Communists have also been frequently in power over the years in the state of Kerala. They put education first to the extent of now being one of the top exporters of skilled labor.
Communists exporting people is how we got Ted Cruz.
Wait that's the state where Bombay (sorry -- Mumbai) is and you can't eat beef? Fuck you.
You can still have water buffalo. That's probably the same as bison in flavor.
AIMHMASPP, my parents one had a Catholic priest from India over to dinner. He wouldn't eat beef, even in Nebraska.
I'm fine with no eating beef as long as it isn't for more than a day. Or two days, if there's pork.
4. Locally, the adverse consequences apparently hit muslims disproportionately. You won't have to share their suffering, Insh'allah.
One of the most interesting things for me in reading about India is the unfamiliar social groups. The basis for regional and caste based discrimination just doesn't register for me.
Isn't the new PM from the BJP? I think it's fair to characterize them as more than just "fundie-curious".
So TRO's posting to the military governorship of the Turks and Caicos Territory is on hold while he puts down the anti-beef rebellion in Maharashtra? Do the Canadians know yet?
What if you only eat a little bit of beef at a time? Is that ok?
9. OK, kindly adjust with a better description.
This is interesting. I never would have guessed that India produced so much beef.
I understand the Indian PM will be making a state visit to Canada next month. If they come to an alliance, it could spell trouble for the Turks and Caicos Halford Islands.
That's probably about the
border dispute.
Or maybe Canada wants the Turks and India wants the Caicos.
Pankaj Mishra has used "idengenized fascism."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/16/what-next-india-pankaj-mishra
Yeah right like a military alliance between Canadians and non-beef eaters has a chance. The T&C under benevolent carnivorous despotism are impregnable.
17 is pretty good. Appadurai is definitely worth reading;Ceylan Uzak and others, and Turkish cinema worth watching.
The free flow of capitals is important and I don't think nationalism is really winning as much as being used by other identities and hybridities and nomads across economic classes. IOW, identities are also weapons of the weak but as used on balance strengthen the ruling classes.
And it's a bad terrible mistake to compare this in any way with 30s fascism. Borders, especially mental borders, are way too porous. It is something different, something new, but also something old: neoliberalism, a kind of liberalism as control mechanism.
Himmler likely really did buy into his ancient ritual bullshit, as did many of the Japanese officer corps.
Obama, although y'all can't accept it yet if ever, was just conning the rubes, plebes, and marks at his Nobel speech and at Selma.
Modi's not just from the BJP - he's pretty close to being an actual upfront genocidaire and was definitely complicit in anti-Muslim pogroms when CM of Gujarat.
To his credit, Modi did say something the other day about maybe people should go easy on persecuting the Christians.
The BJP government literally tried to ban Christmas though.
Hmmm not super into these Hindu nationalists I must say.
I didn't mean that. My new phone tells me how many steps I've taken and opens after scanning my fingerprint.
I heard something about all civil servants in India getting free daily yoga passes. Which sounds really cool, until you realize its a Hindu nationalist front to push cultural hegemony.
See for details, with added bonus of seeing the Communists sticking up for the Christians.
The whole Wendy Doniger book banning thing also the litigation over the CA textbook standards are really depressing.
It is plausible but I guess untrue that the Turks Islands are known as the Turks Islands because of their fez cacti.
Beef is the most boring meat widely eaten by humans, basically vaguely meat flavoured filler that will carry relishes and sauces OK. To get a cut that's worth eating for its own sake you have to take out a second mortgage. If I had to forego one dead animal in my life it would be cow every time. That said, I'm opposed to banning it by law; if your beliefs forbid you to eat something, then don't eat it, end of.
Well, try to get cheese from what you get out of a pig.
Live cows are fine; it's dead ones that are insipid and dull.
Several thousand live cows get a bit smelly. I don't understand how you can have a culture that depends on dairy foods but doesn't eat cattle. At least 49% of the cattle born are a waste if you don't eat them.
