We saw a play on Tuesday night. Well, a reading of a play. It’s like a play, except there aren’t any sets, no one is in costume, they don’t know their lines by heart, and the audience is okay with all of this. It was, more or less, the Further Adventures of Jane Austin Characters, if you’re into that sort of thing. Well done and all that, with one charming performance, but I have little tolerance for any sort of old plot that hinges on people not saying anything for 20 years, or being misunderstood and never clearing it up, because shame / fear / social pressure etc. It’s like the old sitcoms where one misunderstanding produces the entire plot and all the Misadventures that follow, because no one ever stops and says “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard that correctly,” or “I think you misunderstood my comment about the boss and what he said about your cooking. Let me repeat myself, and hope that this time my remarks are not cut off by the laugh track.”

It was about 3 above with the windchill, so I consider this trip out to support the arts to be the equivalent of seeing six actual plays in the summer.

It's been a while since we discussed Holiday Packaging. This example is nothing unusual. A special edition of cereal, inasmuch as cereals can have editions. It is a Holiday Edition with Holiday Colors.

The expected symbols are present: a tree, and a device for assiting those who have difficulty walking. I feel bad for Crackle, who has noting to hold, unless he's keeping the logo in place with telekinetic powers.

I gather that Buddy the Elf has specific and identifiable marshmallow prefereces:

The shapes have been updated. Every child's pulse quickens when they contemplate the idea of New Marshmallow Shapes. This Christmas will be so much better than all the others.

Is it just me, or is this the most synthetic and desperate attempt to create a "holiday tradition" we've seen in our lives?

But how pre-fab? And aren't Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman pre-fab, in their own way? I googled the story, and it turns out the Elf is Santa's home-surveillance system, reporting daily on the family to tote up their sins and virtues.

Professor Laura Pinto suggests that it conditions kids to accept the surveillance state and that it communicates to children that "it's okay for other people to spy on you, and you're not entitled to privacy."  She argues that "if you grow up thinking it's cool for the elves to watch me and report back to Santa, well, then it's cool for the NSA to watch me and report back to the government ... The rule of play is that kids get to interact with a doll or video game or what have you, but not so with the Elf on the Shelf: The rule is that you don't touch the elf. Think about the message that sends."

I think they could have developed a better backstory. Say, he stowed away when Santa went on his run, curious about where the frtuits of labors went. He fell out of the bag, was lost, and had to spend the year waiting for Santa to return. He had to hide he had adventures. Finally the family discovers him, and puts him back on the shelf for Santa to take. But on Christmas Eve, he loses his voice! Will Santa see him sitting on the mantle?

And then he's gone the next day, which means he went home. Something like that.

Not a spycam.

It’s not that I don’t like the subject, or the writer. It’s a combination of the two into something that elevates “food journalism” into something very important. It is not very important, although of course I should tlak.
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you will react differently to the first paragraph of this New Yorker profile, which I found mysterious: who the hell cares about any of this

Alison Roman approves of creamed greens, knobby lemons, and iceberg lettuce. She’s a slicer of onions, not a dicer; a “ride-or-die corner person” when it comes to lasagnas and cakes. She doesn’t sift flour, soak beans, or peel ginger. Instapots are a no, as are runny dressings, tomatoes on sandwiches, apples as snacks, and drinks served up. Breakfast is savory. Naps are naked. Showers are “objectively boring” and inferior to baths. The thing to do, according to Roman, is to start the water, put on a towel, and head back into the kitchen. The amount of time it takes to fill the tub is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to tear up a loaf of stale bread, for croutons fried in chicken fat.

“You either like my style or you don’t, you’re into the vibe or not,” Roman told me.

I am absolutely, fundamentally indifferent to her style. The same goes for her vibe. I hope no one ever says anything about me that centers on my opinion on knobby lemons. "Ride-or-die corner person" made me feel sorry for everyone involved. You do get a warning with the shower opinions, though. I think baths are boring. Showers, there’s always something to do, and you do it, and you’re done. Or you can relax under a hot stream for a while. Baths seem too slow, but that’s just an opinion. It has no weight, no moral implications. It's not a style. Declaring showers to be objectivly boring is not a vibe.

Roman writes in the preface to “Nothing Fancy” that she has “always been allergic to the word ‘entertaining.’ ”

God forbid we have people over and provide a friendly environment for enjoying one’s self

Yet teaching her audience how to entertain—even if she calls it “having people over”—is a large part of what she does.

“Having people over” - what a unique way of putting it!

The distinction seems to be about the appearance of caring overly much. In Roman’s world, an admission of effort must be offset by an ungiven fuck.

Ladies and gentlemen, the New Yorker.

You can see the modern-day William Shawn looking at a poem submitted by Robert Frost, thinking “wouldn’t this be better if it was the fuck ungiven, not the road not taken?”

“Roasting a nice chicken for people is such a good way to say, ‘I love you,’ ” she writes. “I recently found this note to myself scrawled on the back of an electrical bill that I had probably forgotten to pay, written one night after a dinner party.”

OH WHAT A HOT MESS

If Roman is putting out little things for people to eat, she’s calling them “snacks,” not canapés. If she’s batching up Martinis, she’ll be serving them in a repurposed flower vase.

That’s so quirky! That’s so her!

