This is what we're having.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

Homemade bread, decent butter, peach-fig jam, balanced with organic, free-trade, dark-roast coffee. Lunch is already made - jambon on the home-made bread with some havarti - may add a little Dijon mustard (from Dijon).

I am such a Frenchie.

Bon chance on the election tomorrow, though it seems that luck won't be needed.

paul spencer

Last night it was mashed celeriac and potato (from our cold room) with blue cheese and a claytonia (from our garden) garnish, steak, and snow peas (frozen from our garden), along with baked apple (we turned our apple crop into applesauce so we bought some) with maple syrup, cinnamon and rum for dessert.

_{aspiring to genteel poverty}

Yle: Study: Internet addiction shrinks grey matter

You can't be me, I'm taken

OMG I hope that I will be able to still dance the quick step at 94 like Mathilda.

Please watch beyond the first two minutes. :-)

Cauliflower casserole.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The Donald Trump for President

You can't be me, I'm taken

He's level with The Rocket again...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Al-Jazeera on Greece. Al-Jazeera, not The Onion. I repeat, not The Onion.

Europeans are regularly skewered by many in the US for having "messed up" Greece. Meanwhile, the United States is doing no better with its own special ward, Afghanistan. There is plenty of blame to go around, but ultimately nowhere more than in the two troubled countries themselves.

The parallels between Greece (from a European perspective) and Afghanistan (from a US perspective) are astounding. Both have turned out to be very expensive engagements, taking up extraordinary amounts of decision-makers' time in Brussels and in Washington. Both have disproportionately dominated global news headlines for quite a long time.

And yet, for the extraordinary degree of European and US engagement, the growing expectation is that much of the effort will be for naught. The principal reason for this disappointing state of affairs is that Greece and Afghanistan have political leaderships focused mostly on serving their own personal interests. In both countries, there is widespread corruption and a general inclination among the elites to take foreigners for a ride.

Hamas Chief on 'Noble' Women Rabbis | The Forward

As it turned out, he was fascinated with my wife; downright astounded, in fact, to learn she is a rabbi.

"There are women rabbis?" he asked.

I broke the news to him: In the U.S. seminaries of Judaism's non-Orthodox streams today, something like half the students entered are women.

I explained to him how Dianne's decision in 1992 to become a rabbi was nevertheless a deeply wrenching one. It made her an outcast in her own community, among the highly patriarchal Syrian Jews of Brooklyn. Basically, I said, what was for my wife her proudest intellectual achievement was for her community an absolute scandal.

"But why?" said the Hamas leader. "She's done nothing wrong. What she's done is noble."

It is inevitable after an interview like this that a reporter immediately thinks of dozens of questions he should have asked but didn't. In this case, I realized the obvious one on the plane home: And what about women imams?

Anyone up for posting an OT for Sunday?

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin