56% of a hundred foods

I did the Australia-themed 50 Foods before. Here's a broader 100-food test, via archy:

Foods I've eaten in bold. Foods I'd like to try in italics.

1. Venison (deer and elk)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (Nastutiums, roses, artichokes, lavender)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Comment Elsewhere: Absurdity in motion

In response to goofy comments on an otherwise sober and informative discussion of New Deal economics, I wrote:

Both of you are ignoring the evidence: time-traveling islamofascists replaced the Founding Fathers with body doubles and revised the Declaration of Independence and Constitution — abandoning the Articles of Confederation for ideological reasons — creating a quantum causality wave that made the otherwise erudite and wise George W. Bush stupid just in time for the 9/11 attacks, which were coordinated through suicide wormhole technology. This is why we can’t find Osama bin Laden: he’s actually hiding in a parallel existence, playing pinochle with his parallel self and waiting for the final victory to come. Barack Obama is another time-traveller, from a future of racial harmony and socialized medicine, who is working against bin Laden, but who nonetheless is also working against the interests of the real Founders who wrote the Articles of Confederation and then time travelled foward to lead the Confederacy.

I'm pretty sure that I'm kidding. But someone objected, and I had to go on:

I’m sorry you feel that way, but the chauvinistic tunnel vision of single-timeline American specialists just doesn’t encompass the reality of the multiverse the way we World Historians understand it. Like Hitler, we have a vision of a world unified under a healthy, vigorous, expansive Historical hegemony, and like Hitler, we will keep invading your blogs until you appease us with internationalism, then we will invade your other blogs, conferences, textbooks and seminars, anyway.

To which the blog host responded, quite appropriately, "It’s funny because it’s true."

Comments Elsewhere

In response to Daniel Larison's comment: "In the event that the officials responsible for these decisions were arrested or found guilty of crimes, that would not be a dark day, but rather the day when the sun has finally started to peak through the clouds of arbitrary and illegal government actions."

I wrote:

Absolutely.

My fear at the moment is the blanket pardon, though it would have the advantage (long-term) of eliminating the fifth amendment dodge.

Most of my more substantive comments lately have been at Edge of the American West. In a discussion of the Vietnam War Memorial, I wrote:

My only complaint about the Vietnam Memorial is that it spawned so many imitators: listing names — or exact enumerations of victims (those stars on the WWII memorial?) — is now the de facto standard for memorials, more or less obliterating any chance at abstraction, inspiration or processing beyond simple grief.

Others have pointed out that name lists were common memorials before, which is true but not entirely the point.

In an earlier discussion about engagement between liberals and conservatives, I wrote:

Going back, if I may, to one of the original questions, not only are there substantial portions of this country where Republicans — often extreme ideologues — rule and reign, but there is a substantial network of institutions developed in the 70s and honed in the 90s which are devoted to the maintenance and development of right-wing intellectual and political figures. Scaife, Murdoch, Gingrich and others have created a way to ensure that the issues will not go away, that the ideas will find outlets and new expressions, and that we will have to contend with all this over again.

The real question, by the way, isn’t “what conservatives are worth listening to and engaging with?” but “what conservatives are speaking reasonable truths to their conservative audiences and whose ideas are going to be influential enough to be worth taking into consideration?”

(and if you're wondering why I repost these, part of the answer is that I only got one response in that 200+ comment thread)

Finally, for now, in response to a fascinating history of a landmark work of modern art, I wrote:

One of the most wonderful things about the 20th century is that it became possible for obsession, intensity, creativity and temporary insanity to be expressed outside of the realm of religion.

I'm going back to my pre-election status: some quotations, some quizzes, ocassional pictures, and reposts of comments made elsewhere. Thanks very much for reading along, though!

Four Years, 1167 posts later....

To mark the fourth anniversary of the humble beginnings of this blog (Seriously humble, friends), I will note other blogs -- many of them blogs of considerably energy and high quality -- which have added me to their blogrolls, in spite of my attempts to take a hiatus and generally focus my energies elsewhere. These are roughly in the order that I noticed them. If you like what I do here, check them out; apparently they do to, and you might find them worthwhile. I do.

• A Shrewdness of Apes by Ms. Cornelius


• BlueBird's Classroom. BlueBird and Ms. Cornelius are both classroom teachers who have a wonderfully perceptive and warm approach, as well as funny and rigorous.


• Scott McLemee's Quick Study


• Progressive Historians, where I'm an active commenter and recently rejoined the blogging team.


• ACRLog, the blog of the Association of College and Reference Librarians. No, I haven't a clue what got their attention, though I have done a bunch of book lists and intellectual memes


• Ericstotle, aka Eric Vance Johnson.


• The Academy's Bench Warmer, aka Geschichte Grad, one of my PH colleagues


• Spherical Frictionless Cow. Serious points for the name.

That's about it for new linkfriends. Not bad for someone who's mostly coasting, with the increasingly frequent, ill-tempered rant.

I'd also like to thank, with a link, the hardcore sources I've been reading on politics that I don't normally, and am going to go back to mostly ignoring:

• Talking Points Memo
• Think Progress
• Matthew Yglesias
• Daniel Larison
• Sadly, No!
• Andrew Sullivan
• FiveThirtyEight.com
• Digby's Hullabaloo
• FireDogLake
• Kevin Drum
• Political Animal

It's been a good ride!

