"He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance..."

"... his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried...."

From "The Battle of Fishkill/When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war" (NY Magazine).

There's a misplaced modifier — "where they were buried" — but still, I like that passage. I love that a restaurant guy is named Broccoli, but he sells pancakes. And I love that it's IHOP — which is the first place that ever employed me and also iconic in the writings of David Sedaris. And Broccoli's opponents are colorful and sometimes dressed in Revolutionary War outfits.

"In 1964, Gloria Szymanski, a recently divorced mother struggling with the sexual and behavioral strictures of her new status, was filmed as a patient of three renowned therapists..."

"... Carl Rogers, Frederick Perls, and Albert Ellis. The film was produced and narrated by the psychologist Everett L. Shostrum, who was Szymanski’s personal therapist and who recruited her for this starring role.... 'He told Gloria that the films would only be used in schools and colleges to teach psychology students so imagine her surprise then when making her breakfast pancakes a year or so later to see her interview with Dr. Perls on TV and then she found out that the films were going to be shown in full in movie theatres all over the country.'... She talks, with frankness and charm, about her daddy issues and her pinings for smart, authoritative men. If not for the clinical setting and the disapproving gaze of the therapists, her desires would seem normal—which, of course, they are...."

From "Gender Critique Meets Lewd Spectacle in 'The Patient Gloria'/Gina Moxley’s play examines the sexual and behavioral strictures on women through the lens of psychotherapy circa 1964" (The New Yorker).

Even as disease could be perceived as health — see the first post of today — health could be perceived as disease.

ADDED: I believe it is a terrible invasion of privacy, but nevertheless, I found the original film on YouTube, so I present it here: 

"I admit to having a complicated relationship with Aunt Jemima... For a period of time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandmother, Ione Brown..."

"... was part of an army of women who worked as traveling Aunt Jemimas, visiting small-town fairs and rotary-club breakfasts to conduct pancake-making demonstrations at a time when the notion of ready-mix convenience cooking was new. I never knew about my grandmother’s work until long after she died... [W]hile researching a family memoir... I learned that she made good money and covered a region including Iowa, the Dakotas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. She was often treated like a celebrity in small towns, but could not stay in local hotels. She kept an eye out for houses that had a small sign in the window that said 'TOURIST,' a code for homes that provided lodging and meals to black people.... As a family, we are offended by the caricature that Aunt Jemima represents, but deeply proud of the way my grandmother used the stage that was available to lift herself up. You see, in those days Aunt Jemima didn’t look like the lady you see on the box today. She was a slave woman, and Ione was expected to act and talk like a slave woman, using the kind of broken patois that blighted the full-page ads in magazines like Women’s Day and Life.... One of the things that irks me most about the Jemima brand is the way the mammy stereotype hijacked what should be an endearing image for black America and tried to turn it into something toxic. Most of us have someone in our family with fleshy arms and a loving smile who serves up cherished advice along with delicious food. They are our aunts and mothers and grandmothers. Our godmothers. Our queens.
You tried to make us ashamed of what Aunt Jemima stood for."

From "Why did it take so long to set Aunt Jemima free?" by Michele L. Norris (WaPo). (Quaker Foods announced that it is retiring the Aunt Jemima brand because to "make progress toward racial equality.")

ADDED: At the NY Post, I'm seeing "After Aunt Jemima, people call to cancel Uncle Ben’s and Mrs. Butterworth’s." I understand about Uncle Ben, but Mrs. Butterworth? I've never perceived Mrs. Butterworth as black.

The syrup, sold in a matronly woman-shaped bottle, is accused of being rooted in mammy culture and was modeled after the body of Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen, the black actress who played Prissy in “Gone With The Wind.” The Jim Crow-era “mammy” character was often used to show that black women were happy working in white households....

That's news to me. I looked up Mrs. Butterworth on Wikipedia and it did not contain that information. I did learn that the voice for the character was done by Mary Kay Bergman, who looked like this:

"Her parents were Jewish," and she died by suicide at the age of 38 in 1999. She was the original lead female voice on "South Park."

