Pickled herring in a white whine sauce is phenomenal. Seek it out the next time you're near Scandinavians.
2: I forgive you. I had a typo in the post at first, but I get to fix mine, and presumably only the RSS feed people know about it.
One of my grandfathers subsisted for years on pickled herring in mayonnaise, which you can get mixed all together in giant jars. Seems like a food-poisoning invitation to me, but apparently not.
I have a half-empty jar of pickled herring in cream sauce in the fridge right now. First half was dinner on Sunday. My Jewish Mormon missionary companion introduced me to the stuff in Ukraine.
I had a typo in the post at first
Is this where I say that it's been days, and the typo in the Tiger Woods post is driving me bananas? (Sorry, heebie, I know I'm shallow.)
Pickled herring in a white whine sauce is phenomenal. Seek it out the next time you're near ScandinaviansRuss & Daughters.
My Jewish Mormon missionary
Come again?
You've never had herring? Bad Pole. Herring is also the best pairing for good, ice cold vodka. Never been to Russ & Daughters, bad New Yorker me.
6: You mean the possessive in the first line? I only noticed because I went looking to see what you were talking about.
Russ & Daughters is really, really great. Herring might actually be my favorite food in the world. The baltic/Scandinavian/Jewish kind, though, not the fatty kind you get in Holland.
I wish we had a Russ & Daughters here. We can get top versions of almost all of the Ashkenazi food groups, but there's sadly no great place that I know of for great pickled herring.
Elder Fr/edman from Sc@rsdale. His mom's parents had converted, and his dad converted after marrying his mom.
6, 10: We're supposed to read the posts?
I'm also pretty sure I've never had herring.
Maybe you did but it tasted like pilchards. And only one miracle needed for canonization in these reduced times, Saint-to-be Stanley!
14: I'm going to push for "St. Anley".
I can't find the definitive answer, but some say his second "miracle" was his chastity and one incident in particular(a little over halfway down--but clearly there are other miracles claimed).
This Robert told the witness what his uncle (a certain brother Stephen, a worthy religious) had told him concerning Thomas's imprisonment in the castle of Montesangiovanni, when his brothers abducted him from the Order and tried, unsuccessfully, to make him discard his religious habit and, with it, all his good intentions; and of how his brothers sent a pretty girl to his room to allure him to sin; and of how Thomas, seeing her and feeling the first effect of her presence in himself, snatched a log from the fire and indignantly drove her out, and then, with the tip of the log, marked a cross on the wall in a corner of the room; and then prayed long and with tears to God that no carnal impulse might ever corrupt his mind or body. And so praying, Thomas fell asleep; and in sleep he saw two angels come to him.... And they bound his loins, saying: 'In the name of God we bind you with a chastity that will resist every temptation.' And he cried out with the pain of that binding, and so woke up; but to no one would he disclose the cause of that cry; until later he revealed it, with many other things, to his socius for the love he bore him.
Whatever, it's all pretty goddamn weaksauce.
My favorite justification of his canonization was that 'every article of the Summa is a miracle.'
The page that Stormcrow found has the contemporaneous account of the miracle of the herrings: " Asked if he knew of other miracles attributed to brother Thomas, the witness said that he had heard of many; and in particular that when Thomas lay sick in the castle of Maenza and was urged to eat something, he answered, 'I would eat fresh herrings, if I had some.' Now it happened that a pedlar called just then with salted fish. He was asked to open his baskets, and one was found full of fresh herrings, though it had contained only salted fish. But when the herrings were brought to Thomas, he would not eat them."
That version makes it sound as if Aquinas was a liar.
A Franciscan wouldn't be so picky about food.
19: Yeah, they'd probably be all, "Let's go get some bánh mì and make fun of Oakland."
Nice use of the accents in banh mi, Stanley, but even in SoCal we know that the good Norcal banh mi is in San Jose.
22: So I still managed to make errors, both acute and grave?
(I'll be here all week. Try the herring.)
||
The opposite of a rat orgasm:
Cannabinoids were initially evaluated in the mouse tetrad assay to determine doses that do not induce hypothermia or catalepsy. The automated mouse forced swim (FST) and tail suspension (TST) tests were used to determine antidepressant action
|>
Beamish, I hope it won't offend you if I say that the title of your most recently published paper is kind of funny.
Because the implication is obviously false, or because of a slang sense of 'represent'?
Eh, I'm old and out of touch. (You're reading it like 'South Philly represent!'?)
Yep! It's the only sense of "represent" with which I'm familiar which is customarily used without an object.
I am reading it now!
