Well, off to Buffalo, off to Toronto!
Posting will be close to nonexistent.
Enjoy your week and happy Independence Day!

Wretchard of The Belmont Club's prose absolutely sings. Noticed that he was updating while I was - and found these three posts on change and revolution. Do go and look at his site some. His work is something to aspire to.

Zarqawi's Oath

The Enemy Offensive Begins

High Over the Mojave

Attended a cooky-baking party tonight, the first such gettogether I'd ever been to. It was fun! We all brought dough with us, and then did the final prep work at a girlfriend's house.

I brought my favorite recipe, a modified version of the old Yankee Magazine gingersnap:

(about 40 cookies)

3/4c vegetable shortening
1c sugar, plus extra to roll the cookies in
1 egg
1/4c molasses
2c flour
2t baking soda
1/2t salt
1T ground ginger
1t cinnamon
1t berbere (ethiopian red pepper)
1/2t cloves
1/2t nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 350 deg F and grease some cookie sheets. Beat together the shortening and 1c of the sugar. Add the egg, and beat until light and fluffy, then add the molasses. Stir and toss together the flour, baking soda, salt, ginger and cinnamon, and add to the first mixture, beating until smooth and blended. Gather up bits of the dough and roll them between the palms of your hands into one-inch balls, then roll each ball in sugar. Place about 2 inches apart on the prepared cookie sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes, until the cookies have spread and the tops have cracked. Remove from the sheets and cool on a rack.

***

Karen made 'spitzbubbi' - linzer style cookies of a butter base, filled with either apricot or raspberry jam. They are lovely, but very very fussy. Very good work for Karen, who has the mindset for them. Wonderful.

LeAnn, of course, brought three different kinds of cookies: almost oreo-like chocolate refrigerator cookies, cardamom cookies, and my favorite of the lot: orange coconut refrigerator confections. These last ones are made from concentrated orange juice reduction combined with crushed 'nilla wafers and powdered sugar. The dough is refrigerated, rolled in balls and coated with dried coconut. The intense, yet subtle flavor sends a frisson throughout my body, makes my toes curl. LeAnn gets a kick out of the fact that I can only describe them as being...well, like your first kiss - not with some teenage goofball, but with an older man who knows what the heck he's doing, for goodness' sake. Yes, they're that good.

Wonderful evening, was nice to spend it with 'the girls.' Would love to do something like this around Christmas - we'd all end up with so much more variety in so much less time.

For the sake of parity, an image of Ampersand. 

You know, I do call my cats my 'little odalisques.' For the life of me, I'll never understand how Mamasan could ever find that position comfortable.  

...Then came the third siege of the city which carried his name. In 860, while the Slavs were battering Constantinople, Constantine, on the Olympus of Asia Minor, was laying a trap for them. In the silence of his monk’s cell, he created the first letters of their alphabet. First, he invented rounded letters, but the Slavic language was so savage, so wild that the ink could not contain it as such – so he constructed another alphabet with bars, thus caging this strong-willed language like a bird. Later, when it was tamed and taught Greek (for languages do learn other languages), the Slavic tongue could be confined within the original, glagolithic letters…

Daubmannus relates this story on the creation of the Slavic alphabet. The barbarian tongue would not let itself be tamed. During a brief, three-week autumn, the brothers were sitting in their cell, trying in vain to trace out the letters that would later be called “Cyrillic.” The task was a difficult one. From their cell, one had an excellent view of mid-October, and the silence was the length of an hour’s walk by the breadth of two hours’.

Methodius directed his brother’s attention to four vessels sitting on the window sill just outside their cell, on the other side of the bars.
”If your door were locked, how would you bring one of those vessels over here?” he asked.

Constantine shattered one of them, then brought it bit by bit through the bars and glued it all together again with a mixture of saliva and the packed earth underfoot.

Thus they proceeded with the Slavic tongue: They broke it into pieces, put it into their mouth by passing it through the bars of the Cyrillic letters, then reconnected the fragments with their saliva and the Greek earth beneath their feet...

CYRIL, entry from the Red Book – Dictionary of the Khazars
-Milorad Pavic

...Puis arriva le troisième siège de la ville dont il portait le nom. En 860, pendant que les Slaves assailaient Constantinople, Constantin, dans L'Olympe de l'Asie Mineure, leur prépara un piège. Dans le silence de sa cellule monacale, il créa les premières lettres de leur alphabet. Tout d'abord, il inventa des lettres arrondies, mais la langue slave était si sauvage que l'encre ne put la retenir, et il fit un autre alphabet aux lettres grillagées, enfermant ainsi comme un oiseau cette langue insoumise. Plus tard, lorsqu'elle fut apprivoisée et initiée au grec (car les langues apprennent d'autres langues), la langue slave put être emprisonné dans les premières lettres, glagolitiques...

Daubmannus relate une histoire sur la création de l'alphabet slave. La langue des barbares ne se laissait pas apprivoiser. Pendant un bref automne de trois semaines, les frères étaient assis dans leur cellule, essayant en van de tracer les lettres qu'on nommera plus tard cyrilliques. Le travail s'annonçait difficile. De leur cellule on voyait bien la mi-octobre, et son silence long comme une heure de marche et large comme deux heures. Alors, Méthode attira l'attention de son frère sur les quatre cruches qui se trouvaient sur l'appui de la fenêtre, dehors, de la'autre côté des barreaux.
-Si ta porte est fermé à clef, comment feras-tu pour prendre une de ces cruches? demanda-t-il.
Constantin cassa l'une d'elles puis la fit passer morceau par morceau à travers la grille et recolla le tout avec un mélange de salive et de terre glaise prise sous ses pieds.