Her characters included Liane Cartman, Sheila Broflovski, Shelly Marsh, Sharon Marsh, Carol McCormick and Wendy Testaburger.... Bergman credited South Park for pulling her out of a typecasting rut. 'I'm known for these sweet, cute little characters,' she said, noting her roles in various Disney films. "So I've been doing them forever. My agents were trying to submit me on shows that are edgy, and they're laughing, 'Mary Kay, are you kidding? No way!'" After Bergman's death, the two episodes "Starvin' Marvin in Space" (the final episode for which she recorded original dialogue) and "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics" (the final episode in which her voice was used via archive footage) were dedicated in her memory.

No comment on the role of Starvin' Marvin and Mr. Hankey in the quest for progress toward racial equality. RIP Mary Kay Bergman. Watch this (it's phenomenal):



Mrs. Butterworth voice at 1:11.

ADDED: Norris writes that her grandmother, in the role of Aunt Jemima had to use a "kind of broken patois." And I see in the comments that David Begley is asking, "Just asking, but isn’t 'broken patois' the language of today’s rap music?" Which makes me wonder, what's wrong with a patois? To answer my own question, I naturally look up "patois" in the OED.

I see that it's "dialect spoken by the people of a particular region (esp. of France or French-speaking Switzerland), and differing substantially from the standard written language of the country" or — and this is "frequently depreciative" — "a regional dialect; a variety of language specific to a particular area, nationality, etc., which is considered to differ from the standard or orthodox version."

I was intrigued by this example from "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles (who was born in New York City):

Then he remembered having heard that Americans did not speak English in any case, that they had a patois which only they could understand among themselves. The most unpleasant part of the situation to him was the fact that he would be in bed, while the American would be free to roam about the room, would enjoy all the advantages, physical and moral.

Apple's new iPhone has a set of 3 camera lenses in back... and it upsets people with "trypophobia," the fear of clusters of small holes.

WaPo explains.

The backlash comes from people who say they suffer from an obscure and perplexing condition called “trypophobia” ⁠ — a fear of clusters of small holes like those found in shoe treads, honeycombs and lotus seed pods.... The phobia isn’t recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... But self-described sufferers and some researchers claim the images can evoke a strong emotional response and induce itching, goose bumps, and even nausea and vomiting....

Ah, yes. Of course. I've written about trypophobia twice already on this blog. In 2013, I told you about the subreddit devoted to the peculiarity, r/trypophobia. And I see that they're expressing themselves about the new phone:

It’s all camera from r/trypophobia

And here's my 2017 post, on the occasion of an "American Horror Story" poster that triggered trypophobes.



Back to WaPo and the new iPhone:

In 2016, Kendall Jenner raised the condition’s profile when she wrote a blog post saying the images give her “the worst anxiety.” “Things that could set me off are pancakes, honeycomb, or lotus heads (the worst!)," she wrote. “It sounds ridiculous but so many people actually have it!”

Pancakes! I know what she's referring to — the look of the batter when it's time to flip.



Flip the pancake. But for some people, apparently, flip their lid.



Back to WaPo:

Researcher Arnold Wilkins, a professor emeritus at the University of Essex, theorizes the mathematical principals hidden in the patterns require the brain to use more oxygen and energy, which can be distressing.... “We know the images are difficult to process computationally by the neurons of the brain, they use more brain energy.”

Photos of honeycombs and strawberries — common sources of the creeps, or worse, for people with trypophobia — also share those mathematical qualities with more sinister sights like mold and skin lesions. Other research suggests the discomfort might come from an innate drive to avoid infectious diseases and contaminated food. Some have also hypothesized the fear could stem from an evolutionary response to dangerous animals like poisonous frogs and insects, which often display patterns similar to those seen trypophobic photos.

Camera lenses are a special problem, I think, because they're sort of eyes. When we look at eyes, we have the feeling that it's a living thing, and if it's not 2 eyes, the living thing feels alien — heartless or cruel:



Have I triggered your arachnophobia? Again?

Back to WaPo:

What can you do if you want to wretch every time you see the new iPhone?

