Some Jews began arriving in the late 19th century. At the time... As more Jewish people moved in, they pushed the Palestinians out and destroyed their...
2 gallon of vegetarian white bean soup sounds more penitential than holiday gluttony and sloth deserve. But... it will be good for your soul. The ange...
Israel is committing Genocide! "Israel, Israel, you can’t hide: We charge you with genocide." the demonstrators chant. Just how many people add up to ...
In "Down and Out in Paris and London" George Orwell observed that French waiters at exclusive restaurants would sometimes spit on the plate of food as...
"Little black" Sambo -- the pejorative term -- is 19th century. but "Sambo" references a sandwich arose only the 1970s. I read a children's book about...
there seems to be a knack to shucking oyster -- a knack I lack. Stewed in milk. I don't take as long to cook oysters as people did / do. I'm not sure ...
How did that happen -- tradition or chance? Oysters on Christmas Eve are a tradition in many families in this area, even here in the middle of the con...
Minnesota, generally a relatively low public fraud state in the US, is still prosecuting a $250,000,000 rip off of Federal Covid-19 funding. Under the...
Risk is complex, as our individual estimations of risk are. In the Shoutbox, there is a current discussion of aged egg nog -- eggs, milk, sugar, and a...
I've heard that eggnog could be aged for a while, months or a year. I have not heard of mass die-offs from aged nog, but they might not have filled ou...
In this part of the world, children still make snowmen (with adult help -- big balls of snow are heavy) with carrot noses. What they can't do, these d...
Go ahead and read it again -- many adults read it as part of their Christmas rituals--maybe not every year, but every few years. Many theaters perform...
This victorian card is Edward Gorey-ish; maybe more so. I'm surprised there aren't spiders in the tree or the ribcage. https://64.media.tumblr.com/ec6...
True, that. So here's a bloody Christmas card. By the way, the late Victorians sent cards we would consider wildly inappropriate. They also liked to r...
At 6:44, just heard there was a shooting in a Prague university targeting the Philosophy Department. 14 killed. No information at this time whether it...
Languages are different but that doesn't mean one has to be better than another. The language(s) we learn as children are not the result of one being ...
Of course you had duck. In real cities that have real Chinatowns, duck is de rigueur. Out here in the flyover hinterlands, the mass's diets are nightm...
Good question. There are not many rabbit farms, true. But Americans used to eat rabbit and did so with enthusiasm. Hasenpfeffer, braised rabbit, is pr...
Most of our oil no longer comes from the Middle East. "In 2018, the impact of U.S. shale oil production was readily apparent. Crude oil imports to the...
OK, so I got the wax plug wrong, but I did know about the radioactive material in smoke detectors. I grew up in a fire-hazard house without so much as...
My impression of the current crop of pre-school children is that they are smarter than children used to be. but these sorts of impressions are not wor...
It depends... Smoke detectors are relatively inexpensive and fairly reliable. They are alarms which normally do not do anything about the smoke, aside...
"The smoke alarm went off" seems pretty standard to me. Yeah, I don't know why we don't have "fire alarms", in stead of "smoke alarms" in our homes. W...
No, but a copy has just now been acquired for $5, which is not enough to get a decent coffee these days. I clearly need to learn more about stupid peo...
I'm very surprised at how liberal and permissive Florida Republicans are. Even a bit kinky. According to Axios, the GOP Chair, Christian Ziegler, is i...
I have no doubt that children's extensive screen time has significant negative consequences. However, young children are not buying phones, tablets, o...
Her image of "the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow" is novel, but also quite odd. There are more straight-forward, more effective w...
There have been several items in the news about loneliness. some studies have shown how using media and devices makes people feel more isolated. It is...
I'm glad you liked it. Let me spotlight another piece frequently performed in Christmas concerts--Ave Maria by Franz Biebl, a contemporary German comp...
Airplane pilots have used checklists for some time. "Just follow the steps and not think about them" increases the risk of ending up dead. Similarly, ...
@"Tom Storm" @"Moliere" Michael Praetorius, German composer, died 1621. Ere how a rose is blooming. Wonderful piece, but I agree the pace at which War...
Well, when I was a kid it was normal for children to go outside, totally unsupervised, and do whatever. Did our parents approve of us playing in the s...
I thought what I had written might be misunderstood, and so it was. What I should have said was, "People who have children can relive their own childh...
Christ isn't the problem, as it happens. As children we were/are revved up and become overly excited about Christmas. As we grow up, we try to recaptu...
Lots of people share your feelings -- positive about December, stressed out by Christmas. For many people, the stress comes from the difference betwee...
Your theory isn't all wrong. Many or most "Winners" have preloaded advantages. Being born into wealth and privilege isn't an iron clad guarantee of su...
All great. Whose forehead could I crack an egg on? I thought the subway station manager was telling the big-breasted woman (identified as "the custome...
That's a nice trick, bringing statues to life. The 'pre' history of Europe is shrouded in the mists of time, and the topic of where they came from, wh...
In my IDEAL society, there would not be "the wealthiest person" because one person's wealth requires someone else's loss. Even in an ideal society, th...
I wonder what long-term affects, if any, the late-Roman barbarians invasions (Visigoth, Goth, Burgundian, Vandal, Suevian, etc.) had on Spain. Who wer...
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