Huh, I find beef unbelievably delicious, even when done badly. Chicken is the filler meat that I wouldn't care if I never ate again.
Exactly. Tastes like chicken isn't praise.
At least 49% of the cattle born are a waste if you don't eat them.
Agreed, which is why it's a good thing there are people who actively like them, and cookery writers who can imaginatively dress the stuff up for the rest of us. But my point was that banning the stuff is insane. For example, I have no clue what water buffalo tastes like, but I have drunk water buffalo milk, and it's decidedly inferior to cow milk. Waste of good potential mozzarella.
In fairness, the moronic voters of California did ban both horse meat and foie gras, depriving us of two sources of deliciousness just to be morons. The fuckheads aren't only in India.
I don't think I've knowingly eaten a horse.
37 is exactly what you'd expect from a Nebraskan.
I've eaten horse sushi. It wasn't bad.
We all agree pig products are supreme though, right?
43: On one trip through Kyushu, we were served horse sashimi one night and whale sashimi the next. My ex ate a lot more on that holiday than I did.
Heebie has never had roast chicken I guess.
These central Texas chickens are delicious, live fairly happy lives until slaughter, and should be available in Heebie-land.
I like a good roast chicken a lot but it's not even top tier bird meat, too bland. Duck, goose, turkey all have more flavor and rock way the fuck harder than chicken.
live fairly happy lives until slaughter
That seems like psychological cruelty.
49 is possibly one of the more eccentric defences of battery farming that I've come across.
I'm not trying to defend battery farming, but cockfighting.
Fig leaves and green almonds at the market this morning, yum yum yum! Also feeling hilariously old listening to very deep voiced young man at the artichoke stand generously and at surprising length giving advice to an apple farmer about some tractor issue as the apple farmer isn't too much older than me I'd guess and the artichoke kid I remember as a pipsqueak back in the day.
Some chickens are tastier than others, depends if they're bred for eggs or meat taste, or combo. I've heard but have no idea if true that the tastier meat ones are closer to the cockfighting ones. We've been sorta spatchcocking them and roasting in a big cast iron pan otherwise used for pizza night. Also mega yum!
Heebie has never had roast chicken I guess.
This is false! It's delicious. So is fried chicken, for that matter. But chopped up chicken in a pasta or in a dish....eh.
47 is good to know! Also there's MooJesus which is no joke, and in nearby Seguin.
Fig leaves and green almonds at the market this morning
I miss the market I assume you went to, on which the berkeley farmer's market, while nice, is not a patch. (I'm assuming it was the Ferry Building but maybe it was actually Alemany??? At Alemany as at Civic Center on Wednesdays there's a mostly-citrus farm from Fresno or thereabouts that also has green almonds and green walnuts and sometimes BITTER ALMONDS too. They have the most astonishing variety of citrus in autumn and winter, and also quinces for cheap.)
From 56, just to drive home the point:
-Please take the time to browse (or read word-for-word!) our website, to find out about who we are, what we are doing and how very, very, VERY much we love Jesus.
Plus the only licensed hand-pumped raw milk dairy farm in Texas!
Not that I think raw milk is a great idea.
It was the FB but i love Allemany and CC too, you can get better okra either place than at FB. I am having to staunchly resist lemon hoarding as you can just feel that any week now poof! they'll be gone. I'm not being particularly successfully at resistance though we have an absurd amount of Meyers at home.
I may become vegetarian to never again worry about explaining why I would find whale sashimi morally abhorrent but might try horse.
That, and I enjoy feelings of moral superiority.
Because you can't overfish horses.
Goddamnit, heebie, I just meant thinking how about killing intelligent, social animals for food makes me sad. Extinction threats hadn't yet entered my mind.
Although, with the oceanic ecosystem collapse it's probably too late to worry about that particular barn door.
Horses aren't intelligent social animals? Pigs? Goats? Chickens I'll concede, but I suspect you are unlikely to clamor for chicken sashimi. I knew a guy who was socially constrained to eat chicken sashimi once, during a heat wave. He survived!
