Around the Web

Not much time to blog-- Matt just swooped through (and I expect will have pics and maybe video soon) and guests plus Mr. and Mrs. Peculiar are coming for Thanksgiving. But here are a few tidbits to tide you over.

Attention houndmen: PETA is trying to steal your dogs. HT Patrick of course.

As I have always suspected, evolution works faster than you may think.

Some people are really too dumb to live; David Zincavage at Never Yet Melted links to one here.

Larissa has written a hilarious but ultimately serious defense of vanity. She begins by remembering that when she was little she actually watched herself cry:

"There’s a story from my babyhood that I often ask my mom to repeat, partly because it’s so damn cute, but mostly because it’s about me, and I like hearing stories starring me. She says that whenever I cried, she’d hold me, and I would angle myself to face the large antique mirror that hung on the door in our kitchen and then just watch my reflection as I cried. She’d have to hold me up in front of the glass for a good twenty minutes while I sniffled and sobbed until I started kicking her in the chest, which meant I was finished and now hungry. If I was in another room at the time of an upset, she’d pick me up, and I would twist and strain in her arms as she held me, and instead of the usual uninhibited wailing, my sobs had a hesitant, questioning quality--my perceptive mother would then carry me to my favorite spot in the kitchen where I’d finally let it all out “on camera.” "

RTWT, of course.

Andrew Stuttaford points us to a reissue of a cookbook I suspect I'll be getting: the politically incorrect- but- green Countryman's Cookbook from England. In addition to prescience about polluted rivers and such, and some really good recipes, it includes a (parodic) recipe for cormorant (I lost it and will try to find a link) that includes setting the carcass on fire to remove the feathers, burying it for thirty days, and worse...

More to come. You might check out the remarkable blog Rants and raves, especially the post on fictional and imagined religions that begins with Kipling's Mithraic hymn-- I'll be commenting on it at lenghth soon I hope. Another for the blogroll...

Happy Thanksgiving!