On Christian charity

Last Monday, an F/A-18D Hornet crashed into a neighborhood near MCAS Miramar in San Diego. The pilot ejected shortly before impact as he was trying to land his disabled plane. Tragically, the crash claimed the lives of four members of the Yoon family: Young Mi Yoon, her 15-month-old daughter and her two-month-old daughter Rachel, and Mrs. Yoon's mother. The father, Dong Yun Yoon, has displayed remarkable courage and faith. Of the Marine aviator, Yoon stated, "I pray for him not to suffer for this action. I know he's one of our treasures for our country. ... I don't have any hard feelings. I know he did everything he could."

Santa

Mapquest or Garmin or Onstar or somebody is running an advert about a call from very young children trying to find out where Santa is on Christmas Eve using their miserable digital services. And, yes, it's cute. Damnably so.

And so, Children and Santa. Why does it capture the imagination so? Or, to put the matter squarely, why is it that telling whoppers to little people is so charming? I mean, I suspect they know what's going on, and they're in on it. They get the warm gooey waves of charm sweeping back and forth through them about it, too. The little people are as caught up in the cuteness of it as we are.

But what is it about a fantastic whopper that is cute? "You better get upstairs or purple meanies will snatch you away to a far away land called Massachusetts and eat all your toes." And the the little bastards just gush with glee.

Naturally, there's a phase in everyone's life where people are telling you gigantic whoppers. One tall tale after another. Fibs and fantasies. Must be a weird time.

Highways and hillsides

I like driving Route 9 from Old Saybrook to Middletown. It's one place where a man can drive like a man, —and the road has curves like a woman.

Wallingford, Connecticut, November 10, 2008, 4:53 p.m.

Art in Massachusetts

One afternoon after a rainy morning, a former acquaintance and I were driving around somewhere near Boston;―looking for Walden Pond, I think,―and accidently drove up into an estate.

And after a bit, there was this huge column, 25 feet tall, of garbage. Multicolored, plastic, mostly laundry bottles,—garbage.

Me: That's art.
Her: No, it can't be.
Me: Yes, they mean it to be.
Her: Don't be ridiculous, it's garbage.
Me: I know, but they think it's art now.
Her: You're pulling my leg.
Me: Well, what else can it be? It's not recycling.
Her: Stop it, it's not art. They haven't sunk that low yet.

So, we looped the house, realized it was closed and that we probably shouldn't be there and that there were several other piles of arranged garbage on the property. When she saw the other piles, she started giggling that she thought I might be right.

On our way out, we passed through the gates, where there was a sign, "DeCordova Museum."

And we laughed all the way to Walden Pond.

Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut

Napatree Point, Rhode Island, on August 10, 2008. The point is in the center, Fisher's Island, New York, on the left horizon, Stonington, Connecticut on the right horizon.

College Class Reunion Notes

---------- Message ----------
From: jsmith@wam.ubc.edu
Subject: Anything for the class notes?
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:40:58 -0700

Hello, classmates!
Since we all donate on line now, I never get sent those little envelope flaps with our news. While I'm perfectly happy to update you on my former housemates, I'm sure that you have some hip happenings of your own that need to be reported to the class at large. So send me some news. Of course, the deadline looms, so drop me a line today or tomorrow.

Remember: you don't need to have gotten a promotion or been made partner to submit class notes! Run a race? Bumped into a friend? Read any good books lately?

Thanks! Caroline

---------- Reply Message ----------
From: Jaime Souviens
Subject: Re: Anything for the class notes?
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:21:33 -0700

I am currently hiding from Provincial authorities in the vicinity of Stony Plain, Alberta. They are interested in me for three branch bank holdups in the greater Edmonton area, (well, three banks and a Wawa convenience store, which I swear I was never near). Other than that, I'm fine as long as the cash holds out.

Jaime Souviens.

Archaeological Expedition to New York, (II - 2008)

The Taconic State Parkway; Ghent, New York. This is a panoramic view of the Catskill Mountains, seen on the horizon across the Hudson River Valley.

September 11th

It's almost futile to write about September 11th. The topic is too big, too much has already been written, and it will always be too soon. Nevertheless...

I can barely deal with the topic anyway. I still too readily choke up seeing video footage and photographs. There's something at the center of it which is just solid, pure grief, and it pays to stay away from it. Whenever some televised idiot mentions the subject, I tense up, ready to pitch a fit if it's even remotely disrespectful or exploitative.