Is it "wretch" or "retch"? It's retch.  Fortunately, wretched editing doesn't make me want to throw up. "Wretch" isn't even a verb. You wretch.

ADDED: If "wretch" isn't a verb, why does the word "wretched" exist? "Wretch," the verb, is obsolete. The OED has it as a transitive verb meaning "To render miserable" and as an intransitive, Scottish verb meaning "To be or to become... parsimonious." From 1633: "As the wretch wretcheth, the more he is enriched."

So WaPo's spelling is fine if these iPhones are making you parsimonious (in Scotland in the 17th century).

MORE: To be wretchedly precise, the OED does not say that the adjective "wretched" comes from the obsolete verb "to wretch." It says the etymology happened "Irregularly" by adding the "-ed" suffix to the adjective "wretch." "Wretch" was once an adjective that meant "poor, miserable, deeply afflicted" (that is, having the qualities of a wretch). Thus, in the 1400s, one might write: "Allas! I, woful creature,..I, wreche woman."

By the way, originally, the noun "wretch" referred to a banished person, an exile: "Goo naked vngry and bare foot.., as wrecch in werlde þou wende." As you wend your way through the world, you wretch, go naked, hungry, barefoot, and phoneless.

Choking to death on pancakes in an amateur pancake eating contest and why the Heimlich maneuver and mechanical suction didn't work.

I'm reading "A college student choked to death during a pancake-eating contest. Now, her family is suing the school" (WaPo).

When police responded, they discovered [20-year-old Cailin] Nelson’s mouth “was compacted with pancakes almost to her teeth,” the lawsuit said. One officer said the “glob of pancake paste in her airway” was “‘like concrete.'”...

The lawsuit... called Nelson’s death “as foreseeable as it was horrific,” alleging the university is at fault for allowing the pancake-eating contest to happen.... Beyond the “inherent risks” of holding an eating contest with participants who are not professional speed eaters, the lawsuit also pointed out the “particular hazard of pancakes.”

Cooked pancakes, which largely consist of flour and liquid, turn into a “thick glob of paste” when they come into contact with saliva or other liquids, the lawsuit said.... “Once a person’s airway is obstructed by a glob of macerated pancake paste, rescue becomes exponentially more difficult,” the lawsuit said.

Nelson suffered severe brain damage and died "days later."

Should this be the end of amateur eating contests? Should it be the end of all contests where participants get carried away and go for the win without paying attention to what is happening within their own bodies?

Who first came up with the idea of a bottle shaped like a woman's body?

You may have noticed in the news today that Kim Kardashian West has been accused of copying a design idea from Jean Paul Gaultier — a perfume bottle shaped like a woman's torso.



The Gautier design (on the right) goes back to the early 1990s. But surely the idea of a bottle shaped like a woman is older than that. What about the famous Coca-Cola bottle? Wasn't that designed to look like a woman's body? At the Coca-Cola website, I see the company wanted a distinctive bottle (so it could fight off trademark infringers — e.g., Koka-Nola, Ma Coca-Co, Toka-Cola, and Koke):

On April 26, 1915, the Trustees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Association voted to expend up to $500 to develop a distinctive bottle for Coca-Cola. So, eight to 10 glass companies across the U.S. subsequently received a challenge to develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”...

In Terre Haute, Indiana, the Root Glass Company received the brief and had a meeting to begin to work on their design. The Root team was composed of C.J and William Root, Alexander Samuelson, Earl Dean and Clyde Edwards. Samuelsson, a Swedish immigrant who was the shop foreman, sent Dean and Edwards to the local library to research design possibilities. When the team came across an illustration of cocoa bean that had an elongated shape and distinct ribs, they had their shape....

Ah! So it wasn't a woman's body! It was a cocoa bean! But:

The Coke bottle has been called many things over the years. One of the more interesting of the nicknames is the “hobbleskirt” bottle. The hobbleskirt was a fashion trend during the 1910s where the skirt had a very tapered look and was so narrow below the knees that it “hobbled” the wearer. The bottle was also called the “Mae West” bottle after the actress’s famous curvaceous figure....

