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“Some of the earliest known table forks made their debut in Ancient Egypt. The Qijia culture (2400-1900 BC) that resided in part of present day China also are known to have used forks. A couple thousand years later, the fork’s popularity in the Western world spread via the Silk Road into Venice.

One of the earliest recorded evidence of forks in Venice is from an 11th century story of the the wedding of a Byzantine princess, Theodora Anna Doukaina, to Domenico Selvo. She supposedly brought gold forks as part of her dowry.

Apparently it was quite the scandal. The God fearing Venetians saw these pronged monstrosities as a slight against The Lord himself who gave us perfectly good fingers to eat with.”

– http://gizmodo.com/the-history-of-knives-forks-and-spoons-1440558371

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“Many authors measured the quality of their output by uncompromisingly quantitative metrics like daily word quotas. Jack London wrote 1,000 words a day every single day of his career and William Golding once declared at a party that he wrote 3,000 words daily, a number Norman Mailer and Arthur Conan Doyle shared. Raymond Chandler, a man of strong opinions on the craft of writing, didn’t subscribe to a specific daily quota, but was known to write up to 5,000 words a day at his most productive. Anthony Trollope, who began his day promptly at 5:30 A.M. every morning, disciplined himself to write 250 words every 15 minutes, pacing himself with a watch. Stephen King does whatever it takes to reach his daily quota of 2,000 adverbless words and Thomas Wolfe keeps his at 1,800, not letting himself stop until he has reached it.

A minority, however, measured quantity as inversely proportional to quality. James Joyce proudly considered the completion of two perfect sentences a full day of work and Dorothy Parker, an obsessive reviser, even skewed to the negative, once lamented, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.””

– http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/23/odd-type-writers/

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“In this era where cultural products seem to live forever digitally, the fear of music becoming lost to time may seem distinctly outdated. But efforts to preserve America’s audio history have never been more active than they are right now. Jack White has become the public face of these efforts, recently donating $200,000 to the National Recording Preservation Foundation, affiliated with the Library of Congress. He sits on the board with producer T. Bone Burnett, Sub Pop label founder Jonathan Poneman, legendary engineer George Massenburg and other music luminaries. What, exactly, are they trying to save? Turns out, a lot: Their ambitions are nothing smaller than protecting the entirety of America’s sonic history.”

– http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/just-how-much-of-musical-history-has-been-lost-to-history/279948/

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The full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution was designed to avoid the potential absurdities and uncertainties, by requiring the states to credit the “public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.” Before DOMA, states mostly went along with this sensible uniformity.

But there is historical precedent for one state strongly objecting to a sister state’s marriage laws.  States that forbade interracial marriages often refused to recognize such marriages from other states. That lasted until the Supreme Court declared all bans on such unions unconstitutional in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. 

It’s safe to say that Pennsylvania won’t be citing the interracial marriage bans to justify its declaration that Palladino and Barker’s marriage is void. But what will Gov. Corbett say? What public policy can he invoke? It’s hard to imagine how the governor can come up with a rationale that’s any better than the justifications for DOMA that the Supreme Court rejected as legislative gay-bashing.  In 2013, simple dislike or disapproval of gay and lesbian couples isn’t good enough, legally speaking.

If Palladino and Barker win, and Pennsylvania has to recognize their marriage, the state still won’t have to authorize its own same-sex weddings. But that will soon become a distinction without a difference. Pennsylvania couples can plan their destination weddings in all of New England, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and D.C.—and head home knowing that their marriages are also legal and binding in the state of Pennsylvania. And once this strategy catches on around the country, we’ll have gay couples living with the same rights and protections as straight couples everywhere—even if some states continue to pretend otherwise.

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– http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/10/the_pennsylvania_lawsuit_with_the_best_chance_of_toppling_state_laws_against.html

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If you ask me, the apex of twentieth century comedy was reached during Cameron Crowe’s 1982 coming-of-age masterpiece, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sitting in his room, smoking a bong, discussing brain damage with his shaggy haired compadre, Jeff Spicoli (played by Sean Penn) pulls out a brand new pair of Vans slip ons and begins to bash his head with the waffle sole to show off to his equally as blitzed out friend just how mentally numb he was. We could discuss the timeless humor of a stoned out kid bashing his own head in, or number of brain cells that Spicoli discarded that day, or the slapstick origins of his cranial abuse, but for today, I’m more concerned with Spicoli’s Vans.

