Air France

Beautiful Air France poster from 1935.

Feel...

Good, inc.

Boeuf

I'm making boeuf bourguignon for dinner tonight. A simple, classic piece of French cooking that I make every so often. Note that I do not make my version of this yummy dish with mushrooms or pearl onions.

Addendum: I made daube provençale* the other night. It was my first attempt. My one recommendation is to let it sit overnight.** This allows the lamb to soak up all those juices.

*This recipe is a bit different than the one I used, but they are similar. One of the main differences of course is that I used lamb instead of beef.

**In other words, the second bowl I ate of the stuff the next day was much, much better.

No Butter?

“We’ve gone back and replaced all of the nice, good butter with supposedly trans fat-free margarine,” said Rick Doyle, the Schwartz regional manager. “The hardest one for us was the croissant. We replaced butter with palm oil. From my perspective it’s not a croissant any more. It’s lost all its lamination and flavor.”

As my wife can tell you, I am a pretty passionate guy when it comes to croissants.

Cleon - Black Hat?

After the death of Pericles, Nicias, who subsequently fell in Sicily, appeared as leader of the aristocracy, and Cleon son of Cleaenetus of the people. The latter seems, more than any one else, to have been the cause of the corruption of the democracy by his wild undertakings; and he was the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse on the Bema, and to harangue the people with his cloak girt up short about him, whereas all his predecessors had spoken decently and in order.

-- Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens (trans. Sir Frederic G. Kenyon)

It's A Big Ad!

Expensive Ad!

This has been knocking around the internet for a while I realize, but it is still an awesome commercial.

New Books

Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time: A Theory Of Constitutional Self-Government

Max Pohlenz, Freedom In Greek Life And Thought: The History Of An Ideal

The Hydrogen Economy

Apparently one of the reasons that hydrogen will not replace gasoline as a fuel is due to storage issues. You have to carry around a lot more liquid hydrogen as compared to gasoline.

Tea Tree Shampoo

This ain't exactly particularly "manly" of me to admit, but I sure do love tea tree shampoo.

Injured Toe

I was working on the bathroom wallpaper (ripping off that mess in other words) when I lost my footing and hurt my toe. It is black and blue. I don't plan on seeing a doctor about it though; I've had broken toes before and all they did was put a simple splint on it. Which is all I am going to do.

Anyway, the improvements on the townhouse proceed apace. My office is finished (except for the crown molding and a few odds and ends). We now have a new washer and dryer in the laundry room and I'm obviously working on remodeling the bathroom. I hope to have the tile down by Sunday.

Posters

The Hoover Institution apparently has one of the world's largest collections of posters. Click here to see some of that collection.

I myself have been a fan of pre-WWI aviation posters for many years, particularly those advertising French airshows. They are of course beautiful pieces of art, but perhaps more importantly they communicate the fascination (and optimism) associated with pre-war aviation in France. In that way they are also reminders of what might have become of Europe without a "Great War."

Addendum: Apparently the webpage I have linked doesn't work for everyone. I don't know what the exact problem is.

Smacky

Assuming that you read my blog, I thought that you'd like to listen to this discussion about Lolita between Monica Greenleaf and Robert Harrison (two professors at Stanford).

Russia's Demographic Crisis

Sobering paper by Nicholas Eberstadt on the demographic situation in Russia. It is approximately fifty pages long.

Recent Acquisitions

Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism

Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War

Bruce Ackerman, The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy

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I've been meaning to buy and read Kagan's work for some time now. It is - as far as I know - a distillation of his four volume series on the era in question for a more popular readership. I've read sections of that original series, but never the whole thing.

Climate Change Questions

I wrote the following in the context of another blog conversation (note that here I've both edited that langage as well as added to it):

(A) Is the Earth experiencing climate change (I really do not like the term "global warming")?

Yes. But that is hardly surprising given the history of this planet's climate.

(B) Is the change rapid in nature?

Probably no more rapid than some periods in the planet's history. How rapid were the were the changes in the past that occurred with the greatest alacrity and what did these changes add up to re: overall climate, etc.?

(C) Is it at least in part a result of man-made processes?

Probably. Though there are also likely other factors involved.

(D) What future problems (or benefits) can we expect from these changes?

This is where scientists seem to be all over the map.