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 view part of my duty as to debunk folk myths about health and medicine. Readers know that one of my bugaboos concerns the human diet and the First World preoccupation with what we eat as if it mattered all that much. Food faddism has always been part of American life since we became a wealthy country and had food choices.
Eating fats does not make you fat. Carbs make you fat. That is no longer in dispute.
Do saturated fats "cause" heart disease? There is no evidence for it. Bacon and eggs is the Great American Breakfast, with or without grits, or biscuits and gravy. In the WSJ,The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease -Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade.
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, the enchanting, and the absurd.
Speaking of the absurd, I'm back to work on today's collection:
Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after all.
Mrs. BD and I were tasked with spending the past 12 days inspecting the domain of Roger de Hauteville and his Norman descendents across the land known to the ancient Greeks as "the land of the sun," Sicily.
From the furthest western end of the isle to the furthest east, we covered all we could in the allotted time with a nice diesel Peugeot and a Garmin, touring from remote agriturismo to remote tenuta to agriturismo with many fun adventures, mishaps, annoyances, etc, along the way and mostly avoiding the tourist traps and tour buses. Still married, however, at present. Possibly the most lovely and dramatic land we have explored thus far.
I will of course assemble, in time, a photo travelogue with all sorts of travel tips and deep insights because that is my way of processing an adventure, but for tonight, just two comments.
First, I had two bottles of Marsala Dolce from Marsala itself to send to Roger to try. Sad to say, they tipped the luggage scale at Alitalia - and that would have made for some very expensive wine, so we abandoned them at the Catania Airport. I did manage to bring him a bag of Busiata Trapanese though, which I doubt can be found in America. I will tell him how to make it, country-syle.
Second, we quickly realized why the Greeks of Attica - and the Phoenicians of Palestine - were so eager to get out of their crappy places and to vie to live in Sicily. (Also why the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Spanish, and recently the Italians) all wanted it. For all of them, especially the Corinthians, it was like going to America. During the prime of Hellenistic civilization, Siracusa was the largest and wealthiest city in the Western world. It was NYC. Greeks moved there around 700 BC.
This rock pile in Segesta in western Sicily was built 250 years before the Parthenon. They had a large theater, too, up the hill.
A farm road outside Ragusa. We took a long morning walk down the road, saying hi to the cattle and the wheat fields and the hay fields.
Entrance to our somewhat exclusive tenuta about 30 minutes outside Ragusa:
There is nothing below the fold. I am tired and I messed up.
My sis asked me to post our favorite carrot recipe. It's Italian.
Peel a mountain of carrots. Cut them into roughly 3 inch lengths, then quarter them lengthwise - more than quarters for thicker ends of thick carrots. Regular carrot sticks, like a pile of split logs, with enough consistency of thickness to cook evenly.
Toss into lightly salted, lightly-sugared boiling water for several minutes until firm but no longer crunchy. When at the exact right point, toss them into ice water to arrest the cooking, and drain.
Sprinkle the carrot sticks first with red wine vinegar, then sprinkle to your taste with finely chopped garlic (I use a LOT - such that each carrot stick has 5-10 little pieces of garlic on it, but most people don't like garlic the way I do), then toss gently with good olive oil. Marinate thus in the fridge for several hours, or preferably overnight, then serve at room temperature with fresh chopped parsley on top.
It can also be done more properly, and less intensely garlicky, by holding off the chopped garlic and simply burying a bunch of halved or quartered fresh garlic cloves amongst the carrots to marinate with the oil.
It's Sunday. Have a pleasant Sunday. But remember, Sunday is Monday's mother. She seems nice, but she's just as likely to smack you with a hairbrush as not. Happens almost every week.
But we were good boys. We didn't break the Sabbath often enough to signify--once a week perhaps. Anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold. --Twain
There are some fairly bright people abroad in the land that don't understand that if the velocity of money is zero, as far as inflation is concerned it doesn't exist.
Another fine kiddie chair from my Mom's stash of furniture: a kiddie potty chair from the olden days. Of course, you put an old pot under it but it had already been adapted to a regular kid's chair when I was a lad.
Thanks to Mom for having saved all of this old stuff.
I wonder whether any readers know anything about the history of this one.
Tuna and anchovy have a natural affinity. For those who enjoy intense Mediterranean flavors, here's the spaghetti sauce I made the other night:
Season and sautee in butter (to pink inside) a couple of fresh Bluefin Tuna filets
Dice an onion and sautee in plenty of olive oil until soft. Add 3-6 canned anchovy filets. Throw in a tablespoon or so of diced garlic. If the pan gets dry, throw in a 1/2 cup of the pasta water: you don't want the garlic to brown, you do want the anchovies to dissolve, and you want a sauce. Cut sides from the pit up to around 1/2 cup of Italian olives and toss them in, along with a tablespoon or two of capers. Season. Simmer for a bit, adding pasta water if needed to make sure you have a sauce. Then toss the tuna filets into the saucepan and crumble roughly with a fork to 1-1/2" chunks. Mix and serve over angel hair pasta with a good sprinkling of fresh chopped parsley on top.