Hmm. I thought it could be used ordinarily and intransitively, but on checking a dictionary, I see that you are right. Embarrassing. Isn't this the sort of mistake that referees are supposed to save you from?
If you feel like it, let me know what you think. I'm going to sleep.
I am basically in agreement, though I found the argument about long experiences kind of puzzling, in part because when talking about something one is tempted to call long experiences, especially when these are associated with interruptable and resumable actions (planning an invasion, e.g.), it seems odd to me to describe it as an experience, or as if there was the experience of planning the invasion. (I have no qualms about e.g. the question "can you describe the experience of planning the invasion?"/"it was the most stressful thing I've yet experienced"; it's just talking about having that experience that seems odd. I have no idea whether to put any weight on that feeling of oddness, though.)
(It also seems likely that your opponent will just deny your second premise in your first argument—though obviously getting into that would require a rather longer paper. I also wonder if someone might simply deny that representation requires the possibility of misrepresentation. Someone at a colloquium recently asked Michelle Mont/gue a question about this (since she seemed, IIRC, to be committed to such a denial) but I can't remember her answer since I was confused by something else in her talk. A person who thought something like that might then try to defuse the argument with Dretske at the end of your first argument by saying perhaps that the most an experience could represent would be on the order of "climbing this mountain"? I dunno.)
Nice use of the accents in banh mi, Stanley, but even in SoCal we know that the good Norcal banh mi is in San Jose.
Nope. The best banh mi in the Bay Area is right here in Oakland.
i thought this would be about tasty protein that is low on the food chain and unusually healthy.
anyway, whats that bloke on the left's name? can't say where i've seen him before
So Aquinas was the first to reveal the answer to the question: What's green, hangs on a wall, and sings? I don't think he came up with that himself.
You people are impossible. They would have torn the witnesses to pieces on the stand if they could! Viz.:
Asked how he knew that the fish were herrings, he said that he had seen salted herrings at the papal court at Viterbo, so that he knew herrings when he saw them. Besides, brother Reginald, who had eaten fresh herrings in the countries across the Alps, declared that these were herrings too. Asked how they had been cooked, he answered that some were boiled and some fried.
31: Thanks. I think your oddness intuitions may have been corrupted by philosophy. To my ear, it's perfectly natural to talk of 'the experience of growing up on a farm' or 'the experience of working in a bakery' and that these are both much more ordinary than 'the experience of seeing a red tomato.' Perhaps the plain people of the internet can chime in, if they can be brought to care.
My first inclination is to say that it's a deep fact about representation to say that it can go wrong. If you've got a sign and a signified, then the sign could always be there without the signified. But maybe that isn't true. Can a numeral misrepresent a number? I still think that, absent a reason to think otherwise, where there is representation of a contingent thing, the representation could exist and the thing represented not.
anyway, whats that bloke on the left's name? can't say where i've seen him before
David Mitchell? I've linked to stuff with him before. Or are you funnin' me? It's too early yet to fun me.
Note: Not the David Mitchell who wrote the Cloud Atlas that isn't the other Cloud Atlas.
Since this is the theology thread, I had a somewhat unsettling discussion at work with a couple of folks on what the Immaculate Conception really is*. Yeah I know, asking for it, but I presented it just as a semi-OT "bet you've got this one wrong" bit of trivia during a conversation with otherwise generally reasonable people. None of them were offended, but after they got over their disbelief (sort of), the consensus seemed to be that I had tread on dangerous ground by bringing up something that contradicted what so many folks believe. Kinda weird.
*We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.
--Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854
37:
Substantively irrelevant terminological quibble - using "signifier" and "signified" in this way invites confusion with the Saussurean usage, on which the signified is not the referent of the term, but the mental concept expressed.
Saussure: I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifre] and signifier [signifiant]
Also, I strongly disagree with the idea that being able turn the food you get into the food you want is anything less than awesome.
41: Perhaps I'll be more careful about that in the future (depending on the audience). Still, it seems like on Saussure's terminology, a sign doesn't signify the signified, contrary to the usual rules governing past participles. Maybe the problem is with the translation. Is signifre a term of art? The past participle of signifier is signifié, according to wiktionary.
