This 3Quarks Daily post from a few weeks ago takes an easy swipe at TV cooking shows by loosely dividing them into three main types: “Exotica” (lots of unusual ingredients, expensive kitchens, etc.), “Dumb Gluttony”, and “Celebrity Chef”. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the various genres of food television, and he’s missed some of the categories that Food Network has experimented with to greater and lesser success, most notably the competition/reality genre, but some of his observations are good.

Sometimes I wonder how much longer the Food Network and its imitators (mainly the Travel Channel) can go on. I have to admit that the advent of the competition shows on Food Network really revived my interest in that channel after several years of them casting about for programming other than the traditional cooking show. There were definitely a few lonely years in there where there wasn’t a whole lot worth watching. Maybe Food Network will ultimately find itself going down the same road as the History Channel, which is no longer about history, and TLC which is no longer about education (TLC originally stood for “The Learning Channel”) and stop running food-related shows entirely.

Not just a gambler, he cheated too: A fan proves that Pete Rose corked his bats during his quest to become baseball’s all-time hitter. This ESPN column from last summer tries to come to terms with the reality that Charlie Hustle will never be in the Hall of Fame, but in light of this article it’s hard to justify any sympathy at all.

I was moved by this story at Salon by musician John Manchester, who is the son of the late historian William Manchester. William Manchester, who died in 2004, left instructions that his children should build a coffin for him by hand, and in this article his son writes about not just trying to figure out how to do it, but figuring out why his father wanted them to do it.

From the department of “Capitalism Destroys Everything”, this post at 3Quarks Daily by Jeff Strabone makes an observation that should seem obvious but apparently isn’t to a lot of people: the insatiable juggernaut of capitalism compels corporations to do anything and everything they can get away with under the letter of the law in order to turn a profit, so if you want to rein them in, your only recourse is to regulate the motherlovin’ shit out of them. The folly of Reaganism is the single most destructive thing that happened to the United States in the 20th Century, though it has taken these last 30 years to really bear fruit. This may be our last chance to reverse Reaganism once and for all.

The gift that keeps on giving: this Fast Company article documents the ongoing health nightmares affecting people who helped clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill 21 years agom which are already beginning to show up in workers cleaning up along the Gulf Coast. So far the human death toll from this incident is still 11, but how many more lives will it eventually claim.

Finally, something we’re still Number One at! This post at 3Quarks Daily by Adam Ash dissects the characteristic of national superiority that defines a handful of nations — China, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the U.K., and, of course, the U.S. — and wonders if the world wouldn’t be a much better place if they gave up their over-inflated self-importance. Frankly, it’s a nice breath of fresh air for a piece like this to acknowledge that we Americans are not the only ones who cannot see beyond our own noses; the Big Three European powers certainly have had their moments, and certainly the xenophobia-cum-racism of both Chinese and Japanese exceptionalism rate high on the scale of general assholery.

For me, the money quote is this section where he talks about how America reacted (and is still reacting) to 9/11:

What in fact did we do after 9/11? Instead of taking the moral high ground, a pedestal upon which we were suddenly thrust by the rest of the world — in Iran they held candle-lit vigils for us, Le Monde thundered “We are all New Yorkers now” — we sunk lower than sharkshit into the deepest assholumbra of assholectonomy. Instead of using our elevated moral position to examine ourselves, and come up with a measured look at ourselves and a suddenly changed world, and to render a semi-mature judgment about what had happened and how a civilized nation should respond, instead of thinking and weighing and reasoning the whole thing out among ourselves like the democracy we’re supposed to be, instead of stepping up like adults, we behaved like a child who stubs his toe and hits the smaller kid next to him for relief. We did not rise to the occasion. We did not even stoop to it.

It brought out the demon in us which, heart-breakingly, might be what we really are.

Definitely worth keeping in mind this week as we all sit glued to our television sets watching most of these World Assholes duke it out through the proxy of men and women in oddly-colored skintight superhero suits and goofy helmets.