C'est ainsee qu'ils procédèrent avec la langue slave, ils la brisèrent en morceaux, la firent entrer dans leurs bouches à travers les barreaux des lettres cyrilliques et recollèrent les fragments avec leur salive et la terre grecque prise sous leurs pieds...

CYRILLE, du livre Rouge du Dictionnaire Khazar
-Milorad Pavic (traduit au français par Maria Bezanovska)

Breakfast of Champions today; am rearing to go. A girl should have more mornings like this.

Hitch reviews Fahrenheit 911.

Jack Shafer mocks Moore's threats of lawsuits against anyone who criticises the film.

-via Andrew Sullivan

Plus, don't miss Lileks's musings on Hitchens's writing style. (Also an adorable photo of Gnat grocery shopping.)

On entering her mother's building for the evening visit, one of my friends from work heard another resident use the most charming line on her gentleman friend:

"Oh dear, I neglected to blot my lipstick. Would you mind letting me do so on you?"

I really have to find the occasion to use this. It's precious.

There's a lesson to be learned here, I think:

I looked a bit down and out, so a girlfriend offered me a chocolate. Generally able to put sweets aside, I stuck this in my one in my pocket for later. Much later, stuck my hand in my pocket.

On a good note, I do smell like a raspberry truffle.

Monday Morning Flower 

Found this in my mailbox this morning. Am not sure where it came from, but was very happy to receive it.

Happy Monday!

Okay, one last post, and then I'm off. With regards to the whole "one nation under surveillance" meme, I think that the biggest critics of the Patriot Act are the ones least informed on it. I remember talking months ago about this to a friend of mine who mentioned something about implanting us all with microchips (huh?). On asking her to explain herself, her response was something to the effct of 'well I read the Constitution, damnit.' Okay. Didn't really understand the relevance of this, but, as I've later seen, it's a pretty popular answer.

Anyway - I have a challenge:

Here is a copy of the US Constitution with all the amendments and a bonus edition of the Declaration of Independence.

Here is a copy of the US Patriot Act.

Let's get these documents read before we debate them, okay?, rather than rely on other groups' or individuals' commentaries on them? Otherwise, with all due respect, please just shut up.

Just got a flier for these new darlings. Granted, they are more attractive and less militantly stupid than these. Still, I think that if I were to go out and indulge my impulsive need for a meaningful symbol, I might as well get something that actually has some substance to it.

Blogs are like those Russian nesting dolls - open one up, and you find another gem within. Steven den Beste, my favorite neglected blogger (gosh darnit, I need to read him more regularly), has a great article called "Teleology and Solipsism." It's about the schism between disciplines requiring rigor and empricism and the others that do not - and on the resentment felt by academes in the latter area (who den Beste refers to as philosophical or 'P-Idealists.')

Granted, I'd not been in academia long enough (by Boston standards, anyway) to have had my brain sullied by postmodern literary theory, so I do have a hard time grasping it. My interests prettymuch end at about WWII, anyway. I guess what has been disturbing to me and what also has given me a great distaste for continuing literature studies the now mainstream appeal this form of criticism has in humanities departments and beyond. I can't function in this lack of reason. Therefore, my brain has been seeking alternative food for thought. Hence the interest and pursuit of a greater depth of knowledge statistics - something still pretty creative, but with more of a solid footing.

Heck, another factor might the deeply ingrained pragmatism of the lower classes. You know, the same thing that keeps making me think that the only people who are fervent believers in things like Socialism are the upper classes who can afford it.

Another beheading, more images of torture in Abu Ghraib - this time of the horrors perpetrated by Saddam's thugs. (I won't link to the pictures of Nick Johnson's decapitated body - you want to see them, you'll find them. I also have to warn you, Nick Shulz's article on the Abu Ghraib video is very graphic and made me sick to my stomach.)

Given how the US guard scandal - a horrible thing to be sure, but surely not the norm, and something that is being investigated and corrected as I write - was paraded all over the television screens and newspaper front pages, why is it that next to no one is covering these other acts of atrocity? Is it because they give lie to the notions that the media hold to be their truth?

Ed Driscoll has some great posts on the nature of this, and other forms of historical revisionism taking place.

(via Instapundit, of course.)

Rude awakening: woke up in a fit due to a dream I had of being so sorely aggravated at work that I yelled at the bosses and packed my things. Forgot that it was Saturday morning. Called Karen to assure myself that I did not, in fact, yell at her, that I did not leave work and that it was actually the weekend.

I don't like to talk about work here. Too personal, I think, plus, you don't really need to hear me kvetch. We all have our little trials. The past several months have been very difficult, however, between systemic changes and turf wars going on. At the moment, I've the sad occasion of being under two managers who are completely at odds over everything. The one I usually side with (the correct one 9 times out of 10), tends towards being stomped down by others. My nickname for her is Cassandra.

At the current moment, and I swear it's an emotional thing on his part, my other manager (her boss) is trying his darndest to oppose everything she does in spite of its appropriateness. He's also taken to hollering at her. Sadly, I find myself caught up in the middle of things. If going to a higher up were an option, I would.

It's a difficult position to be in, and one that I find myself wasting too much time, emotional and intellectual energy on.

[The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not
refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop
here.]

"But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities." - Christopher Hitchens

Michael Moore Update, via Instapundit.

There seem to be a lot of gullible EE types, as well, who fall for this whole package. Michael Moore is quite a good marketer in that he gives his public what they want. For that, I salute him.

However, I can't help but cheer this sort of stuff on.

Strongest tastes and smells of the day:

On my walk in, had the start of the linden blooms mingled with the unmistakable perfume of ailanthus.
Not exactly pleasant, but totally unforgettable.

Breakfast, apple crisp granola bar. These are not the nature valley bars I grew up with, let me tell you.