Category Archives: Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Old Book Love, a Pub Renewed, and More

Here’s a Thoroughly Professional Video showing a couple of my antique books. They aren’t commercially valuable, but they’re pretty and have the humanistic value of a great books. On the left is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a Walter J. Black edition, which I think means it’s cheap. I say it’s leather bound, but I’m sure it’s imitation leather. On the right is the Works of Edmund Spenser, an 1895 MacMillan edition.

It’s too bad I don’t have something really nice to show you, but I may record more physical books to better reveal their tangible value, especially if I can up my A/V quality.

Inklings: “The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) has purchased the historic Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’ from St John’s College, with plans to refurbish and reopen the space to the public.”

Poetry: From Philip Larkin
“For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.”

Horror: Mike Duran has written on horror stories and how they fit with a Christian worldview.

Also, some of the story of the man who portrayed Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist.

(Photo: “The Eagle and Child,” Hofendorf/ Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

A Con Artist, Betrayal, and Artificial Intelligence

If the Christian life is one of continual repentance, then what do we do with a minister who has lived in sin for many years, justified his sin with spiritual abuse, and disqualified himself from ministry–most of which was learned after his death?

One of my friends brought up an apologist who recently passed away and was subsequently exposed as having lived an abusive life for years. Before his death, we thought he was a great Bible teacher. Now, we slough off his books at the used bookstore. Aren’t his books still as good as they were before? He compared the apologist to King David, who sinned far more extensively than we usually give him credit for. We overlook Solomon’s gross sins too.

I didn’t say anything this time. I’ve argued my case before, and maybe it doesn’t sit well with me.

The comparison to David doesn’t work. He and Solomon are categorically different. We look to them and see the Lord’s saving grace unbound.

Should we reject a man’s published work for a pattern of sin mostly uncovered after his death? Does known sin raise any theological questions? The man wrote a book on living the faith we profess, and we should consider its merit on the words of the books, not the life of the author? If this were a local pastor, would we continue to distribute his books, studies, and recordings as if it’s all academic? No. If he were a local pastor, we would expect him to be excommunicated were he still alive. The filth of his sin touches everything.

But that argument doesn’t sit easily with me, because I think of readers down the road who won’t know of the sin. They’ll only know the books, and perhaps the Lord will demonstrate his unbounded grace yet again.

I assume you know whom I’m talking about. It still hurts to remember it. Why do I feel betrayed by someone I didn’t know personally? I don’t know. It isn’t academic for me.

What else do we have today?

Deception: I recently listened to the first season and a little more of a well-produced podcast by Brian Brushwood called “The World’s Greatest Con.” Brian is a good storyteller, and this show is dynamite. The first season is on Operation Mincemeat, a scheme from WWII to deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allied would attack Italy.

Artificial Intelligence: “With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that.”

This rings true to me. Microsoft’s Bing AI presents itself as if you’re talking to an intelligent friend, but it doesn’t give answers any better than regular search results. Microsoft seems to think we all want to search as if we’re talking to someone IRL, but if it doesn’t understand us like a friend could, it’s pointless.

Orthodox Church: St. George’s Church in Drohobych, Lviv Oblast (west Ukraine), is a gorgeous work. It “is a unique monument of Galician wooden architecture of the late 15th – early 16th centuries. It is one of the best preserved monuments of old Ukrainian sacral architecture.”

Also, St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (via The Cultural Tutor).

Coffee: I don’t mind pumpkin spice, but I don’t drink it either. “Six bucks is a small price to pay (apart from still being scandalous and highway robbery) for the appearance of agency.”

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

When Did Biscuits Become Light and Fluffy?

A visiting preacher from England spoke out our church last year, and he share what he was offered for breakfast by his host on his first morning in our city. There may have been more to the offer, but he focused on his initial take on being offered biscuits and strawberry jelly. He knows how Americans use English differently than he does, but he couldn’t help reacting to the thought of having cookies and strawberry Jell-O for breakfast, because that’s the British use biscuits and jelly. For the actual food he was being offered, he would have said scones and jam.

The American Encyclopaedic Dictionary of 1896 defines biscuit first in this way: “Thin flour-cake which has been baked in the oven until it is highly dried. . . . Plain biscuits are more nutritious than an equal weight in bread, but owing to their hardness and dryness, they should be more thoroughly masticated to insure their easy digestion.” Among other explanations, the writers warn that toasted biscuit crumbs have been used to “adulterate coffee” grounds (which is far preferable to sheep dung, if adulterated coffee is all they have at the market). They also allow that some biscuits are “raised” with shortening or “lightened” with baking powder and perhaps known to be dunked in coffee, but this definition doesn’t carry the weight of authority of the first one does.

