Growing up in a working class provincial small town, I lusted after sophistication, the high end Outside World, and the perqs and privileges of adulthood.
The post-WWII collapse of the Anthracite Mining industry devastated the economy of my native region of Pennsylvania, and my father was forced to buy a membership in the Steamfitters Union and work far from home on construction projects, where work existed, paying 10% of his paycheck for a “Syracuse book,” i.e, permission to work in a different union local’s territory. He typically worked all week in Westchester County, NY and came home for weekends.
During high school, I joined him, and worked construction as a plumber’s helper. Outside work, I had in 9th Grade already adopted the habit of wearing a suit and tie every day. Part of it was simply an expression of my eagerness to be treated as an adult, but it was mostly to separate myself from the ordinary society of lunkheads and idiots my own age and to part company with my earlier reputation as a tough guy and street fighter. I was sick and tired of an endless series of strange kids showing up to challenge me to a fight in order to take over my reputation as top fighter, and one ridiculously dangerous incident woke me up and persuaded me that, sooner or later, somebody would get really hurt, that my current identity and life-style would get me arrested and sent to jail. I decided to make a clean break with all that and to devote my time instead to a reading program of self education.
You might think that a teenage kid going around in a suit-and-tie every day in a tough coal town would get a lot of crap, but my reputation, and in extremis, my ability to both take and to throw a punch were still there, and I only very rarely had any problems.
Apart from my personal reading program, I took advantage of access to NYC in summertime with cash from working in my pocket to make myself familiar with the big bright adult world. I attended jazz concerts at NYC clubs. I ate haute cuisine dinners, and drank French wine, at famous restaurants. I even stayed occasionally, with no actual necessity, overnight in grand hotels. Since I wore glasses and was wearing a suit and tie, my being an adult of drinking age was simply universally accepted, even when I was in early high school.
I did this kind of thing often enough that in a number of prominent NYC venues, the Oyster Bar, Toots Shor’s, and 21, I was recognized by bartenders and presented upon entry with my personal drink.
This kind of thing can backfire. I was just beginning to explore the world of cocktails and was commonly ordering new ones I’d read of by name for the first time. Upon visiting the Oyster Bar, the world’s most convenient watering hole for persons waiting for the next train, I ventured upon my first Pink Gin, made, you must understand, entirely of straight gin with a dash of Angostura bitters. Pink Gins are not a teenage kid’s drink by any means. By comparison, a Dry Martini is like a Shirley Temple. Nonetheless, I gamely choked it down, tipped the elderly Chinese barman and left. Well, he remembered me, and the next time I stopped in, a large Pink Gin was in front of me in the proverbial NY minute. Every time I came in, I got a big greeting, a wide smile, and a great big straight up Pink Gin double. I was flattered by the recognition and I simply didn’t have the heart to disappoint him by changing my drink. Over time, I got enough practice choking them down that I gradually acquired the taste.
All this reminiscing has been inspired by the very sad news that 21 is going to be closing down early next year. Like the long gone Toots Shor’s, 21 has always been one of all mankind’s little homes away from home, a Clean, Well-Lighted Place, where a warm welcome, a good meal, and a perfect Martini await.
As a teenage kid, I found 21 pretty darn expensive, but the management’s knowing my name, the hearty greeting, and the general atmosphere struck me as actually worth the price of admission. At 21, you were a member of the family. I really don’t know anywhere that made a better hamburger or mixed a better drink. NYC will just not be the same NYC without 21. What a sad, sad time we’ve lived to see!
With high-priced imbibing currently on hold at ‘21,’ (the current owners) have done the sensible thing.
“We’re suspending our lunch this year,” said the author. Then his voice turned hopeful as he echoed a Christmas wish of many a New Yorker: “Maybe ‘21’ will reopen in 2021 and we’ll be there next Christmas.”
I find whatever this really, really bright guy has to say worth reading, though laborious. His erudite and witty references are downright dazzling, but he hits the reader with so many of them that one feels like one has encountered the intellectual equivalent of a golf ball-sized hailstorm. It gets tiring.
He himself clearly tires of particular points he’s making. There will be a number of paragraphs filled with intellectual acrobatics, delivering rapier-sharp insights and simply showing off. His denunciation of “conservacon” losers amounts to a strong argument. But he never really seems to get around to identifying his preferred alternative. Armed revolution? A new Caesar crossing the Rubicon to end the farce that the Republic has become and to start the Empire?
The Moldbugian Revolution seems destined inevitably to bog down, unable to make progress through his prolix prose. He needs an editor in the worst way.
For those of my own readers lacking the stamina, allow me to summarize:
The Moldbug has no sympathy for us losers. Might makes right, and the democrats demonstrated their virtu, their deserving to win, by using force to steal the election.
Yes, Virginia, the election was stolen. America has a loosey-goosey, complicated, and wide-open electoral system that readily lends itself to fraud. Other countries are considerably more careful.
