Category: Culture

21,000 steps before supper


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Probably the most written-about hotspot for food in Edinburgh is the Sheep Heid Inn, especially their Sunday roasts. This inn lies some distance from the more trafficked parts of Edinburgh. If you walk down the Royal Mile to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, you’ll be right at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, a high, steep hill with stunning views. The walk up Arthur’s Seat will burn some calories.

Then if you descend from Arthur’s Seat in just the right direction, you’ll find the Sheep Heid Inn, hidden among some trees and a high stone wall. According to my watch, I had gone more than 21,000 steps in Edinburgh that day before we had Sunday roast at the Sheep Heid Inn.

Dunrobin Castle


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Most of Scotland’s castles are in varying stages of ruin. An exception is Dunrobin Castle, which is about an hour’s drive north of Inverness. The castle is in beautiful condition, and it’s fully furnished. It must cost a fortune to maintain.

Cèilidh!

If you want to know how to pronounce cèilidh, you’ll probably need to ask someone in Scotland. It’s KAY-lee. But I suspect that anglophone pronunciation is approximate, because most of us don’t know how to make the sounds of Scottish Gaelic.

I was ever so happy to be able to go to a cèilidh while I was in Scotland. It was at the West Barns Village Hall in East Lothian. The jig in the video is “The Flying Scotsman.” I believe that’s a 19th Century jig, meant to evoke the movements of the famous train with that name.

The dancing isn’t exactly perfect. But this is how children learn these things. As for men, I imagine more men would participate if their prospects in courtship still depended upon it.

Leakey’s Book Shop


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I’m back from Scotland. On this trip, I spent two days in Inverness. The first stop after checking into the hotel was Leakey’s Book Shop, which is said to be the largest seller of used books in Scotland.

It would take all day, and then some, to explore the entire store. I made do with the literature section, looking for older editions of Scottish writers, books that would be pretty much impossible to find in the United States. I bought two novels by John Buchan and a copy of Nigel Tranter’s Man’s Estate that had been signed by Tranter — a steal at £30.

I’ve written a great deal here about Sir Walter Scott, and I already have a complete set of the Waverley novels, a gift from Ken that he schlepped all the way from Scotland, in a box, as checked baggage. I bought only three books at Leakey’s, no more than I could fit into my suitcase. Scottish novelists, I suppose, have always had to live in the shadow of Sir Walter Scott, and none have achieved Scott’s fame. I will have a separate post soon on John Buchan. Nigel Tranter, like Buchan, must be on any reading list of Scottish fiction.

The inscription in the book makes me think that Dorothy was a friend of Tranter’s, as opposed to someone who bought the book after a bookshop reading by Tranter.

I have a ton of photos from Scotland, including castles, castles, and more castles, and of course some food and seascapes. I’ll post some of them during the next week or so.


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Traditional values??


From my morning walk: a happy goat

David Brooks

Show me a conservative intellectual and I will show you someone who is insufferably morally smug, with blind spots half a galaxy wide.

I do give David Brooks credit for halfway recognizing that everything he has flacked for for many years has gone to the devil. Still, he identifies as a conservative, and periodically he writes a piece intended to sustain his moral smugness and to flatter conservatives and conservatism.

His column in the New York Times this morning is a masterpiece of self-deception: Why I Am Not a Liberal. Brooks writes: “As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty.”

It is conservatism, he would have us believe, that knows how to nurture this human capital. Then he shoots himself right between the eyes by citing a study on how Swedish culture protects people of Swedish descent from poverty, even though Sweden is always at or near the top of the list of the world’s most liberal countries.

Because of his blind spot, it doesn’t occur to Brooks to ask himself who conservatives throw money at: the rich and the super-rich. Did the trillions of dollars redistributed upward, and the creation of hundreds of American billionaires, make the rich virtuous? Is it more virtuous to throw money at the rich than at poor people who can barely afford to feed their children?

I have a fantasy of running into Brooks in an airport restaurant while he’s having his $78 hamburger. “You’re a pretty nice man,” I’d say to him. “But you’re an idiot.”

Ken is in the New York Times again

Ken has an article in the Aug. 30 New York Times, The Era of the American Lawn Is Over. On his Substack page, he also has a short video showing his wee front and back gardens near Edinburgh.

