tim merritt [dot] net

The Omnivore – Learning to Eat Everything. By Jeffrey Steingarten in Slate (from 1996!) .

People should be ashamed of the irrational food phobias that keep them from sharing food with each other. Instead, they have become proud and arrogant and aggressively misinformed. But not me. When I donned the heavy mantle of food critic, I sketched out a six-step program to rid myself of all puissant and crippling likes and dislikes.

Radical Georgia Moderate – Hidden provision in Voter ID bill
“So, bravo to the Republicans for once again out-thinking the Democrats.” How did they out-think them, and on what issue? They made it harder for folks to vote in runoff elections. Follow the link to the Radical Georgia Moderate for more details.

Jeffrey Rosen in The New York Times Magazine: The Unregulated Offensive

As Epstein sees it, all individuals have certain inherent rights and liberties, including ‘’economic’’ liberties, like the right to property and, more crucially, the right to part with it only voluntarily. These rights are violated any time an individual is deprived of his property without compensation—when it is stolen, for example, but also when it is subjected to governmental regulation that reduces its value or when a government fails to provide greater security in exchange for the property it seizes. In Epstein’s view, these libertarian freedoms are not only defensible as a matter of political philosophy but are also protected by the United States Constitution. Any government that violates them is, by his lights, repressive. One such government, in Epstein’s worldview, is our government. When Epstein gazes across America, he sees a nation in the chains of minimum-wage laws and zoning regulations. His theory calls for the country to be deregulated in a manner not seen since before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Is That a Poem? – The case for E.E. Cummings. By Billy Collins, at Slate

“In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and letters, employing eccentric punctuation, and indulging in all kinds of print-based shenanigans, Cummings brought into question some of our basic assumptions about poetry, grammar, sign, and language itself, and he also succeeded in giving many a typesetter a headache. Like Pound, who never wrote an obedient line, Cummings reveled in breaking the rules of grammar, punctuation, orthography, and lineation. Measured by sheer boldness of experiment, no American poet compares to him, for he slipped Houdini-like out of the locked box of the stanza, then leaped from the platform of the poetic line into an unheard-of way of writing poetry….”

Paul Ford of Ftrain shares some thoughts on health insurance benefits:

“What insurance promises is continuity in the face of fate. If you’re uninsured and you get hit by a car, you are basically screwed. While you heal up you’ll have a hard time making a living, and once you’re healed you’ll have an itemized hospital bill as long as a novel to pay down for the next several years. But if you’re covered, you’ll spend some time being tended by doctors and nurses, then you’ll return to the life you had before you were hurt, and things will be roughly as they were, and you can forget that anything bad ever happened. That’s the promise….”

And why, exactly, isn’t this available for everyone?

”[This tip] involves two things: 1) images that are transformed to a size, say, 75% or smaller from the original size, and 2) the Unsharp Mask filter. Now, I’m speaking in Photoshop terms on that second one, so those of you who speak Fireworks will have to translate for the rest of us.”

Using the Unsharp Mask to make smaller images look better on the web. It works, too.

NY Times: Museums by Day, Hospital (With Hotel Rooms) by Night

First link for research on a trip to Paris. In this article, on less than – ahem – $250 a day. Ouch.

Peter Hertzmann’s recipes for fine French cooking, painstakingly presented. Also well-diagrammed knife skills, including illustrations, and more and more. The lamb recipes attracted me first, and apparently legs of lamb are on sale after Easter….

After showing off iMovie and my Manila blog, I’m showing Erica my WordPress site. She’s going to show me her favorite cricket site!

Smithsonian Global Sound: “Beautiful music from around the world. $0.99 downloads. Audio samples. Support local musicians and archives.” Files in MP3 format, with no DRM limitations. Via boingboing.net.

At J.D.’s, our group watched Matewan, about the 1920’s effort to organize the coal mines. I can only paraphrase Sayles’ comments in the production notes from the DVD, but the combination of capitalist greed at its most rapacious and a violent leftist populism makes for a powerful and disturbing story.

Capitalism brings wealth and benefits to many, but like all human-made institutions, it’s a flawed system that can do great damage when moved to excess. It needs to be restrained before it can do too much harm, and that’s where unions can level the field. They too, are flawed institutions, which must have restraints as well… that’s part of the complex system we’ve set up for ourselves. We have to work it out or fight it out, over and over, as these tensions flex over time.

Fight the good fight, as the old hymn goes.