Was nobody else bothered by the smarminess of a bunch of English guys, who are presumably at least passively/ethnically partially Protestants (Fry seems to be part English & part Hungarian Jew, and Davies seems to be entirely English, and Wikipeda doesn't note that they are Irish or Catholic, as British bios often do) making such one-sided and exaggerated fun of sainthoods and Thomas of Aquinas, without really talking about who he was, or acknowledging that they're making fun of someone else's religion? It seemed to go beyond merely making fun of religion in general, though obviously there was some of that, to specifically exhibiting a completely assumed contempt for Catholicism, which just seems a little creepy in light of the often violent English dissolution of monasteries, destruction of icons, and frequent execution of resistors during the Reformation and Civil War. It reminds me of the icky moment in The Good Soldier when Florence nastily points out some artefact of Luther's reformation:
It's because of that piece of paper that you're honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived. If it weren't for that piece of paper you'd be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly the Irish. . . ."in front of Ashburnham's Irish Catholic wife.
I mean, obviously they're entitled to make fun of whomever they like, but there's something graceless about the way they're making fun of people whose predecessors previously died for it at the hands of theirs.
45: Jimmy Carr, who was there, is of Irish descent and jokes regularly about his Catholic upbringing.
Yeah, I didn't want to go through the trouble of figuring out who the other guys were; I am slightly mollified thought I still think it felt smarmy; at some level it's none of my business.
I still think it felt smarmy
QI? Never!
Was nobody else bothered by the smarminess of a bunch of English guys...
No, not really. I thought it was funny (if a bit smug, yes). The idea that no English person of Protestant background can make a joke about late-medieval Catholicism without being called to account for the dissolution of the monasteries seems a bit much to me.
I'm going to push for "St. Anley"
There is a local parish that we call Stan's Church, like Stan's bar or Stan's Hardware. (St. Ann's).
49: well, I wasn't saying that exactly except they seemed so very contemptuous. Anyway, whatever. I'm not invested enough to defend the point, it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Yes to 49. I don't think anything they're saying crosses a line; they tend to be kind of dismissive of Catholicism in the UK, yes but by comparison in the US our default is to treat it with discursive kid gloves - I remember being shocked when I first read a Guardian article excoriating John Paul II, without knowing why since I have no love for Catholicism or religion in general, and realizing I had never encountered anything like it in American newspapers.
Also Fry mentioned along the way that Aquinas had written some great books.
they tend to be kind of dismissive of Catholicism in the UK,
Well, they do have that long tradition of burning the Pope in effigy.
45:Bothered more than you can possibly imagine, even as a nominal atheist. That scene is the moral and intecctual center of the Ford novel, followed by Leonora's
"Don't you see," she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a really horrible lamentation in her voice, "Don't you see that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world?
And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them... ."
I connect directly and causatively to Why Is Economic Inequality Higher in English Speaking Industrialized Democracies which gets interesting around comment 17, when they start discussing analytic philosophy and English empiricism.
And it is all in The Good Soldier. That is what modernist novels do. I suspect if I accept the AUFS challenge of Omensetter's Luck I could explain even more.
s/b intellectual
I got excited
I haven't participated in the CT thread. I figured it would be boring and Henry deletes my comments at whim. But then Burritoboy showed up, and now I hope John C. Halasz, renowned Internet Hegelian & Heideggerian econophile, will also contribute.
And here is Nick Rowe with a comparison of economics and modern art, but so far, it is pretty clueless. What, I would expect somebody to have an understanding of both economic modeling and post-modern theories of representation?
Only Halasz.
Have I amused you yet? Babble babble, walking the dog.
Have I amused you yet?
Sure, I just imagine you saying "walking the dog" like Beavis and Butthead doing "breakin' the law".
but by comparison in the US our default is to treat it with discursive kid gloves
Yes, exactly. I guess I'm as Catholic as the next (sort of semi-lapsed, but not always, so not really) Catholic, but the American media's weird deference to religion is something that I find quite creepy. So I see the British attitude of irreverence as sort of refreshing by comparison. And it's not that I'm indifferent to the historical context cited by Ile in 45, and if something strikes me as anti-Catholic (and especially as anti-Irish-Catholic, really) in a certain way (aimed not so much at the theology as at the practitioners of the religion as a kind of ethnic slur), then, yeah, I'll likely be a bit irked by that. But jokes about Aquinas and standards of canonization are just fine by me.
And I really really hate it when media people use phrases like "man [or woman] of faith" as though this were some sort of objective descriptor. I mean, what the hell?
44:
I don't think it's a translation problem - i.e. it seems to be a genuine difference in usage, as evidenced by Saussure's earlier claim: Indeed, we should not fail to note that the word-image stands apart from the sound itself and that it is just as psychological as the concept which is associated with it So Saussure's 'concepts' are genuinely intended to be mental entities.
Notwithstanding, looks like there was a typo in the translation, which I cut and pasted. The original has "signifié" (Isn't there some rule that attempting pedantry sooner or later involves you in error?)