Horses aren't intelligent social animals?
Neigh.
Horses are just slender, athletic cows, right? I assume grazing herd animals are not possessed of innovative, independent minds.
No one takes whales to dressage competitions.
But my novel supposes, what if they did?
Then we wouldn't feel so bad about eating them.
There's never been a commercially successful recording of horse song.
Horses perform terribly in rap battles.
Krill gets stuck in their giant horsey teeth.
No one takes whales to dressage competitions.
Because you have to buy them tickets for like 50 seats.
Then we wouldn't feel so bad about eating them.
We might, if they went to dressage competitions all the time, for no good reason?
Horses are just slender, athletic cows, right?
Technically, it would be more accurate to say that whales are obese, indolent cows, but for the sake of argument, why not?
So horses are slender, athletic, land-whales?
Sheep are just goats without wool.
Goat is just another word for nothing left to shear.
If Eggplant watched the Super Bowl, he'd know a lot more about horses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNqtNBMfa0E
83: Slender, athletic land-whales are so dumb.
In Chinese, the word for "sheep" is the same as the word for "goat". I trust, gentlemen, that you take my meaning.
That they don't get parts of Gospels?
87 probably explains why I had so much trouble recently convincing my girlfriend that a ram is a male sheep but a goat is something else altogether.
"Those who can't do, teach. And those who can't teach, teach physics."
The year of the goat/sheep has just started and I work with mostly Chinese people at the moment, so I can attest to 87.
92: Yeah, we were at a Chinese restaurant that had some sign related to the new year and a picture of a ram and she referred to it as a goat, which led to an hour of Wikipedia-ing the biological classification of ungulates.
Wait a second. In Chinese Christianity, who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?
People who read 88 were already wondering.
Also I took a whack to the face this morning. Cut me some slack.
I had no idea sheep and goats had something to do with heaven and hell.
I do remember lots of stuff about how we're supposed to bathe in lamb blood.
One of the churches we pass on the drive to school has had a sign alluding to the idea that Christ's blood will wash you whiter than snow and I have no idea if it draws only from the white part of a very poor racially mixed neighborhood or if I should be more obvious about saying "Fuck that shit!" to the older girls, but for now I've left it alone and let them not pay attention.
Thorn, I think that the idea of a red sticky substance making you white already suggests we're in the realm of metaphor. Though I suppose there is carbolic soap ...
But I can't help feeling that the metaphorical equation of "white" = "clean" and "pure" is something that could do with some push back by now, however old and traditional it is.
106: I wish, but good luck on that.
Milk, raw silk, cotton, wool, linen
Clouds
Yoruba, Brahmin, Muslim, Chinese and Japanese
"Old and traditional" understates the force
I'm a night and rain person myself, but I still like stars and being able to read
Green has a shot, blue maybe cause sky and oceans
Best you could would probably push yin and yang as hard as possible, but you really aren't going to be able to devalue fucking light. Nature is not on your side.
It would be easier to point out that white people aren't.
"Christ's blood will wash you as clean as the Snuggle fabric softener bear appears to be clean." "Christ's blood: Like a ShamWow, but for everything."
I'm still confused about something. Did Amanda Know kill somebody or not?
111: Only the innocence of tourists in Italy.
Shit. Now I can't mock the typo in 112.
Shit. There's isn't a typo in 112. I'm going to have more coffee.
But there is a typo in 111. I don't think coffee will be sufficient. Time to break out the whiskey.
Let's also pause for a moment to recall the fantastic awfulness of the British press in the Amanda Knox thing. Europe: sometimes it sucks.
And while we pause let us also consider the unseemly eagerness of otherwise intelligent Americans to be persuaded on the case by the efforts of the expensive spin doctor hired by Knox's family.