Look at the etymology of the word, and you see what our forefather’s bit into. Biscuit comes through the French from the Medieval Latin biscoctum, which means “twice-baked.” It’s something of a fraternal word to biscotto, which is actually baked twice and dunked in 99.97% pure coffee.

So, how did twice-baked flour discs become comforting bundles of all that’s right with the world?

Shawn Chavis of How Stuff Works attributes it to improved flour coming out of Midwestern mills and the invention of baking soda in the 19th century. In these early days, risen biscuits were called “soda biscuits” by some to distinguish them from the regular kind.

Fluffy biscuits rose in the South for a variety of reasons. Debra Freeman writing for King Arthur Flour notes regional biases sidelined this quick bread in the North and allowed it to flourish in the South. Mix in particular creativity from various African Americans, and Southern biscuits were popping out of American ovens from coast to coast.

Photo by Stephen McFadden on Unsplash

Word Games, Moscow, and the Secret Life of a Librarian

I may have just found a book I must read this year.

Joel Miller asks, “If you lived in a society that was strictly and officially materialist in which the state and its officers vetoed disagreement, what would you do if you still recognized the transcendent and dissented from the party line?”

One option would be to “write a surrealist satire that mocked the materialists and dropped the devil and his entourage in Moscow to bend the party line well past breaking.”

That’s what Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov did in his posthumously published work The Master and Margarita (1970). Miller explains one of the author’s themes this way. “For all their anti-capitalistic propaganda, Muscovites were every bit as covetous and grasping as anyone, maybe worse. And as far as the Soviet insistence on strict atheism, Bulgakov replies: Fine, if you won’t have God, you can have the devil—and the devil will have you.”

Word Games: Merrium-Webster shelled out an undisclosed 7-figure amount to purchase Quordle, the word-guessing game that gives you four target words at once. I played many times last year and have gotten away from it for a while. Returning to it this week has not been easy. I want to blame Wordle’s hard mode. You can’t guess four words at once while using all your current hints. Maybe the dictionary has placed harder words.

Quordle is a different challenge than Daily Sectordle, which gives you 32 words at once.

Are word games actually good for your brain? If it’s a challenge, if you aren’t running through them on auto pilot, then yes.

Librarian: There’s a novelization of Belle da Costa Greene, the woman who built J. P. Morgan’s personal library, by Alexandra Lapierre. Gina Dalfonzo writes, “Lapierre is the kind of writer who can make a rare book auction into a thrilling action scene, and make a reader yearn to hold a copy of the bejeweled 8th-century Lindau Gospels. She gets you so caught up in Belle’s untiring passion for her work, it tears at your heart to think that Belle would have been barred from that work if her heritage had been known.”

Finding a Good Home for Books: Steve Donoghue says being a “book person” tends to attract orphan books. “I’m talking about squalling little orphans furtively deposited at the back door of the rectory by tearful (or grateful) parents who have decided that their babies will have a better chance for happiness if cast onto the mercy of a rude stream than if they stay neglected and underfed at home.”

Apocalypse Next Door: Russian sci-fi novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky says his apocalyptic novel set in the Moscow metro system is selling well after his government condemned him for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Coffee: At least among customers of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, iced coffee has overtaken hot coffee orders by three to one. Next month, Starbucks is changing its rewards program to make getting free hot coffee or tea 100 stars (not 50) and free iced coffee or tea 100 stars (not 150). Fans are upset, maybe because handcrafted drinks cost 50 stars more, maybe because change of any kind upsets people.

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash

Will We Overcome by Faith, Remembering Poetry, and the Importance of Librarians

Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory begins in a Mexican state that has outlawed the church and attempted to drive Christianity out of its culture. Priests have been executed. Churches have been repurposed or destroyed.

The first section contrasts two priests. Both are despicable, but one deeply believes God made him a priest and that duty is irrevocable. Even when he wants to run away to save himself, he turns back at the call of duty. The other, Padre José, is a priest in name only.

In one scene, José is walking alone between grave stones and interrupts a family burying a child. “They had been quite resigned until he had appeared, but now they were anxious, eager.” They are familiar with and resigned to the patterns of death, but when they see José, they remember their hope. They beg him to pray for their daughter, saying he could trust them not to say anything to the authorities.

“But that was the trouble–he could trust no one.” He fears one of them will naturally tell someone else, and he will be found. The family has more faith than he does. All he can do is tremble in the grip despair has on him.

Believer, it doesn’t take a murderous state to press you into fear that sharing or expressing your faith publicly will get you condemned. Mere criticism can do that, but God is greater and calls us to overcome the world and our own pride by being transformed by the knowledge of him.

Poetry: In this old blog post, Patrick Kurp shares an anecdote of Shirley Hazzard talking with Graham Greene about remembering lines of poetry.

Coffee: A rambling post on coffee, writers, and books. Camus asked, “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” Did that man say anything worth hearing?

