Photos of this estimated as 12-13′ (3.6-3.9 m.) alligator strolling on the links at the Myakka Pines Golf Club in Englewood, Florida have been all over the Internet recently. HuffPo

“Carry on, Cat.” “Same to You, Eagle.”

“One of the coolest parts of our trip to Russia was a chance to check out scale model miniatures of some classic firearms. Everything from a FG43, Suppressed AKM, 1911, Thompson and everything in between.”

————————————

————————————

————————————

An Old Mory’s Menu

Mory’s started out as a neighborhood New Haven bar on Temple Street, not far from campus, frequented by Yale students in the late 19th century. In 1912, Mory’s was scheduled to close and be demolished, but the affluent Yale men of that era refused to give it up. They simply purchased the bar and moved the whole building, kit and caboodle, to a new location on York Street, even closer to campus, and arranged to have it operated as a private club.

Before WWII, Mory’s was exclusive and expensive and membership was restricted to wealthy (and non-Jewish) Yale men. As time passed, however, Mory’s became more democratic. First every male undergraduate could join, then every Yale faculty member & employee, then females, now God only knows.

In my day, Mory’s was still the preferred drinking place for undergraduate singing groups and societies, but it was already too expensive to be a real undergraduate institution. Mory’s really made its money serving lunches and dinner to Yale bureaucrats and New Haven bigshots. The Mory’s of the late 1960s was already unionized, and one fine day its management announced that Mory’s no longer cared to stay open to 11:30 PM. They began closing earlier, after dinner service ended, so undergraduate clubs were no longer able to adjourn to Mory’s at the conclusion of evening meetings for a shared toasting cup and a few beers.

Mory’s (in my view, deservedly) went broke in 2008, and closed indefinitely. The Yale Alumni Magazine searched its soul over whether such an (imaginarily) elite and reactionary institution ought ever to be re-opened. But, the Yale Administration, in the final analysis, really did need a traditional sort of place to eat lunch and entertain, so a fund-raising effort was made and the old whited sepulchre saved and re-opened.

Mory’s continues to close early, but it does remain an exemplar of old-fashioned WASP elite culture in one respect: its menu. In my day, and even today, Mory’s retains essentially the same old fashioned simple and stodgy menu of yore, featuring such offerings as Welsh Rarebit, French Dip Sandwiches, and Rhode Island Clam Chowder, characteristic of the genuinely elite WASP club.

Elite WASPs like that kind of cuisine, and they abhor change*.

David Ross ’92, now an English professor at Chapel Hill, retains a particular affection for, of all things, Baker Soup, a menu item apparently unique to Mory’s, and he has devoted considerable energy and research into duplicating the secret recipe. Mr. Ross’s resulting article, I’m told, appeared yesterday in some newspaper in North Carolina, but he graciously agreed to allow me to share it with my readers here.

My eight years in New Haven, Connecticut—four as an undergraduate and another four as a newspaper reporter—ended in a hail of bullets and a falling body. The former redecorated my apartment lobby, the latter plummeted past my eighth-floor balcony at 3 a.m. New Haven—at least during the early 90s—was that kind of town.

I don’t miss the sirens, the dirty snow or the fake gothic. I do miss Mory’s, the legendary dining club situated in a clapboarded, warren-roomed manse incongruously tucked between two epitomes of the modern mindset: the Yale graduate school and a rock club called Toad’s Place.

Mory’s is to New Haven what Antoine’s is to New Orleans—a redoubt of bygone sensibility. You go there to eat, but even more to ponder the fork- and knife-carved words in the old wood and to pretend that it’s 1912, the year Mory’s opened at its present location.

As you order pommes de terre souffles and bread pudding at Antoine’s, so you order—unwaveringly and ritually—the Baker Soup and Welsh rarebit at Mory’s. The Mediterranean dieter who orders the seafood risotto for $27 misapprehends everything.

What is this “Baker Soup”? Nobody knows. Superficially, it’s a curry-flavored cream soup of vaguely ochre hue. The operative ingredients seem to be carrot, celery, onion and tomato, though this is a controversial speculation.

A year ago, feeling oddly homesick for the film noir dankness of New Haven and remembering the life-infusing counter-dynamic of the Baker Soup, I set myself the task of engineering a recipe based on twenty-year-old memories.

