High culture is being corrupted by a culture of fakes | Roger Scruton |
Nice to see Roger Scruton turning up somewhere again.
One example is class violence, once seen a shameful but ineradicable feature of American life. Beginning in the 1870s, the United States became infamous around the world for the brutality of its labor clashes, in which gun battles, dynamitings, and hand-to-hand combat produced what seemed to be an unending stream of senseless death. Sometimes the violence came at the hands of police: 100 strikers killed during the rail uprising of 1877, 11 children burned to death in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. On other occasions, it came as retaliation from below. In 1910, men employed by the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers blew up the headquarters of the anti-union Los Angeles Times, killing 21 printers and laborers working inside.Elsewhere in Slate, a comment in National Review Online that the Bushmaster semi-automatic is not worth worrying about banning because it is (apparently) not powerful enough to reliably kill a deer is given a thorough ridiculing, including showing this ad that illustrates the mentality behind some gun ownership in the States:
It is, to Australian ears, extremely odd that such an argument even has to be explained. But we're not talking a normal country here. From another Salon article (worth reading in full):To spell it out:
- Being in a shopping mall, on a train, in a theater, or at a school where someone starts shooting is statistically more frequent in America than anywhere else, but is vanishingly unlikely for any individual. Yet if we were to rely on the "more guns make us safer" principle, logically we'd have to carry guns all the time, everywhere, because ... you never know. Jeff Goldberg and I have both railed against TSA policies based on the premise that every single passenger is a potential terrorist. A more-guns policy would involve a similar distortion in everyone's behavior based on outlier threats.
- There is very little real-world evidence of "good guys," or ordinary citizens who happen to be armed, taking out shooters in the way the more-guns hypothesis suggests. After all, and gruesomely, the mother of the murderer in Newtown was heavily armed and well experienced with weapons, and that did not help her or anyone else.
- It is all too easy to imagine the real-world mistakes, chaos, fog-of-war, prejudices, panic, and confusion that would lead a more widely armed citizenry to compound rather than the limit the damage of a shooting episode.
Although the NRA has temporarily gone to ground, it’s no secret that its solution to this sort of gun violence is more guns. Indeed, chief spokesman LaPierre has made clear that he believes every American should be armed with a concealed weapon. “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection,” LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention, and he wasn’t trying to establish his feminist credentials. LaPierre thinks every man in America should be packing heat as well. The NRA believes that armed citizens in places like Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Columbine can stop determined killers. ”The presence of a firearm makes us all safer,” LaPierre said. ”It’s just that simple.”When it comes to random mass shootings, Americans don't need protection from crims: they need protection from the insane paranoia of the NRA and its supporters.
Whether or not a “responsible,” law-abiding adult trained in the use of firearms could make a difference in any particular situation is worthy of discussion. Likewise the question of how to ensure that adult gun owners are responsible. The problem is that the NRA and its congressional allies don’t want a rational debate about guns. Two months after the 2011 Tucson rampage, which left six dead and 14 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, LaPierre rejected an invitation from President Obama to discuss ways of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable. LaPierre said there was no point talking to “people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment.” Following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which left 13 dead, the NRA urged a similar boycott of a meeting called by President Clinton to discuss ways of addressing teen violence.
The challenge today is not coming up with “the answer” to the nation’s gun violence; rather it is to move beyond the absurd but prevailing myth perpetrated by the extremists who currently run the NRA that nothing should be done because any effort to limit access to guns will lead to gun confiscation and tyranny.
Bilbo then (in both film and book) leaps over Gollum's head, leaving the creature despairing but unharmed. Later, in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf suggests that Bilbo's pity for Gollum "may rule the fate of many." At the end of Rings, it is ultimately Gollum who, inadvertently, destroys the ring and saves Middle Earth. Mercy is ultimately salvation, and Bilbo's decision not to use violence is at the heart of the quasi-Christian moral order of Tolkien's world.
If Jackson meant for Gandalf's comment to highlight Tolkien's nonviolent ethic, though, the rest of his film undercuts it—and, indeed, almost parodies it. The scene where Bilbo spares Gollum in the movie comes immediately after an extended, jovially bloody battle between dwarves and goblins, larded with visual jokes involving decapitation, disembowelment, and baddies crushed by rolling rocks. The sequence is more like a body-count video game than like anything in the sedate novel, where battles are confused and brief and frightening, rather than exuberant eye-candy ballet.