Book Blogs: Are these the 50 best book blogs of 2022? How could they be? We aren’t on the list.

Librarians: “A Good Research Librarian Can Help You Find Information You Didn’t Even Know You Needed” (via Books, Inq)

Photo: B.P.O.E. Elks Lodge, Alturas, California. 1991. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The Powerful Rings So Far, Libraries, and Freedom in Commitment

Someone in our house picked up Amazon Prime, which means we’ve watched five episodes of The Rings of Power. If you remember what Lars said about not watching it, those reasons still stand. After the first two shows, I told the rest of my family it was not a Tolkien’s story, but a good fantasy that leaned heavily on Tolkien’s established world. It could have been independent of Middle Earth, but then it wouldn’t have gotten all of the hype, fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come out of the woodwork to comment, and it wouldn’t have disappointed viewers as badly as it has.

I can’t say I’m in the most disappointed camp yet, though I have my complaints. Straight out of the gate, the writers tell us there was a time without darkness, which I took to mean evil had yet to come into the world, but they follow those words with little Galadriel getting bullied over her toy boat. Then they say, you know why a boat floats and a rock sinks? It’s because a boat has hope and keeps it head up. If the dialogue had maintained that level of inanity for the whole first episode, I would have dropped it, but it improved. Not before arguing that Galadriel, who had bent her life on stamping out Sauron, was in danger of sustaining the evil by seeking it, because if evil isn’t out there, but you think it is, then you could become the very thing you seek.

Those were meta level reasons I said the story wasn’t Tolkienesque, but it still seemed okay as we moved along. Characters weren’t doing stupid things until maybe episode five. A wizard-like character who fell from the sky has not been explained–he’s interesting. The Sylvan elf is the only one fighting at this point and has gotten in some good Legolas moves. The Duran-Elrond storyline is good overall.

But with episode five, things have begun to turn sour. There’s a laughable fighting tutorial that suggests swordmen should fight with their feet, not with their arms. An actor with stage fighting experience has a couple videos in response to this part of the show, in which he explains how actors swing weapons to appear lethally aimed when they aren’t and what the camera must do to make a battle look real.

  1. Fight Scene Autopsy
  2. How Fights Tell a Story

I could say more, but many others have said many things about this show already. I should just move on with blogroll links.

Bookcases: “We’re so enamored of digital technology we often presume its superiority; worse, we sometimes forget its alternatives even qualify as technologies.” Joel Miller recommends a bookcase as the most underrated user interface we have.

Coffee: Artist Alyssa Ennis paints detailed architecture and landmarks of Northeast Ohio using pencils and coffee. Her dad sculpts wildlife models from wood.

Liberty: Peter Mommsen writes about our love of liberty, fear of commitment, and the freedom found in making good vows. “I soon discovered that being bound [by a vow] didn’t feel like a loss of liberty. On the contrary, once the step had been taken, paralyzing daydreams about other possible life paths disappeared . . .”

Libraries: The Palafoxiana Library in Puebla, Mexico is the oldest public library in the Americas. “On the first floor, there are more than 11,000 Bibles, religious documents and theological texts. The second level is dedicated to the relationship between God and people — chronicles of religious orders and the lives of saints — and the third contains books on physics, mathematics, botany, language, architecture, even carpentry.” (via Arts Journal)

Photo: Springfield Library, Springfield, Massachusetts. 1984. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

A Grand and Splendid Feast from History

And now for something completely different, “grand and splendid entertainment in two courses” from a 200-year-old cookbook.

Food scientist Anne Reardon worked through the recipes recommended a couple centuries ago for an entertaining meal and shares her family’s opinions on them. It’s impressive, historical, and sometimes gross.

Reardon’s YouTube channel is excellent for exposing silly or dangerous food hacks in other videos and explaining how to bake things well.

Beautiful Summer, a Small Hotel, and Coffee Orders

Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Then, were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

— Shakespeare’s Sonnet 5, on the fading beauty of summer and distilling it into perfume to preserve it. Applies to making jams and canning vegetables too.

Sovereignty: Faith from Staton Island writes maybe her personality or being a first-born or Chinese heritage or being a mom has trained her expect to serve others all the time. “At church events, standing in line at Panera, on elevator rides with strangers, reading an email, as long as another person is in my physical or mental space, I’m “on.” Unless I’m completely alone, and sometimes even when I am, I can’t help being vigilant for needs I may be called on to meet, sensitive to what demands my presence may similarly impose on others.”

So, it’s a great relief to her that God needs nothing from us. “That he who made all things, owns all things, and doesn’t use his creation to supply his needs. Rather, he is ever the gracious Giver, ever the joyful Benefactor in our relationship, the Source of life itself.”