Spicoli’s checkerboard slip ons have become the stuff of legend, and dare I say that never before has an actor’s footwear so completely captured the spirit of his character. Even the name “slip on” reflected Spicoli’s attitude, which was many steps beyond devil-may-care, in devil-may-get-high-off-brain-damaging-weed territory. Since ’82, slip ons fortunately have lost their THC-laced reputation as shoes for stoners, but it wasn’t until recently, that they registered on the menswear radar.

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– http://wax-wane.com/2013/10/02/the-enduring-appeal-of-vans-slip-ons/

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The reason the tea party caucus isn’t willing to compromise is because there’s no pressure on them to compromise. Their constituents are as crazy as they are. They want the safety net slashed, taxes cut, the EPA put out of business, and the Fed eliminated. They believe that Obamacare is the thin edge of the wedge that’s driving America into decline and ruin. They believe this so strongly that they’re willing to do anything to turn the country around. If that means government shutdowns and financial panic, so be it.

But why? There’s always been a faction of right-wing craziness in America. It’s part of our DNA. But how did it become so widespread? The usual answer involves the rise of conservative think tanks, conservative talk radio, Fox News, the Christian right, and racial resentment toward a black president. And maybe that’s it. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel quite sufficient. But if it’s not, then what’s going on? What’s happened over the past decade or two to spin up so many Americans into a blind rage?

Complaining about tea party congressmen misses the big picture. The problem is the people who voted them into office. What happened to them?

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– http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/tea-party-blind-rage

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The entire premise of shutting the government down over Obamacare is that shutting the government down is bad and has bad consequences. The consequences were supposed to be so bad that Democrats flinch from the horrors being inflicted on the American public and agree to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For that to work, two things need to be the case. The first is that middle-class people must suffer from the absence of government services. The second is that middle-class people must turn their rage against the uninsured and demand the repeal of Obamacare rather than turning their rage against Republicans.

The problem for Republicans is that the shutdown is clearly—obviously and unambiguously—their fault, so the public’s rage is much more likely to turn against them.

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– http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/10/01/small_batch_appropriations_plan_new_gop_idea_makes_no_sense.html

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This ought to be a glorious moment, in other words, for sit-down tacos. But it’s not. All the worst tacos I’ve eaten, and only a handful of the best, have come from New York restaurant kitchens.

This is not because I romanticize the hot, dribbly taco eaten with a tilted head and cupped hand at a stall in Mexico City or a parking lot in Chinatown in Los Angeles or a sidewalk in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. No, it’s because, objectively speaking, those tacos have a better shot at greatness than one that rides on a plate from a kitchen to a table.

I am not talking about the tacos you make yourself by wrapping a few forkfuls of your mole or adobo into a warm and willing tortilla pulled moments before from the basket next to your margarita. Those are almost always fantastic, and if you like tacos I strongly urge you to eat them that way as often as possible.

The problem tacos, the underachieving tacos, are the ones assembled on a plate by an overworked line cook and then picked up by an overworked server and ferried across the dining room to your table, where they sit and wait until you and all the people you’re out with stop talking and drinking and begin to eat. All this time, the tortilla has been curling and going brittle like an autumn leaf and the filling has been nosing up toward room temperature.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/dining/making-a-stand-up-meal-out-of-the-sit-down-taco.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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Federal wiretap law exempts interception of communication if it is necessary in a service provider’s “ordinary course of business,” which Google said included scanning e-mail. That argument did not fly with Judge Koh.

“In fact, Google’s alleged interception of e-mail content is primarily used to create user profiles and to provide targeted advertising — neither of which is related to the transmission of e-mails,” she wrote in last week’s ruling.

Judge Koh also dismissed Google’s argument that Gmail users consented to the interception and that non-Gmail users who communicated with Gmail users also knew that their messages could be read.

“Accepting Google’s theory of implied consent — that by merely sending e-mails to or receiving e-mails from a Gmail user, a non-Gmail user has consented to Google’s interception of such e-mails for any purposes — would eviscerate the rule against interception,” she wrote.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-of-wiretapping-in-gmail-scans.html?ref=todayspaper

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