra-sugary and ultra-salty foods together? Not usually. Yet there you are, chewing on the ultra-sugary jellied toast while stuffing another piece of ultra-salty bacon or sausage into your mouth, again brought together by the eggs.
Another oddity is pepper on bananas. You never see anyone peppering a banana, just because it would look too weird. In secret, or in the confidence of a mate, perhaps. I wouldn't know, I've never tried. It would just look too weird.
Yet I've peppered tons of bananas in my life. Sliced, on sandwiches. As soon as you add the bread and mayo, the pepper just seems to magically fit and the results are delicious. I'm not sure I'd eat a banana sandwich without pepper, just because it adds so much to the taste.
And here's one I bet you've never tried. How about munching on some barbecue potato chips... then washing them down with chocolate milk? Doesn't sound very appealing, I admit. We're back to that salt-sugar clash.
But, assuming you like egg salad sandwiches, the next time you have one, buy a bag of BBQ chips and your favorite brand of chocolate milk. It's just amazing how well the three go together.
How about garlic bread and soy sauce?
"Yuckypoo!"
Exactly. But there I was the other night, eating some garlic 'Texas Toast' with some Chinese eggrolls, dunking the garlic bread in the soy sauce on the plate. Somehow the eggrolls magically tied everything together.
If you have your own favorite food quirk, toss it in the comments and I'll slap it on the list. If you'd like to include an accompanying blurb like the above, please do so.
Why is the CDC based in Atlanta? Because Georgia was the center of malaria in the US, and elimination of malaria from the US was the CDC's first job. It's hard to imagine, but through the 1940's malaria was endemic in the southern US, and prior to that in the northeast too. Every doc in New England used to treat malaria routinely.
DDT was a major factor in the elimination of malaria in the US, but it remains a common disease in the Third World, in the southern hemisphere. And, sadly, DDT harms lots of other things, too, besides mosquitoes but probably isn't as evil as Rachel Carson claimed.
The long history of malaria would make a fascinating book. I'll just share a few facts: the germ which causes malaise, fever, and anemia is a plasmodium, a wierd one-celled bug. There are 4 varieties. The vector (meaning the thing that distributes the bug) is of course an anopheles mosquito, which squirts the germ into the human bloodstream with its anticoagulating saliva. The plasmodium reproduces in your red cells, then goes loose in your blood, where it is presumably sucked up by an innocent mosquito who spreads it further. Humans are the host of this bug (meaning their reproductive home). Like any parasite, the goal is to keep the host alive, while reproducing itself. If you kill your host, you sort of defeat your purpose (like over-taxing productive people), so malaria is more likely to cause chronic illness than death, except in the otherwise vulnerable. Fascinatingly, the sickle-cell trait of Africa confers resistance to malaria. Nature is amazing, which makes being an MD an astonishing privilege.
Prevention is simpler than treatment. Treatments include derivatives of sweet wormwood, as discovered in China in 300, and derivatives of cinchona bark (quinine), as discovered by the Spanish in the 1600s. The quinine treatment/preventative of course gave rise to the finest drink of the British Empire - the Gin and Tonic, which exemplifies the idea of making a virtue of necessity. A Brit will drink nothing without either gin or wine in it. Add a lime and the Limey can prevent scurvy too, as was attributed to Captain Cook. Thus truly a superior medicine for both body and soul.
Does the brand of gin matter? For martinis, yes. For gin and tonics, not to me anyway.
When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride, He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside. But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man, He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can. But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws, They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws. 'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say, For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away; But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale - The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man, a bear in most relations - worm and savage otherwise, - Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise. Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low, To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe. Mirth obscene diverts his anger - Doubt and Pity oft perplex Him in dealing with an issue - to the scandal of The Sex!
But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same, And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail, The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
Well, Bird Dog has abandoned the farm for, er, greener pastures, and left me in charge again. You reap what you sow, big feller. I’m going to link to sites without tone. I’m going to link to sites without sand. I’m going to link to sites without panache. I’m going to link to sites without cachet. I’m going to link to sites without je ne sais quoi. I’m going to link to sites that don’t know which fork to use. I’m going link to sites about sausages. You heard me: sausage links!
Still the greatest website on these here Interwebs: Zombo.com
The truck in front of us turns off, revealing an ancient, angry man standing in the road ahead. He has a vast white beard and looks like one of the grumpier Old Testament prophets. In his hand he holds a long wooden staff. Threading his way between cars, the man singles out a stopped truck and starts beating on it as hard as he can with the staff, yelling the whole time.
Don't say that he's hypocritical. Say rather that he's apolitical."Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down; that's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Calm down, civil liberties traditionalists. Policemen have been looking at your face as you walk by since Robert Peel invented them. Besides, if you fill out a 1040 form, you have no rights. The rest is conversation.
For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner. He also wrote poems and speeches that he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged.