But I did recently realize something. It's not the deaths. 3,000 people is a lot of people, but a natural disaster, a good earthquake, say, could kill 3,000, and that wouldn't affect me the same way. Nor is it the attack by foreign enemies and the security issue aspect; I'm not afraid.

And then I realized what exactly it was. It's that anyone would DO such a thing.

I mean, anyone can daydream about a plane crash, and maybe you would want some awful thing to happen to a despised opponent.

But to actually do what they did... take innocent men, women and children, and use them as human weapons, and smash them in their jetliners, into other people, to create such carnage, and to do it four times... to actually do what they did, it means that what we, as humans, are capable of horrific things.

Such mindless hatred, such unutterable cruelty...what a yawning, bottomless chasm there is in us. What a psychotic depravity.

I look at the photos of the second plane before it hits the tower, just an instant before, and I am completely undone trying to concieve how they could possibly do such a thing. How could a human being be so utterly inhuman?

I've seen the video now a thousand times, and still gape at it, thinking it can't possibly be true that they are going to fly it straight in.

And then they do.

Before then, I would have thought that no people anywhere could really do such a thing. But I'm wrong, they can,--we can. And that's why I still shed tears.

Think of the cruelty beyond our comprehension, as amongst the screams and the anguish of the innocent, those hijackers drove at full throttle planes laden with fuel into buildings where tens of thousands of people work. They have no moral inhibition on the slaughter of the innocent. If they could have murdered not 7,000 but 70,000, does anyone doubt they would have done so and rejoiced in it? — Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Pell Bridge, Newport, Rhode Island

The List of Things Not to Pay Attention to in Life

I've long known that there were many things in life, that, if you simply ignored them, vast amounts of time opened up to you. These things are the list of things to ignore. I do not say that these things are worthless. There are apparently reasonable people who seem to derive pleasure from—at least some of these things. But I do say that the total possible joy derivable from these things, the total possible joy, is less than the amount of work required to be invested in the first place. Here then is The List of Things Not to Pay Attention to in Life:

Opera
Golf
Teen sensations
Wine connoiseurship
Methodist theology
The N.B.A.
George Stephanopolous
Bond films
Entertainment Tonight
Horseracing
Harry Potter
Newsweek
Phlogiston
Joseph Biden
New Jersey
Isreali-Palestinian relations
Physiocracy
Survivor
Scientology

DuBois Park, Stonington Point, Stonington

I haven't been...

I haven't been listening to enough Bach lately.

Canada: Very Little News from the Northland

Many people are unaware of this, but, officially, from June 3, 1896 to March 28, 1928, nothing happened in Canada. Not a thing. There literally was no news. It actually set a record for the longest period in human history where, among a given population, no newsworthy event of note occured. (The prior record of 23 years, 4 months and 5 days was set by Finland.) For more than 30 years, all across Canada, the newspapers printed blank sheets of paper; (no ink, they just ran paper through the presses and packed them up for delivery).

The "newsless period" was only broken on the morning of March 28, 1928, when Lady Tweedsmuir accidently dropped half a buttered scone on the head of a seated Prime Minister Mackenzie King. The resulting embarassment almost forced a Parliamentary election, but for the fact that the newsless period had almost entirely depopulated Canada of journalists, and there was no one to write the scandal up.

Canada has had several other periods where nothing happened for extended periods of time. Professor Oliver Heepheeppatah of Ryerson has published a theory that short intervals of nothing happening occur irregularly and simultaneously across Canada on an almost continuous basis. And that, therefore, it is literally true to state that "in Canada there's always nothing happening somewhere." Others, however, claim that Heepheeppatah should not be taken seriously because he has almost certainly been boozing again.

If a future period of nothing happening Canada-wide breaks out, we promise not to report it until after things begin to happen again.

Cuil

I don't like it.

First, it doesn't seem to recognize anything. It can't find "The American Minerva." Now, we may overestimate the importance of The American Minerva, but Google finds it. Second, the three column article layout is not conducive to seeing a lot of hits.

And third, the name is stupid.

Cuil, not cool. Indeed.

Base Camp, Archaeological Expedition to Vermont, (I - 2008)

Praying to Al Haig

I was told, by a woman that overheard, that once when I was deeply asleep, I sat bolt upright and said in my sleep, very calmly and firmly, "I do what I can, with what I have, I do what I can;—that, and pray to Al Haig."