The goblin battle is hardly an aberration in the film. I had wondered how Peter Jackson was going to spread the book over three movies. Now I know: He's simply added extra bonus carnage at every opportunity. The dwarves, who in the novel are mostly hapless, are in the film transformed into super-warriors, battling thousands of goblins or orcs and fearlessly slaughtering giant wolves three-times their size.
In his last class, cataloged as Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino burned down the damn Third Reich, Hitler included. This time, with Django Unchained, he lines up slave traders so a black man can blow their fool heads off.
They’ve falsified every pet political theory about what kind of culture or medical system or firearms legislation prevents mass murder.Maybe, but here's what I've noticed from the list: look at the decades in which they have occurred.
"There are all sorts of rumours that have been running around about Mr Slipper for years," Mr Abbott said. [And I have supported him wholeheartedly throughout this.] ... "I think any such inquiry would plainly be a bit of a witch-hunt" [whereas my promise to hold an inquiry as to the PM's choice of boyfriend 18 years ago and legal matters for which no criminal prosecution has ever been instituted despite investigation at the time would be a matter of crucial public interest and not motivated by political self interest at all.]
The thing I hope readers take away from my book is this: Lincoln truly suffered in life. He had horrible bouts of depression. He was on suicide watch several times. He was sometimes completely bed-ridden. He said he was haunted by the thought of rain falling on graves all of his life. His mother died when he was nine; his sister died when he was sixteen. The first woman he ever loved died within a few months of him meeting her. He had one son die before the boy was four years old. He lost another son named Willie not too long after they got to the White House. And given Lincoln’s depressive nature, all of that almost pushed him over the edge. He suffered with the massive themes of his administration: slavery, spies, and ordering troops into battle. But I think, like Churchill, it was his private suffering that prepared him to help a nation that was suffering. William Herndon, Lincoln’s first biographer, said that he, “dripped melancholy as he walked.” I think his suffering drove him to faith and deepened his faith once he got to it. But he also had an atheist phase earlier in life.OK, some of that I knew, but a fair bit is new to me. As is this:
His family were what used to be called “hard-shelled” Baptists, and they were caught up in the second great awakening, which swept the frontier and was really, quite frankly, violent. It was barking and being “slain the in Spirit.” People would run around and climb trees and it was all too emotional, all too sweaty for Lincoln. His father was the kind of man that would get all weepy at dinner over something that was happening in the revival, and then beat his son the next day to make him work. Lincoln had a hard childhood but he’s the archetype of a person who rises largely through self-education. He probably didn’t have a year of school in his entire life. He read voraciously. All the stories about walking miles to borrow books are absolutely true. He began to read religious skeptics: Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbons —those men challenged Christianity. A lot of the American heroes of the Revolution were that way, Ethan Allen and others. Lincoln bought into it and went through quite a long “village atheist” phase. He schooled himself on how to attack the myths of Scripture and would carry around a Bible just to undercut it. He called Christ a bastard; it was very heated. This is one of the keys to understanding Lincoln’s life: Lincoln’s mother was illegitimate. Her grandmother had been raped by a Virginia aristocrat and Lincoln concluded that God had rejected him, given him the mark of Cain because his mom was “a bastard.” He would even call her that. So, strange as it is to us, Lincoln thought he was cursed. And he began to conclude that all of the sufferings he’d endured were because God had cursed him. So his atheism, his friends said, really was not that he didn’t believe in God, it was that he was angry at God.
....Australians have had it up to here for three long years - nothing but mad, hysterical politics, day in, day out. And a strong currency.But one of the worst things about the current popular mis-perception of the Australian economy was in the media again recently - the idea that Australia's budget deficit would not have happened under a Coalition government.
So what we are seeing in Australia is the effect of a very unusual double whammy: political instability coupled with a strong currency.
Usually the first leads to the opposite of the second, but unfortunately the credit ratings agencies don't watch Question Time in Federal Parliament: if they did they would have cut Australia's credit rating several notches below AAA long ago.
