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Category Archives: Culture

Neither here nor now, please

Faroe Islands sheep. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high resolution version. I was on jury duty all of last week. It was educational, but it also was suffocating. There were more than a hundred people in the jury pool, and sometimes we were obliged to sit in a too-small holding room for more than […]

A snapshot of Scottish cooking, 1925-1946

Newly rebound in cloth, with the old cover used as a label I hope I am wrong, but I am reluctantly inclined to conclude that traditional Scottish cooking is almost completely lost, just as my native cuisine, Southern American cooking, also is almost completely lost. Though there are older people who remember it (both here […]

Falling for Figaro

Would it be possible to go wrong with a smart and sweet romantic comedy set mostly in the Scottish Highlands with an operatic soundtrack? Not to my taste! Some of the critics didn’t like it as much as I did. For example, the Wikipedia entry quotes someone at RogerEbert.com: “The performances are what make Falling […]

The arc of justice

U.S. marshals escort Ruby Bridges to school. New Orleans, Louisiana, November 1960. Source: Wikimedia Commons. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by […]

Yes, someone still writes rags

I haven’t had a musical post for a while… If you do a YouTube survey of ragtime playing, I think you’ll find that, like country music, ragtime playing is an area in which a great many poorly trained musicians are in it a for a good time and wearing bowties and funny hats. I’m all […]

Two parts snobbery per eight parts coffee

An imaginary 1938 espresso machine, in Italy. Image created by DALL-E 3. I could not find an image of a classic espresso machine that was in the public domain. But if you search for something like “classic Bezzera” you can see what they look like. Given any good thing — wine, Scotch, or coffee — […]

Trains: Social glue we Americans will never have

When people ask me why I love Scotland, I have lots of answers. Most of them are nice, because there are so many nice things about Scotland. But I also have a snarky answer: “Scotland,” I say, “is what white people are like when they aren’t Americans.” We Americans are overexposed to wedge-issue social toxins […]

Try my French verb conjugator

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I made a valiant effort to learn French. For three semesters, I went to night classes at the University of California (Berkeley) extension in San Francisco. With that foundation, I started reading. I never claim to speak French, and my aural comprehension is terrible. But I did […]

Music soothes the skittish cat

Lily listens to Herbert Blomstedt conduct Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphoses.” The television doesn’t always terrify my cat, Lily. It depends on what’s on. Long ago I started using headphones when I watch television, to accommodate Lily. Loud blockbuster movies scare the living daylights out of her. But she likes music. Last week, after we watched the […]

The Name of the Rose

1986 While scouring for watchables, I recently came across the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, on Netflix. It’s truly a classic film and always worth watching again. Back in the 1990s, I read Umberto Eco’s novel on which the film is based. The novel, too, is worth reading again, now that […]