The December issue of Vogue has an excellent interview/profile of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Van Meter. It’s gotten most of its attention from the behind-the-scenes explanation of how she came to accept the offer to be Secretary of State when she really did not want the job. The piece really shows Hillary’s ability to keep moving forward despite being tossed around by political misfortunes not entirely of her own making, and leaves me genuinely feeling like the Democrats picked the wrong nominee. For all the Hillary Hatred that the right would have mustered up against her, it couldn’t be near as bad as the batshit-insane stuff they’ve plastered Obama with, and I think she would probably have made more headway by now than Obama. Most insiders expect that she won’t stay if Obama wins re-election in 2012, but unlike Bill Clinton, who’s massive ego keeps him going and going and going, it’s hard to see what she would do ex officio.

Last week’s New Yorker takes a peek inside the world of Michelin restaurant reviewers. While all restaurant reviewers have to struggle with maintaining anonymity, the people who work for Michelin are a whole order of magnitude more secretive about it. Author John Colapinto’s description of meeting one of the reviewers who covers New York City for lunch at Jean Georges reads like the machinations of a James Bond novel…and it seems the Michelin people prefer it that way. There’s some criticism of the guides and their old-fashioned biases toward traditional French restaurant cuisine, and after reading the challenges the reviewers themselves face in having to maintain their secret identities, having to live up to the demands of the guide’s management, and having to eat everything on their plate everywhere they dine, I think I won’t be applying for that job.

This original post at the group blog 3Quarks Daily by Evert Ciliers gets down to brass tacks about Afghanistan: it was stupid to go to war there in the first place, everything we do there is back-assward, and Barack Obama is only making things worse by prolonging the conflict in order to look tough. Here’s the money pull-quote, which is actually a quote from John R. MacArthur at Harper’s:

“’Fighting terrorism’ in Afghanistan ‘to prevent another 9/11′ simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers. No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being ‘soft on terror’ in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as ‘humanitarian interventionists’ — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s ‘civilizing’ mission in the world includes not only establishing ‘democracy’ but also ‘freeing’ Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”

If you’re still operating under the delusion that Barack Obama is Superman, hopefully this article will dissuade you of that once and for all. If you’re operating under the delusion that Our Soldiers are Fighting For Our Freedom, this probably won’t change your mind because you’re too big a dumbfuck to get it.

Most of us who cook know that saffron is one of the rarest and definitely the most expensive seasoning in the world. We also know that the reason saffron is so expensive and rare is that the threads are actually the stigmas of a specific crocus flower, Crocus sativa, grown primarily in the Mediterranean region and parts of the Middle East, and must be harvested carefully by hand. Cooks use saffron for the concentrated carotine that turns anything it touches bright yellow, as well as its slightly bitter flavor and aroma.

If you want to know more, then let me point you to these three links from 3QuarksDaily, where Elatia Harris has been writing about saffron intermittently since 2007. In these articles, Harris not only writes about the culinary aspect, but also the history of saffron as medicine, luxury, cultural artifact, and more. If these articles aren’t the chapters of a book-in-progress I’ll eat my hat (seasoned with saffron, of course).

Yesterday, my good friend Solonor tagged me with one of those chain-mail memes.

Usually, I don’t participate, but the meme was to identify 10 excellent blogs, and he was very kind to include me in his list of those that earn the distinction in his opinion, so I figure it’s only fair to play along.

My RSS feed reader tells me I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-165 blogs that I follow these days. Luckily for me, not all of those blogs post every day, or even every week, otherwise I would be so far behind I’d never catch up. Over the last couple of years, though, the content of my list has shifted along with the trend in blogs. Where it used to be that my entire blogroll was personal blogs, now the overwhelming majority of blogs I follow are topical, and the few personal blogs that remain are generally low-frequency posters.

So I found it quite difficult, honestly, to come up with a list of 10 really good personal blogs. What I ended up with is two lists of five blogs — one list of blogs that I really enjoy reading, and one list of blogs that I really enjoy looking at. I also ended up with a big empty space in my heart where all those friends from the early days used to be; blogging was a lot more fun when everybody knew everybody else.