Time to settle up!

The long-running parlor debate is over. For years, political junkies both professional and amateur have amused themselves by arguing whether the US would first elect an African American, woman or Jew to the White House. It's over: an African American was first, and there's little doubt that a woman is much more likely than a Jew at this point. Jews now fall into the "miscellaneous Caucasian ethnic" category, probably less likely than Hispanics.

Anyone who had outstanding wagers on the subject is now required to hand over the money, booze, embarassing photographs, personal services or to undergo the appropriately noteworthy hair styling to which they committed themselves. I'm not much of a gambler myself, so I'm pretty sure I don't owe anyone anything.

Vote!

Update (11:10 pm, EST): Wow.
Update (11:21 pm, EST): Right in the middle of McCain's concession speech, my local Fox affiliate cut away to a "I've fallen and I can't get up" commercial. This is not satire: it really happened, and it was grossly inconsiderate, surreal.

I had to switch channels to see him say "Let there be no reason for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth."

Why do they call it Indian Summer?

This is the mildest autumn in an age, and the flowers are still blooming, the bugs are going nuts. There's still a world out there, when we get up from the desk....

Thursday Lyrics: Summer, Highland Falls

At random, ended up watching a National Press Club appearance by Billy Joel in which he talked about music and politics. We watched the question session, which was all music, and he ended up by singing one of my favorite Joel songs of all time. If you don't have any interest in the whole video, you can hear just the song.

Summer, Highland Falls
by Billy Joel

They say that these are not the best of times,
But they're the only times I've ever known,
And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own.
Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes,
And I can only stand apart and sympathize.

For we are always what our situations hand us...
It's either sadness or euphoria.
And so we argue and we compromise,
and realize that nothing's ever changed,
For all our mutual experience, our seperate conclusions are the same.

Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity,
Our reason co-exists with our insanity.
And though we choose between reality and madness...
It's either sadness or euphoria.

How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies
Perhaps we don't fulfill each other's fantasies.
And so we'll stand upon the ledges of our lives,
With our respective similarities...
It's either sadness or euphoria.

Echoes of Fascist Rhetoric

In response to a funny post at Terry's blog, I got serious

Stalin was a low-key, low-charisma party functionary who parlayed administrative responsibility into strategic superiority; he wasn’t as much an ideologue as he was a power-hungry S.O.B. (he ended up adopting large portions of Trotsky’s program after hounding Trotsky out of the country for programatic heresy!)

Palin, on the other hand, reminds me more of a non-military version of Juan Peron or Francisco Franco: someone who plays the demogogue in democratic terms until the game isn’t working for them, then they bring the hammer down, having laid the groundwork for accusing their opponents of subversion, treason, etc.

In response to a Sam Crane comment on Maoist guerrilla tactics as a metaphor for McCain's rural strategy (which has intensified, since), I said

More to the point, it resemble's Mao's use of rural peasants as "authentic" and politically pure, whereas urbanites and educated citizens were suspect and required retraining. This woman really does worry me.

I still wasn't going to make a big deal of it, but this attempt to claim that the recession is just "some regions of the country not doing as well as others" has a direct parallel in the Maoist obfustication of the Great Leap Forward Famine. At that time, official reports claimed that the Great Leap Forward was going very well, producing record amounts in both agriculture and industry, while the reality was that both agricultural and industrial production were dramatically undercut by the Maoist program. Famine across most of China resulted in roughly thirty million deaths, but the vast majority of the Chinese people believed -- and many still believe -- that the Great Leap Forward was generally successful except in their districts. This propoganda sleight of hand effectively shifted the blame for the famine away from central planners (or planner) to local officials and a "failure of revolutionary zeal" among the population. That gave the regime cover for the Cultural Revolution, a political purge and self-destructive "renewal" that killed millions more and set Chinese intellectual and cultural life back decades.

Blame shifting is a natural human act, not a particularly fascistic or Republican one. But the cumulative effect of the specific tactics is suggesting to me an affinity with extremist politics which is deeply unsettling:

• shifting blame away from the center
• blaming minorities (especially for the mortgage crisis; also immigration issues and Islamophobia)
• calling for a renewal of lost "authenticity"
• excluding large segments of the population from membership in the "the nation"

It never ceases to amaze me that right-wing radicals can get away with much more than left-wing ones, but there has to be a line somewhere....
[Crossposted]

Welcome, Avedon readers! Also Open Left folks!

Free History!

Via Ralph Luker, I note a new effort to clarify the liberating role of history, and the importance, conversely, of liberating history from legislated truths. The new appeal says, in part [emphasis added]:

History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories. In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.
...
We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an official truth whose legal application can carry serious consequences for the profession of history and for intellectual liberty in general.
In a democracy, liberty for history is liberty for all.

I would add, in the list of dangers to history from state attention, the creation of national curriculums of such detail and narrow conception as to force primary and secondary school history into memorization exercises, stripping them of the inquisitive and argumentative joy that real history offers.
[Crossposted]