Category: Culture

Country comfort food

Biscuits are a misdemeanor. Fried biscuits are a felony.

The fact that it’s February is justification enough for comfort food. But the parlous condition of the world at the moment, with Putin (hopefully) knocked back onto his heels in Ukraine, is even more justification. Pinto beans, biscuits, and slaw are a Southern staple. Onions are always served with pinto beans. Danish Havarti is not exactly a Southern staple, but it’s a comfort food that goes ever so nicely with beans, slaw, and biscuits.

I was surprised to learn that not all Havarti comes from Denmark. I buy it at Trader Joe’s. I need to check on the source, but it’s possible that it comes from Wisconsin or Canada. According to the Wikipedia article, Havarti is a staple in Denmark, where 17,000 metric tons are produced each year. I can certainly testify that, in Danish hotels (which don’t necessarily reflect the kitchen tables of the Danish population), the breakfast buffets always include huge loaves of Havarti, mounted on a rotating-wire device for slicing.

Fry your biscuits in (what else) an iron skillet. I shortened the biscuits above with butter and fried them in olive oil.

The Urkainian national anthem

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post on Facebook, writes this morning:

“The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.

“The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: ‘Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.’

“That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.”

Though the Ukrainian national anthem sounds as though it was written for this very moment in history, its origins are in the 19th Century, and it was banned during the Soviet years: Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy i slava, i volia.

Nay, thou art not dead, Ukraine, see, thy glory’s born again,
And the skies, O brethren, upon us smile once more!
As in Springtime melts the snow, so shall melt away the foe,
And we shall be masters in our own home.

The new LGBT numbers


Augustine of Hippo with his hair on fire. Philippe de Champaigne, circa 1645. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A new Gallup poll includes a surprising new statistic. That is that 20.8 percent of Generation Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. What’s surprising is that this change is happening so fast, not that the change is occurring. And no matter what religionists may think, this is a return to the pre-Christian normal, not some sort of breakdown in society.

It is a breakdown, though, in the iron grip of Augustinian religion. I am very happy for Generation Z, but this should multiply our sadness for so many millions of lives made miserable, for 2,000 years, by the church. It’s clearer now just how many millions of lives that was.

Alfred Kinsey shocked the world back in the 1940s with his study of male sexuality. Many said that Kinsey’s numbers, which were based on behavior rather than identity, must have been wrong. Now Kinsey’s numbers and contemporary polls are starting to align. Depending on which of Kinsey’s numbers one compares with contemporary polls, we may be even more surprised by the generation after Generation Z.

There is another sad element here. That is that the young people of Generation Z have little awareness of the history that brought them these gains. The short version is that they can thank the Boomers for it. It was the Boomers and their friends who rose up in great enough numbers not to put up with it anymore and to start society on its return to the norm.

You’re welcome, Generation Z.

‘Typewriters are haunted’


Tom Hanks in California Typewriter ⬆︎

Twenty years ago, typewriters were headed toward extinction. No new typewriters of any quality were being made. The surviving typewriters were deteriorating, unused and unloved, and many were being junked. Around 2010, typewriters started making a comeback, particularly among young people who were born after the Golden Age of typewriters who were intrigued by the typewriters’ elegance, magic, and retro quality. In 2017, Tom Hanks, who is a typewriter collector, made a beautiful documentary, California Typewriter. That documentary gave new energy to the movement to save, and use, old typewriters.

I acquired my first typewriter when I was eleven or twelve years old. My career was in newspaper newsrooms, so I have been around typewriters all my life. I confess that, around 1985, fascinated by computers, I stopped using typewriters. But around 1997 I salvaged an IBM Selectric III from the basement of the San Francisco Examiner and had it restored. A couple of weeks ago, while wasting time on eBay, I came across an Adler 21d electric — a huge office machine that weighs almost 45 pounds — and I bought it. It looked almost new, but it needed help. I’d collect typewriters if I could. But, unlike Tom Hanks, I don’t have anywhere to put 250 typewriters. Two or three well chosen, and well loved, typewriters will have to do for me.

California Typewriter interviews a good many people, but it focuses on a typewriter shop in Berkeley, California, across the bay from San Francisco. It’s horrifying, but the typewriter shop closed in 2017 not long after Tom Hanks made his documentary.

