http://www.vanishingdays.com Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:13:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en On 11 September 3 BCE, the Jewish New Year’s day, otherwise known as Rosh Hashanah, Jesus Christ was born. As Theodor H Gaster writes in Festivals of the Jewish Year: Judaism regards New Year’s Day not merely as an anniversary of creation but also—and more importantly—as a renewal of it. Shanah tovah! http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/09/08/rosh-hashanah/ After watching Anthony Bourdain’s 100th episode of No Reservations last night, filmed in May while we, too, were in Paris—hell, I almost bumped into Bourdain on the street because I was so engrossed in my pastry from Ladurée—The Wife commented how she wished we’d had a meal worthy of rhapsody ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/09/07/%e2%80%9cno-reservations-paris%e2%80%9d/ I don’t agree with everything Angelo M. Codevilla writes in his op-ed, “America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution”, but he certainly exposes some brutal truths: Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/09/03/across-the-great-divide-2/ Unless a cocktail includes egg whites as an ingredient—or demands frothiness—I’m a strict stirrer (I loathe tiny shards of ice floating atop my cocktail). Cooking Issues’ Dave Arnold has “taken on the more ambitious task of summarizing everything [he’s] learned about cocktail science over the past year.” He posted Cocktail Science ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/09/02/shaken-not-stirred/ Critic and literary historian DG Myers asks, “What happens when Amazon ceases to support the version of the Kindle that you own?”: Nearly two years ago, I divided books into two categories: “those which are needed for practical activities and those which are collected, treasured, preserved from destruction.” The Kindle, I ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/08/31/paper-scratcher/ From City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple on “Modernity’s Uninvited Guest”, otherwise known as evil: Whether men behave better or worse, individually or in the aggregate, than they did before the Enlightenment, is probably a question that we cannot answer approximately, let alone definitively. But what is certain is that moral evil has ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/08/28/evil-ways/ The day Stevie Ray Vaughan died, I was working for a major metropolitan newspaper in Texas. Rumours spread quickly; no one knew exactly who was dead—Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray—or if anyone indeed were dead. Someone, and I honestly don’t remember who, said they hoped it was Clapton and not local ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/08/27/i%e2%80%99m-cryin%e2%80%99/ Over the past few years I’ve grown tired of the “local food movement” and the idea that “eating locally” somehow makes you virtuous. What happens if you live in Dallas where there isn’t a lot of locally grown food (due mostly to climate)? On what, exactly, are Dallasites to subsist? Stephen ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/08/23/ahvak/ What does China think about anthropogenic global warming? Thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang, we in The West now know. Courtesy of their Chinese correspondent, Liberty Gibbert provides a translation of the book’s introduction, part of which I’d like to republish here: Behind the back of ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/08/19/china/ Even if you live in the States, you’re probably not watching AMC’s Rubicon . . . and that’s a damned shame because this espionage/conspiracy series deserves your attention, especially if you, like me, remember (and still watch) with great fondness the dark and strange paranoid films of the ’70s—The Conversation, ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/08/16/%e2%80%9crubicon%e2%80%9d/