SaltShaker

 I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.”
- A. Whitney Brown, writer & comedian
Before anyone feels the need to point it out, I know I said awhile back that I wasn’t scheduling any more vegetarian dinners – but that’s not exactly what I said. I said [...]

 The system of slavery in Brazil was the longest and well structured of the Americas, with about 4 million Blacks being brought here who, enslaved over three centuries, built the fortune of the Brazilian ruling classes and increased that of the Europeans. But while they were enslaved in Brazil, the blacks resisted it in various [...]

 When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
- Walter Lippmann, Journalist

The writing of a cooking book is a difficult process, [...]

 Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet
Last week, La Nacion published a weird interactive map of the “best pizzerias” in Buenos Aires as chosen by their readers. The map is weird mostly [...]

Wood-Apple? Blue Cracker? The asteroid belt 72? Nay, not those Feronia, but the Roman goddess of… wait, of travelers, or fire, or waters, or the harvest, or fertility… no one seems quite sure, though woods and springs are some of her favorite things. All I know is that it was her feast day last weekend [...]

 Repeating the same constructive behavior over and over, hoping (one day) for a positive result is difficult but virtuous. It’s the effort made by eating oatmeal every morning, brushing your teeth after every meal and daily journaling. It’s weekly therapy, consistent workouts and taking time for spirituality. It’s Rudy trying over and over to get [...]

 Kid, the next time I say, ‘Let’s go someplace like Bolivia,’ let’s GO someplace like Bolivia.”
- Paul Newman, in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
While we know them best as Butch and Sundance, their original names were Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh. There’s a fairly good record of their lives, which [...]

 It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality.”
- Francoise Sagan, French playwright
Not that I’m necessarily in accord with the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, mine normally consisting [...]