It's in Wells' novel; our narrator down in the Morlocks' enormous underground lair comes upon the remains of a monstrous feast with large red limbs still there--it's clear these are Eloi bodies. What I am not remembering if these have been cooked--I think not, since Wells would probably have intuited that central anthropological divide Levi-Strauss writes about between animals and humans, "the raw and the cooked."

And, gosh, narc, I hadn't read any of what looks like delicious fare of the 30s! Thank you! Won't look at her work now, as what I am supposed to do looms over me like a slow tsunami (for instance, I just discovered the fairy tales of Lord Brabourne [Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen, made Baron in 1880], whom I had known before as the first editor of Austen's letters in 1870--who wrote roughly a book of excellent fairy tales for about 20 years! they are a delight to read, but dagnabit I was almost DONE with primary sources!). But I will take up these beautiful honest tales of the young as soon as possible--totally up my alley.

matt: "What then emerged was a new class of thinker and experimenter. In the beginning they were grounded in faith, but then like Icarus began to fly ever closer to the sun. Perspective was lost." Excellent--think of what Newton is thinking round about now! (I'm assuming he is in whatever is celestial bliss or, following other other orthodox thinkers like N. T. Wright, in the slumber of the dead awaiting the trumpet call--the latter of which will probably be, in case, rather loud!). Hi, Buford!

That was great, Ig. "Enlightenment" and "The Age of Reason are indeed loaded terms, but for that matter so is "the Renaissance" and even the "Medieval" period or "the Middle Ages," the latter two of which suggest that between Rome and, say, da Vinci there was a great nascent movement towards Renaissance and thus later Enlightenment values. So there was, but I don't think the great monastic thinkers would be happy with that characterization.

Saw Dylan in Nashville late eighties, I think, when he had his gospel singers with him--his Christian phase, which no one knows if he's returned to because he's so gnomic--I'm listening to Slow Train Coming in his honor. I'm going to post what follows also on our other site so Kev might see it: my very nice sprinkler guy's family has substantial acreage (17K) in SW Nebraska and they just bought a herd of 100 buffalo, including three males--and an ALBINO buffalo is one of the males! He said five different tribes are all coming to his property on a set day about several weeks away, to do whatever ceremony you do when you have an albino buffalo. He and his family can invite 20 non-tribal members; I could have gone, but it's a four and a half hour drive each way, so no. But interesting, yes?

Narc, how DO you remember things like who Lefcourt was? I read Radical Chic many times as a teenager, always roaring--especially at this passage, about how preciously wrong it was to kill the WRONG animal: "Those goddamned permutations in taste! In New York, for example, Freddy Plimpton had Jacques Kaplan, the number one Society furrier, make her a skirt of alley cat pelts (at least that was the way it first came out in the New York Times). Not for nothing is Jacques Kaplan the number one Society furrier. He must have seen Radical Chic coming a mile away. Early in the game he himself, a furrier, started pitching in for the embattled ocelots, margays, fitch and company like there was no tomorrow. Anyway, the Times ran a story saying he had made a skirt of alley cat hides for Freddy Plimpton. The idea was that alley cats, unlike ocelots and so on, are an absolute glut in the ecology and end up in the ASPCA gas chambers anyway. Supposedly it was logical to Kaplan and logical to Mrs. Plimpton—but to hundreds of little-old-lady cat lovers in Dickerson Archlock shoes, there was some kind of a weird class warp going on here . . .Slaughter the lowly alley cat to save the high-toned ocelot . . . "

s/b no interest!

Re UFOs, I think the only living possibilities are a) our own super-tech which we have interest in letting anyone know about; b) demons; c) visual error; d) a mixture, quite variable, of the above. I'm leaning towards demons!

Hi, narc--thanks for asking about Nick--6 A plusses this past term (math and CSE), so while still not so happy with the management of the world is pulling through. He got to meet Pin and his son a few months through--Pin, that basil you gave me was doing great but then it wasn't--sorry!!

narc, this is rather late support, but I always click on your links. Two-thirds go through with just a second click, one-third are intractable. But it's a decent ratio.

Narc--do you know your Yertle the Turtle? Given the political waverings of Dr. Suess, it's nice that this one couldn't be more firmly for the turtles oppressed on the back of the stack and against the megalomaniacal Yertle, who ends up in the mud as he deserves after his turtle-tower-of-Babel collapses. Melinda, I've been reading here and there about this Chaos book, but this review was riveting and did what a good positive review should do, as you noted! I feel increasingly on the knife's edge in my profession--my great fortune is that I work in the nineteenth century and have always used at most bland sarcasm (I think you've seen my book). But who knows what has crossed some to-be-constructed line? I do make sustained fun of Darwin, but as he was one of the leading edge of 19th c. racism, I think that's ok. There's this beautifully clueless moment in the Descent where he says that obviously lighter skin comes from civilization, since how else would one explain the lighter skin of house servants in the American South relative to the skin of field workers? The obvious answer he couldn't even begin to think of! Both an ideologue and a babe in the woods, but neither innocent.