The price of silver

One often hears it said that people who grew up during the Great Depression remain frugal for the rest of their lives. Those of us who remember the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s will never forget it. I’m convinced that I can smell a financial calamity well before it happens, because of the irrational exuberance and the obvious unsustainability. That unsustainability never unwinds gradually. It always comes crashing down.

On January 17, 1980, silver reached a high of $49.95 per ounce. Two months later, the Hunt brothers (who were trying to corner the silver market) missed a margin call, and the price of silver fell to $10.80 per ounce.

This morning, as I write, silver is priced at $41.46 per ounce, having risen by around $10 an ounce in the past few months. If you have some silver, that’s nice. But it is not a good economic indicator. Irrational exuberance continues in the stock market, but many warning signs are flashing in the bond market and in gold and currency markets.

As I see it, there is a calamity in our near future. Irrational exuberance tends to last much longer than a rational person can understand. When bubbles will burst is impossible to predict.

The August jobs report was just released. “U.S. labor markets stalled this summer,” writes the New York Times. Yet the stock market is up, apparently because the weakening labor market means that the Fed will reduce interest rates. We should ask ourselves: Who benefits more from low interest rates than from a healthy economy? (Hint: people who play with other people’s money — the people who always cause financial crises.)

To my lights, it’s time to fasten our seatbelts and prepare for turbulence. A financial crisis is never good, even when governments are wise and rational in managing it. But we Americans are now passengers in a ship of fools and con men, who, given choices, will always choose the worst, then double down.


Originally published September 5, 1957. Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Douglas Martin, the Charlotte News, via Wikimedia Commons. This photo was selected as the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year. Click here for high resolution.

The deplorables, an anniversary

The photo above was first published 68 years ago today. We must never forget who the deplorables are, what they are, what their values are, and what they are capable of. The photo is of Dorothy Counts, taunted by white students at Harry P. Harding High School.

Beans for breakfast?


A modest version of a Scottish breakfast: Barley scone, beans, fake bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried egg

It’s less than a month until my trip to Scotland, and that got me looking forward to those enormous and irresistible Scottish breakfasts. How did it come to pass, I wondered, how beans are served for breakfast (to tourists, anyway) in both England and Scotland? I even have had breakfast beans in a hotel on Connaught Place in Delhi, which made me wonder if the idea came from India.

Nope. According to ChatGPT, breakfast beans came from America.

The H.J. Heinz Co., said the AI, started shipping its tinned Boston baked beans to Britain as early 1895. “By the 1920s,” AI wrote, “Heinz had adapted the recipe for British tastes, making it less sweet and more tomato-forward. These beans were cheap, easy to store, and didn’t require cooking from scratch, which made them popular in working-class homes — and eventually a fixture in the full English breakfast after WWII.” Breakfast beans arrived in Wales and Scotland a bit later, AI said — the 1960s-70s.

When I was making the breakfast in the photo, I tried to figure out the minimum number of pans required — (two). In a commercial kitchen, I’m sure, those big British breakfasts are cooked on a griddle. That made me realize than an electric griddle would be a nice thing to have, if I had a place to store it.

Democrats always get blamed for what fascists do

If I made a short list of the biggest lies ever told, one of them would be that there are two sides to every story. But there are not two sides to fascism — not two truthful sides, anyway. But that’s not how the mainstream media play it. We have a word for it — “both-sidesism.” It’s an ugly cousin of radical centrism, and it’s a foolish and deadly way of describing a world that has wicked people in it. Both-sidesism requires that lies have to be treated as though they’re true, or at least might be true, or at least that some people think they’re true.

There is a huge industry that blames Democrats for what Republicans do. For example, how many times have we heard that “Democrats abandoned the working class.” But Democrats didn’t abandon the working class. Republicans won over the working class with propaganda and con men that appeal to the deplorables’ ignorance, their racism, their gullibility, their awful religion, and their meanness.

The moment someone dares to point this out, the propaganda and con men have a ready answer: See there! You call them ignorant, racist, gullible, and mean but you claim you didn’t abandon them! No wonder they don’t like you! This is thought to be a real clincher of an argument that really owns and bedazzles the libs.

