Quote of the Week

"None of us like Christmas. That's sort of bad if you're a pastor."
--Reverend Rick McKinley of the Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon, recalling a recent conversation with fellow clergy.

The Week in Food

You want someplace to put your money that will provide big returns? Forget gold. Think garlic.

Canned tomatoes, microwaved popcorn....find out what health experts won't eat.

In other news, competitive pie eating refuses to follow in the steps of cycling and baseball. Officials are taking anti-doping measures....

A Big Mac vs. a burger at your local high school cafeteria. Guess which is safer....

It's a problem we've all had: you've got a suckling pig handy, but what you really feel like is making pizza.....

Quote of the Week

Regarding the supposed War on Christmas:

I never cease to be amazed by how little the Bible-believing Protestants, who constitute most of the soldiery in the Christmas wars, know about their own tradition. Under the rule of the Puritan Revolution in the England of Oliver Cromwell (ancestor in many ways of the Pilgrim Fathers) the celebration of Christmas was banned outright. This was for three reasons: the December fiesta was actually the honoring of Paganism in disguise, and a descendant of the old rites of the Winter Solstice. Then, it was also a manifestation of Popery and superstition (the "Christ-Mass"). Finally, it was an excuse for the riff-raff to get drunk and over-indulge in general. Only the last part seems to have truly survived into our present day.

Christopher Hitchens in The Washington Post.

The Way We Live Now

When I got to work today the first email I noticed in my Inbox informed me that our Internet connection was down.

The Week in Food

If you find yourself hosting some ancient Romans for dinner, this should get you started.

In a follow-up to a recent post about lab-grown meat, some Dutch scientist have cooked up (as it were) the other white meat.

Some people better get up to speed on their TSA regs: a) Homeland Security doesn't like it when people fly with fully cooked birds and b) HS really frowns on certain kinds of stuffing.

Have you been looking for a good recipe for tree bark? Can't decide what to do with that leather jacket you don't wear anymore? You can find your answers here.

In closing, there are some things you just shouldn't eat, even if French chefs tell you to.

No Comment

Recently added to Facebook:




*Sorry for the poor image quality.

The Way We Live Now

Will somebody please explain to me why if there's a war on Christmas, the Boston-area town in which I live started putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving? And also why the Sunday after Thanksgiving--apparently networks can't even wait for December to start--two major networks started a Christmas ratings duel: and their choice of weapons was movies about cute dogs that save the holiday? Never mind that The Dog Who Saved Christmas is as insipid and meaningless as the phrase "War on Terror." Why can't we have something a little more original from our TV networks? Start a surprise ratings war in two and a half months with a seasonal movie like The Grizzly Bear Who Mauled Ash Wednesday.















But if you really want to know what an all-engulfing wave of aesthetic rot is taking over the media in the next month, go here and see a list of all the Christmas specials appearing on television in the next four weeks.

You will want to lock yourself in a mountain cabin that has no electricity.

That is, if you still have the will to live.

Admittedly, some of these specials are not without their charms: It's A Wonderful Life has Jimmy Stewart, A Muppets Christmas has muppets. But my God, A Garfield Christmas? A Very Brady Christmas? This country has been through 9-11 and the worst economic crisis in seventy years. Haven't we suffered enough?

Reflecting on the upcoming month-long nightmare reminds me of the time when I was twelve and my father dragged me along to a medical convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee (think Branson, Missouri, without as much class). We were going to lunch one day when we passed a store dedicated to nothing but Christmas merchandise. And this was in March. Think about it: a store that could suppport itself by trafficking in nothing but Christmas merchandise all year 'round. And the glory and horrror of the Internet is that I can verify that it is still there.

The horror, the horror.