I assume she misheard that last bit.

But I'll always wonder what it was I really said instead of 'Al Haig'.

Squirrels

After a lovely Sunday drive, I have to report that there was one fatality.

But, for those who did not know, I'll note that squirrels are surprisingly crunchy.

The Religious Views of Mermaids

Although neither anthropologists nor philosophers have yet reported on the religious views of mermaids & mermen, we can only assume that they must of necessity be Baptists.

Religious conversion

The real problem with converting to Judaism is frankly, the food. Gefilte fish and all that. It's like wallpaper paste flavored with plaster. I suppose with Anglicanism, you get Wassail bowls, which is something. Lutheranism has good food, especially in the dessert menu. Catholicism has a lot of good food, though there is a world of spiritual difference between pierogies and manicotti. Even Islam can make a reasonable stand for itself with Shawarma. But the Hindus have everyone beat for food, how can anything compare to mango chutney, chicken vindaloo, or tikka makhani? Hail, Shri Ganesha!!

On intelligent design

It seems that the question is not so much the intelligence in the system, but whether that intelligence has a will.

Questions for the Editor

> I know your stance on Taco Bell (I think), but what is your
> take on KFC? Specifically, their wraps? The chicken can be
> a bit heavy, but I saw a commercial for some wraps that
> look delicious.


McDonald's now sells salads.

Someone recently said that going to McDonald's for a salad is like going to a crackhouse for vitamins.

Somehow, KFC selling wraps is the same thing. If you're not going there for the big bucket of greasy chicken, why are you going there? I just don't see the buying wraps idea as prudent. ---If you're going to some restaurant for the experience and you choose $10 wraps becuase you're at a restaurant with friends and it's the experience, fine. But driving to a place for a $5 wrap sandwich that you can make at home for, what, a buck? And you're getting the restaurant experience of a KFC?

I actually don't mind the big bucket of greasy chicken. I don't get it a lot because I spend the rest of the day sliding out of chairs and I spend the next three days all shiny. But it's something I can't make myself. And it's cheap. I remember hanging one summer with some Middletown kids at the little half-park down by Home and Ravine Avenue. One worked for KFC and would bring a huge hefty bag of the leftover end of the day chicken--like 20 pounds of it--and we would all eat
it. Yum.

And I also spent a lot of time in the company of a woman who had a deep and restless craving for it. It was part spiritual and part unreal, but she would gorge on KFC on a regular basis. It was a woman thing.

I don't mind the Taco Bell food, and get it regularly. Beef and Chicken grilled stuffed burritos. They're great. (Not deep fried, not baked in a huge wad of polyunsaturated synthetic polymer cheese-food product.) But I don't eat it there, cramped into an over air-conditioned plastic booth caked with refried beans someone has sneezed onto the wall. Zitty-faced zombie high school kids on both sides of the counter. Nope. The take-out window is absolutely necessary.

I found an excellent and cheap fish shop in Meriden. Now that's food.

Haddam

Killingworth Road, (Route 81); Haddam, Connecticut

Change

I think as I get older, I am less and less likely to advocate
changing institutions from within.

American Idol

Simon Cowell's number 1 complaint about Randy Jackson is that he keeps on hogging the donuts, and Simon's number 1 complaint about Paula Abdul is she keeps hogging all the boys.

Norfolk

Haystack & Bald Mountains; Norfolk, Connecticut.

Not Rude Anymore

When did it get to be fine to eat in front of other people? Wasn't that a thing?

You used to not be able to eat in front of other people because it was rude. Apparently it's no longer rude.

One reason why it used to be rude was that if you ate in front of someone else, and they were not eating, it was effectively denying them food. 'I'm not going to let you have any of this, I'm just going to eat it in front of you.' Remember old lady schoolteachers saying "Did you bring enough for everybody?" That could only have been because it would have been rude to eat food and not share. After all, we're all humans, we all need to eat. No matter how different our social rank, our backgrounds, or our waistlines, anyone with food, in front of someone without, was supposed to offer to share.

But another reason is that eating food is...indelicate. There's chomping and gurgling and wheezing and burbling. Even in the most refined person of manners, if you really listen to them eat, it sounds like a sewer backing up. Now, paradoxically, if both people eat, no one person can really hear the other over the noise, and it's a pleasant time for both.

