August 2004 – Page 4

RIP Julia Child

We all should be so lucky to have had a life and a death like Julia Child’s. Dying peacefully in your sleep at age 91 is a pretty good way to go.

Julia Child’s passing is a great loss. Her honesty and humor were refreshing, and her passion for good food, good wine, and having fun in the kitchen were obvious.

I saw a couple of the FoodTV programs featuring her last year. One that stuck in my mind was a visit by Emeril to her home, where they cooked together. She totally schooled Emeril on how to cook a chicken. It was a hoot. There was another epiode where Wolfgang Puck came over bearing champagne and made her veal, asparagus, and dessert.

Red wine with your steak, anyone?

Nader Puppetry

I was on the phone with my grandmother a little while ago. She’s almost 80 but active as ever and is a dedicated Democrat, and we spent a lot of time talking about current events. I started reading through my blogroll after I got off the phone with her. Lots being said about the resigning New Jersey Governor, which I don’t have much to say about right now, and then this little gem (hat tip – Sisyphus Shrugged) got me angry:

“The days when the chief Israeli puppeteer comes to the United States and meets with the puppet in the White House and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets, should be replaced,” Nader said earlier this summer.

Source here.

The belief that Jews are secretly the puppet masters of international events and finance goes directly back to the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“.

Certainly American-Israeli relations and the whole godawful mess in Israel is something that everyone is entitled to have an opinion on. But to express your opinion using inflamatory language that suggests Jews secretly run the world is not fine.

Yet one more reason why Ralph Nader ought to go back to writing consumer protection guides.

Economic Instability

I’ve often thought over the past few years that my grandparents, who weathered the Great Depression, would have a lot of insight to offer on today’s economy. Kevin Drum makes a similar point on his site today:

Almost everyone who’s not already well off these days knows someone who’s been ruined by a personal catastrophe, and this personal knowledge rubs off. You’re worried that you could get laid off at any time

Comment Spam

Comment spam, which to date has been pretty minimal, has sharply spiked upwards the past few days. I suppose it’s the price of increased site traffic, but it’s annoying. Not that I get a lot of comments, but I definitely prefer to keep commenting on when possible. I have reluctantly decided to turn off comments on some of the more popular older posts (e.g. the ones on The Davinci Code and Fahrenheit 9/11) on my site for now, since they’re the posts getting hardest hit with comment spam.

I’m planning on upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 when it comes out, in large part becasue it will integrate the MT-Blacklist plugin. If comment spam starts getting really bad I may implement the plugin sooner than that, but I’m going to try to hold out for just the one upgrade so I don’t have to implement the same change twice.

More From BushWorld

It’s a frequent criticism of President Bush that he’s stupid, and this latest quote below is certainly a stupid thing to say. But I don’t think it’s actual lack of intelligence that’s the problem. Rather, I think the problem is that he lives in a world completely cut off from the reality 99% of the rest of us live in.

Bush on taxing the rich:

[Bush said that] high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.”

In BushWorld, any tax increase that Congress could come up with will have loopholes that their well-paid accountants will figure out how to exploit, so it’s a waste of time even trying to increase taxes. They’ll just offshore their corporation, or rewrite their compensation package, or shuffle the web of trusts, or something like that.

In short, in BushWorld, they can’t conceive of a tax package that cannot be dodged or evaded. The rules are for suckers.

It would be nice if people in BushWorld took their obligations as seriously as they do their privileges, but that, I suppose, would be asking too much.

Bow Before Giblets!

There is so much bad news coming out of Iraq these days, so much confusion and chaos, and no idea how anything good is going to be able to come out of that mess, that I just shut down and stop processing information. I don’t want to deal with it.

I suspect I’m not the only person who feels that way, and that might be part of why Iraq coverage is not in the press as much anymore. Also, of course, the so-called handover of power now means that news stations can, if they choose, slot Iraq back into their Middle East coverage, not treat it as US news (despite the fact that American troops are still dying and being wounded there daily).

All this is a very long preface to yet another reason why I LOVE Fafblog. The guy is a freaking genius. He somehow manages to report on a lot of news and still make me smile.

“You gotta use discipline on a young country,” says Giblets. “Otherwise it won’t grow up with the right values. Spare the gonad electrocution, spoil the child.”
“But won’t torture corrupt the government an make the people angrier and more hostile?” says me. “An won’t they hate us more for letting the new government torture them?”
“Oh-hoho,” says the Medium Lobster. “You poor, ignorant little Fafnir. You must understand: Iraq is going through a transitional period right now. It would be wrong for us to shock them with the presence of strange, new, unfamiliar cultural elements, such as ‘not-torture’ and ‘not-oppression.’ The key phrase here, Fafnir, is ‘transition’.”

Meanwhile Iraq’s new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has banned the TV network Al Jazeera for the next 30 days after accusin it of “inciting hatred” an actin “against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people.”

“But how is this different from politically-motivated censorship?” says me.
“Well you can’t have a democracy without some politically-motivated censorship,” says Giblets.

Go read the rest. Then bookmark Fafblog if you haven’t already. And then bow! yes, bow before Giblets, bow before Giblets NOOOOOOOOW!