Wallace and Gromit get a hand at home
A Wallace and Gromit exhibition is at the Powerhouse museum. Sadly, though, the article says no W & G film is currently in production.
Despite Schlesinger’s more optimistic outlook, he stresses sharp emissions reductions must begin, in case his estimates are wrong.
“...for argument’s sake, let’s suppose the [climate sensitivity] is larger than the values we determined....humanity must act sooner and more rapidly...” Schlesinger said.Indeed.
The bottom line is that a single act of intercourse between a young couple has on average a one in 20 chance of pregnancy – this assumes the opportunity presented itself on a random day, as these things tend do when you are young.However, the article then goes on to talk about the effectiveness of various forms of contraception, but only seems to quote figures if they are used correctly. This seems a bit of an oversight.
As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have. Of course, we’ll do whatever we have to do to find ourselves victorious in court and Professor Mann thoroughly defeated, as he so richly deserves to be. Meanwhile, we have to hire attorneys, which ain’t cheap.Righto. So a publication that is making no profit decided to escalate a fight by challenging him to sue after they called him "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus" and approved this quote:
Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.What idiots.
South Australian senator Cory Bernardi, formerly Mr Abbott's parliamentary secretary, said: ''I do not think human activity causes climate change and I haven't seen anything that changes my view. I remain very sceptical about the alarmists' claims.''
Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce said the whole debate about whether humans were causing the climate to change was ''indulgent and irrelevant''.
The second unexpected point is the look of the thing. Jackson has pioneeringly shot The Hobbit in HFR, or High Frame Rate: 48 frames a second, as opposed to the traditional 24, giving a much higher definition and smoother "movement" effect. But it looks uncomfortably like telly, albeit telly shot with impossibly high production values and in immersive 3D. Before you grow accustomed to this, it feels as if there has been a terrible mistake in the projection room and they are showing us the video location report from the DVD "making of" featurette, rather than the actual film.Some other critics have noted that it makes it way easier to spot the changes from special effects shots to reality, and that it makes fast motion look wrong (speeded up, I think they say.)
The jokesters, however, know it can go badly wrong. A Kyle Sandilands radio stunt involving a lie detector test and a 14-year-old, who revealed she was a rape victim, was deplored across the nation.
Record temperatures across Queensland have helped show solar power units on private homes are keeping peak electricity demand down in rural areas of the state, a utility says.
Ergon Energy, which supplies regional areas of the state outside Brisbane and the south east corner, says the most noticeable impact is on the mid-afternoon peak loads.
Temperatures on Tuesday soared to 40 degrees across much of Queensland, with new records for December were set in the southeast, and while they dropped slightly on Wednesday, temperatures were still above the monthly average.
With solar power units in regional areas capable of generating around 173 megawatts (MW), Ergon says as much as 150mw is flowing back into the system from private homes.
Chief executive Ian McLeod says peak demand of 1957 MW during the heatwave was down by 14 per cent on the record peak of 2285 MW in January 2010.
'After a number of mild summers this heatwave has been the first real test of where peak demand is heading on those few hot days of the year,' Mr McLeod said in a statement.
'The record growth of the last decade may be behind us.
'A reduced peak demand reduces the need for more investment in new substations or increasing the capacity of existing substations and powerlines and this takes the pressure off rising power prices.'
The next steps are harder: A carbon price is a necessary condition for facing up to the pollution our consumption is causing. If we don't want to pay the price of our pollution, then we don't want to tackle climate change. So far, the sad reality is that we are not prepared to act. That is why nothing much has been achieved on the carbon front since 1990.Why then might the U.S. consider putting a price on its carbon emissions, through taxing pollution? One powerful reason has nothing to do with climate change: It needs the money. Taxing carbon might be politically painful, but not as painful as taxing income. So for the wrong reason there are some grounds for optimism.What would be even better is if some of the money were spent on new technologies. Current renewables can't bridge the carbon gap. Low-density intermittent energy just doesn't generate enough electricity to carry though decarbonisation. But future renewables just might, and here is not only the best hope on the climate front, but also precisely where the U.S. stars. Its deep technological base and its entrepreneurial culture provide one of the best places to drive through the necessary advances.For the rest of the world, the lessons are much the same. Everyone needs to switch out of coal, and gas provides a now much more abundant alternative whilst we develop new technologies. Sadly Europe is engaged in a dash from nuclear and gas towards coal.It needs to waste less money on current expensive renewables -- especially the really expensive options like offshore wind -- and get serious about future renewables. Next generation solar technology is an obvious candidate. And everyone needs to put a carbon price in place.The climate change problem can be cracked, but not through current policies. And in the meantime the world needs to get used to the idea that the U.S. no longer needs the Middle East to keep its cars and industries moving.