But, now, all that's swept away. It's gone. It's no longer rude. Now people eat on their own in front of other people without the slightest embarassment at all. And they sound just as sewery and bildgey and bloppy as ever. Grunt and wheeze and salivary glands shooting gushing sprays of spit left and right. It's all good.

Apparently. I say 'apparently' because that's what I see all the time now. Maybe I just spend too much time on a college campus. A college campus particularly populated with self-absorbed, solipsistic, utterly indulged their entire lives, college students.

Who sound like sewers backing up.

Very pretty.

Winter

They say we're up for some snow this weekend. I don't care at all, because the sun has gotten warm enough that Spring is coming anyway. Somehow, this past week, the back of winter has been broken. The crows sense it, the squirrels sense it, the doves have even reappeared. I can sense it. Let Winter do what it wants now, it's lost the battle again.

Scratch that one Off the List

Beautiful woman sits two chairs away. Casual. Sassy. Long flowing hair.

Pops in some gum and starts clacking away at it like she was a platypus in the Galapagos islands.

Breasts & Comedy

I was considering the comedic value of women's breasts.

Well, I was.

Children certainly see it. They find them hilarious. Not that there's any sexual tension in that; they just do. I remember pieces of some ancient joke about a woman who has a dog named 'Titswiggle'; there's a punch line for the joke that you can figure out pretty simply, and then you can write the rest of the joke yourself.

Then it occurred to me, it's the wiggling that is so funny. Anything that wiggles is, by definition, funny.

Think about it, that's why Jell-o is always a hit with kids. I mean, it's gelatin, hardly appetizing, but what could possibly wiggle more? Jelly is funny, too, though to a lesser extent, (the extent to which it still wiggles). Jam is even funny, but just slightly.

So breasts are legitimately funny, in their own right. Wiggly, wobbly, jiggly;—they're naturally funny.

Le Cinéma

I have been a devoteé of French cinema lately. Just trying to catch up with what I've missed, retracing some old ground as well.

And it's striking; apparently in French cinema, the idea of a middle aged man's romantic involvement with a high school aged girl is apparently considered enough of a plot in itself to be the basis of a whole movie.

There need be no more than that.

Not only can that be a whole movie, it's one out of every two French movies.

That's it. Apparently the whole movie-going French public will watch endless permutations of the subject.

The Thrice Secret Order of Profound Ignorance

Can there possibly be anything more tedious than an old Freemason, prattling on about ancient secrets of unknown provenance which no one understands? I have wasted so much of my life dealing with these garralous old buffoons; Freemasons, Bonesmen, the whole tin-hatted lot. Don't they know it's the Girl Scouts with the universal ark of alchemical talmudic secrets, and that they practice ungodly ceremonies to their interplanetary God in Area 51? That's where the secret society action is.

Yup.

When I was at Harvard, I used to hang out with the cool students who were all from Stuyvesant High School in New York. But then I suddenly realized they were all assholes, and instead I started hanging out with all the students from France. The French were far cooler. And they had beautiful women and guitars and wine. So, how can you beat that?

But I used to drive them crazy because I said “Yup” all the time. Especially one woman, Angelle Gecco. “Chris, you speak English, you should say ‘Yes’! N’cest pas ‘Yup’! After me, after me, say ‘Yes!’”

Who? What?

Is it just me or did they nominate utterly unknown films for Academy Awards this year?

Words to Live By

When in doubt, have a Guinness.

Blue Hill Farm, Haddam

Blue Hill Farm, Haddam, Connecticut.

Hammonasset Beach

Hammonasset Beach, in the very off season, near sunset.

Considering the truth of the book of Genesis

Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that the Bible was written down by Moses.

The Bible is also in some sense the primal answer to the primal question. Or, in other words, we can also imagine that Moses had asked God about the Meaning of Life, and that the Bible is the divine response.

God could have responded, "Well, Moses, in each living thing there are small molecules, which you can call deoxyribonucleic acid, made up of far smaller things, called atoms, and these moleclues regulate the function of the human cell, another very small thing, and they can replicate themselves...

...and that's why you can breed a donkey and a horse and get a mule."

But saying that wouldn't have helped Moses. In fact, that really wouldn't have answered Moses' question. Moses wanted to know what it all meant. And we can only imagine that, if God is moved to answer a question, being God, such an answer would be full and complete and suited to the intent of the questioner.

God's response wouldn't have been a biochemistry seminar.