There is a line in the documentary, spoken by a poet or writer, “Typewriters are haunted.” That is it exactly. There is something about old typewriters that is alive, that has a clear personality, a kind of mechanical spirit that is made happy when someone uses them to write. One pushes words into a computer. But a typewriter’s magic is that it pulls the words out. I thought I must have been the only person in the world who sometimes writes on a typewriter, then scans the typewritten page to get the text into a computer. Thanks to California Typewriter, now I see that I’m not the only one.

The biggest problem with owning, using, or collecting typewriters these days is that the number of typewriter shops and typewriter mechanics continues to dwindle. With my IBM Selectric III, I was fortunate to get a full restoration done by a technician trained by IBM who was in his eighties at the time. That was ten years ago, and the Selectric continues to work perfectly. With my Adler 21d electric, I was able to get some help (and a diagnosis of the typewriter’s problems) from Ed at A.B.C. Office Systems near Asheville, North Carolina — the nearest remaining typewriter shop near me. Because I’m mechanically minded and have some pretty good tools, I was able to do much of the work myself to get the Adler typewriter back into working condition.

Manual typewriters are much easier to find and easier to restore. I have a fetish for electric typewriters, though. They’re faster, easier to use for hours at a time, and somehow they seem more alive to me. The electric typewriters made in the 1970s by Adler, in West Germany, particularly fascinate me. I regard those Adler electrics as the apex of typewriter engineering and manufacturing before the IBM Selectrics came out with the “golf ball” typewriters as opposed to the typewriters with little hammers.

As someone in the documentary points out, typewriters — good ones, anyway — will never be made again. The typewriters we have now, and the neglected typewriters that we can save, are the only typewriters we will ever have.

Often even typewriter lovers know very little about the long history of typewriters, or how the office machine industry, through the turn of the century and the world wars, led straight to the development of computers. Below I mention a book that discusses some of this history.


A writer writes, in California Typewriter ⬆︎

California Typewriter trailer, on YouTube ⬆︎


My recently acquired Adler 21d electric typewriter ⬆︎

My video on restoring my Adler 21d typewriter ⬆︎

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created, 1865-1956. James W. Cortada. Princeton University Press, 1993. 350 pages.

Typewriters were an important part of the technologies that led to today’s computers. This book concludes, in fact, that because of the extraordinary demand for efficiently moving data to support the allied armies during World War II, “one could conclude that democracy could not be saved without the typewriter.”

The machines that saved democracy — including typewriters, calculators, and the earliest computers — are in museums now, if they were lucky. Less lucky examples of some very beautiful mechanical technology are waiting for us to find them, preserve them, and even use them. The luckiest old machines of all those that are still being used.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde: A Life. Matthew Sturgis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. 838 pages.

It’s an important question, and there probably are many answers: A hundred and twenty years after his death, why does the life of Oscar Wilde still matter, and why does Wilde interest us so much today? This is the second vast biography in 30 years. Richard Ellman’s biography (1988) still sells and was a fine piece of scholarship. Sturgis’s biography is even better.

Sturgis offers no opinions on why Wilde matters until the four-page epilogue. Wilde matters today, Sturgis says, because he was right about a lot of things.

The tragedy was that Wilde was born into the wrong place and time. Even at the time, France and Italy would not have destroyed Wilde the way England did. France and Italy were often refuges for Wilde, though they were not places where Wilde could have become famous.

At times while reading this book, I wanted to scold Wilde. Clearly he was vain, and much of his posings, posturings, and sayings were a show driven by the desire for fame. Again and again he made ridiculously bad decisions. He was clueless about how to handle money. If you add up what Wilde earned versus what he squandered (not just money), then the squanderings at the time of Wilde’s pathetic death (Nov. 30, 1900) surely exceeded the earnings — except for the fact that Wilde left a legacy that we continue to value today. I don’t recall that Ellman was clear about the fact that Wilde was born to enormous privilege. Sturgis tells us much more about Wilde’s aristocratic origins in Ireland and the open doors for Wilde at Oxford. Much should be expected out of so much privilege.

And yet foibles aside, Wilde comes across, always, as a kind, generous, and very decent human being. When he damaged others — as he certainly did with his family — it was always out of blindness for which he subsequently repented (and often relapsed), never wilful malice. There were many people of high achievement who saw Wilde as a fraud but who, after talking with him, had to concede that Wilde was a superb scholar and a more genuine person than they had supposed.

