There are not many methods of cooking birds which are peculiar to Britain. The British regard as inedible many birds – for instance, thrushes, larks, sparrows, curlews, green plovers and various kinds of duck – which are valued in other countries. They are also inclined to despise rabbits, and rabbit-rearing for the table has never been extensively practiced in Britain. On the other hand they will eat young rooks, which are shot in May and baked in pies. They are especially attached to geese and turkeys, which (at normal times) are eaten in immense quantities at Christmas, always roasted whole, with chestnut stuffing in the case of turkeys, and sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce in the case of geese.
Fish in Britain is seldom well cooked. The sea all round Britain yields a variety of excellent fishes, but as a rule they are unimaginatively boiled or fried, and the art of seasoning them in the cooking is not understood. The fish fried in oil to which the British working classes are especially addicted is definitely nasty, and has been an enemy of home cookery, since it can be bought everywhere in the big towns, ready cooked and at low prices. Except for trout, salmon and eels, British people will not eat fresh-water fish. As for vegetables, it must be admitted that, potatoes apart, they seldom get the treatment they deserve. Thanks to the rain-soaked soil, British vegetables are nearly all of excellent flavour, but they are commonly spoiled in the cooking. Cabbage is simply boiled – a method which renders it almost uneatable – while cauliflowers, leeks and marrows are usually smothered in a tasteless white sauce which is probably the “one sauce” scornfully referred to by Voltaire. The British are not great eaters of salads, though they have grown somewhat fonder of raw vegetables during the war years, thanks to the educational campaigns of the Ministry of Food. Except for salads, vegetables are always eaten with the meat, not separately.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
December 26, 2020
QotD: British meals – fish, fowl, and vegetables
December 25, 2020
Bonus QotD: Modern services in church
Back then, you could still visit an average (Protestant) church and hear a pastor actually teach real doctrine and share authentic insights. You could hear his thoughts on how to live an upright Christian life, or on why bad things might happen to good people, or how Christian marriages might be improved. And you could hear it all supported by actual Bible passages.
After the sermon, you could hear the congregation sing hymns affirming the importance of obedience, humility, faith, courage, or some other Christian virtue. They were something, the old hymns: bold, clear, impactful, sometimes even militant, like “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand”, or particularly thoughtful, like “How Great Thou Art”.
Things are different now. Wander into a typical Christian church these days, and, far from hearing a sermon challenging you to live an upright life, you’re more likely to hear an unsuccessful attempt at a Jeff Foxworthy-style stand-up comedy routine, Hallmark-style stories of dubious veracity, and utterly vacuous “praise songs” which all sound like U2 album rejects from 1986. (They even feature the thumping eighth-note bass parts, echo-drenched guitar, and melodramatic vocal performances.)
Oh, and I forgot: At some point, you’re also going to see the pastor dutifully hand the mic over to his overly-assertive, overly-eager, overly-made-up wife (presumably on pain of divorce, or possibly even death), who will then speak loudly and rapturously — all about herself — for the next half hour.
Not all Christian churches are like this, of course. The problem is, too many are. As the years roll by, contemporary Christian churches increasingly abnegate their scripturally-prescribed role as fortified beacons of divine truth, and instead transform themselves into vehicles for a social justice pseudo-gospel completely incompatible with Christian (or Jewish, for that matter) scriptural teachings.
Tal Bachman, “Christians, Come Back”, Steyn Online, 2020-09-03.
QotD: Christmas movies
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…At which point, Sylvester the cat looks up from his long fruitless vigil outside the mouse hole in the baseboard and sighs with feeling to the narrator, “You’re not jutht whithlin’ Dickthie, brother.”
“Gift Wrapped” is like every Looney Tune or Merry Melody — a mere six minutes long. But with Christmas movies that’s a good thing. The western and the musical may be dead, but the charmless Xmas movie is now a genre all of its own and doing gangbusters. Do they teach it in film school? In fact, it’s really two genres: there are intentionally charmless Christmas movies like Bad Santa 2, and then the accidentally charmless ones, like that Ben Affleck flick where he’s some heartless yuppie who rents a bluecollar family for the holiday season so he can enjoy the authentic down-home Yule he’s never known. In such pictures, the great American Christmas, once the ne plus ultra of e pluribus unum, appears on celluloid an utterly exhausted seam.