Instead, God would have said : "In the beginning, I created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And my Spirit moved upon the face of the waters. And I said, 'Let there be light' and there was light. And I saw the light, and said that it was good."

And Moses would have said, "Now I begin to understand."

The Sound of One Mime Clapping

Marcel Marceau is dead.

Did he have any last words?

Pandora

When I was a kid, we had promiscuous female cat. She kept on getting pregnant so quickly after each birth no one could get her to a vet between pregnancies. My mother swore the cat had something like 80 kittens in a year.

Anyway, from that time, the cat was named Pandora.

My mother had a sense of humor.

Clearly, it was just a slip...

I was reading the speech by Martin Luther King on August 28, '63 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. One thing caught my eye.

But let me say first that one of the reasons that Martin Luther King was such a good orator that he had a lot of phrases stored up in memory that whenever pressed he could always fall back on. For example, when he says, "I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight...", he's not making that up on the spot, he's quoting from the Bible, and not only is he doing that because it's nice to quote from, but he doesn't have to think about what he's saying. He can get the next idea in line, or be mindful of the delivery and where he's going. Twenty years of sermons allowed him to build up an impressive reserve of phrases like this.

So, when he's sermonizing, he's got his plan, he has his text, he has phrases like this to help him get there, and he can also free associate a little to move the argument along; and do all the things like develop a cadence, build to a climax, and everything else.

And then there is this:

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California...

Wait. What was that last one?

Berkshire Farm

On the western slopes on Mount Greylock, Massachusetts, this past November 22nd.

Tantalize Me

I have to admit, I'm becoming an Ocean State Job Lots fan. Even the food. Now, you might think, discounted job lot food? What horrible stuff would there be in an aftermarket food retailer's shelves?

I was in there today, and they had caviar. Caviar. The same brand as at the best supermarkets. And a lot of natural foods, rough organic oatmeals that no one can afford in the health food store, marked down to a buck; likewise for the granolas, nuts, dried cherries and figs.

They also have overstock bread from a local bakery. Fresh bolos levedos, and how can you not like bolos levedos?

Since October, I've been keeping track of where the local stores are in all the neighboring towns. Today I got some buns, some guava puree that was delicious, biscotti, dried mission figs, organic fair-traded sodas, a couple cans of lobster bisque and all for eleven dollars; it would have been twice as much, or more, at a supermarket.

The Eldritch Land of Massachusetts

Massachusetts is a curious place.

I am convinced it is the only geronto-gynocracy in the annals of human history. Geronto-gynocracy, is, of course, rule by old women. I have never seen a place where septuagenarian women dominate social intercourse as in Massachusetts. And, the gods forgive me, I hope to never see another.

This singular fact may not be immediately evident in the halls of the state capitol, or in the grim streets of the even grimmer Boston, but out among the old small towns still wedged into the nooks and crannies of Massachusetts' hilly countryside, old women hold an iron hand over every community.

How this came to be, I do not know. But be forwarned, gentle reader, if ever among the inhabitants of Fitchburg, Pittsfield, or Foxborough : Give them a wide berth. Open doors and allow them to pass. Allow them to cut in line. Give them room on the highways and intersections. Massachusetts is theirs.

Little persons

I was visiting friends with children last night. Small children. As in two feet tall and standing and wailing like it was the end of the universe, tears streaming down their faces, and just into a full howling shriek,—forever.

Not that it lasted that long.

At one quiet moment though, I was in the kitchen/family room, parents off in different areas of the house. I was sitting and enjoying the quiet, and I realized that one little person was on the kitchen table, foraging for food, another was over by the couch, also foraging for food. One cat was over in another corner, probably doing the same, and cat number two was also picking around, also foraging.

And it suddenly occurred to me that, essentially, this was no different than a forest floor, with raccoons and squirrels, idly picking around for an occasional nut, foraging for food.

The Golden Compass

I went to The Golden Compass because I had heard that in the movie there was a sophisticated sub text of criticism of the Catholic church. I don't really need to see a sophisticated sub-textual criticism of the Catholic church, (that topic having been thouroughly played out since Paine's day, if not Luther's). But a movie with any sort sophisticated subtext beats one without, so I thought I would see it.

