Who knew that Ettore Boiardi (later Chef Boy-Ar-Dee) had such a storied career.  Think about that next time you have canned ravioli to soothe your soul.

And go nominate my pal GottaLaff for a Shorty Award for politics. Because she’s smarter than the average pundit.

But IOKIYAR – she will pay no price.

My favorite historian:

Sadder, wiser, those of us gathered on the Washington Mall in the freezing morn of Mr Obama’s inauguration can see now that of all the brave, unsustainable hopes uttered by the new young president, the most unsustainable of all turned out to be his Biblical plea to “put away childish things”. He might as well have tried to legislate the word “dream” out of American public discourse. Dreams? Reality? It’s not even close, is it?

And if you haven’t seen Schama’s A History of Britain, shame on you.

An America Lost in Fantasy Must Recover its Dream [Financial Times]

Preznit git bad review:

Decision Points flaunts its postmodernity by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. That is to say, the parts that are not outright lies – particularly the accounts of Hurricane Katrina and the lead-up to the Iraq War – are the sunnier halves of half-truths. The legions of amateur investigative journalists on the internet – as usual, doing the job the major media no longer perform – are busily compiling lists of those lies. Gerhard Schroeder has already stated that the passage in which he appears is completely false. And even Mother has weighed in. Interviewed recently on television, she said she never showed Junior that jar, but maybe ‘Paula’ did. (It was assumed we would know that Paula was the maid.)

Probably the first and last time I will see the names George W. Bush and Michel Foucault in the same piece.

‘Damn Right’, I Said [London Review of Books]

This snowstorm is different, somehow – this is W 30th Street this afternoon and a buried cop car:

At 6:30 this evening I was amazed to see that 7th Avenue had yet to be plowed. The response is not so Bloomberg this time.
Read more »

This is my bedroom air conditioner with its blanket of snow … I love the winter.

Today it’s Gordon Ramsay’s Glazed Ham with pear and tomato chutney.  He’s something of an asshole, but his recipes work. I don’t have a written recipe, so the amounts are estimated. You can watch him do the ham about 1:50 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF5c5U4HhKE

So here are the ingredients:

Read more »