Atomic Shrimp
Published 16 Aug 2020Here’s something I have been meaning to feature on the channel for a little while — it’s a savoury anchovy paste that has been in continuous production in England since 1828 — the Georgian Era.
For more information about this product, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlem…
The music for the spoon segment is called “Forever Yours” by Wayne Jones – from the YouTube Audio Library
May 4, 2026
Gentleman’s Relish (Patum Peperium) – Weird Stuff In A (Sort Of A) Can #142
QotD: Saint Hillary
If Michael Kelly can rise from the grave, this will be the week. He’s been summoned.
Kelly was the most relentlessly savage chronicler of the Clinton administration, and of the Clintons personally, but his opening shot was so subtle you had to squint to see what he was doing. In a long feature story that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in May of 1993 under the that’s-not-a-compliment title, “Saint Hillary”, Kelly very quietly mocked Hillary as a preening know-it-all who didn’t know much of anything. He wrote that she represented “the message of the preacher”, with a way of speaking that delivered a stream of moral lectures, as if she had the authority and the wisdom to direct others in the act of moral reconstruction. If you click on the link and read the whole story, you’ll want to watch for the transitional paragraph, the switch from mostly description to mostly derision. It begins with the words, “It is at this point that some awkward questions arise”. Next paragraph: “If it is necessary to remake society, why should Hillary Rodham Clinton get the job?”
It becomes less kind from there. Kelly described a meeting between Hillary Clinton and the progressive Jewish editor and activist Michael Lerner, who (Kelly says) offered a vision of “unintentionally hilarious Big Brotherism”. And then: “The reason Lerner’s proposals for the application of the politics of meaning focus so heavily on bureaucratic irrelevancies is the same reason Mrs. Clinton is struggling still with words”. Self-delusion, unawareness of political realities, hard-headed self-importance, unaware bumbling in an unearned sense of certainty. A moralizer, but not moral, unwise but committed to the appearance of wisdom.
Remember, this story appeared in 1993, in the opening months of the Clinton presidency. Michael Kelly was opening a political era with a dismissal, rolling his eyes at the Clinton project as it began. “Saint Hillary”, they called it. The New York Times used to publish things like this.
Chris Bray, “Saint Hillary the Bluntly Obtuse”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-01-30.
