Happy Birthday, Joseph Alsop

The cocktail hour, now so drearily interminable in most American houses, is the moment of maximum danger. One stands around forever with nothing to eat but horrible canapés.  The simplest measure of self-protection is to eat a piece or two of bacon before going out to dinner.

Joseph Alsop, born on this day in 1910

Mercifully, he was spared the fruit and chocolate that today's "foodies" put on their charcuterie "boreds."

Influencer-Proof.

Began.

An argument can be made that the world began to go to hell on this date in 1880 when Thomas Edison received a patent for the first incandescent light bulb.

Endless.

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

T.S. Eliot

Interesting.

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

J.M. Barrie

Scream.

National Review on "the woke but godless, the arrogant but ignorant, the violent but physically unimpressive, the degreed but poorly educated, the broke but acquisitive, the ambitious but stalled" ...

On one hand, those toppling statues or canceling their own careers on the Internet pose as vicious Maoists — the hard-core shock troops of the revolution. Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police, firebombs, and spray paint.

In homage to Italy’s Blackshirts of the past, they wear black hoodies, don makeshift helmets, and strap on ad hoc protective padding — part lacrosse attire, part cinematic Road Warrior costume.

The televised stereotype of the Antifa activist is a physically unimpressive but violent-talking revolutionary. He seems to strut in laid-back, blue-city Minneapolis but wisely avoids the suburbs and small towns of the nation’s red states. He spits at police when standing beside fellow agitators but would never do that when alone confronting an autoworker or welder.

When police march against the Antifa crowd and their appendages in order to clear the streets, they often scream like preteens, objecting to mean officers who dare to cross them.

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Vice.

Certainly the most destructive vice that a person can have, more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins, is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around -- "It destroys everything around it, except itself."

Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.

Stephen Fry

Last.

Violence is the incompetent’s last refuge.

Isaac Asimov

Thank you, Kurt.

Exhibitionism.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.

Thomas Sowell

You.

Banish.

I hereby banish the words "deserve" and "fair."

Give it a rest with "well-played," also.

Life.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

G.K. Chesterton

Against.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Wendell Berry  

Fiesta.

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Ritual.

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.

C.S. Lewis

Individuals.

The billionaire French donors who publicly proclaimed they would give hundreds of millions to rebuild Notre Dame have not yet paid a penny toward the restoration of the French national monument, according to church and business officials.

Instead, it's mainly American and French individuals, via Notre Dame charitable foundations, that are behind the first donations paying the bills and salaries for up to 150 workers employed by the cathedral since the April 15 fire that devastated its roof and caused its masterpiece spire to collapse. This month they are handing over the first private payment for the cathedral's reconstruction of 3.6 million euros ($4 million).

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Curse.

Once you really know the history of Native Americans, if you put a sheet over the American continent you can see all the places where the blood soaks through.  And once you know that, once you start in on that,you can become buried in an instant thinking about what went on in terms of human suffering.  We need to pay attention to what we've done to that land and native peoples before we strangle on our own detritus, which we of course are already doing.  We've shit on our doorstep until we can't see the doorstep anymore.

When I was asked in an interview about how Chief Seattle's curse haunts us, I said, "They got even with us by allowing us to invent television."  Curses come in very ordinary ways.  Television is their curse on us.  We don't live anymore, we watch.

Jim Harrison

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Mechanization.

To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanization. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense - the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavoring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-colored cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanization of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilization within a few months. Mechanization leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanization, and so a vicious circle is established.

George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier

Expensive.

Ah, what Dedo would've done with a few more francs in his ratty pockets.

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Responds.

Thank you, Wrath of Gnon.