My five favorite blogs to read:

1. Metamorphosism — This is, in fact, the only really personal blog on the list. I admire Mig for his wit and his insight, his sense of the poetic, and his genuinely warped sensibility.
2. 3QuarksDaily — Best group blog I know of; lots of great links to top-quality articles and other blogs, but also a fair amount of original writing by some of the contributors, including poetry. Because a number of the contributors are non-Americans, the point-of-view of the blog is refreshingly free of the American perspective of the world. This may be the best blog I read, period.
3. Dangerous Intersection — Also a multi-author blog, although the primary voice belongs to a fellow named Erich Vieth. His posts are intelligent and well-crafted most of the time, with only the occasional minor rant. I find myself agreeing with his opinions and/or appreciating his explanation of an issue over and over again. I realize the inadequacy of my own original writing every time I link to one of his posts and can only manage to croak out “Me, too.”
4. bookofjoe — Joe has a sharp eye for cool stuff, and often has good links to articles about a wide variety of subjects; I especially appreciate it when he blockquotes the entire article in his post rather than just posting a link, since newspapers and other periodicals often have stupid linking policies and/or the tendency to expire articles after a few days.
5. Daylight Atheism — There are a lot of atheist blogs right now, but “Ebon Musings”, the author of this blog, is one of the few who takes the time to write thoughtfully in a way that is purposefully designed not to confront believers but to try to explain to them why atheists think the way they do on certain issues and why religious dogma is so often inadequate.

Five favorite blogs to look at:

1. Roadside Scholar — Gigi Leonard blogs about art, crafts, design, and other cool things. I never know what to expect from her site, only that it will be fun to look at. She’s great about linking to the websites of the artists she features and she occasionally interviews them as well. I find her blog restorative after having plowed through a pile of tech blogs.
2. La Tartine Gourmande — most food blogs are visually appealing, but this food blog goes to 11. The author is a food stylist as well as a cook, and the craft shows. Plus, she often has wonderful stories about her recipes and her life in France.
3. Radiology Picture of the Day — I just find this site fascinating. Traditional radiology requires a great deal of observational ability to make out meaningful details from what generally appear to be grey blobs, and yet when you know what to look for it is a powerful diagnostic tool. Most of what this blog shows are X-rays, but the occasional MRI and/or other more modern medical imaging technology are all the more amazing when they appear here. Decidedly not everyone’s cup of tea, but I can’t stop looking.
4. Strange Maps — Many of us who spend time on the Site Which Must Not Be Named have become fans of this blog, and the pictures that he posts often appear on our web community’s site. Maps are strange and wonderful things indeed — informative, imaginative, wishful, controversial, and beautiful. This site captures all of those things.
5. Retro Thing — James Grahame, the site author, always has some tidbit from my childhood, or the tantalizing world that existed just before I was born, or some gadget that came from the inscrutable world of Japanese retro-tech, and yet the blog isn’t steeped in hipster irony or kitsch at all.

A-list Blogger Anil Dash has some tips for those of you considering making your first visit to New York City. They’re mostly common-sense and offered with the perspective of someone who actually lives in Manhattan and is forced to encounter skyscraper-gawking, fanny-pack wearing tourists everywhere he goes.

And if, for some reason, you eschew his sage advice to leave the car at home, Asad Raza at 3QuarksDaily has some first-hand suggestions on how and where to park in Manhattan

This essay, written by Alon Levy (scroll down through the contributor list to find his bio), offers some very good insight into the context of religion as an element of conflict, particularly in the Middle East. As he points out, in our multicultural society in America, we see religion as a sort of ideological division, but in other countries religion is virtually inseparable from racial determinations, and thus humanity’s neverending ability to invest hatred against “the other”.

Most of the contributors to 3Quarks are foreign nationals living in America — Arabs, Indians, Israelis, etc. — and so they are able to write from outside our somewhat blinkered American perspective. While that makes, at times, for essays that I find it hard to become too involved in, at other times, like this one, it’s like a shaft of light on a particular subject. The present debate on religion in America is decidely ideological, even as we find ourselves becoming far too involved in conflicts where the issue of religion is wrapped up in issues of race and culture. But even our own debate has the tinge of racism about it when you begin to look a little closer at the rhetoric from the religious right (and now also beginning to come from the secular left).

Worth reading.