Whatever there is in the novels, nothing made it to the screen. There is the slightest criticism of an entity called the Magisterium. In the movie, the Magisterium is, of course, the Anglican Church, not the Roman, (at least the headquarters of the Magisterium is a modified St Paul's). (It's a sad commentary on the status of affairs that nobody can even tell when the Anglican church is even the target of criticism anymore—the Anglicans have drifted so far out of consequence that even when they're the night's whipping boy, nobody even knows who they are and assume they're Catholics.)

But even with that, all it comes down to is that the Magisterium is bad, no reason is given as to why, really, they're just bad.

The movie also has unusual things happening all the time which made no sense, although they might have in the book. There's a army of flying witches that come storming through at one point for no reason at all. Since it's a fantasy, you accept anything that happens as being a part of the fantasy: "Oh, this is a parallel dimension, here apparently armies of flying witches come and go." As opposed to armies of flying haberdashers from Melbourne.

But why there are flying witches, or who they are, or what they're doing, or why they aren't engaged in haberdashery in Melbourne, I don't know, and the movie does not say.

It's all very pretty, and all very cg fascinating, but nothing substantial. It's a children's fantasy story

An interesting yet minor furor occurred in Blighty over this movie. Philip Pullman, the author of the novels, has spoken out against the movie and its elision of the religious critique. The President of England's National Secular Society has spoken to the press: "It was clear right from the start that the makers of this film intended to take out the anti-religious elements of Pullman's book," said Terry Sanderson, president of the society. "In doing that they are taking the heart out of it, losing the point of it, castrating it. It seems that religion has now completely conquered America's cultural life and it is much the poorer for it. What a shame that we have to endure such censorship here too."

What Sanderson didn't get is that the producers of the movie are hardly clerical grandees who have mangled the beauty of the original work. They are a handful of utterly secular people out in Southern California who took out the religious content because it seemed boring. All that content got in the way of the talking bunnies. They took it out because they didn't understand it. But they did know damn well that anti-clerical polemics don't sell theater tickets. (At least they haven't since, again, Paine's day.)

So I guess Pullman and Sanderson feel so put upon by sneaky clerics out to get them from behind every arras, that they've jumped the gun here and are already on the counter-attack against imagined threats that are not there. Or maybe they just wanted to traduce America by resorting to a stereotype that the country is run by redneck zealots. "Religion has now completely conquered America's cultural life," indeed.

Either way, their defense of secularism has only worsened their position in the lists.

PM P.M. Ravages Downtown Toronto.

Below is a photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin on October 14, 2005, wreaking havoc in the streets of Toronto.

In an interview two days later on October 16, Mr. Martin admitted that his outburst "was wrong", and that he was sincerely very sorry. He also suggested that he had only been searching for the Tim Horton's at Portland and King Street West, because he wanted some pecan Tim Tarts. He claimed to have been disoriented and quite hungry.

He was later found to have laid wates to 7.3 hectares of the GTO, causing $23.6 million CDN in damages from this ill-mannered rampage.

Martin was later replaced in office by the election of February 6, 2006. He has not stalked the city since that time.

A Good Posset for a Winter's Night

In his postumously published book, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Kenelm Digby, Knight, (London: 1670 or 71), is a recipe for the favorite posset of Charles Howard, the 1^st Earl of Carlisle.

Since a good posset is hard to come by these days, it seems the recipe should be reprinted here.

Take a pottle of Cream, and boil in it a little whole Cinnamon, and three or four flakes of Mace. To this proportion of Cream put in eighteen yolks of eggs, and eight of the whites; a pint of Sack; beat your eggs very well, and then mingle them with your Sack. Put in three quarters of a pound of Sugar into the Wine and Eggs, with a Nutmeg grated, and a little beaten Cinnamon; set the Bason on the fire with the Wine and Eggs, and let it be hot. Then put in the Cream boiling from the fire, pour it on high, but stir it not; cover it with a dish, and when it is settlede, strew on the top a little fine Sugar mingled with three grains of Ambergreece, and one grain of Musk, and serve it up.

Pouring the cream in from a height mixed it with the sack, however the two would seperate, (the cream rising to the top, naturally), and create a sort of custard layer above the wine. The foam would also stiffen and become a third grace layer on top. Interesting that the very top gets its flavoring from ambergris and musk. I assume they do mean ambergris from whales.

All of this goes to show that our miserable forbears did have cunning schemes to get themselves through winter in some comfort, and that people did not live as savage barbarians before the invention of fluffernutter sandwiches.