I think there were some surprising aspects in Deser et al.‘s results. Not that I didn’t expect natural multi-annual variations to be important (on shorter time scales, they are very pronounced), but what strikes me is the strong contrast (on a 50-year time scale) between the global mean temperature (lower graph), which was not very sensitive to the regional atmospheric circulation, and the regional temperatures which were strongly influenced.
It has long been recognized that local and regional climate would warm at different rates than the global mean, but not with such large differences as presented by Deser et al. at the time scales of 50 years and for continental scales. Their results imply that while some regions could experience almost zero warming over 50 years, this will be compensated by substantially stronger in other regions (because they also find that the global mean temperatures to be largely insensitive to the different model initial conditions).
These results also imply a surprisingly long persistence of weather regimes in different parts of the world. Usually, one tends to associate these with inter-annual to decadal scales. However, Deser et al observe:
Such intrinsic climate fluctuations occur not only on interannual-to-decadal timescales but also over periods as long as 50 years… even trends over 50 years are subject to considerable uncertainty owing to natural variability.These findings were in particular important for the winter season at mid-to-high latitudes. Hence, they could be entirely attributed to chaotic dynamics. On the other hand, the two simulations that they highlighted in their study represented extreme cases, and most of the simulations suggested that the future outcome may be somewhere in between.
My interpretation of Deser et al.‘s results is that the range of possible future temperatures gets broader at the same time as the most likely outcome follows a warming curve. This means that the most likely scenario is warming for the future while there still is a small possibility that the temperature for a particular location hardly changes (or even cools) over a 50-year period.What strikes me as important about this is it surely means that those economists or advocates who argue for money to be spent more on adaptation to climate change rather than limiting emissions are barking up the wrong tree.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, the concentration of sperm samples collected by the bank dropped 37% from 106 million cells per milliliter to 67 million, according to Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a leading Israeli infertility researcher at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center.Now a very similar sounding study in France finds much the same:
New research shows that the concentration of sperm in men's semen has been in steady decline between 1989 and 2005 in France. In addition, there has been a decrease in the number of normally formed sperm.
The study is important because, with over 26,600 men involved, it is probably the largest studied sample in the world and although the results cannot be extrapolated to other countries, it does support other studies from elsewhere that show similar drops in semen concentration and quality in recent years.
They found that over the 17-year period there was a significant and continuous 32.2% decrease in semen concentration (millions of spermatozoa per millilitre of semen), at a rate of about 1.9% per year. The researchers calculated that in men of the average age of 35, semen concentrations declined from an average of 73.6 million/ml in 1989 to 49.9 million/ml in 2005.
In addition, there was a significant 33.4% decrease in the percentage of normally formed sperm over the same period. Changes in the way sperm shape (morphology) was measured during this time may partly explain this decrease and make it difficult to give an estimate for the general population. However, the researchers say that these changes do not account for the total decrease in the quality of sperm morphology observed over the study period.
In their paper, the researchers write: "To our knowledge, it is the first study concluding a severe and general decrease in sperm concentration and morphology at the scale of a whole country over a substantial period. This constitutes a serious public health warning. The link with the environment particularly needs to be determined."A few observations:
Poor women who drank tea were viewed as irresponsible as whisky drinkers in early 19th-century Ireland, new research by Durham University has unearthed.This is the best bit:
Critics at the time declared that the practice of tea drinking – viewed as a harmless pastime in most past and present societies – was contributing to the stifling of Ireland's economic growth, and was clearly presented as reckless and uncontrollable. Women who drank tea wasted their time and money, it was said, drawing them away from their duty to care for their husbands and home. It was felt this traditionally female responsibility was vital to progressing the national economy.