This so-called clincher of an argument also belongs on a short list of the biggest lies ever told. That lie is that educated elites are the real cause of fascism and that the deplorables are really just wonderful, wonderful people, if only we understood them. As for educated elites, as much blame gets heaped on liberals for failures to stand in the way of fascism as on fascists for their fascism. But if the deplorables saw fit to hand both houses of Congress, and the White House, to Republicans, just what magic wands do we expect Democrats to use to exert control, especially since fascists have packed the courts? Gavin Newsom of California is finally getting some traction with ridicule and plain talk.

Those who blame liberals for fascism apparently think that there exists some political strategy in which the deplorables can be won back from fascism with flattery, sweet talk, and “understanding.” That is nonsense. We have passed the tipping point. The only solution is to remind the deplorables that there are more civilized people in the world than there are deplorables, and that civilized people have a bigger stick, once they decide to use it. If the deplorables want a war, then ask them whose side half the American people (the smarter half), plus Europe, Canada, and Mexico would be on. Gavin Newsom and Beto O’Rourke are now, at last, being heard above the noise of both-sidesism.

One of most beautiful things we’ve seen lately was seven European leaders — five of them heads of state — descending on Washington to let Trump know where some lines will be drawn. The American media pretended not to understand, because it would feel oh so very harsh to have to explain to the American people that they now live in a rogue country that the world is preparing to deal with. That visit was a warning.

Trump and company know that this is their last chance. They’re going to go for full-on fascism that no law and no election can depose, counting on never being held accountable, free to loot and to dominate. They don’t have the cards to do that. Someone should remind them of Nuremberg.

Summer is winding down


A spicebush swallowtail butterfly was kind enough to pose for me on a Mexican sunflower. Click here for high-resolution version.

After a hot and humid month, Hurricane Erin moved up the East Coast, followed by weather than feels like early fall, with nighttime lows in the 60s and even 50s.

What a relief.

Yearning for hell to freeze over


Surely we must be in hell: March 19, 2025. Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

The news of late has been so surreal that it feels like living in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, set in a fascist America from which there is No Exit. How the hell do we get out of this place?

A lifelong criminal, con man, and creep of the highest order struts on the world stage like a king, dispensing commands to hellify the world. Half the population, eager and true-believing citizens of hell, are so depraved that they see this king as God’s agent on earth, even as he hastens to light their little lives, too, on fire. The other half of us see what is happening, stunned, bewildered, and near paralyzed by the spectacle of it.

In this hell, freedom is the right to dominate and exploit. Truth is whatever serves the king. Virtue means doing whatever the king wants done. Empathy is toxic. Justice is retribution and persecution. Fairness is at the top of the list of things that must be reversed because fairness can no longer be allowed. Any act of fairness is a crack in hell’s foundation.

In philosophy and literature, there is a well developed idea that this world is hell (even before Donald Trump came along). Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

Time after time people like me have bought into hopes that this criminal, con man, and creep would be neutralized and brought to justice. Time after time he has slithered out of it, not least because there are so many who are afraid of him or who long for a piece of the perks and power in a hellified world — hell’s courtiers, sold souls, connoisseurs of the practice of domination, exploitation, and cruelty.

A new hope?

The Epstein scandal gets more interesting every day. Dare we hope that it will be the Epstein scandal that finally causes hell to freeze over? This morning, the New Republic has this piece by Alex Shepherd: Is This the Turning Point of Trump’s Presidency? It’s early yet, but the Epstein story has all the makings of a defining scandal that could grind Republican rule to a halt.

It’s asking a lot of MAGA fools to comprehend that reality is pretty much a complete reversal of all the lies they have believed. A thousand smoking guns pointed right at their tiny brains may not be enough. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, even if Trump manages to slither out of this, the subversive beauty of the truth trying to come out, while the king and his court struggle to keep the scam going, is a sight to see.

The media and some of the punditry, bless their timid little hearts, are ganging up now to come up with scoops that fry Trump’s ass in the grease of his own guilt. Here’s an example of a good one this morning, from Midas Touch. The link is below.


A screen shot from the video at Midas Touch.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Happy Bastille Day!

I scoured YouTube for a truly good performance of Hector Berlioz’ setting of La Marseillaise. The version above is poorly recorded and somewhat slimmed down, but it was the best I could find. Done properly, the piece requires a huge and excellent orchestra and a vast chorus with a separate men’s chorus, women’s chorus, and children’s chorus. In the above, we must settle for a single chorus, though it’s large and well trained.