I agree that the Saussurean usage is a bit unfortunate, by the way, but I don't know that it commits you to accepting that the signifier doesn't signify the signified. That would follow if "signify" has to mean "refer to", in the analytic philosophy sense, but my feeling is that in popular usage x can 'signify' y as long as x in some way or other indicates y or has y as part of its import (as in "full of sound a fury, signifying nothing"). "Signify" is like "mean", in this respect. (Then both the Saussurean usage and the analytic philosophy usage are different ways of technically regimenting the popular usage. I agree that the latter is more useful for purposes of philosophical hygiene.)
Well, they do have that long tradition of burning the Pope in effigy.
There's one town where they do that. Everbody else burns a 17th century terrorist in effigy, which is surely harmless. "Pope Night" was an American tradition; in England it's always been "Guy Fawkes night" (which is a little hard on Robert Catesby, who was the brains and organiser of the incident.)
If Ile wants to see people being contemptuous and dismissive of the Catholic church, she should try reading some of the Irish alternative media sometime.
a completely assumed contempt for Catholicism, which just seems a little creepy in light of the often violent English dissolution of monasteries, destruction of icons, and frequent execution of resistors during the Reformation and Civil War.
Or, on the other hand, entirely justified in light of the Marian Persecutions. But, yes, what Mary Catherine said.
And I really really hate it when media people use phrases like "man [or woman] of faith" as though this were some sort of objective descriptor. I mean, what the hell?
What do you think is a better way to collectively refer to religiously observant people of varying faiths? I grew up saying "religious people" but I've moved away from it as an adult because it sounds (is) faintly pejorative.
Theists? Not that anyone actually uses the word, but that means it hasn't got any unpleasant connotations I know of.
63: What do you have against Buddhists, LB?
(which is a little hard on Robert Catesby, who was the brains and organiser of the incident.)
A little easy on him, rather, isn't it? He's not getting burned in effigy.
I'm not sure, but I think mostly it's that I've never liked orange as a color for robes.
62: That's a good question. I don't have a good answer. What about, simply, "religiously observant people"? No, that has too many syllables.
Theist is good, but would probably offend many people.
Bible- thumpers, but that is limiting.
"Observant Christian," or whatever they are? Plus that's descriptive in a way that emphasizes they're in the minority.
63-70: And this is why I use "people of faith." It's the only phrase I know that manages to encompass plurality while distinguishing observantly religious people from those who identify or are identified with a religion through culture or "blood."
Remember that I'm working in a city that includes Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhist, Jews, Christians, animists, Hindus, Jain, and practitioners of various other East Asian, African, and Indian religions. It's a real issue when you're speaking in public. Nobody has time to list all the possible groups, plus doing so also opens you up to all of the infighting if you use an umbrella term that some people don't see themselves as part of. (I was so puzzled as a child by the demand: "Are you Christian or Catholic?")
And the other problem with "theist" is that it's not well-known enough in English. It intimidates native-born Americans who feel stupid not knowing the word, and it confuses non-native English speakers. Starting off by confusing and intimidating the audience is never a good idea.
I haven't participated in the CT thread. I figured it would be boring and Henry deletes my comments at whim.
Judging just by his CT behavior, Henry comes off as something of a dick. As obnoxious as D-squared but without the brains, humor, or panache to pull it off.
"People of faith" is one of those clunking phrases that personally grates.* Mary Catherine's suggestion in 67 is, to my ears, much better. Or just plain, "religious people", or "religious believers", or "actively religious people", or any one of a number of equivalent phrases.
Also, for what it's worth, "faith" is a fairly Christian concept, so I wouldn't be too comfortable making any great claims for that as a nice over-arching term for different religions. Faith doesn't play any role at all in some of the religions you mention. If I was a Buddhist I could get quite pissed off at being lumped in with people 'of faith'.
Assuming you were the tense, touchy kind of Buddhist.
I think they need to drop the whole "serenity" thing if they want to fit in the U.S.
re: 74
You can take the man out of Scotland ...
72: Speaking of D2, did anyone else see his (polite, utterly non-confrontational or bomb-throwing, and profanity-free) performance in the Reason comments in re Journolist? It was . . . something. (He was trying to sort of jolly them along.)
77: link, please? I don't follow Hit 'n' Run, although Welch did call me humorless recently.
78: Oops. Here you go! He's very nice to them. I think our feelings ought to be hurt.
79: I think maybe calling people cunts is dsquared's way of showing affection.
78: Golly, Welch is a wanker. His "omg national health care is terrible, but of course my family all goes to France for ours, since it is weird that people with our attainment of cultural capital don't have health care to match it in the States -- I mean, we're fancy white people, ffs!" article was something else.