117: The prosecution's theory of the case was absurd, there was very little physical evidence pointing to Knox, and someone else was convicted of the crime. If they paid that spin doctor 5 dollars, they paid too much.
Yes, "spin doctors" known as "all available physical evidence" are an American plague! Bizarro sex cult theories with no physical evidence are cool! "Foxy Knoxy" goes free!
And there are many ways that the UK is better than the US. Are you seriously going to defend the UK tabloids as one of them?
I used to wonder why the Soviets bothered with Pravda, because everyone must know that much of it is lies. I think the Knox case demonstrates the power of propaganda in the absence of a competing narrative. If it was an important story, there would have been competing narratives, but since it was a sleazy tabloid story, there was only one. In the absence of a competing narrative, the only existing narrative becomes the default one.
To be fair, we as Americans have the advantage of having seen people convicted for ridiculous Satanic cult crimes on our very own soil.
I've said this elsewhere, but anyone even vaguely inclined to consider AK guilty should read The Monster of Florence, which isn't about AK at all, but rather, at least in part, about her batshit insane prosecutor who apparently applies his same theory of the crime (sex! sluts! satan!) to every case that crosses his desk.
Not to pile on chris y, but piling on chris y: Are we to take it that Italy's Supreme Court was also swayed by the mesmerizing power of American spin doctors?
Are we to take it that Italy's Supreme Court was also swayed by the mesmerizing power of American spin doctors?
Pocket Full of Kryptonite sucked. I'm sure that the Italian Supreme Court listens to Blues Traveler if they want a pop-bluesy early 90s band from the mid Atlantic.
If the Italian Supreme Court had to choose been Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler, I'm surprised many more Americans haven't been sent to jail there.
sex! sluts! satan!
To be fair, Who? What? Where? is a bit old.
Anyway, I was thinking a good way to look at this is to get base rate and then proceed with Bayesian adjustments. I couldn't find any crime statistics broken down by how hot the perpetrator was, so that didn't work.
I've heard impassioned defenses from Italian physicists I know of both the Amanda Knox prosecution and the prosecution of those geologists who said L'Aquila wouldn't have a disastrous earthquake. They tend to get riled up at the thought that Americans are trying to influence the outcomes of their legal proceedings.
Impassioned defenses of Baysesianism?
An Italian coworker had a truly unfortunate brush with the US legal system (a disgruntled ex-boyfriend, serious accusations, drama). She kept telling us how stupid and terrible our system was, so I was grateful to have the counterexamples in 128.
Re: Beef. I am looking at beef for one of the dishes at our wedding reception, but I am tempted by the duck. (you have to get two dishes, because they use up 2 cuts of meat.
The duck is (a.) Five-Spice breast with dried aprocot sage Shrub and (b.) Confit leg or thigh with rhubarb chutney.
There are several grass-fed beef options.
No 1 is (a.) Grilled-then-sliced double-thick sirloin steak with red onion jam and (b.) Cider-Braised boneless beef short ribs with spring garlic gremolata.
Duck and beef (with the exception of tenderloin) cost the same.
Having duck and beef is nice. Gives you something for the vegetarians.
Holy shit I can't wait until this wedding is over.
Is 131 just musing aloud or is there a question there or what?
I don't go to fancy restaurants much these days. I've never even had onion jam.
134: There was a question, and I got distracted while I was typing. Which sounds better is what I meant to say.
132: Mobes, there will also be fish and probably something vegetarian.
133: Sorry.
Back to the Italians... For Love and Gold playing at the PFA tonight! http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN22027
I've not seen it yet but heard about it for years and prospective proof of its awesomeness, the Italian I just messaged about it replied within 30 secs.
So bay areans, go to the PFA tonight!
Ummmmm, hello dq, tonight is the last night of the SFCMP Project TenFourteen series, with three world premieres including the premiere of a piece by George Crumb, and a performance of Varèse's Ionisation.
That movie does sound pretty cool though.
Speaking of bay area goings-on the Berkeley Rep's production of Tartuffe is intolerably awful in almost every respect (the set dressing is nicely done).
