You Suck At Cooking
Published 23 Dec 2015A 100 percent full throttle high adrenaline speed chase through the history of christmas.
Wishing you all a great close to your year!
December 26, 2021
You Suck at Christmas – You Suck at Cooking (episode 28)
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QotD: Boxing Week Sales
I’ve done a few tours of duty behind a cash register. The job takes your soul, twists it like a wet chamois and runs it through the shredders they use to turn car hoods into tinfoil strips. […] When I lived out east, the relationship between cashier and customer was the same as that between a German gunner and the troops disembarking at Normandy.
James Lileks, “Backfence: Beyond new store’s hype, genuine smiles”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2004-08-03.
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December 25, 2021
QotD: Blackadder and Melchet exchange Christmas greetings
Lord Melchet: Greetings of the season to you, Blackadder! May the Yule log slip from your fire and burn your house down!Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988.
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December 24, 2021
Repost – Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
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QotD: Christmas nostalgia
James Lileks
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December 23, 2021
If Delivery Companies Were Santa
It’s a Southern Thing
Published 21 Dec 2021Up on the housetop, click, click, click.
Down through the chimney comes UPS … and FedEx, USPS, and Amazon Prime.
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QotD: Stupid Commercials
Alan McLeod, “1 + 0 = 2”, Gen X at 40, 2005-11-15.
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December 22, 2021
QotD: Sibling rivalry
Mealtime was competitive too. The winner was the one who moved the greatest percentage of my father’s income through his or her digestive system. I was in my thirties before someone told me that eating is not a speed sport.
Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 61.0, 2005-10-25.
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December 21, 2021
Repost – ‘Tis the season to hate the senders of boastful holiday letters
Gregg Easterbrook receives the perfect, perfect holiday letter:
Don’t you hate boastful holidays letters about other people’s fascinating lives and perfect children? Below is one Nan and I received last week.
Dear Friends,
What a lucky break the CEO sent his personal jet to pick me up from Istanbul; there’s plenty of room, since I have the entire aircraft to myself, to take out the laptop and write our annual holiday letter. Just let me ask the attendant for a better vintage of champagne, and I’ll begin.
It’s been another utterly hectic year for Chad and I and our remarkable children, yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It’s hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car.
Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel’s girls’ volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life.
Now the Big Decision looms — whether to take the early admission offer from Harvard or spend a year at Julliard. Plus the whole back of her Mercedes is full of dance-company brochures as she tries to decide about the summer.
Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes and his volunteer work. He just got the Yondan belt, which usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I really believe this!) they are reincarnated deities.
Modeling for Gap cuts into Nick’s schoolwork, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers.
What can I say regarding our Emily? She’s just been reclassified as EVVSUG&T — “Extremely Very Very Super Ultra Gifted and Talented.” The preschool retained a full-time teacher solely for her, to keep her challenged. Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young.
Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown at one of the leading galleries without the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned!
Then there was the arrival of our purebred owczarek nizinny puppy. He’s the little furry guy in the enclosed family holiday portrait by Annie Leibovitz. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we named him Mandela.
Chad continues to prosper and blossom. He works a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time supervising restoration of the house — National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict. Corporate denial consulting is a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies call him all the time. There’s a lot to deny, and Chad is good at it.
Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. This year I was promoted to COO and invited to the White House twice, but honestly, beading in the evening means just as much to me. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home my $14.6 million bonus, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and I caught her making a personal call.
Chad and I got away for a week for a celebration of my promotion. We rented this quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves — we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative and we could ponder rising above materialism.
Our family looks to the New Year for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome and Seville while Chad and Nicholas accompany Richard Gere to Tibet.
Then the kids are off to camps in Maine, and before we know it, we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel’s things to college. And of course I don’t count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions.
I hope your year has been as interesting as ours.
Love,
Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas & Emily(The above is inspired by a satirical Christmas letter I did for The New Republic a decade ago. I figure it’s OK to recycle a joke once every 10 years.)
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QotD: The Royal Victimhood Olympics
It’s certainly been a bumpy old ride of a year, making Her Majesty’s annus horribilis look like a teddy bears’ picnic. But though I’m not a royalist, I’m counting on this most stiff-upper-lipped of ladies not to mention those two little words which were inescapable this year: “mental health”, or the Mental Elf, as I’ve come to think of him.
Remember our old friends Elf and Safety? They’ve been replaced by Mental Elf, and he’s even more annoying, a nasty little imp intent on making every single member of this once-stoic island race confess to hidden sorrows.
The Royal Victimhood Olympics are now an open-season event, like tennis. The Prince of Wails had a head start, moaning about being sent to boarding school by his “distant” mother who – shame on her! – was a young woman doing her very best in a role she had neither wanted nor expected. Meghan Markle famously fled Frogmore Cottage with the Mental Elf in hot pursuit. Prince William, who appeared to be the sensible one, revealed this week he felt as if “the whole world was dying” after he helped save the life of a child while working as a helicopter pilot for the air-ambulance service.
And of course Sarah Ferguson has referred to herself as “the most persecuted woman in the history of the royal family”. All we need now is for Duchess Kate to weigh in with a detailed account of, say, her PMS problems and we’ve collected the full set of Unhappy Royal Families!