It became a woman's body in the mind of the beholders. Whether you want to credit Coke or not, you've got to concede that Mrs. Butterworth beat Jean Paul Gaultier. We've been seeing this bottle since 1961:



To be fair to Gaultier, his bottle omits the head and just has the bottle cap on top of a torso, a design idea copied/arrived upon by Kim Kardashian's people. Mrs. Butterworth has a head, and the bottlecap  goes on top of that head. The cap is a cap. To leave off the head and just put a cap at the neck... that's a bit disturbing, like the truly offensive "Bitchin' Bod" comic by R. Crumb:



For refreshment, this is a hobbleskirt:



And this is Mae West:

"Where are my pancakes?"

Why pancakes? I was thinking of Obama's old "Why is it that I can't just eat my waffle?" but there's this:

"What happens when you fuse a waffle iron, a croissant, and '90s one-hit wonders Kris Kross?"

"The apocalypse. Also: IHOP's latest monstrosity, the puntastic Criss-Croissants, a name that the breakfast chain has trademarked. But there's no promise this breakfast mash-up will make you want to 'jump jump.'"

Whatever.

Did you know that the first job I ever had was waitress at the International House of Pancakes? Year: 1969. That year of years.

Taj Mahal in Wisconsin.

Isn't this a beautiful building?



No, it's not the Taj Mahal. Taj Mahal was in Wisconsin last night, playing a solo concert in the Stoughton Opera House. The place was almost full, with people who were very warmly appreciative and as far as I could tell 100% white and old. Taj — who is 72 and whose real name is Henry Saint Clair Fredericks — had us all smiling and laughing and spent a good deal of time trying to teach us the proper way to sign the lines:

I had the blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frown
You know I'm feelin' so much better I could cakewalk into town

We were feeling so much better we could raindrive back to Madison.



But we were already feeling good, already happy. Arriving early, we'd walked on Main Street in Stoughton. We'd stopped to read the names on a Civil War Memorial plaque, and up came a very friendly woman who struck up a conversation. We said we'd been looking at whether all of the names were Norwegian, Stoughton being strongly associated with Norwegians, and she told us her name was completely German, but when she was growing up, Germans were not popular, and she did what she could to blend in with the Norwegians, and these days she makes lefse, the Norwegian pastry, in a "health food" form. Sweeties Lefse. Here, I found a video of her demonstrating her lefse technique:



Meade and I walked further on down the road to the Yahara River Grocery Coop and bought some Sweeties Lefse, which we stowed in the car and which I couldn't help thinking about during the concert, as many of Taj's songs are about food, beginning with the first song, "Fishin' Blues." "Put him in the pot, baby put him in the pan/Mama cook him till he nice an' brown/Get yourself a batch o' buttermilk, whole cakes mama/An' you put that sucker on the table and eat it on down." Whole cakes, eh? Anything like lefse?

When we got home it would be lefse I'd be putting on the pan. It was the very pan where we cooked pancakes when I was a little girl. In Delaware, we called that pan the "spider."

Aunt Jemima's descendants want their share of that pancake money.

"The great grandsons of Anna Short Harrington, who was hired as the American pancake icon in 1933, claim that her family is entitled to a percentage of the company's revenue every time her likeness was used. They're now seeking $2 billion in compensation, plus a share of future revenue."

This is more of a public debate... or a shakedown. I can't imagine how any conceivable legal claim could survive a statute of limitations defense. But it's a publicity problem for Quaker Oats. And if you're going to apply moral pressure, it's convenient that the company is named after a religion associated with high moral values. At this point, the company's response is that Aunt Jemima is a fictional character symbolizing "a sense of caring, warmth, hospitality and comfort." The plaintiffs are leaning on us to see Aunt Jemima as "one of the most exploited and abused women in American history."

I wonder what the descendants of Larry have in mind litigation-wise? You know what I'm talking about? Larry? This is Larry:



Reparations... micro-reparations. If micro-reparations are $2 billion, just think what the reparations would be for all of the most exploited and abused people in American history.

Speaking of Prince...

... he just did something amazing.

