GlennFrazier.com

Arrgh! In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (which was actually yesterday—it seems to sneak up on you sooner and sooner every year, doesn't it?) I have crafted a pirate joke:

So a pirate walks into a bar, and he's fully decked out, rigged from head to foot with all the standard pirate gear: tri-corner hat, earing, eyepatch, hook, and peg-leg. The bartender notices something amiss, though: in the place of a brace of pistols, this pirate has a dead goose strapped to either side of him.

After a minute the pirate says, "What's the matter? Have ye never afore cast eyes upon Spanish double loons?"

Arrgh!

Posted by Mac at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a wonderful followup to the foie gras pizza story...

To recap, the city of Chicago has banned the sale of foie gras in restaraunts, and in response, restaurateurs(*) are slapping down "free" foie gras garnishes all over their dishes as protest.

Well, I just read about someone who took it a step further:

Chef Robert Gadsby of Chicago's 676 Restaurant is offering a seven course "Outlaw's Dinner". Here's a description from a food blog I check now and then:

...Foie Gras wrapped in proscuitto and doused with hot chocolate followed by a host of other banned foods which have fallen foul of the law in various places ranging from absinthe, to wild mushrooms and unpasteurised cheeses. He even incorporated cooking methods such as sous vide which are banned in certain states by the food police.

Brilliant!

For more on this, go to Kitsch'n'Zinc.
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( * By the way: how much longer is the "correct" spelling, "restaurateur" going to stick around in the face of everyone's natural inclination to spell it "restauranteur"?)

Posted by Mac at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saddam Hussein has made yet another stunningly hillarious pronouncement. He's going to crush our heads! Yes, the father of "The Mother of All Battles" is now ripping routines from Kids in the Hall.

Next thing you know, Bin Laden will be threatening to pinch our faces!

Posted by Mac at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just read an interesting article:

"The tragic tale of Louis Sullivan"
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/sho-sunday-sullivan03.html
Kevin Nance
Chicago Sun Times
2006.09.03

The paragraph that brought the piece to my attention was this:

Whatever his sexuality, it's clear he subscribed to a philosophical binary put forth by the 18th century writer Emanuel Swedenborg, who posited types of creativity as male or female. In this way of thinking, the rational, logical aspects of architecture -- which is to say structure -- were masculine; the emotional, intuitive impulses behind Sullivan's ornament were feminine. For him, structural matters were secondary, leading him to produce buildings that were ever more elaborately encrusted with his signature ornament, much of it derived from flowers.

Louis Henri Sullivan was a famous architect. Frank Lloyd Wright was his protege. According to wikipedia, the extremely well-known phrase "form follows function" was first coined by sculptor Horatio Greenough. It was only after Sullivan adopted it that it became a mainstream aphorism. Interesting, given that Sullivan was at least a Swedenborgian, if not also a New Christian.

The references to his sexuality, by the way, stem from a new book that seems to be just one more in a long line of revisionist histories claiming to have spotted yet one more famous crypto-homosexual. I'm not prepared to comment on the merits of this particular case, but experience has taught me to take such claims with more than a grain of salt when they are not backed up by clear documentary evidence.

Anyway, Sullivan's "arch nemesis" apparently, was architect Daniel Hudson Burnham. Now this gets me to wondering, given the "family business" nature of the New Church in America: Burnham is an "old church name", and there are, for that matter, Sullivans in the church as well; is there any connection between the Sullivan and Burnham of the architectural world of a hundred years ago and the modern Sullivan and Burnham families in the church today?

Posted by Mac at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)