Winter hiking

Winter hiking along Pattaconk Lake, Chester, Connecticut. December 1, 2007.

The Great American Burrito

Mexican food is very popular in the United States. Except, of course, it isn't really Mexican, just like our Chinese food isn't really Chinese, our Italian food isn't Italian, or anything else. (Our Lithuanian food is exactly Lithuanian, but nobody eats it.)

At any rate, I realized long ago that in American Mexican food, the burrito has surpassed the taco. But what I realized today, shooting across the surface of Haddam, Connecticut, at 75 miles per hour, is why the burrito is king. The burrito can be eaten while driving.

And thus, the key to the success of Taco Bell. If only the poor French could find a way to make a bouillabaisse edible with one hand, then there'd be French food franchises at every interstate exit.

Imitation is the sincerest form of admitting you've got nothing

It always seemed obvious to me that Ms. Ciccone/Madonna was only ever a cheap Sony knock-off of Debbie Harry.

Hussunash & kommuks

These are Kommuks.

I don't know what they are, but I have named them.

Let's start from the beginning. Everyone knows that there are no pre-Columbian ruins in New England. There are ruins in Ohio and west, (The Mound Builders). But this side of the Alleghenies, somehow the Algonquin just couldn't figure out how to make piles of rocks;--it must have been some sort of constitutional infirmity, they just couldn't manage to put one rock on top of another.

At least, that's what we're told.

Therefore, every single rock-on-rock combination you can ever find in New England cannot be Algonquin. It's perfect pre-emptive reasoning.

Every rock-on-rock combination must therefore be of English colonist creation. For an example, in the picture above, we are told that we are to believe that an English colonist farmer was simply trying to clear his fields of stone. Just like all those farmer's stone walls around the perimeter of every New England field was built up by farmers dragging stones to the edge of the field; this is the same thing, only he made these piles in the middle of the field.

Except that's just insane. Look at those rockpiles. Look at them. Why are they so neat? Why the hell would a farmer make piles like that? (They're actually fustra, or bottom ends of cones.) Why did our farmer here make neatly organized fustra out of his rocks? Or are we looking at something else? Something that isn't supposed to exist. Pre-Columbian ruins in New England. Our universities, our archaeologists, tell us that there are no such things.

So, the Kommuks you're looking at don't exist.

They're not there.

They're shadows of nothingness.

Why Kommuk? The word is derived from the Algonquin, kommuk meaning a building or tower. In general, all rock-on-rock combinations of the clearly-its-not-farmer-yet-it-exists-anyway variety are hussunash, from the Algonquin, hussunash meaning stones. We use these words to talk about them because people were making up a lot of weird words for them out of European archaeology and elsewhere which were wholly inappropriate.

Since May of 2006, I have been cataloging these things across New England. So far I am up to about 30 kommuk, about 600 hussunash of all kinds, and about 300 other associated oddities and anomalies. It's fun. I'll have a LOT more to say about hussunash some day, (hopefully soon), but more than will neatly go into this blog.

Yes, I did say 600. That's a lot, isn't it? These things are all over the place---if you know where and how to look. I've gotten to the point where I can spot them from a moving car at 60, because I know where to look. I know my people now, the hussunash people; I don't know who they were, but I do know how they think.


Here's another kommuk. It's about 12 feet tall. Of course, it was made by farmers stacking up stones on the perimeter of their field. Although, if you look where it is, that isn't in a field, the nearest flat land is a couple hundred yards off, but just because the official word makes absolutely no sense, that doesn't mean it isn't absolutely true.

Another kommuk. And it, too, doesn't exist.

You don't believe me? Don't. Don't believe me. These things do not exist. Just pretend you didn't read this post. It's all fiction. Nevermind. These are not the piles of rock you're looking for.

What if?

What if there were no hypothetical situations?

I just wrote a poem...

...clickety-clickety-clickety (pause) clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety (pause) c-l-i-c-k (pause) click-clickety-clickety-clickety...

Britain's Greatest Invention : Gravity

Gravity?
Yes, gravity.

Before the British invented gravity in 1687, the world depended on the previous source of mass attraction, invented in 1486 by Antoine Grandpied Marche Fortement, Duc de Groscul, and named L'attraction personnelle profonde, or APP, which was an early gravity precursor.

APP was a simple system that worked through energy waves powered by oral garlic aroma. Or 'le souffle malheureuse'.