I can easily imagine constructing an unserious but entertaining theory that the reason we Americans have such a factured political culture is that we don’t have a proper national anthem. If the day ever comes when we can actually fix the American Constitution to repair our democracy and take it back from the oligarchy, Christianists, and authoritarians, we also need a new national anthem to go with the new Constitution.

Slough again

A friend emailed me yesterday with more about Slough and how the English town of Slough punches above its weight, culturally. I have never watched “The Office,” and thus I don’t know what kind of treatment Slough got. I should add, though, to my mention of “Slow Horses” (Apple TV+) and the Slough House series of novels by Mick Herron that in “Slow Horses” and Slough House the reference to Slough is insulting. Slough House is a place where MI5 sends its failed agents, and this Slough House is said to be so far from MI5 headquarters that “it might as well be Slough.”

My friend’s email also included a link to this video, which is a kind of hymn to Slough — quite touching — by the main character of “The Office.”

Extra credit: From the New York Times, 2008: What’s So Bad About Slough?

Streaming hours well spent

“Zero Day,” on Netflix, is the political opus that “Mountainhead” was not. Robert De Niro is magnificent as a former president who is called out of retirement to investigate a nationwide cyberattack.

“Mountainhead,” by the way, started out with an interesting premise but quickly devolved into a rather silly black comedy.

In “Long Way Home,” on Apple TV+, Ewan McGregor and his old friend Charley Boorman, starting in Scotland, ride classic old motorcycles across seventeen countries of northern and eastern Europe. It’s good, lightweight fun. It’s also a fine travelogue that gets us into some places where tourists don’t often go — northern Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.

Drone photography has done wonders for travel documentaries.

Revisiting a lost era


The former home of the Winston-Salem Journal (a morning newspaper) and the Twin City Sentinel (an afternoon newspaper), built in 1926-1927. The building is a reduced semi-replica of Constitution Hall and Congress Hall in Philadelphia. It’s no longer a newspaper office. The building’s interior has been renovated for other uses. Click here for high resolution version.

The Winston-Salem Journal

Today, like most newspapers that manage to hang on in diminished form, the Winston-Salem Journal can’t even be considered a real newspaper at all. But once upon a time it was considered to be one of the great Southern newspapers. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for environmental coverage having to do with a plan to bring a huge strip-mining operation to northwest North Carolina.

The newspaper already had a great staff. But, after the Pulitzer, applications for jobs poured in from recent graduates of Ivy League universities, because the Winston-Salem Journal had a well deserved reputation for being one of the best “training newspapers” in the country.

The Journal was my hometown newspaper. In 1966, when I was a senior at Reynolds High School, I was chosen by the journalism teacher to be the “teen page correspondent” for the two-page spread of high-school news that the Sentinel ran every Friday. The managing editor of the Journal at the time, Fred Flagler, instantly recognized me as a nerd and therefore as copy boy material. That was my first job, part time on weekends. I subsequently did four summer internships at the Journal, and after that I was a Journal copy editor up until 1991 (when I moved to San Francisco and went to work at the San Francisco Examiner and then the San Francisco Chronicle).

The Journal’s staff moved out of the old building to smaller offices almost twenty years ago. Like many defunct newspapers, the newspaper’s real estate became more valuable than the newspaper. This building now houses a law firm on the first and second floors, and an architectural firm on the third floor. There is an ongoing project to renovate the building’s basement and repurpose an adjoining (but un-historic) building nextdoor.

I went on a tour of the building yesterday sponsored by Preservation Forsyth. There were about forty other people on the tour, but only three of us had ever worked for the Journal.


⬆︎ When I was a copy editor and “slot man,” I sat pretty much in the same place where this new occupant of the space is sitting. There’s a balcony outside the windows.

In a newsroom, all copy works its way toward the copy desk. The “slot man” is the copy editor who gives everything one last check before putting it into a pneumatic tube and sending the copy to the composing room. Lawyers call the slot man the editor of last resort. That’s not entirely true. The slot could always appeal to the managing editor if he or she thought something was not ready for publication, when, say, the city editor disputed the slot’s judgment. The Journal never got sued over any of the thousands of stories that passed through me as slot, though the Journal was a defendant in libel cases several times over the years. Click here for high resolution version.