So, besieged by such horrors, I thought I’d retreat to short-form holiday entertainment, or alternatively short-form holiday entertainment within long-form non-holiday fare. Any thirty seconds of “Gift Wrapped”, for example, is more rewarding than all three-and-a-half hours of Bad Santa 5 or whatever it is: six minutes of pure Looney Tunes pleasure in which Sylvester determines to land the only Christmas present he really wants — Tweety. The film opens with Granny slumbering upstairs and the impatient cat sneakily unwrapping his gift. It’s a rubber mouse and he’s not happy about it. “Why couldn’t I get thumthin’ practical?” he complains. “Like a real mouse.”
Mark Steyn, “A Frizzy Christmas”, Steyn Online, 2018-12-15.
December 24, 2020
QotD: Guinness
David Warren, “On beer consumption”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-09-07.
December 23, 2020
QotD: Christmas songs
On balance, I prefer the approach of the London Borough of Brent, one of Britain’s sternest loony-left councils but far more sporting than the Scrooge-packed school boards across the Atlantic. Back in the Eighties, Brent decreed that it would permit municipal performances of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” as long as they were accompanied by a couple of non-heterosexist choruses of “I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus”. That’s a lot less vicious than replacing the entire seasonal repertoire with obscurantist dirges for solstice-worshippers. Anyone can St-Nix “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, the hard part is finding something to put in its place.
There are very few good Hannukah songs, never mind Kwanza or the Islamic festivals of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The reason for the dearth of Hanukkah songs is that for most of the last century the Jews were too busy cranking out Christmas songs — Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas”, Mel Torme wrote “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting on an open fire)”, Jerry Herman “We Need A Little Christmas”, Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “The Christmas Waltz”, Johnny Marks “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas”, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and a zillion others. As far as I know, the only Christian to offer to return the compliment was stiff-necked Mormon Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (whose “Come To The Manger” has been recorded by Donny Osmond). Senator Hatch confirmed to me during his short-lived presidential campaign in 1999 that he was working on a Hanukkah song. I don’t know whether he’s finished it, but I would have to say on balance that, musically speaking, the Christians got the better end of this deal.
Mark Steyn, “Imagine Christmas”, Steyn Online, 2019-12-23 (originally published in The Spectator, 2004).
December 22, 2020
QotD: The foundational weirdness of Judeo/Christian/Islamic religions
The shortest summary is “No!” The less short answer is: “No, because religious moral codes are epiphenomenal.” And it is on point to add that the question reveals serious ignorance of the actual traits of most religions over most of history.
I’ll address the historical point first. The commenter’s question was framed from within the assumptions of one particular family of religions: the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, which are more succinctly describable as the bastard offspring of Zoroastrian dualism. In this family, “religion” bundles cosmology, theology, and morality into a single total system designed primarily to enforce norms by programming the believer with an internalized guilt machine.
Because the dominant religions of the modern West are all derived from this group, it is difficult for Westerners to understand how bizarre and exceptional these religions are in a broader context. Most religions are not total systems. Most religions do not tie morality to cosmology. In fact, most religions have very little to say about morality at all!
Consider, for example, an Altaic shaman. It’s not his job to pronounce on who should sleep with who, or to tell people that theft is wrong. It’s not even his job to tell people that they must worship Tengri or Kara-han; dealing with the gods is his specialty, thank you. His job combines aspects of psychologist and medic with a bit of divination. The closest analog of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and taboos which is reinforced by explanatory myths but not generated by them and not really dependent on them. The closest equivalent of religious structures about right and wrong is an elaborate set of rules about ritual purity and impurity. In the jargon of the field, his religion is an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy.
Over most human cultures in most human history, “religion” has been much more like Altaic shamanism than like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Er, so why didn’t these cultures “collapse in a heap of nihilism”? The same question actually applies to modern religions outside the post-Zoroastrian family. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, are almost completely unconcerned with “morality”. Hinduism is organized around ritual purity and impurity; Buddhism’s quest for merit is about liberation of the self from attachments, not about duties one owes to God or others.
Eric S. Raymond, “If God is dead, is anything permissible?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-02-10.
