We started with an antipasti lunch, beginning with shrimp cocktail, with the cocktail sauce made from roasted tomatillos. Then we had red peppers stuffed with tuna (from a jar). We made baccala, of course. Next came fried calamari, which I had never tried at home before. We went with calamari fritti arrabiata, based loosely on the recipe at a restaurant called Paravicini's in Colorado Springs. Unbelievable. Even my wife liked it, and she does not eat seafood.



Tonight we're having linguini with clams and mussels, and also ricotta gnocchi--my wife's grandmother's recipe (kind of like this one), made with buffalo ricotta from Italy . We'll have our family red sauce with meatballs (beef, pork, lamb) and sausage, but the sauce this time got the addition of anchovies.



That's seven total, for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. We mixed it up some, but it's a traditional Italian American thing to do on this day. Cause it's snowing outside, my folks are in town, there are three very excited kids waiting for the big guy, and it is just such an important night.



Merry Christmas everyone.

One from City Journal. Mark Riebling reviews Paul Johnson's new biography of Churchill. Riebling finds the book surprisingly lacking, but does a nice job himself of getting at the complexity of the twentieth century's essential man.

Two from City Journal. "Romantic Science," by Michael Knox Beran, a review of Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Beran writes:

If Enlightenment thinkers built on the metaphor of the well-ordered machine, the Romantics sought to understand the spark that makes a thing live, whether it be a human being, a work of art, or a nation-state. The framers of the American Constitution were deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and labored to perfect a republican mechanics of checks and balances. Bismarck and Lincoln, by contrast, grew up reading the Romantic poets and conceived of their nations as organic growths. The German nation was for Bismarck a living thing, with a right “to exist, to breathe, to be united.” Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, described the foundation of the United States as a species of live birth: the republic was “conceived in liberty” and “brought forth” by the “fathers.” Like a human being, the nation was capable of undergoing a second, spiritual birth, “a new birth of freedom.”

The organic vitalism of the Romantics did something to correct what Cardinal Newman called the “dry and superficial” thinking of the eighteenth century. But the Romantic approach held its own dangers. It is one thing to seek the secret of life, another to dabble in diablerie. Romantic wonder is closely connected to Romantic nightmare. The literary monsters of Byron, Beckford, and Mary Shelley find a political counterpart in the monstrous qualities of Bismarck’s German Reich, and perhaps a scientific one in the temptations of today’s genetic technology. It’s easy to play God, but difficult to keep hold of one’s beast.

Reading this, it's almost as if he believes there was something like Western civilization. How dare he impose his narrative structures on the chaos of existence? What power structure is he trying to impose under the guise of "understanding"? How topical am I for questioning postmodernism a decade after the fact? How many rhetorical questions can I ask in a row before it becomes obnoxious?

Three from City Journal. Also from Beran, "Can the Polis Live Again?", an essay on public spaces through a critique of Hannah Arendt. I confess that I have not done my due diligence in reading Arendt, so this blurb stood out to me:

Studying Eichmann in the dock, Arendt concluded that he was not an evil genius but a fool: “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” He was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” Arendt wrote; in his aphasic helplessness, he could but repeat, in “officialese” (“my only language,” he said), the formulas he had learned to parrot. “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to his inability to think.”

Unfortunately, her description of Eichmann sounds all too familiar to me in my professional life. Before anyone panics out there, let's not go too far with the parallels. The U.S. military is not producing a bunch of Nazis--the banality of Eichmann's evil, not the evil itself, is at issue here. Arendt, had she a greater sense of humor--or art, as Beran points out--could have beaten Scott Adams to the punch. I don't work with the SS, our banalities are benign, but I am definitely in a Dilbert world, where the repetition of cliches replaces thinking all the time.

Finally, a reminder that the book will be out by the early spring. It's called A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along, and it's about how military service in World War II led to widespread tolerance among white ethnic and religious groups in the United States. Think I can get City Journal to review it?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Conversations with children.

"Daddy."

"Yes son?"

"The bulldozer...Anthony and me...the pusher bulldozer...it's stuck."

"You mean Anthony and I...nevermind. Where is it stuck?"

"Under that...uh...long thing."

"Use your words."

"Under the...uh...the...coupon."

"You mean futon?"

"Yeah. It's under that."

Captured at breakfast recently:



Reminder: He is three years old, and that is from memory, and he did it completely on his own.

In case you would like to check his accuracy, here's the speech from the movie:

Before time began, there was the Cube. We know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create worlds and fill them with life. That is how our race was born. For a time, we lived in harmony. But like all great power, some wanted it for good, others for evil. And so began the war. A war that ravaged our planet until it was consumed by death, and the Cube was lost to the far reaches of space. We scattered across the galaxy, hoping to find it and rebuild our home. Searching every star, every world. And just when all hope seemed lost, message of a new discovery drew us to an unknown planet called... Earth.

I guess we'll take him to see part two.

Just imagine if we used his powers for good.

Random Stuff:

*I hate Pittsburgh. Seriously, I hate the frickin Steelers. Of course the hatred is fueled by the ineptness of my team, but we are going to turn it around any decade now, then maybe I won't hate the Steelers so much. Nah.

*We get it, the clydesdale's granddaddy came to America from Scotland, found his love, worked his way onto the Budweiser team, and then passed on the job to his progeny. Living the American dream. Very touching. So why did his grandson have a Scottish accent?

*My son Anthony is pretty sure mosquitos--he calls them "mocheetos"--are bad guys, which seems like a solid conclusion. He is also pretty sure that mocheetos live in caves with strangers (who are also bad guys), and that their greatest natural enemies are cows, because "Cows eat the mocheetos," which is why there are no mocheetos in winter.

*Anthony also thinks we should get coats for ladybugs, to keep them warm so they don't come in the house when it gets cold outside.

*A final note on the Anthony front: this morning, as his mother drove him to the store to pick up some mulch, fertilizer, and other springtime goodies, Anthoyn declared that it would be a good time for us to plant a cookie tree. His mother said, "Well, okay, but I don't know if the store will have any seeds for a cookie tree." To which he said, "That's okay, we'll just plant the crumbs."

*Dominic has a girlfriend at his preschool. Her name is Sydney, and she tells her parents all the time that she is going to marry Dominic because he is such a very nice boy. There is a lot of love there. So this morning Dominic made a proposal to his mother that we offer Mary to Sydney's parents in a trade for Sydney. Dominic is now the GM for Team Bruscino.

The Boy (v. 1) at his first piano recital (with a visit from a very proud little sister):