The villains in this story are the Victorians. The ogres are a few horrible people such as Lord Alfred Douglas and his father, John Douglas, the 9th marquess of Queensbury. The saints are people such as Constance, Wilde’s wife, who died a few months before Wilde died, probably from grief and shame. Another saint is Robbie Ross, who stuck with Wilde until the end and who, as Wilde’s literary executor, did much of the work than preserved the record of Wilde’s life and works.

In 2017, the Queen of England pardoned Wilde, along with 75,000 other Britons who had been convicted under the abolished laws that sent Wilde to prison and led to his death. That took almost 120 years. What a sorry race of human beings we white people are, even if we’re slowly getting better.

I’ll venture one other thought on why Oscar Wilde still matters. It’s that the Victorians are still among us, and that the work that Oscar Wilde bravely started remains incomplete. If Wilde’s life was a warning to other misfits about how to live in the wrong place at the wrong time, other lives in this story are models — Robbie Ross, for example, with his loyalty, integrity, and his talent for salvaging as much as possible from catastrophe.

Munich — The Edge of War ★ ★ ★ ★

Was there ever a bad movie about the political turbulence that preceded World War II? I can’t think of one. Munich — The Edge of War is partly a political drama and partly a spy drama. In this version, Neville Chamberlain is still Prime Minister, and the story is divided between London, Berlin, and Munich.

The political intrigue alone, historically accurate, would carry this movie: What was Hitler’s intent with Sudetenland? What motivated Chamberlain’s efforts to avoid war at almost any cost? It’s the fictional espionage plot, though, that makes this such a brilliant story. Two young men who were Oxford classmates, one German, the other British, are in way over their heads in a German plot to arrest and remove Hitler. The British character is Chamberlain’s private secretary. The German character works as a translator in the foreign office in Berlin. Neither of them ever gets a moment of relief. The fear and menace grows and never lets up. Hitler is a relatively minor character, but Ulrich Matthes plays him like a character in a horror film.

This film reminds us just how important it is, after 75 years, to continue to grapple with the history of World War II. Today Russia may be on the edge of invading Ukraine. Only a year has passed since the United States removed a madman from the White House, who, had he remained in office, would have continued to work with Russia to destabilize Europe.

Just as a period piece, the film is elegant — old cars, old London, old Berlin, trains, typewriters, radios, cabarets.

Munich — The Edge of War can be streamed on Netflix.

Support the Scottish economy!


I got that little glass while touring the Oban distillery in 2018.

Tonight is Burns Night in Scotland. For those of you not familiar with Burns Night, I’ll leave you to Google for Scottish sources that can describe it much better than I can. But you’d be safe to assume that Burns Night involves food, drink, and the poet Robert Burns.

Having run low on Scotch, I went to the ABC store in Walnut Cove this morning and was surprised to find that they now carry Oban Scotch. In a way, this is unfortunate, because Oban Scotch costs three times as much as what I usually pay for quite good single-malt Scotch. But it’s Burns Night, and I bought it.

I would not have guessed that food and drink are only the second most important Scottish export to the United States. The first is listed by the Scottish government as engineering and advanced manufacturing. I have no idea what the specifics are for the engineering and manufacturing, but I’m sure it would be interesting.

Last year I came across the web site for Highland Titles. They have an interesting fund-raising scheme. For a certain donation, you get 10 square feet of land in Scotland. It’s a gimmick, of course, but it’s also a smart way of raising money for the conservation and rehabilitation of Scottish land. Lots of people who buy the 10 square feet of land visit the reserves while in Scotland to have a look at their little spot of land, so that brings in more money.

Haggis is traditional on Burns Night, but no haggis is likely be eaten in this house. (In Scotland you can get vegetarian approximations of haggis.) Instead I’m making a chicken pot pie with fake chicken, with winter vegetables on the side. There will be ale to start and Scotch to finish.


Oban, from the ferry. Ken and I toured the Oban distillery there in 2018, but we must have been so mesmerized by the distillery that we forgot to take pictures inside the distillery.


You can get one of these certificates by making a donation to Highland Titles, a conservation and restoration project.


Source: Scottish government web site

Pub food


Scallop pot pie

In this publess part of the world, if you want pub food, you have to make it yourself. One of the few compensations of January is the pleasure of running the oven. There’s snow outside. That was my excuse for making comfort food.