December 21, 2020
QotD: The evolving style of John Coltrane
Coltrane’s late style emerged in his 1960s quartets. Now leading and writing for his own group, and newly clean of drink and drugs, he was finally able to pursue his vision and the possibilities of the music to the limits of form and expression — and ultimately beyond both. The further he went, the more ambitious and less accessible the music became, until it was incomprehensible to almost all of his audience and even to some of his closest collaborators. In the logic of modernism, further means better. But “faster” and “louder” aren’t necessarily better, so why should “further” be the supreme critical value? To judge Coltrane’s late-style art is, in an important sense, to judge modernism itself, and especially American modernism.
Dominic Green, “John Coltrane and the End of Jazz”, The Weekly Standard, 2018-08-26.
December 20, 2020
QotD: Online literacy
But sometimes I’ll find myself looking at the posts of a Facebook friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend and I see these random aggregations of misspelled words. They have the occasional capital letter or punctuation mark thrown in, as though the writer knew they were supposed to include those, but not how or why.
And I find myself wondering “What’s it like inside their head?” I mean, you’d probably be going through life slightly angry, thinking everybody was secretly laughing at you behind their hands, that there was some arcane code of keyboard use you were violating. The whole internet would be like one of those fancy restaurants with too much silverware and you never know which implement to use to eat which dish.
Tamara Keel, “I’ve always wondered…”, view from the porch, 2018-08-24.
December 19, 2020
QotD: Ego and the A-listers
No. It’s more that ego games have a diminishing return. The farther you are up the ability and achievement bell curve, the less psychological gain you get from asserting or demonstrating your superiority over the merely average, and the more prone you are to welcome discovering new peers because there are so damn few of them that it gets lonely. There comes a point past which winning more ego contests becomes so pointless that even the most ambitious, suspicious, external-validation-fixated strivers tend to notice that it’s no fun any more and stop.
[…]
I think there are a couple of different reasons people tend to falsely attribute pathological, oversensitive egos to A-listers. Each reason is in its own way worth taking a look at.
The first and most obvious reason is projection. “Wow, if I were as talented as Terry Pratchett, I know I’d have a huge ego about it, so I guess he must.” Heh. Trust me on this; he doesn’t. This kind of thinking reveals a a lot about somebody’s ego and insecurity, alright, but not Terry’s.
There’s a flip side to projection that I think of as the “Asimov game”. I met Isaac Asimov just a few months before he died. Isaac had long been notorious for broadly egotistical behavior and a kind of cheerful bombast that got up a lot of peoples’ noses. But if you ever met him, and you were at all perceptive, you might see that it was all a sort of joke. Isaac was laughing inside at everyone who took his “egotism” seriously – and, at the same time, watching hungrily for people who could see through the self-parody, because they might – might – actually be among the vanishingly tiny minority that constituted his actual peers. The Asimov game is a constant temptation to extroverted A-listers; I’ve been known to fall into it myself. It’s not really anybody’s fault that a lot of people are fooled by it.
Another confusing fact is that though A-listers may not be about ego or status competition, they will often play such games ruthlessly and effectively when that gets them something they actually want. The something might be more money from a gig, or a night in the hay with an attractive wench, or whatever; the point is, if you catch an A-lister in that mode, you might well mistake for egotism some kinds of display behavior that actually serve much more immediate and instrumental purposes. Your typical A-lister in that situation (and this includes me, now) is blithely unconcerned that a bystander might think he’s egotistical; the money or the wench or the whatever is the goal, not the approval or disapproval of bystanders.
Finally, a lot of people confuse arrogance with ego. A-listers (and I am including myself, again, this time) are, as a rule, colossally arrogant. That is, they have utter confidence in their ability to meet challenges that would humble or break most people. Do not be fooled by the self-deprecating manner that many A-listers cultivate; it is a mask adopted for social purposes, mostly to avoid freaking out the normal monkeys. But this arrogance is not the same as egotism; in fact, in many ways it is the opposite. It is possible to be arrogant about one’s abilities compared to the statistically average human being and the range of challenges one is likely to encounter, but deeply and genuinely humble when dealing with peers or contemplating the vastness of one’s own ignorance and incapability relative to what one could imagine being. In fact, this combination of attitudes is completely typical of the A-listers I have known.
Eric S. Raymond, “Ego is for little people”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-11-09.