You can also use the same sauce as a sauce for tuna filets themselves. Some might add a little tomato paste to the recipe, but I think tomato and tuna don't mix.
1 Boring Old Man has been devoting himself to uncovering the Pharma-Psychiatric research cabal, but nobody is really listening. My rule of thumb is to take everything I read with a a few grains of salt.
"Old-fashioned Liberals" sound conservative these days, just as JFK would. The Harvard Bait & Switch: Prof. Harvey Silverglate on the University's Free Speech Fakery:
'Have you ever done anything of particular merit?' St. Peter asked the cowboy.
'Well, I can think of one thing,' the cowboy offered. 'On a trip to the Big Horn Mountains out in Wyoming, I came upon a gang of bikers who were threatening a young woman. I directed them to leave her alone, but they wouldn't listen. So I approached the largest and most tattooed biker and smacked him in the face, kicked his bike over, ripped out his nose ring, and threw it on the ground. I yelled, 'Now, back off or I'll kick the shit out of all of you!'
They probably are. We have friends who use them, and think they are great. If you like traveling with groups and hate to gain weight, give them a look.
Check out their blog. As with all such schemes, the only people who want to show themselves naked are the only people you don't want to see naked. And the books suck.
It would be unchristian of me to point out who the little darlings voted for twice, wouldn't it? Pardon me while I go find a pagan to laugh at them and tell them to stop sh*tting where they eat.
‘New evidence strongly suggests that the very different kinds of society seen in the various races and in the world’s great civilizations differ not just because of their received culture – in other words, in what is learned from birth – but also because of variations in the social behaviour of their members, carried down in their genes.’
Erm, I don't want to rain on your parade, but that's only earthshaking news to people who Occupy public parks.
Several waiters in white coats told the council they, too, didn't like Brunei's laws but they asked why workers should possibly suffer for the City Council's vote of condemnation.
"It strangles our livelihood," said Ann Romer, a server in the hotel's Polo Lounge, a renowned gathering spot for Hollywood stars and filmmakers. "It causes us to be unable to support our families, my children and my sick grandmother in Vietnam."
There's more than a hint of Two Minutes Hate when the media mob gets interested in any particular thing. The object of their vitriol is chosen at random, by persons who stand to lose nothing, at the expense of the usual innocent people. And by the way, when I have sketchy outlays from strip joints and casinos I need to put on my expense report, I prefer listing them under "Entertainment", not "My sick mother in Vietnam." It's good accounting practice.
I agree with some of this, disagree with some of it. For one thing, she ignores insulin physiology. For another, she ignores menopause. She is right that losing weight is difficult given all of the abundant and cheap carbs available to everybody, and she is surely correct that people without weight issues are those who hear an internal signal that says "That's enough."
In the end, though, carb "addiction" is the main challenge for anyone who is overweight.
H.M.’s operation took place on September 1,
1953. Scoville peeled back his patient’s scalp, then used a hand crank
and one-dollar drill saw from a local hardware store to remove a bottle
cap’s worth of bone from above each eye. As cerebrospinal fluid drained
away, the brain settled down in its cavity, giving Scoville more room to
work. With what looked like an elongated shoehorn, he nudged aside
H.M.’s frontal and temporal lobes and peered inside.
PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
“You know,” he said to me, “it’s just wood.”It took me a moment to realize how liberating this statement was. To him, woodworking held no mystery at all - it was just a thing you did. If he wanted a garden bed, there’d be no question in his mind that he’d make it himself. Why spend more on something suboptimal when you can build exactly what you want?
I think I've heard this line of reasoning before. My toddlers experienced it the first time they went boom boom by themselves.
Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray - Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch 'Groundhog Day' (again). Advice on how to live to the fullest.
My son has decided which college to attend in August. Yesterday I received a survey from one of the colleges he turned down. It was a series of questions about his decision, who influenced the decision, and which factors guided him.
It ended with two questions which surprised me. The first was to what degree allowing freshmen to have a car on campus would have altered his decision. I responded "Definitely would have no impact." I see no reason for a car on campus and certainly not freshman year.
The second question was "To what degree did the university's commitment to environmental issues play a role?" I replied "None at all."
Seriously? I know a few wingnuts take this seriously, but frankly I can't understand this devotion to 'environmental issues' I keep seeing at the colleges I visited. It truly is a religion and it's astounding when you consider the improved state of our environment today as opposed to, say, 60 years ago.
I suppose in another 18 years we'll only send kids to schools powered by sun, wind and geothermal energy. The glass, paper and plastic will all be in separated trashcans, every five feet, which are emptied every 20 minutes. Or maybe we're there already.
I know when I want to learn, it must be in the most eco-friendly environment possible and I don't care about the academics, it's all about saving the earth.
I view part of my duty as to debunk folk myths about health and medicine. Readers know that one of my bugaboos concerns the human diet and the First World preoccupation with what we eat as if it mattered all that much. Food faddism has always been part of American life since we became a wealthy country and had food choices.
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, the enchanting, and the absurd. 
My sis asked me to post our favorite carrot recipe. It's Italian.
Tuna and anchovy have a natural affinity. For those who enjoy intense Mediterranean flavors, here's the spaghetti sauce I made the other night: