Month: March 2023
Excuse after excuse after excuse
There is not a good time to talk about gun control. Not immediately after a shooting. Not before a shooting. Not a day after or a week after.
Now is a fine time to talk about abortion. Now’s a great time to show pictures of aborted babies. Now’s a great time to go protest killing babies.
But guns? Never.
Continue reading “Excuse after excuse after excuse”Italian academic cooks up controversy with claim carbonara is US dish
The Guardian printed this whopper:
“On the basis of imaginative reconstructions, the most deeply rooted national culinary traditions are disputed,” the association said.
“In essence, [he claims] the Americans have invented carbonara, and panettone and tiramisu are recent commercial products. Above all, [the interview] goes so far as to hypothesise about parmesan and the one produced in Wisconsin in the US – the homeland of fake ‘made in Italy’ cheeses.”
Grandi also attracted the ire of Matteo Salvini, the Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League who has long used food as a symbol of Italy’s national identity.
In a post on social media, Salvini said “experts and newspapers are envious of our tastes and beauty” before adding that “buying, eating and drinking Italian is good for health, work and the environment!”
Grandi’s claims were partly drawn from existing academic literature, the Financial Times said. In reference to carbonara, he cites Luca Cesari, a food historian and author of the book A Brief History of Pasta, who said carbonara was “an American dish born in Italy”.
Parmesan cheese, from the Emilia-Romagna region, dates back to the 12th century and Grandi believes Italian immigrants, probably from the Parma area, started producing it in Wisconsin in the early 20th century.
The dish is believed to have been first made by an Italian chef in 1944 for American soldiers in Riccione using bacon and eggs rations. “Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian,” Grandi told the Financial Times.
He said Wisconsin parmesan was “an exact modern-day match” for the original recipe because, unlike their counterparts in Parma, cheesemakers in the US state never evolved the recipe.
Read the rest.
“And the word was deity”
This dude Dan McClellan is crushing it on the social medias. Whether I agree with him or not, he’s disturbing the general academics and life-long theologists by being an articulate communicator on Biblical history and language.
This discussion of the mistranslation of John 1:1 is an interesting one.
One of the largest aspects of my walk away from the church was learning a second language and discovering as an adolescent the challenges of language nuance/rules/grammar and how to navigate those waters. In English, I was forced to identify idioms and nuances that we understand culturally so that when speaking to a non-native english speaker, it helped me approach my studies of French.
When applying that logic to Biblical studies, we have to assume that people who translate languages understand all the nuances/grammar and rules of those languages. And as educations become more well rounded, we should be depending more on modern approaches to language interpretations rather than ones from, say, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg’s day.
We owe it to ourselves to attempt to understand the original texts, and it takes dudes like McClellan to help us understand what we will NEVER understand fully, because English was not Jesus’s language nor any writer of the original biblical texts.
Trailer: Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City”
I’m not a HUGE Wes Anderson fan, but I’ll always pickup what he’s putting down.
Eureka, I have a “new-to-me” conspiracy theory
I finished reading “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg | Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business yesterday.
Yesterday, I couldn’t help but land on a conspiracy theory, which I’ll get to in a minute. First, the book in general.
Continue reading “Eureka, I have a “new-to-me” conspiracy theory”A man who lived in the back of an old car has something to say
Screw the political bullshit, induction is better than gas
I love to cook. I live a restaurant prolific Chicago part of the year, and I would much rather say, “No, I’ve never been to that restaurant, either. I’d rather cook for myself.”
I’ve been following the so-called debate about environmental approaches to cooking. It’s dumb as rocks.
In my subjective experiences with objectively pleasing results, induction stove tops are my favorite method to cook in 90% of situations. I’m lucky. I share my time living in a home with Induction and one with gas.
Induction’s benefits are that they are safe, fast heat that his very controllable and the surfaces are easy to clean. Gas is fun as well. And both are good for cooking. But in a contest, I’d go induction before gas.
It’s safe because when you’re done cooking, if you move the pans and pots off the surface, the whole thing turns off by itself. The surface is usually cool-ish to the touch.
When you want to boil water, it’s probably 50% faster than gas.
In homes with children or the elderly, you have “lock” features so you can avoid unwanted cooking attempts.
I love to cook.
Fallen & Can’t get up!
How are we not all fucking furious?!!?
UPDATE: I just saw the below post. Studies show that easy access to certain vehicles for death make it much easier for people to use those methods in harmful ways. When ovens featured lethal gas, suicide by that method skyrocketed.
We owe our children better. This is out of control.
Le Café Wittypoots 