I devised a pumpkin-apple soup to which I naturally added a splash of Calvados in homage to my Francophile hero A.J. Liebling. Though luscious, my soup was not the soup. The color was right, but there was too much richness, sweetness and complexity. And my 2-hp Vitamix produced a super-silky potage plainly over-beholden to technology. Baker Soup, in my recollection, is homier and earthier: a peasant rather than a Parisian soup.

I put the question to a Yale listserv. There was an animated response: philosophies unfurled, chemistries clashed, recipes flew. There was a certain amount of nonsense, but one Baker Soup devotee claimed to have a friend who had cooked at Mory’s back in the day and had divulged the outline.

This devotee wrote: “It’s a cream of tomato and curry soup, starting with fresh tomatoes and chicken stock and thickened with bread. The secret ingredient is carrot. The current Mory’s incarnation uses a little too much carrot, a little too much garlic, not enough curry powder. And it’s too smooth. The result is a slightly more elegant, but somehow less satisfying dish.”

Building on these intelligent hints, I conjured a plausible facsimile. Here, then, are two recipes—mine and his—both warming, one classic.

Pumpkin-Apple Soup with Curry and Calvados (serves 4)

2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

½ large yellow onion (200 grams), preferably Vidalia, sliced

1 Golden Delicious apple, sliced

1 15 oz.-can pumpkin puree

3 cups unsalted chicken stock

1 cup whole milk

¼ cup heavy cream

1 Tbsp. curry powder (or to taste)

2 tsp. Calvados

1 tsp. kosher salt (or to taste)

In a stock pot, melt the butter until it begins to brown. Add the onion and sauté until softened and lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add the apple and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the pumpkin, stock and milk. Simmer at medium temperature for 15 minutes. Transfer to a blender—preferably a Vitamix—and process to a silky, airy puree. Return the soup to the pot. Finish with the cream, curry powder, Calvados and salt (in quarter-teaspoon increments, tasting as you add). The soup should be thick but not inert; it should run, but just barely. Adjust the consistency by adding additional stock. A full tablespoon of curry powder produces a modest piquancy; for a milder soup reduce to 2 tsp.

Mory’s Baker Soup (serves 4)

2 medium beefsteak tomatoes (575 grams)

3–4 large carrots (400 grams)

½ large yellow onion (200 grams), preferably Vidalia

2–3 medium stalks celery (150 grams)

3 cloves garlic

4 Tbsp. unsalted butter

½ cup dry vermouth

1 Tbsp. curry powder

1 tsp. ground ginger

4 cups unsalted chicken stock

1 bay leaf

1 ½ cups fresh breadcrumbs (roughly food-processed French baguette)

¼ cup heavy cream

1 tsp. kosher salt (or to taste)

Parboil the tomatoes (to release the skins), 1 minute. Peel, seed and dice the cooled tomatoes. Dice the carrots, onion and celery. Finely mince the garlic. Melt the butter in a stock pot. Add the carrots, onion, and celery. Sweat until softened, 15 minutes. Add the vermouth and reduce by half. Add the garlic, curry powder and ground ginger, stirring to combine. Add the tomatoes, chicken stock and bay leaf. Simmer at medium-low temperature for 20 minutes. Add the breadcrumbs and continue to simmer, 5 minutes. Remove the bay leaf and roughly puree (be sure to retain some texture). Return the soup to the pot. Finish with the cream and salt (in quarter-teaspoon increments, tasting as you add). Garnish with parsley, chives or croutons.

——————————–

Notes:

“Curry powders” differ enormously. To avoid winding up with an excessively exotic or assertive soup, I recommend a mundane supermarket brand like McCormick.

The quality of your soup will depend on the quality of your stock. Do not be tempted by salted and MSG-laden stocks. A deep-souled homemade stock is ideal.

* Old Joke

How Many WASPs does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: 5. One to change the bulb, and four to stand around reminiscing about how great the old light bulb used to be.

Mory’s

Though handicapped by a recent knee injury, Belgium’s Queen Mathilde accompanied her husband King Philippe to a papal audience previously scheduled. Hello Magazine

Rafal Heydel-Mankoo, who is a connoisseur of these kinds of traditions, noted that while traditional protocol requires women granted a papal audience to dress in black, a number of Catholic queens and princesses enjoy Le Privilège du Blanc entitling them to appear in white.