The classic domestic goddess orients herself toward others; her register is the second person (“You take the Parmesan . . .”). Roman’s pedagogy, on the other hand, is proudly egocentric.

You didn’t see that coming.

Hospitality is foremost about pleasing herself. “And then to serve it, if I were having you over, which I’m not, I would probably just, like, bring this whole pot to the table,” she says in one video. “And then I would set out cheese, with a Microplane, and you can do it yourself, ’cause I’m not your mom.”

No, because that would imply that she is an adult, and everything in this cohort - frazzled, uncoordinated, opinionated, egocentric-but-yet-self-loathing - is afraid of being Mom, but also wanting it, but also not knowing how it is even possible to be Mom, who does that?

As the writer Andrea Nguyen has observed, the brash, prescriptive “bro tone” that has served many a male food-world personality so well is increasingly becoming gender-neutral. Roman has been one of its premier female purveyors, rarely shying away from—and occasionally picking—a fight. “Rice has always seemed like filler to me,” she wrote in 2016’s “Dining In,” dismissing the world’s second most important cereal crop as though she were swiping left.

She dismissed rice. RICE.

Then she made a recipe that came from another culture in “a post in which Roman had announced a giveaway with an equity-focussed spice company, inviting readers to respond with their 'favorite ideas for dismantling the patriarchy OR cooking with turmeric.’”  It was problematic that she made this dish. This is explained for us.

“There’s a sense in editorial, publishing, and TV spaces that, if you are from a nonwhite background, what you talk about has to be generated from your identity in some way,” Endolyn told me. “But if you’re a white person you can go anywhere you want. You can talk about Asian cuisines, you can talk about African or African American cuisines, you can talk about South American cuisines. No one’s saying you can’t cook with turmeric—cook with turmeric, turn orange if you want to! The point is to recognize that people from nonwhite, non-Eurocentric cultures tend to be pigeonholed by their identity (which isn’t necessarily a measure of expertise) and not offered the same leeway to experiment, play, and ‘discover’ things.”

There’s a sense because the wokeoisie have made racial essentialism the centerpiece of their entire intellectional enterprise. And you obviously can’t go anywhere you want if you’re a white person; you will be dinged for cultural appropriation the moment you step outside of the Mashed Potato Realm. What evidence do we have that people from “nonwhite, non-Eurocentric cultures” are forbidden to experiment and ‘discover’ things? Would anyone look at a video of a woman from Nigeria making an apple pie and rear back in horror?

If someone at a food mag does make an objection, is it more likely that person is the product of an upper-class college on the East Coast, or North Dakota State University?

When Jezebel asked Roman about the issue of cultural appropriation, she dug in her heels. “Y’all, this is not a curry,” she said. “I’ve never made a curry.” She added, “I come from no culture. I have no culture. I’m like, vaguely European.”

Everyone comes from a culture. Why, one could say this is white privilege at its purest: not realizing that your culture is THE culture, and thinking that your lack of Strong Cultural Feelings means you don’t have one.

Anyway, at the end she decides to write another cookbook and make something with lentils regardless of whether she is criticized for making something with lentils, and spends $300,000 to buy a building for a new “little market, selling pantry items” in a small town in the Catskills, where she hopes the internet storm over her simultaneous dissing of Marie Kondo and Chrissy Tiegen will blow over.

We wish her all the best.

It’s 1899. Merry Christmas:

Lots of horrors, but that's the world. Especially the 19th century.

		Maybe lead with the new number?

The mine disaster, according to this page:

An hour before sunrise on December 23, 1899, engineer Solomon Meese stood near the mouth of the Braznell Mine. As the operator of the cage that transported workers up and down the mine shaft, he’d already sent a few groups down that morning. Others had gone in before he’d arrived and were busy preparing for their shift more than a hundred feet below the surface.

When a signal came to raise the elevator, Meese laid his hand on the lever that controlled it. He then heard a strange sound come up out of the earth — a rumble, a groan — and suddenly the lever was jerked from his grasp. The door to the engine room slammed shut. Then a torrent of air carrying twisted chunks of metal, smoke, and human limbs shot up through the shaft and knocked Meese to the ground. 

Yeah, it's the "Human limbs" that sets the scene.

Meanwhile, in other cluster-fargery:

That was off North Carolina. Foundered in a storm. Most seem to have been lost due to confusion, panic, and incompetent evacuation.

		Bonua points if you know what war they're talking about. Seems the Brits were having a rough go, having been softened by a half-century of fighting "inferior races."

The more things change, etc

It's time to stop all this commercialization and get back to the true meaning of Christmas!

Herewith the winner of the annual competition:

It's by Mary Dieter of Rochester. Googling reveals someone who might have been her mother, an author of an account of early MN life, as well as the loss of her husband in the Civil War.

The newspaper judges said "It is almost exactly like a painting by Verestschagin, which has often been called unnatural." They say that name as if everyone knew it. Perhaps the readers did.

I don't see the resemblance, myself.

They ran an entire page of Poetical Fancies, most of which strike the ear as leaden doggeral now.

Yes, some Christmas signifiers have changed over the years.

I can't begin to decode that.

Finally: the old standard.

The answer, as you may have guessed, was Yes.

Rather, Yes, Virginia.

		That will have to do. Now head back to the Fifties! You'll love the style! To say nothing of the vibe!