Oh man that looks great too but going with the Italians on this one. Have fun at the concert and next time à la Cinémathèque!
Another side bar-oh my is it delightful to have a teenager old enough to go with friends to see Don Quixote and not have to sit through it again! And then they take the bus back to the apartment and all you have to do is provide tea. Okay, also pay for tix and lunch out pre performance. And I did miss the donkey.
That doesn't sound like a common problem.
Almost everyone manages to hit some part of the donkey
I've not seen it yet but heard about it for years and prospective proof of its awesomeness, the Italian I just messaged about it replied within 30 secs.
I'm tempted but I'm also afraid that all this proves is that it's awesome to Italians. WHAT TO DO?
Oh Josh go for it! We can introduce you to a couple of very charming Italian women too! Although one is underage, so caution. The movie looks hilarious.
147: I don't know how my girlfriend would feel about that.
Right just friends bring your girlfriend!
||
Not sure what the last installment in this story was, but someone confirming the original WWTSM line. (Warning: perpetually raised voices and long barking laughter - i.e., a sports show.)
|>
145: you can tell when the ballet is putting on Don Q because you'll be unsuspectingly strolling along Van Ness just north of Market and suddenly a donkey and a horse will pass you on the sidewalk. This year's donkey is not as shaggy as last year's which is a shame but really ANY donkey is better than no donkey.
154 is the worst shaggy donkey story I've ever read.
There are some really lovely shaggy donkeys at Chenonceau, and a fabulous kitchen garden.
The Aquila decision was not as weird as it seemed - it was a political press conference with lots of weird shit going on, not just scientists scienticing.
153: Oh well.
ATM: Does one have any recourse if one finds a Canadian quarter in a roll of supposed-to-be-US-quarters obtained from a bank? There's no receipt or anything.
You didn't get a separate receipt for each coin?
Can they serve pierogies than were recovered from some guy's pants?
158 -- become a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit. Alternately go to the bank and explain. Alternately, you've lost .25 so who cares.
.05 only if I can convert it at no cost in time or money.
By this point I've spent more than a minute talking about it here, which at local minimum wage pushes me into negative returns.
Wow loved the movie, highly recommended! Especially the cage fighting scene. And I think the horse had a bit of donkey in him.
166: Parking meters and washing machines won't take them, but you can try to spend it somewhere else and hope they don't notice.
Also, TRO, can you shine any light on why Amazon sells a particular classic album in mp3 format for $8, but as an audio CD with mp3 thrown in gratis for $4?
Straight mp3 governed by licensing deal w/Amazon, CD+download subject to first sale doctrine.
Thanks.
I can see the rough path of how that legal structure came to be, but the end result is going to feel more and more absurd as the years pass. Basically physicality is now a magic talisman? I have CDs I bought but never cracked the plastic on, because of the free download.
Maybe for a small premium (less than the $4) they would agree not to actually send the CD to you but agree to hold it for you somewhere.
168: Parking meters and washing machines won't take them, but you can try to spend it somewhere else and hope they don't notice
At one of my work locations, a couple of guys have a small bulk snack commissary thing going out of a file cabinet (surely in contravention of some agreement with the vending machine supplier). The percentage of Canadian coins they get is quite high--I'm sure do to this effect.
If you are buying physical playback devices just for the "free" download and there is an LP option, consider taking that route. A still shrink-wrapped lp from a limited run may eventually be worth something to someone with only a worn out record.
Btw DQ the Crumb premiere was awesome, and Schick led the assembled percussionists through two back-to-back performances of Ionisation.
Oooooo cool!
Definitely go see the movie if you get the chance it's completely asinine and glorious. Sang the first bit of the theme song to the kid as he headed down the steps this morning, he took the pick up seamlessly and was on his way.
After the first performance he turned around and said something like "you don't think we're going to get all these percussionists together and not play it at least twice, do you?".