This is a sea scallop pot pie with potatoes, cauliflower, onion, celery, and peas. There are only seven scallops in the pie, plenty enough to flavor it. The winter vegetables and the crust are the main event. I may make this again for Burns Night, which is January 25.

Ale goes with everything.

Falling apart at the seams??

David Brooks has an important — but very misleading — column this morning at the New York Times, “America is falling apart at the seams.” The column tries to pull off the same old deception that so-called centrists always try to pull off. That’s the idea that bad things are always symmetrical, that “both sides” are always equally to blame.

It’s not that America is falling apart at the seams. It’s that Republican, Trumpist America is falling apart at the seams. Republicans are well along in becoming what Republican propaganda and Trumpist trash-talk have taught them to become — insufferable.

Show me someone assaulting airline crew and I will show you a white Republican. Show me someone being rude and demeaning to a waitress and I will show you a white Republican.

Brooks tries to blame the usual conservative boogey men. He mentions that a majority of Americans are no longer members of a church. Small wonder, given that the white churches have driven away decent people, having aligned their religion with Trump and Republican politics. The decline in church membership actually is a sign of moral improvement in American society, given what the churches have become.

Every liberal I know is working extra hard to preserve civility, even though we are often the targets of “fuck your feelings” incivility. A few months ago, a drunk Republican who lives about half a mile away from me threatened to kill me after he saw that the mighty right-wing talking points that he was shouting at me weren’t having the effect he wanted. He had a 9mm pistol in his back pocket. He shouted the N-word several times just to show that he wasn’t “woke.” His intent was intimidation. Trumpist America wants the rest of America to be afraid of them. I told him, and not in a snowflake voice, to stop trying to intimidate me.

David Brooks’ self-deceived, centrist, both-sides hand-wringing will do no good, not until the Republican Party rethinks its politics and the white churches rethink their religion. They hate being a minority, and they are terrified by the fact that it is becoming harder and harder for them to dominate.

Don’t Look Up

Don’t Look Up can be streamed on Netflix.

First, a hat tip to Ken, who alerted me that this movie is a must-watch. Ken also wrote about it on his blog.

I’m not as critical as Ken on the quality of Don’t Look Up. If there are flaws, I didn’t mind, other than that the movie is about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s surgically accurate. And I rejoice because at last we’re heaping ridicule on Trump, Trumpism, and the millions of gullible and deplorable people who can’t see through Trump and who were willing to kill for Trump in the trenches of Trumpism. (Images from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are my evidence that I’m not exaggerating.)

A major — and overlooked — marker in deplorable people’s eagerness to deify Trump was when John Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015. Trevor Noah said that Stewart told him this about why he left The Daily Show:

“He said ‘I’m leaving because I’m tired.’ And he said, ‘I’m tired of being angry.’ And he said, ‘I’m angry all the time. I don’t find any of this funny. I do not know how to make it funny right now, and I don’t think the host of the show, I don’t think the show deserves a host who does not feel that it is funny.'”

It was in 2015 that we lost public ridicule as a defense against the rise of Trumpism. Finally, at the end of 2021, ridicule returns in Don’t Look Up. Stewart is right. There was nothing funny about Trump’s occupation of the White House. We were all angry, too angry to employ ridicule. Hand-wringers on the left told us that we should “reach out” to Trumpists and “try to understand them.” Wrong. We should have relentlessly ridiculed them.

I was curious about how the right-wing propagandists who feed Trumpism to the Trumpists would respond to Don’t Look Up. I think I found the answer in a review in The Washington Examiner, which boils down to, “Nothing to see here. Move along. Everyone knows it’s really the libs who are ridiculous.”

It is definitely not from the Democratic Party that the ridicule must come. President Biden and the Democrats in Congress understand that. The Democratic Party must stay focused on governing and working for the good of the American people. The ridicule is more a cultural than a political responsibility. Thank you, Hollywood. Television, where are you? More, please.

Two very good essays in the New York Times this morning are reminders that, though Trumpists eagerly embrace their own deception, the rest of us understand quite well what’s going on. The first is by Rebecca Solnit, “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.” Solnit focuses on gullibility. The second is by Francis Fukuyama, who focuses on the world’s horror at what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

But understanding what happened is not enough to pull the American Democracy back from the brink. Those who broke the law to follow Trump must be brought to justice. And those who followed Trump but didn’t break the law must face public ridicule and public contempt so severe that they would be embarrassed to show their faces among decent people again for the rest of their lives.