Yes, I know Princess Diana started it. But neurosis was just a part of her emotional repertoire. She realised that one of the best guarantees of good mental health is helping others rather than contemplating one’s navel. Or in the case of the wretched Fergie, one’s novel. The writing of Her Heart for a Compass was reportedly “therapeutic” and boosted her “self-esteem”. Is the world big enough for a more self-loving Fergie?
Julie Burchill, “The Queen is the last sane royal standing”, Spiked, 2021-12-09.
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December 20, 2021
QotD: Turkeys
It did not go well.
As it turns out, turkeys are dumb. And not just a little dumb, no. Turkeys are catastrophically dumb. As in keeping them alive is a monumental challenge, kind of dumb. Turkeys are an abomination of creation: they will make you doubt the plausibility of natural selection. Nothing so dumb should be permitted to survive, except to sustain something more useful.
My husband recalls his peak moment as an amateur turkey farmer; he watched as one of his birds drowned itself in its own water dish. He swears that this is true. He watched the bird stretch down to take a drink, get stuck under the water, and die.
All in all, my husband lost nine of his 20 turkeys.
You should never feel guilty about an animal that is too dumb to pull its own head out of a shallow water dish. Poultry is God’s tofu.
Jen Gerson, “Done with the political turkeys after the holidays”, CBC News, 2021-01-04.
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December 19, 2021
QotD: Sun Tzu’s Art of War reworked for the 21st Century by General Mark Milley
“If you think you might attack an enemy, pick up the phone and give ’em a heads up. It’s only fair.”
“You have to be careful not to surprise your enemy. They really don’t like it.”
“Treason is not treason if it is the lesser of two treasons.”
“Know thy pronouns, and know thy enemy’s pronouns.”
“The supreme art of war is to surrender to your enemy without fighting.”
“All war is white rage.”
“If you surrender, you can never lose.”
“If thy commanding officer sends mean tweets, thou need not follow orders or the chain of command.”
“The enemy of my friend is my friend.”
“Keep your friends close and your enemies on speed dial.”
“You can not betray the one to which you were never loyal.”
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for China.”
“When retreating, leave most of thy armaments behind so you know what you’ll be up against next time.”
“Chinese bros before American hoes.”
“He who turns on bad orange man gets big book deal.”
“General Milley Is Releasing A Revised Version Of The Art Of War — And We’ve Got Exclusive Excerpts”, BabylonBee, 2021-09-17.
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December 18, 2021
History Summarized: Minoan Greece
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Dec 2021The classical Greeks weren’t the first kids on the Aegean block. Long before Athens’ golden age, before Homer, and even before the Trojan War, there was a civilization on the island of Krete. The land of King Minos was home to beautiful palaces, a fascinatingly-complex economy, and something approximating Bull-Cthulu. It’s a fun time, let’s jump in.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline for National Geographic, The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton, Lectures from The Great Courses Plus — “Being Minoan and Mycenaean” from The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World by Robert Garland, and “Minoan Crete” & “Schliemann & Mycenae” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney. And I have a university degree in Classical Studies.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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December 16, 2021
QotD: “Advance Australia Fair”
O Canada!
Our home and native land…Which should of course be:
O Canada!
Our home on natives’ land…Game as I am to disparage the senior Dominion’s anthem, I have to say it’s effortlessly outpaced in insipidity by …
Australians all let us rejoice
For we are young and free
We’ve golden soil And wealth for toil
Our home is girt by sea…“Girt” is famously the only point of lyric interest in “Advance Australia Fair”. Peter Dodds McCormick wrote the song back in 1878, which meant, by the time they decided to make it the official anthem twenty years ago, most of the verses were unusable. No point shaking off the old cultural cringe of “God Save The Queen” only to start singing couplet after couplet about “gallant Cook from Albion” and “true British courage” and “old England’s flag”. And how about this quatrain?
Britannia then shall surely know
Beyond wide ocean’s roll
Her sons in fair Australia’s land
Still keep an English soul …So, after all the colonial sucking up was excised from the lyric, “girt” was pretty much all that was left. A few years ago, incidentally, there was an Aussie satirical magazine named Girt in its honor: I signed on with them but it folded after one issue. Don’t believe I ever got the check. Or cheque. I try not to be biased against “Advance Australia Fair” on that account, but honestly, was there ever such a gulf between the spirit of a great nation and its official musical embodiment?
Mark Steyn, adapted from A Song for the Season, 2008.
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December 11, 2021
QotD: In praise of getting stinkin’ drunk
Slingerland admits the problem of problem drinking. Yet he convincingly argues that the downside of booze has been addressed at length over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s time, he observes, for some pushback against the “puritanical discomfort with pleasure lurking in the background of scholarly discourse.” Slingerland decries “our current age of neo-prohibition and general queasiness about risk,” and exports “the simple joy of feeling good.”
Slingerland, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, then goes even further, positing that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal … intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups.”
That is to say, without Budweiser and red wine, civilization might not have been possible. For our ancestors, intoxication was “a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers.” Brewing vats and drinking vessels were found at a 12,000-year-old site in Turkey. When humans began to sow crops and domesticate livestock, it allowed us to get over distrust and work in larger numbers, giving rise to towns and then cities. Slingerland: “It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers and trippers who emerged triumphant.”
Mark Judge, “Drunk: The Vital Pleasure of Getting Hammered”, SpliceToday, 2021-09-01.
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