The Shaffner Inn


⬆︎ After the tour of the Journal building, I had dinner downtown with an old friend who also used to work at the Journal. I stayed at the Shaffner Inn, a 1907 banker’s mansion that is now a bed and breakfast. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The living room. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ Looking down the entrance hall. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The main staircase. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The dining room. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The landing of the main staircase. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The dining room set up for breakfast. All five rooms were occupied the night I was there. The breakfast was lavish and very well done. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ This was the first traditional breakfast I had had since I was in Scotland last fall. There was yogurt and fruit. But if I’m somewhere near eggs, bacon, grits, and toast, then that’s what I’m going to have.

About Winston-Salem

Winston-Salem has always had a bit of an inferiority complex, because Raleigh, Charlotte, and now even Greensboro are bigger. Winston-Salem has grown relatively slowly, spared the ugly growth and some (but only some) of the corporate brutality that has caused the explosive growth of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. In my judgment, there are really only two cities in North Carolina worth visiting — Asheville, and Winston-Salem. Asheville is sometimes called the San Francisco of the South. I’d say that’s far too generous. Asheville doesn’t really have much to offer other than the mountains.

Whereas, culturally, Winston-Salem has always punched above its weight. Its history is deeply intertwined with the Moravian settlement of Salem in 1766. The Moravians came from Germany, a protestant sect that brought with it quite a lot of German technology and German high culture. Winston was a prosperous tobacco and textile town. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts is in Winston-Salem. In 1946, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation (tobacco money) pretty much bought a college for Winston-Salem. The foundation built a campus for Wake Forest College and paid to move the college 100 miles from Wake Forest to North Carolina. That’s now Wake Forest University. The university’s medical school and regional medical center are now a key part of the city’s economy.

As for corporate brutality, Winston-Salem has had it share but survived. I won’t go into it here, but it involved R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Barbarians at the Gate), Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, and Piedmont Airlines.

When I chose to retire in the Blue Ridge foothills, part of the calculus was knowing that Winston-Salem is less than an hour’s drive away.

Retailoring a sack jacket: Can that be done?


A thrifted Jos. A. Banks sack jacket gets a new life masquerading as something more British. Click here for high-resolution version.

I feel guilty writing about trivialities, given the state of the country and the state of the world. But life must go on.

I have long known that I prefer the look of British tailoring to American. Maybe from watching all those BBC period pieces? The most beautiful suit I ever saw was in a tailor-shop window at Oxford. The fabric and cut almost took my American breath away.

But it was only fairly recently that I was able to put some names to certain styles of tailoring.

The standard American suit is the “sack suit.” It sounds derogatory, but it’s not meant that way. The cut goes back more than a hundred years (to Europe). But it was in America where it became the standard.

The sack suit is cut with straight sides that ignore the waist line (if any). British suits are cut to emphasize the shoulders (with padding!) and flatter the waist and V-shape of men whose waists are worthy of some flattery. If you look at a photo of even a portly English gentleman such as Winston Churchill, you’ll see that his jackets have some taper.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I got into the bad habit of collecting Harris tweed jackets after visiting Lewis and Harris in 2019. I bought my first Harris tweed jacket in a second-hand shop in Stornoway. I have about eight jackets that I like enough to have had altered. All but one came from the U.K., from eBay. They’re all suitable only for cool weather. I also have some Islay tweed and some Donegal tweed.

I buy a jacket only if I’m confident that the shoulder width is right for me. They can be altered easily enough to tighten the chest and waist (usually too loose for me in thrifted jackets) and adjust the sleeve length.

Recently on eBay I came across a jacket made of silk tweed. It’s a two-button, light-weight American jacket, from an old-reliable menswear company, Jos. A. Bank, made in Portugal. It was, of course, a sack-cut jacket. Madeline, a tailor trained in Hong Kong who had altered all my other jackets, had retired. So this time I went to a place at the mall. They actually did a good job, and they were less expensive than Madeline was. The young woman who pinned the jacket understood what I was looking for. The result was not exactly British-style tailoring, but it’s close enough. Once a sack jacket, always a sack jacket, I suppose.


⬆︎ Its previous life as a sack jacket is more visible from the front. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Just up the road from me is a pasture in which two old horses live, Pete and Buddy. Just now there are millions of daisies in the pasture. Pete sneaks out at night when he can, and he often comes down to eat some of my clover. Click here for high-resolution version.