Pamphlets published in England at the time suggest that the concerns about tea drinking were also felt widely outside Ireland. Some believed it threatened the wholesome diet of British peasants and symbolised damage to the social order and hierarchies.
According to the Durham University paper, published in the academic journal Literature and History today (5 Dec) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, reformers singled out tea drinking amongst peasant women as a practice which needed to be stamped out to improve the Irish economy and society.
Author Dr Helen O'Connell, Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University, who analysed pamphlets and literature from that time, said: "Peasant women were condemned for putting their feet up with a cup of tea when they should be getting a hearty evening meal ready for their hard-working husbands.
Pamphlets the reformers distributed to peasant households lambasted tea drinking as a luxury poor women could not afford and which could even cause addiction, illicit longing and revolutionary sympathies. It was also said that tea drinking could even be akin to being a member of a secret society, a belief which heightened political anxieties at a time of counter revolution within the Union of Britain and Ireland.
Dr Helen O'Connell said: "The prospect of poor peasant women squandering already scarce resources on fashionable commodities such as tea was a worry but it also implied that drinking tea could even express a form of revolutionary feminism for these women.
"If that wasn't enough, there were also supposedly drug-like qualities of tea, an exotic substance from China, which was understood to become addictive over time."
When birds bathe in water or saturate themselves with dust they are actively maintaining their plumage. In well-watered areas bathing is most common, in arid ones dusting is more often observed. Experiments with quail show that frequent dusting helps to maintain an optimum amount of oil on the feathers. Excess plumage lipids, including preen oil, are absorbed by the dust and expelled along with dry skin and other debris. If quail are prevented from dusting, their feathers quickly become oily and matted. Dusting may also help to discourage bird lice, but no experimental evidence exists as yet showing that to be the case.
Wrens and House Sparrows frequently follow a water bath with a dust bath (one reason to suspect an anti-parasite function for dusting). Overall, the amount of time and effort birds put into bathing and dusting indicates how critical feather maintenance may be. Feathers are marvelous and intricate devices, but keeping them functional requires constant care.
A bird is considered to be bathing whenever it uses any of several stereotyped movements to wet its feathers. One pattern, wading, is commonly observed in birds with strong feet and broad, short, flexible wings. In a typical sequence a bird stands in the water, fluffs the feathers to expose the bare skin between their bases, and rapidly flicks the wings in and out of the water. The breast is submerged and rolled vigorously back and forth, and then, as the front end emerges, the head is thrown back, forming a cup with the partially elevated wings and tail, and dousing the feathers of the back. Those feathers are elevated so that the water reaches the skin, and then lowered, forcing the water between them. The sequence may be repeated, with the bird submerging farther in each cycle, until it is a mass of soaked disarranged feathers. Variations on this theme can be seen in different species, such as robins, thrushes, mockingbirds, jays, and titmice.
After bathing, birds dry themselves using ritualized movements. Even swimming birds must force the surplus water from between their feathers to protect their insulating properties. Anhingas and cormorants, which often sit in a characteristic sunbathing posture with drying wings spread, are perhaps also thermoregulating. (Vultures take on similar sunbathing postures in the morning. Sunbathing, which occurs in many birds, may stimulate skin parasites into activity so they can be more readily picked off.) Songbirds shake themselves to throw off water by vibrating wings and tail and ruffling feathers. All birds normally follow bathing with preening.
Preening is the simplest and most common of feather care activities. It involves two different actions, nibbling and stroking. All other feather care activities seem to be a prelude to preening, or at least end in a bout of preening. Preening serves the function of returning feathers to their correct position and form and often involves the addition of oil to the feathers from the Uropygial gland. Wiping is simply wiping the feathers with the bill, pressing them into place and perhaps spreading some oil over them. Nibbling is a more serious attempt to put the feathers back into pristine condition. The bird uses its bill to nibble along the edges of feathers straightening them out and ensuring the barbules are all zipped up.One thing I am not sure I have heard about before, however, is "anting":
Many different songbird species have been observed picking up single ants or small groups and rubbing them on their feathers. Less commonly, other songbirds "ant" by spreading their wings and lying on an anthill, and squirming or otherwise stimulating the ants to swarm up among their feathers.