“If he needs nothing from me, I can pray— really pray, not worrying about my anxiety or anger or foolishness swaying his judgment or burdening his mind. I don’t need to hedge my request in polite, calculated consideration of his limited supply of patience and help.” (via Keith Plummer)

Lincoln: “Where did Lincoln stand in the vanguard of antislavery and abolitionist advocates, and did he change his views over time?” What can we learn from the many African-American visitors Lincoln received in the White House? Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church said, “President Lincoln received and conversed with me as though I had been one of his intimate acquaintances or one of his friendly neighbors.” (via Prufrock News)

Quaint Photos: “There’s a small hotel/ With a wishing well/ I wish that we were there together.” Here’s a photo essay of the Stockton, New Jersey hotel that inspired that Broadway song.

LOTR: You were asking yourself the other day what characters from The Lord of the Rings would order from a coffee shop, weren’t you? Kaitlyn has your answer. “Merry Brandybuck orders an Irish Cream Cold Brew with cold foam and cocoa powder sprinkled on top.”

Photo: Library (Allegretti Architects), Saint Joseph, Missouri. 1991. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Heeding the Dark Side, Janus-headed Poetry, and Serpents in the Classroom

“Nature’s dark side is heeded now–“

Herman Melville wrote a poem in 1860 of his “Misgivings” before The Civil War.

“With shouts of the torrents down the gorges go,
And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.”

We’ve had storms and rumors of storms for about a month.

This week, the Russian army bombed a large theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, trapping over a thousand people who were sheltering from the siege. Last week, The Guardian ran an article reporting that some believe such destruction is an intentional effort to wipe out Ukrainian heritage and identity, to steamroll their country into Soviet-era sameness with Russia. (via Prufrock)

It’s difficult to take my mind off of the rattling, explosive thunder from the other side of the world. But here are a few other things.

The Complete Review reads The Runes Have Been Cast by Robert Irwin (not a recommendation to our readers, but still of possible interest):

With its colorful characters — notably Raven and Wormsley, but also, for example, Molly (who admits: “I don’t want a happy life. I want an interesting one”) — and a composed-seeming Lancelyn who finds himself coming apart in a world he can not readily categorize and impose an order on, much of The Runes Have Been Cast is tremendous good fun.

Poetry: “De la Mare (1873-1956) was among the first poets I read as a kid. Much of his verse is Janus-headed.” (via Books, Inq)

Coffeehouse Renovation: The Christian Study Center of Gainesville, Florida, is raising funds to renovate Pascal’s, their university community’s coffeehouse.

Education: Thomas Korcok’s Serpents in the Classroom reveals the religious agenda of many who formed how we think of education today. He shows how “these pillars of today’s education rejected Christianity and offered their approach to education as a way to undermine its influence and instill in young people something better.”

Camus: Albert Camus’s The Stranger “was first published in an underground edition in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France, a time of widespread killing without emotion or remorse. It excited controversy from the start; Jean-Paul Sartre admired the novel but called it ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ …”

Pilgrim’s Progress: “Bunyan gives us four ways to engage in the mental and spiritual fight. We have to fight thoughts with thoughts, words with words, untruths with truths.”

Photo: Belmont County Courthouse, Saint Clairsville, Ohio. 1995. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

A Bright Age for Dropouts Drinking Coffee and Reading Defunct Lit-mags

One of my daughters likes spicy food but doesn’t eat it much. She’s willing to try anything hot, and this week it was a dried Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest pepper. I urged her to prepare for eating it by reading what she could find online, but no, she just scarfed it up and downed a milk shake as a counter measure. She told me she was going to do it but not when she would, so I didn’t know she had until she came to us at 1:30 a.m. to ask for help with sharp stomach pain. She threw up a few minutes later, which I understand is a normal response to eating these peppers.

So what are we linking to today?

Local Coffee: Some poor businessman failed to read the room when launching plans to remodel an Arby’s in Livingston, Montana, into a Starbucks. The community has a number of local coffee shops, like Chadz on N. Main and Eastside Coffee in the historic district, and the Livingston Business Improvement District don’t want Big Coffee to put a squeeze on them.

The Bright Ages: On the latest Prufrock podcast, Micah Mattix talks to the authors of a medieval history that focuses on many of the details we ignore about the Middle Ages. “It was, for the most part, seen as neither a virtue nor a vice that a city or region would contain various people from various places speaking various languages. It was a fact.”

Kudos to Mattix’s revived Prufrock newsletter, which you can subscribe to through the website of Spectator World.

Dropping Out: Hippies and drop outs were afraid, in part, of societal brainwashing and the mind-control everyone was talking about in the 60s. They wanted to know and live their true selves. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Closing Shop: Literary magazines are being shut down. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Racism: A popular anti-racist author claims, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That’s how you fight bad discrimination, friends. You fight it with your own discrimination.

Photo: Newman’s Drugs, Lake Huntington, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.