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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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!
No surprises there. My advice: Tell spouse what you are going to do first. You lose the thrill of secrecy but gain in lack of guilt, shame, and self-hatred.
I think the documentary seeks to fix the record in falsity. To take only one example, as I say in my “Notes,” Burns and his colleagues were apparently unable to find a soldier to recall his service in anything other than shades of disillusion, disgust and shame. Much more remains to be done on this deeply dishonest work to prevent it from becoming the received history of the war.
Epstein’s private jet, which transported his friends to Little St. James Island, was nicknamed “Lolita Express.” Initial records claimed that Bill Clinton was listed as a passenger on the jet at least 11 times between 2001 and 2003. That number was then changed to more than double with 26 trips, showing that Clinton flew on the plane at least once a month during the two-year period.
At long last, the people who do the strategic planning for Hillary Clinton and tell her what emotions she should imitate in response to various stimuli have weighed in and they have decided that Harvey Weinstein is not a nice man:
In her first presentation at our 2015 Eucharistic Convention Leah Libresco spoke to her subject matter "Falling in Love with Math, Morality and Mercy - My Conversion Story. It's a witness, not a sermon.
I went through a deontology phase too. She's an obsessionally morally-interested joyful and charming mathematician whose intellectual adventures lead to Christ. Cool, but I wonder what she would say about cultural transmission of moralities and values.
Remember—the mighty indigenous peoples of the Americas couldn’t even figure out the wheel. The WHEEL. The average lifespan for Native Americans before Columbus committed “genocide” against them was around 35. It is now more than double that. When Columbus arrived in the New World, the total number of indigenous Injuns in what is now North America was less than two million. There currently are 5.2 million self-identified “Native Americans” in the USA alone and another two million or so in Canada.
So they’re living more than twice as long and there are more than twice as many of them. That doesn’t sound like genocide to me. That sounds like an upgrade into the first-class section.
I hate these presidential libraries. Why doesn't some pres just hand over the papers to a history dept and call it a day? Why a monument? This is not Rome. These jackasses are not kings or gods.
Since we're on a month of our push-up challenge, a few ideas:
- go as low as you can - squeeze your glutes and tense your belly. Perfect plank. It should be a total body exercise, not just chest and triceps - don't let your elbows flare out - keep them tight - to vary it a bit, do them with your feet on a bench, chair, or box of whatever height. The higher, the better, with the ultimate being handstand pushups. I am going to do half of mine on a decline now.
Slavery, torture, and cannibalism—tell me why we’re celebrating “Indigenous People’s Day” again? And we’re getting rid of Columbus Day to protest—what? The fact that one group of slavery-practicing violent people conquered another group of violent, blood-thirsty slavers? That’s a precis of the history of the Americas before Columbus arrived.
This has always been the fatal flaw of the Left’s politics of race guilt: Name the race that’s not “guilty”? Racism, violence, and conquest are part of the human condition, not the European one.
The deal appears to be, however, a largely symbolic concession to Ms. Merkel’s Bavaria allies that may change little in practice, partly because the right to asylum is enshrined in Germany’s constitution.
My genius trainer thinks these are ridiculous, but they are a routine part of the calisthenic classes I take. All I can say is that they keep your heart rate up and your body in explosive and fatiguing motion. Basically, explosive jumping jacks.
This is about warm pasta dishes, not cold. Room temperature pasta dishes like Nicoise are nice - but that is from Nice, not Italy. 
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My traveling pal emailed me his bowl of goulash in Budapest.