The consensus was that Queen Mathilde’s white mantilla was quite becoming.

BoingBoing reports that a team from MIT has figured it out.

Why did violins slowly develop f-shaped sound-holes? Because it makes them more acoustically powerful than their ancestors, which had holes shaped liked a circle — as a team of MIT scientists recently concluded.

Back in the the 10th century, the makers of European stringed-instruments were building “fitheles” — the ancestor of the modern violin — but they used round holes. By the 12th century, they’d started using half-moon shapes, and a century later they’d refined it to a sort of C-shaped hole. Then in the 15th century they pioneered little circles at the ends of the holes, which, by the 17th century, had become the modern f-shaped hole.

A team of MIT scientists recently wondered why the shape had evolved that way. After crunching the math and doing some experiments, figured it out: The f-shape turns out to have physics that push a lot more air than a circular hole, making the violin’s output dramatically more powerful. From the Economist:

“The answer, arrived at after several pages of advanced mathematics, and confirmed by experiment, is that holes’ sound-amplification properties depend not on their areas but on the lengths of their peripheries. They showed how the shape of the hole varied over the centuries, and how that affected its power output. The final Cremonese design had twice the sonic power of the circular holes of the fithele.”

Read the whole thing.

My Yale classmate and Chicago Law Professor Charles Lipson forwarded this morning what he described “as the best song ever.” Maybe not the absolute best, but definitely amusing.

“The biggest find at the site was a huge wine cauldron. Standing on the handles of the cauldron, is the Greek god Acheloos. The river deity is shown with horns, a beard, the ears of a bull and a triple mustache.”

Daily Mail:

The tomb of an Iron Age Celtic prince has been unearthed in a small French town.

The ‘exceptional’ grave, crammed with Greek and possibly Etruscan artefacts, was discovered in a business zone on the outskirts of Lavau in France’s Champagne region.

The prince is buried with his chariot at the centre of a huge mound, 130 feet (40 metres) across, which has been dated to the 5th Century BC.

A team from the National Archaeological Research Institute, Inrap has been excavating the site since October last year. …

Its discovery could shed light on Iron Age European trade, researchers say.

Read the whole thing.

Sensenbrenner is so right. Let’s do it!

The Hill:

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) this week reintroduced legislation that would abolish the ATF, arguing that the agency has become embroiled in too many controversies.

Many of the ATF’s responsibilities would be transferred to the FBI under the legislation.

“The ATF is a scandal-ridden, largely duplicative agency that lacks a clear mission,” Sensenbrenner said. “Its ‘Framework’ is an affront to the Second Amendment and yet another reason why Congress should pass the ATF Elimination Act.”

The GOP’s resentment for the ATF runs deep.

Republicans have been very critical of Fast and Furious, which ended up with weapons falling into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Disdain for the ATF led the GOP to, for years, block the White House from placing a permanent director atop the agency, until B. Todd Jones was confirmed in July 2013.

The ATF’s bullet ban is the latest issue rubbing Republicans wrong.

Second Amendment advocates in Congress are rallying against it. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and more than 200 other lawmakers wrote to Jones this week demanding he “abandon” the proposal.

“Under no circumstances should ATF adopt a standard that will ban ammunition that is overwhelmingly used by law-abiding Americans for legitimate purposes,” the lawmakers wrote.

Meanwhile, the Protecting Second Amendment Rights Act introduced last week by Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) would roll back the ATF’s power to regulate ammunition.

“We cannot and we will not stand by while the Obama administration tramples on the Constitution, the rule of law, and the Second Amendment rights of hunters,” Rooney said.

Under the ATF’s proposed rules, gun companies would be prohibited from manufacturing and selling 5.56mm projectiles for M855 cartridges that are commonly used in AR-15 rifles.

After Congress failed to pass legislation banning semi-automatic weapons, critics say this is an attempt by the Obama administration to do so unilaterally.

Should the ATF go through with the bullet ban, critics fear it would open the floodgates to all sorts of ammunition bans, with far-reaching implications for gun owners.

