What will Britain ban next? Yes, I know there are some serious issues, but I still think it’s incremental frog- boiling– or has that metaphor been debunked? And– camels? They’re DOMESTIC.
Category: Uncategorized
Menu
It’s almost too easy to make fun of English language menus in foreign countries. From Ken Tynan in Bull Fever (“Anahogs in a Seamanlike Manner” in Spain in the fifties*) to, well, my own Eagle Dreams ( “fillet of beer” and “chicken FANTASY” in Ulaan Bataar in the nineties), these felicities have been one of …
Modern Primitives
In an email exchange with Steve and me, Reid mentioned an essay he plans to write expanding on some of the themes from his good posts below. He may draw some comparisons between traditional hunting & gathering bands and today’s street gangs. It will be a good essay and we’ve already put in for an …
Volcanic Disruptions
Most of us know the story of Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed but astonishingly preserved by the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79. A new study now documents similar astonishing finds resulting from an earlier eruption of Vesuvius in 1780 BC. The damage caused by this eruption was less than in AD 79 …
Why Blokes Barbecue
This article from The Sydney Morning Herald (in its Aussie way) echoes the theme I expressed in my previous post. Archaeologist Mark Horton believes men enjoy cooking outdoors over open fires as an evolutionary holdover from our hunter-gatherer past.
Our Minds are in the Pleistocene
This article by Max Borders is a good reminder of a maxim I always use in evaluating human behavior – the bodies and minds of our species evolved under the conditions of the Pleistocene, conditions very different from today. A quote Borders captures says it: “The environment that humans — and, therefore, human minds — …
Evidence..
.. that humans have not stopped evolving since “Out of Africa”, in this story by Nicholas Wade in the NYT. He is the best science reporter in the mainstream. But Sailer was on the paper weeks ago, which I missed.
Extreme Kite Flying…
… in Pakistan. Actually many Asian countries from Pakistan to Indonesia practice hard- core kite competition, with such substances as ground glass on the strings to cut your rival’s kite off. Libby was once warned away from picking up a fallen kite in Nepal for that reason. But two things to note here. First, the …
And now for something completely different…
A hairy lobster.
Tory Food?
Or just real food? (Certainly not “Health Nazi” food). On the Crunchy Con Blog, Iain Murray gives us a rant by wild cook Anthony Bourdain. Libby and BourdainBourdain is hardly a Tory — see “Ho Chi Minh” below–but he does know what food is, as does Murray. An excerpt: (Murray)“The real enemy of good food …