80: I suppose. If ever a room deserved to be smithereened in c-bombs, that's it.
Wow, amazing equanimity by D-sq in the face of extreme provocation. Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. Maybe the American (lack of) libel laws are more effective at controlling speech than the British libel laws are.
Hey, Josh, nice post on the Jewel thing. Gotta check out your blog more.
Christ, he goes above and beyond the call of duty there. 82 is right.
Let's just agree that any word for trying to encompass all followers of all religions might be rejected by many UU types, Buddhists, or both.
I would also like to know what people think of this week's Modern Love, since I know the writer and I am afraid it might be as unbearable or more unbearable than the typical Modern Love.
The first two paragraphs grate enough that I'm considering not reading further, but that's probably just because I'm a hedonistic Californian who can't imagine not having seen a pomegranate before the age of 18 so it all rings false.
I don't think the story is any more unbearable than the typical Modern Love - it's just the typical overwrought language and emotion with a relatively sweet story at the heart. I could identify, sort of, and that's usually impossible with those columns.
I object to reading anything from the Sunday New York Times before Sunday.
(I realize that half the east coast gets the schmancy sections on Saturday, to say nothing of the internet. Still. Bah!)
Ned, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as a normal one (though I was a bit biased since I was referred to it from this sitr) and actually seemed like a nice counterpart to the creepy wedding post. Plus googling the quote supposedly from the beloved's profile doesn't show me who she is, so that's a privacy plus.
87.2: Apparently, nobody I know in Pittsburgh is interesting enough to make the NYT. I'm going to call that a win and leave it.
I have more tolerance for modern love than most. This one was slightly overwrought as usual, but sweet. Plus it was very self-effacing, there was no passive-aggressive self-aggrandizement by the author, which I appreciated. I expected when it started that it would be about how the author stopped relying on the awesomeness of others and discovered her own inner awesomeness, moved beyond being a follower. But it wasn't at all -- the author was total loyal to her basic feeling that her friend/romance was a remarkable person. Thumbs up to that, sometimes we just meet remarkable people and take the memory and loyalty with us.
But my favorite Modern Love is still the woman who married the random Chinese guy who couldn't drive and brought him to upstate New York where he crashed her car.
73: Yeah, "religious believers" to me is about as good/bad as "people of faith.*" And POF is indeed clunky, to be sure.
The difficulty is that sometimes what you're trying to evoke (or at least what I'm often stuck trying to do) is "people whose belief in a formal religion, divine power, or other animating spirit is what drives them to take action on _____." So it's not just about showing up at a church or temple for religious services periodically -- you're trying to describe a whole universe of people for whom, say, opposition to the death penalty springs from the teachings of their formal religion OR spiritual sense of ethics and human rights, etc.
Bah. The whole thing is difficult.
*Although for me personally, Quakerism is not something I "believe" in, so feels marginally more accurate to say I'm a person of faith. But we're not talking about me.
slightly overwrought as usual, but sweet
I second this. Not unbearable.
77: Huh, that's very interesting, and no, I hadn't seen it.
I thought this was the most notable of his comments:
I don't agree that it has been "addressed". The lady in question [Shirley Sherrod] is still out of a job. Even if she is reinstated, where does she go to get her reputation back? Even if she gets her reputation back, who is going to compensate her for the horrible experience she's been put through.
This is a property rights issue. Someone's reputation is their property (for a lot of people, their reputation is the single most valuable thing they have). They have the right not to have that property damaged by other people's falsehoods. That's the state of the existing law in the rest of the world, and in America for that dwindling class of people who can't be involuntarily kicked through the "limited purpose public figure" loophole.
96: Gosh, when I read that second graph I thought -- "You do not even believe this. You are pandering to the Reason crowd." Property rights!
DD was pandering in one sense but he was also completely correct. He was trying to put the sense of violation people experience when their reputation is trashed into terms that libertarian knuckleheads would understand. Ownership is a really lousy frame to try to jam the entire world into, but it's true that if we own anything, we own our name and reputation.
Actually, the fundamentally communal and social nature of reputation shows up what a lousy metaphor ownership is.
97-99: See, I didn't think of it as pandering, I thought of it as a remarkably effective bit of code-switching.
98/100: Yeah, pandering was the wrong word. I found the "code-switching" sort of heavy handed and obvious, I guess, and the schmibertarians didn't take to it either, it seems.
I don't really see why a libertarian should object to a group like journolist, anyway. Won't we all form such elective communities in the coming utopia?
102: Maybe they're upset that this community existed on the government-created internet.