This election is sending some messages. The messages are: The most powerful branch of the US Government is the unelected Fourth Estate. The NYT was right: The winner of US Presidential Elections is declared by the news media. The media is far more powerful than the Supreme Court. People who voted Republican don’t matter.
Conservatives operate on the basis of an agenda dedicated to good faith operation and preservation of our institutions. Therefore, they will never win. Trump also could not possibly win.
Curtis Yarvin clearly is endorsing some form of undefined revolutionary change.
Read it for yourselves.
Vae victis
“Like all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.”
Vae victis! If the election was indeed stolen, it was stolen fair and square. Whatever happened is as final as Bitcoin. 2020 remains a chef’s kiss from history’s meat-kitchen. You do get a year like this every few decades.
The Supreme Court has sent a clear and lovely Schmittian message. No court or other official authority will ever consider the substance of Republican allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections. All will be rejected on procedural grounds by the courts, and mocked with maximal hauteur in the legitimate press. Maybe some agency will even have to go through the tiresome kabuki of investigating itself.
These tactics will always work. They always do. There will never be any kind of neutral, official, systematic or forensic investigation into any real or apparent irregularities—not even one that goes as far as the comical 2016 Jill Stein recount. (Which had to stop because it found that someone, presumably Russians, had been stuffing ballot boxes (or more precisely, tabulators) in Wayne County.)
Moreover, no one should have ever expected anything else. Carl Schmitt told us that “the sovereign is he who decides the exception.” There was no exception here—so the sovereign has decided. Schmitt, a German and a gentleman (if a bit of a Nazi), would never have said: the sovereign is he who can say, “fuck you.” But he’d probably agree.
The world works this way. It has to work this way. It should work this way. We do have a few things to say—but first, you have to deal. Read the rest of this entry »
Anne Eubank, in Atlas Obscura, describes a seasonal favorite of my native Anthracite Coal Region: Boilo.
Winter’s the time for toddies and eggnog, or any cocktail that combines fistfuls of spices with warm sweetness. But when it comes to sweetness, spice, and sheer boozy firepower, boilo has them all beat.
You can be forgiven for not knowing about boilo. Outside of Pennsylvania, this warm drink, sipped by the shot, is rarely seen, and its main ingredient, Four Queens whiskey, is practically impossible to source over the state border. But for many residents of Pennsylvania coal country, the drink is an indispensable winter treat that began as a favorite of the area’s hardy miners. Today, it endures as a cold-weather cocktail and an unlikely soother of colds and the flu. However, due to its main ingredient, 101-proof whiskey, boilo needs to be treated with wary respect, whether drinking it by the glass or heating it on the stove.
Often stirred up for a Christmas party or a firefighter’s fundraiser, the basic elements of boilo are sliced oranges and lemons, squeezed and cooked in water or ginger ale, along with pounds of honey, spices, and the occasional handful of raisins. The mixture is brought to a boil (one folk etymology claims that the name comes from “boil over,” which is very easy for a foamy, sugary pot of honey and sugar water to do), and then the heat is lowered to let the spices and citrus peels infuse the brew. Only after the mixture is removed from the heat and strained is the whiskey added, since legends tell of boilo explosions from fire meeting a dribble of flammable Four Queens whiskey.
A riff on an Eastern European spirit, boilo is rooted deep in Pennsylvania coal country.
“Boilo” is essentially a literal translation of the Lithuanian virytas.
My own family’s recipe goes roughly so:
2 quarts moonshine or inexpensive bar whiskey, rye preferred
4-6 oranges
4-6 lemons
1/2 cup of raisins
2-7 tablespoons sugar (to taste)
2 cups honey
13 herbs and spices: including 2-4 cinnamon sticks, vanilla beans, juniper berries, cardamom seeds, whiskey glass full of caraway seeds, whole nutmeg, whole allspice, whole cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, saffron, candied ginger, and 1 cup hard candy
Peel oranges and lemons and cut into quarters. Squeeze the fruit into a pot, then throw in remaining fruit pulp. Add remaining ingredients. Cook everything at a slow simmer until the hard candy is melted, stirring constantly. Add whiskey and bring briefly to a rising boil. Add orange juice (some people use ginger ale) to restore any lost volume. Strain and serve hot in shot glasses.
We always used moonshine made in Locust Valley (my birthplace, a rural district in Ryan Township, Schuylkill County). You’re supposed to fiddle with the precise quantities of ingredients to get the taste you prefer.
As always with punches, if you find it too harsh and strong, add more orange juice or ginger ale. If you find it too weak or too sweet, add more whiskey.
You drink it hot out of shot glasses. After about three of these, you’ll find your knees are weak.
Love Actually isn’t in love with anyone except itself: it’s like watching a practiced lounge lizard go through his repertoire. That’s why Bill Nighy’s wrinkly old rocker steals the picture: although he’s just about the only member of the dramatis personae not actively looking for love, in a forest of over-mannered love scenes Nighy lurches through the movie with a cheerful indifference that makes his the only really honest character.