Matt--sumptuary laws! what a treat of a bad idea in human culture, all to keep "low-bred" people from "peacocking"! What the people who made these laws should have realized was that class distinctions would over time stay stable, because the elites always change the rules just ahead of the nouveau riche trying to avoid them. Look at the gross classlessness of Ghislaine Maxwell in her dress--just an example of how well the same system works in practice WITHOUT the stupidity of legal codification....

They gossiped like mad and had elaborate affairs, both sexual and not, plus they thought they were at the point of the spear regarding intellectual fashion, so they were themselves generally amused--but doomed of course. Riding, too--all the elites went riding, which was an actual good thing. Plus dueling--though not for ladies (or only a very few).

So funny, MM! Did men ever dress so oddly before? Well, yes, at the court of Louis XIV, and of course that's when some aristocratic ladies went so far as to have birdcages with living birds encased within their horsehair wigs...but still, I LIVED through the seventies nonsense and I only saw the excesses of the ancien regime in paintings and through Moliere, whereas I could smell the way sweat so peculiarly infests colorful polyester shirts!

God's blessings on your niece--this is such sad news, especially with the three boys--will pray.

GUS, you aren't used to my world in which a contradiction can affirm a positive--you just have to be a nihilist for it to work.

Re Midsomer Murders, I've read a lot of Caroline Graham, but it's a shame that the villain is usually a rich developer! The first one of Midsomer Murders, which I just watched for the first times few days ago, at least had an incestuous brother/sister pair for the villains. That reading by Suchet was wonderful--what a great pilgrimage for him to give readings of the Bible--thanks, Pin. MM, since history is full of fascination, I think the reason it isn't being taught is that the teachers themselves don't know much of it. Why tread on shifty ice?

Catching up-- The Smokehouse? Say it ain't so, rse. I stayed there last summer on my way back from Florida, and the ice machine was broken but the nice people in the restaurant gave me two bins' worth, then there was a terrific storm which so weighted down all of their decorative canopies with gallons of water that they all collapsed--down goes Frazier! That place has been a tourist trap (that is the restaurant and gift store) for decades. At least their swimming pool shaped like a hambone can't have been damaged... MM, loved the piece on Sargent--very useful, and good heavens, what we would do NOW for scandals on THAT level rather then the level we have descended to...

Catching up: re the Irish Rebellion of 1916 (which didn't work), one of my favorite works, and I bet one of a lot of you, is Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands (1903), great sailing book of what turns into anti-German espionage. (This book, as part of a flow of invasion literature, prepared the Brits, for ill or no, for WWI). Childers was shot in 1922 for revolutionary activities (Irish). Here is the backstory of Childers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erskine_Childers_(author)

I am trying to pin down the improbabilities in your scenario, MM--probably the media confession at the end most takes the cake. The rest, sure.

"If the thawing glaciers release anything, I hope it’s mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. That would be exciting and they could chase reporters!"--that's the spirit, MM, and your scheme would please not just geologists and paleontologists but also the general public!

narc channeling the ire of the day with aplomb: "The way i feel about the puppet regime that was imposed by a media cartel enforced by mob rules conducting soviet style purges is hard to quantify." Something to ponder in a similar mood, from Ace: "I'm tired of these feebledicked smoothbrains being constantly surprised by the obvious, and then daring to lecture the rest of us about what the Reasonable Position should be. Sarcastic Ace is the best Ace (as they say)"

Good grief--this poor celebrity not only found herself "triggered" by the aisle of NON-sugar yogurts she found herself confronted by at a frozen yogurt store, she committed herself to print to express her trauma. Really. https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-whole-experience-was-triggering-demi-lovato-attacks-l-a-frozen-yogurt-shop-for-offering-sugar-free-products?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mattwalsh. I read the whole thing through a second time because I couldn't begin to grasp the idea of being offended by low-sugar products. But she provides what she understands are reasons--you'll see.

Sikhs are great people. The burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres was a Hindu custom, and so let us remember the great Charles James Napier's reply to the Hindu emissaries explaining the necessity of the practice ("suttee/Sati"): “Be it so. "This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

s/b "wish I could unsee"