"...and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck."

At Making Light, Jim Macdonald ponders the moral lessons that can be learned from the folksongs of the British Isles:

Avoid navigable waterways. Don’t let yourself be talked into going down by the wild rippling water, the wan water, the salt sea shore, the strand, the lowlands low, the Burning Thames, and any area where the grass grows green on the banks of some pool. Cliffs overlooking navigable waterways aren’t safe either.

[...]

Going to sea to avoid marrying your sweetie is an option, but if she hangs herself after your departure (and it’s even money that she’s going to) her Doleful Ghost will arrive on board your ship and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck.

If you are a young gentleman who had sex it is possible the girl won’t get pregnant. In those rare instances you will either get Saint Cynthia’s Fire or the Great Pox instead. No good will have come of it.

[...]

Professions to be particularly wary of: clerks, salty sailors, serving maids, blacksmiths, highwaymen, gamblers, rank robbers, stonemasons, soldiers, tinkers, and millers. Anyone described as “jolly,” “bold,” or “saucy.” Supernatural creatures are best avoided. If they can’t be avoided, they should be addressed respectfully. If a supernatural creature sets you a task you’re well and truly screwed.

Bar culture in Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is awash in bourbon. And beer. It's a drinking person’s town, due in no small part to the state’s bourbon heritage and the city’s nickname-namesake brewery, Falls City. This is where the Old Fashioned was invented. It’s where Al Capone dodged the law during prohibition, ducking out of the Seelbach Hotel through secret passageways. And it’s where barkeeps plied their customers with rolled oysters and bean soup to keep them coming back. Louisville’s private clubs, hotel bars, and neighborhood taverns are rich with drinking history and lore, and there’s always time for another round.

In January Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian Amy Evans bellied up to many a bar in Falls City, chatting up bartenders, bar owners, and bar patrons, gathering their stories one drink at a time. She met with John C. Johnson, 50-year employee of the Pendennis Club, where the Old Fashioned was born. Greg Haner, fourth-generation owner of Mazzoni’s, talked about his family’s 100-plus-year history of making and serving rolled oysters. Edward Winfield shared stories of the legendary Seelbach Hotel and the much-loved Louisville bartender Max Allen Jr., whom he had the opportunity to learn from before he passed.

Serious Eats/Southern Foodways: Bar Culture in Louisville, Kentucky — An Oral History Project

The interviews will be posted on the web at SouthernFoodways.com this spring.

Save The Deli

Save the Deli is a space dedicated to the preservation of the Jewish delicatessen, a hallowed temple of salted and cured meats. The past half century has seen the deli’s numbers decline greatly, in New York, across the USA, in Canada, and Europe. Those that remain are endangered and in need of our support. Though the challenge is arduous, and the deli’s foes are many, we will persevere.

Now what you hear is not a test

When those of us who grew up with rap saw signs that it was turning ugly, we turned away. We premised our denial on a sort of good-black-girl exceptionalism: They came for the skeezers but I didn't speak up because I'm no skeezer, they came for the freaks, but I said nothing because I'm not a freak. They came for the bitches and the hos and the tricks. And by the time we realized they were talking about bitches from 8 to 80, our daughters and our mommas and their own damn mommas, rap music had earned the imprimatur of MTV and Martha Stewart and even the Pillsbury Doughboy.

And sometimes it can seem like now, there is nobody left who is willing to speak up.

Why I Gave Up On Hip-Hop, Washington Post, Lonnae O'Neal Parker, Sunday, October 15, 2006