December 18, 2020
QotD: Hunter S. Thompson’s view of humanity
Colby Cosh, “Q: Where’s Cosh?”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-02-21
December 17, 2020
QotD: Light rail systems are almost always an upper middle class boondoggle
[…]
The problem with light rail (and the reason it is popular with government officials) is that it is an upper middle class boondoggle. There can be no higher use of transit than to provide mobility to poorer people who can’t afford reliable automobiles. Buses fulfill this goal better than any mode of transit. They are flexible and can reach into many corners of the city. The problem with buses, from the perspective of government officials, is that upper middle class people don’t like to ride on them. They like trains. So the government builds hugely expensive trains for these influential, wealthier voters. Since the trains are so expensive, the government can only build a few routes, so those routes end up being down upper middle class commuting corridors. As the costs mount for the trains, the bus routes that serve the poor and their dispersed commuting destinations are steadily cut.
Warren Meyer, “Phoenix Light Rail Fail, 2019 Update”, Coyote Blog, 2019-11-13.
December 15, 2020
QotD: TedX
sanctimoniousubiquitous Ted Talks programme, is more inclusive than official Ted because they have added a random letter ‘X’ into the word. On an unrelated note, TedX London have decided to start using the totally real and not at all just made-up word “Womxn” when they talk about members of the female persuasion, chapettes, fillies, gels, y’know, charming, delightful, non-men – them. They told anormal personbigot on Twitter who asked why they were using the word “womxn”: “No, that’s not a typo: ‘womxn’ is a spelling of ‘women’ that’s more inclusive and progressive. The term sheds light on the prejudice, discrimination, and institutional barriers womxn have faced, and explicitly includes non-cisgender women.” But are TedX really the inclusive group they claim to be? Trans Media Watch, a pro-trans lobby group told the BBC it would never use the word Womxn: “because we feel it’s important for people to recognise that trans women are women. Trans women aren’t a special, separate category.” So it turns out “women” is the most inclusive term after all. If TedX London hasn’t been cancelled by the end of the week then Twitter’s not what it was.David Scullion, “UN-Believable”, The Critic, 2020-09-09.
December 14, 2020
QotD: Goodhart’s law
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Or as it has been reformulated:
Goodhart’s law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions which alter its outcome.
Set a target for tonnes of shoes and you get one tonne shoes. Set a target for 100 shoes and you get 100 left feet. Set a target for being on time and people fiddle their definition of time.
It is, by the way, entirely fine to insist that airlines play fair with telling us how long a flight will take. You said it will take 4 hours, then 4 hours should be about the time it takes. Yes, sure, we understand, airports, crowded places. Idiot passengers forget to board, luggage must be taken off. Winds vary, thunderstorms happen, French air traffic controllers actually turn up to work today, their one day in seven. Sure, there’re lots of variables. But if you say it’s about four hours then it should be about four hours. Great.
But to complain that they pad their number a bit is ludicrous. We’re holding their feet to the fire, insisting that an underestimate will lead to financial costs. Thus, obviously, they will overestimate. That’s not really even Goodhart’s Law, that’s just human beings. But then, as we know, those who would plan everything don’t deal well with the existence of people, do they?
Tim Worstall, “Goodhart’s Law Applies To Economies, To Everything – Why Not Scheduled Airline Flight Times?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-08-27.
December 13, 2020
QotD: The statistical “Rule of Silicone Boobs”
“Sexy” means “likely to get published in the New York Times and/or get the researcher on a TEDx stage”. Actual sexiness research is not “sexy” because it keeps running into inconvenient results like that rich and high-status men in their forties and skinny women in their early twenties tend to find each other very sexy. The only way to make a result like that “sexy” is to blame it on the patriarchy, and most psychologist aren’t that far gone (yet).
[…]
Anything counterintuitive is also sexy, and (according to Rule 2) less likely to be true. So is anything novel that isn’t based on solid existing research. After all, the Times is the newspaper business, not in the truthspaper one.
Finding robust results is very hard, but getting sexy results published is very easy. Thus, sexy results generally lack robustness. I personally find a certain robustness quite sexy, but that attitude seems to have gone out of fashion since the Renaissance.
Jacob Falkovich, “The Scent of Bad Psychology”, Put a Number On It!, 2018-09-07.
December 12, 2020
QotD: Modernism
Myron Magnet, “Free Speech in Peril: Trigger warning: may offend the illiberal or intolerant”, City Journal, 2015-04.