APP was very effective for short distances, but frequently subject to breakdowns, causing people to float off at oddly oblique angles and become tangled in tree branches.

L'attraction personnelle profonde was finally replaced by gravity after an angry Frenchman, caught in the branches of Sir Isaac's apple tree, lobbed a weighty bulb of garlic at the English philosopher's head, which knocked Newton unconscious and thereby produced the Enlightenment.

Latest literary efforts...

I am working on a murder mystery. It's about a young crofter girl murdered on the Devon moor. It's called Tess of the Baskervilles.

Wikipedia is not truth

I've been engaged in an ongoing battle in Wikipedia. I know, I know, I shouldn't. Arguing on the internet is like competing in the Special Olympics and all that... But I do allow myself a little unproductive time, and although it probably says that something is corrupt in my soul that the best recreation I can find for myself is proving a fellow human to be an idiot, nevertheless, what's done is done.

One of the articles I spar over is the article on Wesleyan, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesleyan_University There are apparently a wide range of interlopers that come through and post this and that, and there are two who are more distinctly obsessive, 69.121.22.66 and Anthropologique. Anthropologique appears to obsess over the sciences and the endowment, 69.121.22.66 has a deep jones for CSS.

But a lot of the posters seem to have the same problem, which is that they yearn to show that Wesleyan is, dammit, simply the best at everything. So, in the article, absolutely everything is described as "elite," "prestigious," "prominent," and "nationally-ranked". These adjectives, (and their cousins), repeat so often that the article reads like crap. And it raises the obvious question, if the place is so good, why do they have to brag about it?

Obviously, the true rule is if you describe it well, people will supply their own adjectives, or to put it another way, show, don't tell. Don't say it's elite, say 1 out of 3,000 applicants gets in, (or whatever the number is). That says more than a bunch of bull adjectives ever can.

I, by the way, wrote mostly all the 'History' section, (so I do do productive things in Wikipedia). And I think that section does have some balance, although it is a warm history, it is true. But it compares well with the rest of the piece, and certainly is better than the seperate 'prominent alumni' section. Among the prominent alumni, someone has listed some schmuck whose achievement is being 'Isaac Azimov's nephew'. Isn't that precious?

The overall effect is to make the Wesleyan article just a little more sanguine than the college catalog. The article is almost an embarassment.

So, I do fight the good fight, trying to tone things down a bit, and after months of ongoing nonsense, I did snap... just a wee little bit. See if you can spot, in the following, which paragraph I added today:

Wesleyan occupies a 360-acre campus, with over 340 buildings including: the five building College Row; the Samuel Wadsworth Russell House, a National Historic Landmark; Alsop House; Olin Memorial Library (having more than one million volumes, with separate specialized Art, Science, and Music libraries plus Special Collections, Archives, and U.S. Government Documents); Harriman Hall (which houses the John E. Andrus Public Affairs center and the College of Social Studies); the Exley Science Center; Shanklin and Hall-Atwater Laboratories; the Van Vleck Observatory; Fayerweather (housing theatrical and dance rehearsal spaces and Beckham Hall--for large lectures), the Foss Hill dormitories; the Butterfield dormitories; the Fauver Field dormitories; and 11-building Center for the Arts complex.

Recent building initiatives include the Freeman Athletic Center (which includes a 50-meter swimming pool, the Spurrier-Snyder Rink for skating, the 1,200-seat Silloway Gymnasium, the 7,500-square-foot Andersen Fitness Center, and the Rosenbaum Squash Center with eight courts), the Center for Film Studies, and a multi-building renovation project creating a 'Humanities District' on the east side of High Street between Fisk Hall and Russell House, which includes facilities for the departments of English, Romance Languages, the College of Letters, Classical Studies, Philosophy, Art & Art History, and Women's Studies.

The Silloway Gymnasium has 156 elite and high-ranking men's urinals, floor-mounted units of the finest Italian porcelain, which are prominent for their nationally competitive flushability, which the U.S. News and World Report rated 3rd overall, stating "These urinals appear finer than Amherst's".

The new Usdan University Center, opened in September 2007 at the center of the campus, has consolidated dining facilities for students and for faculty, and houses seminar and meeting spaces, the Wesleyan Student Association, Student Activities and Leadership Development offices, the post office, and retail space.

Further detail about Wesleyan's campus can be found at the interactive Virtual Wesleyan website.