Cultural Offering.com

Quotation for a bold year

2012-02-09T11:54:57Z

"Fortune befriends the bold."

John Dryden

Food in jars

2012-02-09T02:42:37Z

I now want to start canning.

Pickled red onions, blood orange marmalade, cheese and sunflower seed crackers. I'm hungry.

A quick check of the site did not uncover an "apple pie" recipe. So here you go (use Everclear and store in Mason jars).

Thanks to bookofjoe.

"one by one"

2012-02-09T01:40:31Z

George Will examines the generational criminal recidivism and one idea to break the cycle:

"Born to an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute, he acquired his interest in driving from his grandfather, who would drive around the block with Sugar Bear in his lap. Not until Sugar Bear was 25 did he learn that his grandfather was his father, too, having had a sexual relationship with Sugar Bear’s mother.

Sugar Bear grew up mostly on the streets, episodically drifting into and out of the care, such as it was, of various female relatives. He kept moving on because one relative was beaten to death in an alley, another was killed by a shotgun blast and another had Drano poured in her eyes for reasons Sugar Bear does not remember. He supported himself gathering discarded bottles for their deposits and cadging hamburgers and peanut butter sandwiches from sympathetic strangers."

Thanks, David.

If you have to ask. . .

2012-02-09T01:23:24Z

Ever looked at Christie's Luxury Real Estate auctions? Finishing touches are being made on our ~~basement~~ lower level makeover (drop ceiling panel installation is hell on the neck). Don't even ask; it's not for sale.

I see the old Woolworth place is up for sale. $90,000,000 seems a bit steep for a unique fixer-upper opportunity.

Quaint little place in Ireland.

Music for a Tuesday - Bach and Schubert

2012-02-07T11:37:07Z

Simone Dinnerstein's promotion for her new album, Something Almost Being Said. Traveling today and it is loaded for the trip:

"Everybody brought their 'A' game"

2012-02-07T03:57:17Z

Ian McShane explains Deadwood on Charlie Rose:

Project work

2012-02-07T03:44:04Z

Safety first. . .but coolness is a close second.

It's called planning but it isn't

2012-02-06T18:14:40Z

Execupundit points to a video lampooning the planning process in San Francisco.

Be sure to click through, listen and read the accompanying explanation. I wonder why so many small businesses never get started?

Halftime

2012-02-06T12:16:38Z

Amid all the sex and cleverness, words put together to form a complete thought.

The basics

2012-02-06T11:48:40Z

"The first thing you learn coming into the kitchen at The Inn at Little Washington is how to sweep the floor. No one knows how to do that anymore. No one ever showed them, ever!

I explained how to let energy flow into the broom handle, and how pleasurable it was when I was the broom, and how efficient the sweeping became. I then suggested that they all go to their dorms and practice."

Read on at Wanderations. Everyone should know how to sweep the floor.

Define "nearby"

2012-02-06T11:40:49Z

Good News: Scientists have discovered an "earth-like" habitable planet orbiting a nearby star.

No So Good News: "Nearby" means 22 light years away.

Quotation for our times

2012-02-06T11:37:05Z

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

H.L. Mencken

Bate on selling

2012-02-06T11:35:09Z

Get the Kindle edition of Nicholas Bate's How to Sell Brilliantly in Good Times and Bad at Amazon.com for free. I bought it several years ago and loved it (review here).

Learn

2012-02-05T14:08:38Z

That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

I hope you read The Hammock Papers regularly. You'll learn something.

That it were true

2012-02-05T13:54:22Z

. . .the quotation or the sentiment. President Obama misquotes Lincoln and doesn't mean it anyway.

"We always called each other by our last names"

2012-02-05T12:56:10Z

Execupundit points to a must-read 1956 Paris Review interview with Dorothy Parker. So many lessons on life and work and humor.

Just one taste:

INTERVIEWER

Your first job was on Vogue, wasn’t it? How did you go about getting hired, and why Vogue?

DOROTHY PARKER

After my father died there wasn’t any money. I had to work, you see, and Mr. Crowninshield, God rest his soul, paid twelve dollars for a small verse of mine and gave me a job at ten dollars a week. Well, I thought I was Edith Sitwell. I lived in a boarding house at 103rd and Broadway, paying eight dollars a week for my room and two meals, breakfast and dinner. Thorne Smith was there, and another man. We used to sit around in the evening and talk. There was no money, but, Jesus, we had fun.

Funny because it involves the classification of species

2012-02-05T12:40:59Z

BuzzFeed has classified Facebook into its 46 Types of Users. Article here.

My favorite, of course:

Available Tuesday

2012-02-05T12:22:52Z

Kill Shot, the new Vince Flynn book, comes out Tuesday.

Thanks, Dr. John.

8.3 percent of what?

2012-02-04T21:47:28Z

James Pethokoukis digs into the recent unemployment numbers at the American Enterprise Institute's Enterprise Blog:

"1. If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7 percent then vs. 63.7 percent today—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.0 percent.

2. But let’s not go all the way back to January 2009. In January 2011, the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent with a participation rate of 64.2 percent. If that were the participation rate today, the unemployment rate would be 8.9 percent, instead of 8.3 percent. As an analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies concludes, “Most of the shift of the past year is due not to the improvement in the labor market, but the continued drop in participation in the labor force.”

3. Now, to be fair, some of the decline in the participation rate is aging Baby Boomers dropping out of the labor force. But taking that into account still doesn’t get us very far, as HPS notes:

Demographic projections expect that participation rate to be at 65.3 percent. If that full participation rate is the goal, our economy is “missing” 3.8 million workers, up from the 3.4 million we noted in the white paper. The unemployment rate in that context has not budged at 10.4 percent."

Economist Brian Wesbury accounts for the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusted its working age people numbers in January but I don't think Wesbury's point resonates when you go back beyond two years. Worth reading here.

If I am missing something, I am open to suggestion on this.

Striped ties. . .

2012-02-04T15:47:45Z

and many others here.