Miscellaneous

H.I.F. A few "Today I Learned [http://en.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/]" entries from Reddit: The McRib is only "back" whenever pork prices are lowest. Link [http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage]. A trivia book author included a fake entry that said '

British scientists are saying King Tut died in a chariot accident. I think he was texting.

Great passage from a 1999 interview with Joseph Epstein [http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/ba990630.htm]. I've emphasized the last sentence because (i) it parallels the Samuel Johnson quote that has graced the top of the TDE page for nearly ten years, and (ii) it&

Miscellaneous Rambling Best link of my weekend reading: The Ten Commandments of Government [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-02/10-commandments-government]. They're all relevant and accurate, but I think I liked the Tenth Commandment the best: "As government grows ever more powerful, it must also become increasingly oppressive

H.I.F. Time to whip out that Eddie Murphy routine about shooting the Pope (PG-13 content) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuHNq07Cwms] then going to Hell: "It came out this week that the NSA spied on the headquarters of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and United

H.I.F. I learned about Google Scholar [http://scholar.google.com/] last week. It "provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online

H.I.F. I read a ton of Brownson while writing my biographical essay about him. Brownson's apologetics are like nothing you've ever read: opaque and thick, drawing upon the philosophy of Pierre Leroux, relentlessly and painstakingly logical, almost as though he were merely following the

H.I.F. "A new study found that 30 percent of Americans admit to getting most of their news on Facebook. You can tell news anchors are trying to compete with Facebook because tonight Brian Williams' top story was just a picture of his cat." Fallon

Drinking Quotes Kingsley Amis explains why moderns drink: "While the village remained the social unit, strangers appeared seldom, and when they did were heavily outnumbered by your family, your friends, people you had known all your life. Nowadays, in the era of the business lunch, the dinner party, the

If you want to see a Catholic historian implement some of Franz Oppenheimer's findings (purposefully, I don't know), check out Christopher Dawson's essay, "Warrior Peoples and the Decline of Archaic Civilization" (found in Dynamics of World History), in which he points out