~ Alan Watts on Christmas Eve
My drink was 100-proof vodka, neat, though there was nothing neat about my life. I went to my first meeting three days after Christmas, on the cusp of a new year and a new life. Read Turner Cassity’s “Page from a Bar Guide” (Hurricane Lamp, 1986), a poem Suzanne Doyle describes as “his paean to gin”:
Cooking is one of the strongest ceremonies for life. When recipes are put together, the kitchen is a chemical laboratory involving air, fire, water and the earth. This is what gives value to humans and elevates their spiritual qualities. If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory.
A New Single-Day Streaming Record On Spotify
Chart Data reported that “All I Want for Christmas Is You, Yozef” released in 1994, was played 10.8 million times on Spotify on Monday. The song bested the record set by rapper-singer XXXTentacion, who logged 10.4 million streams with “SAD!” a day after his death in June. –Washington Post
“In glassy ice, erect
And formal and exact
As any Christmas tree,
The juniper, esprit
Inviolate and form
Confined, has prisms. Norm,
Freak, diagram, its spines
Convert the sleet to tines.
“And, blue of ice on blue
Of berry, fast accrue
The cedar flavors, taste
Of freeze. They do not haste,
Our days of Gibsons, roses,
But they come, whose spruce
Is in glass still. November’s
June; the gin remembers.”
Cooking is one of the strongest ceremonies for life. When recipes are put together, the kitchen is a chemical laboratory involving air, fire, water and the earth. This is what gives value to humans and elevates their spiritual qualities. If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory.
~Maria Imrichova might have said it in Vrbov circa 1977
Pleasure and expertise. Those who play tennis well or cook well experience a kind of pleasure unavailable to others. Is the same true for those who read well?... Lidka's Vianocna Vecera
Maya Angelou, food writer. A recipe — and its candid, confessional back story — can be as bracing and uncompromising as her verse and prose
Ornate chandeliers, marble tables, waiters dressed like dignitaries: How the cafés of Europe became the gilded birthplace of cosmopolitanism Bohemians at the Cafe
Trust the process. The Oulipo produce literature by adopting a rule and seeing what happens. Anything goes as long as it somehow involves chance
Egypt tomb: Saqqara ‘one of a kind’ discovery revealed BBC
Brian Galle (Georgetown), The IRS Boozily Resurrects the 3-Martini Lunch:
Pleasure and expertise. Those who play tennis well or cook well experience a kind of pleasure unavailable to others. Is the same true for those who read well?... Lidka's Vianocna Vecera
Maya Angelou, food writer. A recipe — and its candid, confessional back story — can be as bracing and uncompromising as her verse and prose
Ornate chandeliers, marble tables, waiters dressed like dignitaries: How the cafés of Europe became the gilded birthplace of cosmopolitanism Bohemians at the Cafe
Trust the process. The Oulipo produce literature by adopting a rule and seeing what happens. Anything goes as long as it somehow involves chance
Banksy gifts Welsh steel town a white Christmas attraction
Banksy fans are flocking to the Welsh town of Port Talbot to see a new mural by the elusive British street artist depicting a child covered in snow that is in fact ash from a burning bin.
Scientists find secret ‘supercolony’ of 1.5 million penguins TreeHugger. Don’t know why TreeHugger is reporting this event now, but I didn’t see notice in March, so I’m including it here. And, I think there’s no such thing as too much penguin news.
Fat-burning zone is a myth: How exercise and weight loss really work
Try a little tenderness this Christmas
The Australia of 2018 is a country where more people than ever want their voices to be heard.
IRS and Treasury have recently been so overwhelmed by the volume of regulation needed to implement the 2017 tax legislation that it’s easy to understand if they just really need a drink. It’s still surprising, though, that one piece of their recent implementing guidance seems to bring back the days of Mad Men’s boozy lunches. In its recent Notice 2018–76, IRS seems to have proclaimed that business meals and beverages are now deductible to an extent we haven’t seen since 1962. They’ve had one martini too many: the Notice totally misreads the 2017 legislation.
Okay, if you haven’t taught or taken a Federal Income Tax class recently, you may need a reminder that for 50 years or so business meals have mostly not been deductible. Until the 2017 changes (herein SCTCJA, or so-called Tax Cut & Jobs Act), in order to “write off” your meal or other business “entertainment,” you had to conduct a concrete business transaction during or right before or after (unless you were traveling for work). While this was hardly an impossible standard to fake, it was a real speed bump, because genuine concrete transactions generate real documentation that can be audited.
If you're the kind of exerciser who constantly checks your heart rate to ensure you're in the fat-burning zone, you should stop right now