What I mainly remember as the years go by is the power imbalance: Almost every one of the alleged romances on which the film lingers is between a powerful man and his underling – Rickman and his sexpot secretary, Hugh Grant and the lowliest staffer, Colin Firth and his housekeeper. Even at the time, Curtis’s view seemed a weirdly narrow view of human relations. With the benefit of hindsight, I checked to see whether Love Actually was one of Harvey Weinstein’s masterpieces, but he was apparently busy with more obvious chick-flick Oscar bait that Christmas. In the Me-Too era we now know that beloved network anchormen have under-desk buttons to lock you in their offices, that PBS hosts think 25-year old interns at meetings enjoy seeing penises three times their age, that fashionable Manhattan restaurants have rape rooms, and that, when you clear out the sex fiends from NPR, there isn’t a lot left on the schedule.
In the old days, successful men did marry their secretaries and housemaids, but not so much now, at least in America, when power-lawyers and political consultants contract intermarriage like medieval ducal houses. So I thought I’d round things out with a Christmas picture about sex and power in the workplace from an era with very different cultural mores (although certain aspects of the scene remain entirely unchanged over six decades: “everybody knew”). It was made by the ultimate Hollywood cynic Billy Wilder, but he’s a piker compared to Richard Curtis. I’m not the biggest Billy Wilder fan, nor the biggest Jack Lemmon fan, nor Shirley MacLaine fan. But all three did some of their best work here. By the way, I am a huge Fred MacMurray fan and he is terrific in this.
The Apartment is a sad but true urban Christmas fable: there’s no snow, just flu all month long; the office-party booze makes everyone mean and sour; the only sighting of le Père Noel is an aggressive off-duty department-store Santa chugging it down at a midtown bar; and the Christmas Eve climax is an attempted suicide. But that’s what I love about The Apartment: its Wilderian cynicism is redeemed by one of the sweetest Christmas Day scenes in any movie. In his review of Rodgers & Hart’s amoral Pal Joey, Brooks Atkinson wrote: “How can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Well, The Apartment pulls it off, wonderfully.
Forbes reports on an interesting new journal article.
Mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals—including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds—follow a cycle of about 27 million years, coinciding with previously reported mass extinctions of ocean life, according to a new analysis published in the journal Historical Biology.
The study also finds that these mass extinctions align with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic eruptions.
Paleontologists recognize five big mass extinction events in the fossil record. At the end of the Ordovician period, some 443 million years ago, an estimated 86% of all marine species disappeared. At the end of the Devonian period, some 360 million years ago, 75% of all species went extinct. At the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago, the worst extinction event so far happened, with an extinction rate of 96%. At the end of the Triassic period, some 201 million years ago, 80% of all species disappeared from the fossil record. The most famous mass extinction happened at the end of the Cretaceous, some 65 million years ago, when 76% of all species went extinct, including the dinosaurs. Minor extinction events mark the end of the Carnian age, about 233 million years ago, and the transition from the late Eocene and early Oligocene period, about 36 to 33 million years ago, coinciding with the Popigai impact.
The authors examined the record of mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals and concluded that they coincided with the extinctions of ocean life. They also performed new statistical analyses of the extinctions of land species and suggest that those events followed a similar cycle of about 27.5 million years.
The authors also compared the ages of extinction events with the ages of impact craters, created by asteroids and comets crashing to the Earth’s surface, and the ages of flood basalts, the results of a giant volcanic eruption or series of eruptions that cover vast areas with lava and emit large quantities of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere.
“These new findings of coinciding, sudden mass extinctions on land and in the oceans, and of the common 26- to 27-million-year cycle, lend credence to the idea of periodic global catastrophic events as the triggers for the extinctions,” said Michael Rampino, a professor in New York University’s Department of Biology and the study’s lead author. “In fact, three of the mass annihilations of species on land and in the sea are already known to have occurred at the same times as the three largest impacts of the last 250 million years, each capable of causing a global disaster and resulting mass extinctions.”
Thought experiment. There are five Democrat justices on the Supreme Court. There was a Democrat president who just ran for reelection. He supposedly lost, but virtually all Democrat voters believe that massive fraud in several Republican controlled states caused him to lose. Many Democrat attorneys general file a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court, essentially identical to the one that is pending now.
Does anyone believe for a second that those five Democrat justices wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to make sure the Democrat control of the presidency was maintained? Democrats care about power. Democrats do not care about process, or rules. Now we are being asked to be so meticulous about adhering to the rules, that we are to allow a laughably egregious fraud to succeed, and to permit our own throats to be cut by turning over the executive branch to the people who just committed the biggest political crime in history. I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens.
and adds himself:
People always take for granted that the liberal justices will stick together, and rule for the Democrats. Even Democrats take that for granted.
KATO GIZAN (B. 1968) Jigen (Manifestation)
Signed Gizan and cursive monogram
Carved wood sculpture
43 3/8 in. (110.2 cm.) high without stand
With original metal stand
