La cuisine du Cantal avec Renaud Darmanin - Les Carnets de Julie

My new word for the New Year is "Castanéiculteur." One who cultivates chestnut trees. The feminine form of which is not "euse" but "trice": Castanéicultrice. Ces français sont, au fond, aussi latins que les italiens--et même davantage.

CIA-Backed Afghan Death Squads Massacred Children Inside Religious Schoo...

The horror. The abomination.

How to make New Orleans Gumbo

Not easy, the practice at the highest level of a great and venerable art. The making of the foundational roux and various broths, all different and time-consuming, is Escoffier-like.

Versailles grandes eaux 3 : zone nord est du jardin : l'Encelade

• What strikes me is how Le Nôtre's gigantic fantasy is really in sort of morbid bad taste to begin with, and it's only partly excused by the stunning success of its realization. Leaving one with a twisted gut (of painful apprehension), seeing before one this large man, afflicted by Zeus, sinking beneath the earth, with an enormous jet of water shooting out of his mouth.

What if Cascadia Became Independent?

But how about, first of all, autonomous?

Lion jumps into open vehicle full of tourists on safari tour in Crimea's...

Lions--tame Lions--are wuvs.

You know, the Mathers, father and son, Increase and Cotton, visited London in the 1680's or '90's, about the time, or a little after, that the English were having a Glorious Revolution--and had a good time.

They were not looked down upon, nor thought ignorant or uncouth Americans, by sophisticated  Londoner's of the day. Far from it. In fact, being certified graduates of Harvard Divinity School, and being themselves, in that sense, Divines, the Mathers were welcomed, and entreated to preach (the blood sport of Restoration England) in the finest high-church, Anglican-rite churches in town. Which they did, and did not disgrace themselves. And nobody said, "You talk funny," or "You sound like Americans." Because everybody who spoke English in those days  talked like Harvard Divinity School graduates.

Of dialectal differences, or devolution, of course ¿who can judge? But, Sweetie, you've lost tenses, and modalities, and the nice hesitancy of the subjunctive--as well as having bereft yourself of too, too many past participles. Global Pidgin is what you've become...Lingua Franca. Which, I would think, a language, which so intransigently insists on being true to its own quirky Norse/Saxon/Celtic self, were not really well apt to grow into, and maybe never could, or would.

When I say I hate Broadway musicals, I am of course referring to 'My Fair Lady' and 'The King and I'--

But I could have been thinking of 'Kismet' or 'The Sound of Music' or 'State Fair' or, well, the rest of repulsive genre. But 'My Fair Lady' still probably tops the list of gawd-awfulness. What painfully unamusing silliness. What stupid music.

Of course, exceptions have to be made: for Sweeney Todd and Rocky Horror (the movie) and lots of wonderful songs by George Gershwin and Cole Porter; not to mention Kurt Weil. But they fuck-all and forever did it to us with Flower Drum Song.