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Why we (should) cook (more)

Long time, no see, Jonith. This was a must-post -- from Jonah Lehrer, an essay slated for the January edition of now-defunct Gourmet. I am of completely of the mind that if we have to do something three times a day for the rest of our lives, we might as well make it enjoyable (not sure who to credit for that):

Most things in life become more automatic with time. This, after all, is the gift of experience - it allows us to pay less attention, so that we don't have to think about maintaining our balance on a bicycle, or shifting gears in a car. But with cooking the opposite happens - the more time we spend in the kitchen the more we notice. The act is intensified, layered with new subtleties. The first time I cooked beef stew, I was merely obeying a recipe, counting off the minutes until the mirepoix was sweated and the meat was seared. But now I don't need the clock - I've learned how to smell the dark sugar of cooked onions, how to see when the stew is viscous with the richness of bones. The dish is the same - beef bourguignon is too perfect to ever change - but my sense of it has become much richer.

Judy's Song for Sunday

The original faghag (though not haggish at all), Mizz Doris Day sings to her Rock.

My favorite conservative is turning the corner

He posts this:

A classic from his blistering account of the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit:

"Just as Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country’s institutions. If one of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man to bypass the institutions he ought to defend."

His peroration is a show-stopper of rhetoric:

"The America which Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of ‘‘better dead than red’’; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy.

The America of fear. For it is in fear that the ungoverned and the unfree are doomed to live. And there was this America in control at Detroit. It is time that we reminded ourselves, and said aloud and more often, that it is from these people that nastiness comes. It is time that we pointed out to the neo-conservatives that democracy has never been subverted from the left but always from the right.

No democracy has fallen to communism, without an army; many democracies have fallen to fascism, from within. The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy. If the neo-conservatives cannot sniff danger, surely the rest of us can be alert."

The phrase that resonates so powerfully to me after the last few years is his reference to foreign policy: "a now ignorant interventionism." I argued with Henry about this back in the day. But the longer I live in America and keep my eyes open, the closer to his view I find myself traveling.

Blast off!

Berlin TV tower - lift off from Fabian Tischer on Vimeo.

Keep it up, Secret Service

This is getting dangerous, folks. I'm now genuinely afraid for President Obama now that that which comes from Wasilla has weighed in:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Move to International, please

Holy GEEZUS, I know I'm way late to the party on this one, but he's not on CNN Intl, so I don't get to see him ever -- but um, TJ Holmes??? Hi. This picture alone would make watching CNN America worth it. If Halle Berry and her model boyfriend have a son as their second child, he will grow up to look like this.

TJ Holmes simply existing more than makes up for original CNN hotness piece, Bill Hemmer 1) leaving CNN for Fox News and 2) being a krazy kloseted Evangelical.