The purpose of anting is not well understood, but the most reasonable assumption seems to be that it is a way of acquiring the defensive secretions of ants primarily for their insecticidal, miticidal, fungicidal, or bactericidal properties and, perhaps secondarily, as a supplement to the bird's own preen oil. The former explanation is reinforced by a growing body of evidence on the biocidal properties of ant secretions and by an observation of a jungle Myna (Acridotheres fuscus) actively "anting" with a millipede, whose potent defensive secretions (evolved to fend off the millipede's enemies) could be smelled from 15 feet away. Likewise, the observed correlation of anting activity with high humidity might be explained by the documented fungicidal properties of ant secretions. Because the seasonal timing of anting and molting (spring and summer) often correspond, some have suggested that anting may soothe the skin during feather replacement. It seems more likely that the seasonal relationship simply reflects the greater activity of ants during those periods.Interesting.
Birds have long been known to line their nests with vegetation rich in compounds that drive away parasites. Chemicals in tobacco leaves are known to repel arthropods such as parasitic mites, so Monserrat Suárez-RodrÃguez, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and her colleagues wondered whether city birds were using cigarette butts in the same way.
In a study published today in Biology Letters1, the researchers examined the nests of two bird species common on the North American continent. They measured the amount of cellulose acetate (a component of cigarette butts) in the nests, and found that the more there was, the fewer parasitic mites the nest contained.
I just used a Palmolive shave stick for the first time - wow! I have a heavy beard and had two-days growth.Yes, there are men who know a great deal about shaving brushes, with terminology that sounds vaguely associated with weaponry. I still use a cheap-ish looking one I know for a fact I got in 1984. I did not use it for many years, but still.
After soaking the stick for a few minutes, I face lathered with a semi-broken in semogue 1305 boar, a 3rd use Personna IP and a 61 Fat boy. I had three good passes with the lather on the brush and touched up a bit with the stick after for some buffing.
I had tried to stick on Saturday thinking that it would behave like my Tabac stick (wet face, rub stick). The Palmolive is a much harder soap, so there was little lather. I did some B&B research and learned to soak the soap a bit and today perfection.
It provided a nice cushioned lather, lubricated and protected well. I like the scent, finding it to be be damp-forest smelling. Palmolive will be a permanent part of my rotation.
***OLD MAN SCENT ALERT*** The scent of Palmolive is definitely old school. If you like the scent of Williams, Tabac, Van Der Hagen, you'll like this scent. I happen to like all of these very much, so the scent of Palmolive is a plus for me.
Is there any benefit to grating this stuff into a bowl? Has anyone does this?
Unlike recent books by Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards that have come to be regarded as models for the art of rock literature, Lauper’s memoir makes no attempt to be the least bit literary. Lauper essentially lays out the events of her life in something close to straight chronology, with digressions, in the rhetoric of lunchtime chat. Lauper grows up in a two-family house with “shingles that looked almost like the color of Good & Plenty candy.” She struggles as a young woman, so hard up at one point that she skins and cooks a squirrel for dinner. She works almost anywhere that will have her, including as a hostess for a Manhattan club catering to Japanese businessmen. She develops as a singer and songwriter, loses her voice, regains it and pampers it ever after as the precious gift that it is. She endures a vile sexual episode with her own friends and bandmates. She becomes famous, then gravely ill with endometriosis, and she proves to have a habit of saying “the wrong things to the right people” — like the time she told Steven Spielberg, in a meeting, that he wasn’t being very creative.(Actually, if she is referring to the video for that Goonies song, she was right. I'm pretty sure he was supposed to have personally directed it, and it was rather dull.)
The Old Foodie: An Incomplete History of Hash Browns.
I was interested to learn the origins of this way of eating potatoes (I never cared for hash browns at McDonalds, but have learnt that cooking them at home and eating them while crisp makes all the difference,) and in the process found this very interesting blog about old food recipes.
How people used to eat has become a very popular topic in recent years, I think.
I also recently heard on Radio National an English author who has a historical novel all based around a large kitchen in, (I think) the middle ages? It sounded rather interesting. I'll find the title later and update.