Writing everyone a check for $12,000 is cheaper than all federal and state poverty programs combined. But then who would write $12,000 checks to re-election campaigns for politicians? Won’t someone think of the poor politicians?
General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city of Atlanta in 1864. He warned: “I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.” Add a zero to calibrate the problem in the Levant today. War in the Middle East is less a strategic than a demographic phenomenon, whose resolution will come with the exhaustion of the pool of potential fighters.
I’ve never seen Spengler be wrong about anything. And he’s right in advance, the only kind of right that matters.
I've been given an education this week on classic, old-timey flower styles via Mrs. BD. I always like to learn new things and I like purty flowers. Who doesn't? Flower design is just ephemeral sculpture and I like seeing and smelling them around the olde HQ. Any old cabin like ours is enlivened by floral productions.
Black guy is fed up with the Ferguson idiocy and criminality which tarnishes the image of black Americans (h/t Vanderleun and others). Devastatingly right, and the anti-Sharpton, anti-race-pimp.
Why Do Most Jews Stay with Obama? When will American Jews finally realize that the endgame of Obama’s "Progressive" dream will be their nightmare?
The GOP Can Attract Young Black Voters—And Already Has - One in five black men under age 30 voted for Romney; youngest 'millennials' lean even more conservative.
Rising to the Authoritarian Challengeby Daniel Calingaert- U.S. policy on democracy support, especially
during the Obama administration, has been largely reactive. We seem to
be constantly playing (and mostly losing) a giant game of Whac-a-Mole.
Supporting democracy doesn't work out well. People frequently elect dictators.Democratic republics are best suited to places with the cultural and historical underpinnings to support it.
Thinking about the Great War 100 years ago. A terrible, pointless war that never should have happened. Historians say that WW2 was just a continuation of it.
The best movie I've seen about the Great War is The Shooting Party. There is no war in it except allusions to it in the last 30 seconds.
Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot.… [T]he Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It reversed the Idea of Progress.
No one at all, other than me and my friends, many security guards, bodyguards, police, residents of Washington DC, Brinks drivers, rural folks, minimart workers, border guards, the secret service, responsible homeowners, pilots, etc etc. Plus some bad guys too.
You should be happy when the market tumbles - If you are continuing to add money to an investment fund, you're better off with lower stock prices in the short term.
Rand Paul panders to Americans' exhaustion with the failures wrought by half-measures that have marked down US effectiveness and credibility in the world. To do so without a policy of concrete measures that must be taken in the real world is directly akin to the empty pandering of Barack Obama in 2008. Is that the repeat disaster we want, of a continued dangerous downward spiral for the US interests and security.
In short: today, any number of people in the Muslim world are “messing with us,” while the Chinese and Russian governments are setting about doing so even more seriously. They feel safe in doing so. For a generation, the U.S. government has been interfering in other peoples’ business while neglecting our own—making commitments without consideration of what it would take actually to keep them. It has spoken loudly while whittling down America’s stick. We have earned disrespect. Today, nobody takes America seriously. Would-be President Paul has made clear that his America would speak much more softly. Good. But he seems to have given little thought about what kind of stick the U.S. government needs to secure America’s peace as well as about what strokes may be needed to restore respect. Today, China is building a military reasonably designed to control the western Pacific Rim from land bases. How would President Paul counter that? China has warned that any serious attempt to safeguard the independence of the islands off its coast might lead to the nuclear destruction of American cities. Would President Paul defend America against Chinese missiles, or Russian ones? As Muslim potentates from Palestine to Pakistan consider whether to (send or allow, it matters not) any of their zealots to kill more Americans, what reason would President Paul give them to hold them back? If and when terrorists from country X strike America, what if anything would he do to those in power there? In the meanwhile, what would he do to signal seriousness? Would he continue to subsidize the Palestinian Authority’s nursery of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism?
I know a few guys who were dragged to see the Charles James Beyond Fashion show at the Metropolitan Museum. I was, last weekend. Lots of husbands there being good sports, and lots of fashionistas of all varieties (taking notes and detailed close-up photos of stitching, etc).
I can assert that I know more about couture dress-making now than I did before. It is complicated, detailed, and difficult to do.
I thought it might be interesting to go over a few food combos that sound just terrible when mixed together, yet go great together when a third food is involved.
Why is the CDC based in Atlanta? Because Georgia was the center of malaria in the US, and elimination of malaria from the US was the CDC's first job. It's hard to imagine, but through the 1940's 
spreads it further. Humans are the host of this bug (meaning their reproductive home). Like any parasite, the goal is to keep the host alive, while reproducing itself. If you kill your host, you sort of defeat your purpose (like over-taxing productive people), so malaria is more likely to cause chronic illness than death, except in the otherwise vulnerable. Fascinatingly, the sickle-cell trait of Africa confers 
When the Himalayan peasant meets the
'Siri, 
World’s oldest eel dies at 155 in Swedish well