Read the whole thing.

and the Saturday Night Live parodies with Jim Carrey:

Texas Loadmaster Loading Press

I used to reload ammunition, decades ago, when I was young and poor and keen. Like many people, over the years I became busier and more prosperous. I never reloaded anything, and I finally gave away all my tools and supplies. Farewell, Herter’s powder measure and scale and Pacific press!

I got outbid back in the 1980s, in the auction of John Amber’s gun collection, for a Krag customized by A.O. Neidner, and I’ve had a hankering for a Neidner custom rifle ever since.

Last Fall, I ran into a Neidner-built Mauser with a special barrel by the legendary old-time Tucson barrel-maker Bill Sukalle on Gun Broker. It was of unknown chambering, but it was a Neidner with extra Sukalle on the side, so I just had to buy it.

Of course, it turned out that the rifle had been made before 1930 and chambered in a wildcat cartridge invented by Major Ned Roberts, the .25 Roberts, that was modified slightly* and commercialized by Remington in 1934 as the .257 Roberts.

So I’ve been studying on how to modify 7×57 Mauser brass and gradually picking up loading tools and supplies in order to feed that Neidner rifle.

My acquisition agenda has me looking at used loading tools on Ebay, and (as everybody knows) Ebay thoughtfully arranges for items similar to those you have been looking at to pop up to tempt you.

Recently, via that Ebay policy, I came across the strangest thing.

—————————————————

It was Ebay item number 121584408509 (this link will only function for for so many weeks, until Ebay gets rid of the expired listing).

Here is a restored Texan loadmaster turret reloading press. This is circa early 1960’s and in excellent overall condition. The shafts have been re-blued as has the top turret cap by Turnbull restoration and the turret has been color case hardened. The main driving tumbler has also been re-blued and the body has been sand blasted and re-painted with VHT wrinkle paint to simulate the original finish. The decal too is a new reproduction that is smaller than the originals. Finally, the handle has been turned out of stainless steel as the originals were prone to bending. It does NOT come with the priming system normally available with these. It also has no shell holders and only one priming arm. This was rebuilt to reload – or you can just sit there and look at it. It’s up to you. No international shipping – and no returns.

—————————————————

Ebay shoved in front of my nose a massive old turreted loading press from the 1960s by a completely unheard of manufacturer. I used to load when I was in high school in the 1960s, so I’m basically familiar with the standard companies which made loading gear, Lyman and Lee, Reddding and RCBS, Hornaday, Pacific and Herter’s (both now gone). But I never heard of a Texas Loadmaster.

The bid was already up to $214.50, with a few days to go, which I thought extraordinary for an ancient 1960s model loading press. You can buy brand-new top end turret presses all day for that kind of money.

But what was really bizarre was the seller’s statement that this press had been painstakingly restored by Turnbull Restoration. Turnbull Restoration, of course, is a really high-end company, renowned for their unequaled case hardening, which produces extremely beautiful and extremely expensive replica Winchester Model 1886s and Colt 1911s.

What could possibly have possessed somebody to ship off some obscure 1960s loading press to Turnbull for a top-quality restoration? That kind of work by Turnbull undoubtedly costs roughly all the tea in China. For what that must have cost you could buy a large pile of brand-new, 50-years-improved current presses and still have change for a beer.

I was tempted to bid on it. The winner would obviously be getting thousands of dollars of restoration work for some hundreds of dollars, but… When I Googled “Texas Loadmaster”, I couldn’t find anything. All that came up was a new “Loadmaster” press by Lee. I had to search under “Sovereign Instruments Texas Loadmaster”, and I still found only minimal information.

Upon reflection, I concluded that this press was certainly missing parts. I felt sure I could never locate a manual or any parts for it, so what would I do if it needed special shell holders or die bushings?

Bidding ended where it was yesterday, at $214.50. Did someone get the bargain of the century? I doubt it, but who knows?

Anyway, I thought I would write all this up, and throw the mystery out there. The Internet being what it is, you never know. Somebody may come along who can supply the answer to the question of why would anyone restore that press?

*Remington saved work by skipping the original shortening of the 7×57 Mauser case by 1/16″, moved forward the shoulder angle and changed the angle from 15 degrees to a sharper 20 degrees.

Sovereign Instruments, Dallas decal