The Althouse Amazon portal: traditional, nonstick, and ergonomic.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. Ergo, we traditionally maintain a nonsticky respect for your privacy.

Norpro 3113 Cast-Aluminum Nonstick Aebleskiver Stuffed-Pancake Pan

"In case you missed it, there's some news out of Colorado that's better than hot pancakes and syrup. (If that's even possible.)"

Email, received just now, from Donna Brazile, the longtime Democratic Party character, identified in the email as Vice-Chair for Voter Registration and Participation/Democratic National Committee.

What subdivision of the supposedly sophisticated Democratic Party database am I in that my email address got selected for this especially folksy presentation of the news? Does the Democratic Party think I look fat? Does it see me as self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking? Does it assume I'm the kind of person who won't find it offputting to use Donna Brazile as the African American woman coming at me with a plateful of comfort food? And why pancakes? If I were cooking up this propaganda, using Brazile as the email signatory, the last comfort food I would choose is pancakes! And syrup... Like that's going to stir up sweet, mystic childhood memories without causing me to think that's racial and wrong.

(Cue the usual: If a Republican had done it....)

ADDED: Full text of the email:

Ann --

In case you missed it, there's some news out of Colorado that's better than hot pancakes and syrup. (If that's even possible.)

Governor John Hickenlooper signed a new elections bill into law that will make it easier for Coloradans to vote -- and takes some of the most proactive steps to do it that we've ever seen.

Under the new law, every registered voter in the state will be mailed a ballot, while keeping the option to vote in person. They're creating convenience centers for in-person early voting, and making it easier for people to register to vote.

Colorado is modernizing their voting process to make it consistent with how we are living our lives these days -- something that every state should be trying to do.

Agree? If you do, join me in thanking Gov. Hickenlooper for taking such an important step to improve the voting process in his state -- and for creating a model for other states to follow.

Republicans across the country have carried out an assault on voting rights over the past several years -- and we've been fighting them at every turn. But this new law in Colorado reminds us that it isn't enough just to fight efforts to restrict voting rights -- we have to find innovative ways of making it easier for Americans to participate in our democracy.

This past November, thousands of Americans stood in line for hours and hours to cast a ballot. That's not right -- and we should be taking every step we can to make the voting process easier for people to participate in.

Colorado just took a great big step in that direction. Join me and thank Gov. Hickenlooper -- let's make sure that Colorado isn't the last state to pass a law like this:

http://my.democrats.org/Colorado-Voting

Thanks,

Donna

Donna Brazile
Vice-Chair for Voter Registration and Participation
Democratic National Committee

I see that when I click on those links, the URL opens up with some elaborate code (which I'm assuming gives them information about what prompts me to click). 

"He will bring happiness in a pipe/He'll ride away on his silver bike/And apart from that he'll be so kind/In consenting to blow your mind..."

"Fat Angel," by Donovan (who wrote it) or The Jefferson Airplane (live, with oil-based light show) and even Orange Alabaster Mushroom (a rare find?).

Fly Translove Airways... Gets you there on time... a lyric that sprang to mind as I was reading The Lavender Café, where Michael K said:

I'm hoping to get Chicagoboyz back to posts about airplanes. Politics is a dead subject. The lefties have made their bed. Now, find a job.

And john said:

I think there is some early celebration of the med pot voting results.

He wasn't referring to Michael K, but to... well, if you go over there and scroll — which I don't recommend — you'll see a few things, which, as I said, I don't recommend. It was enough to make wyo sis say "This thread is either above my head or beneath my contempt. If I understood it I could tell which for sure." And john returns us to the aviation theme:

Does anyone else here read FlightLevel390? The best aviation blog around, and the site just got pulled off. I thought Tuesday was a bummer, but this is worse....

Flying stuff. Written by a pilot for a major airline (USAir I think). Beautiful poetic writing, gripping (really) tales of flying coast to coast, with regular dips into the technical aspects of flight and airplanes.

That's when Chip Ahoy — our fat angel, though I'm sure he's not fat — comes in with his pancakes made of "17 B-52's of milk," which doesn't stop LoafingOaf from calling him a "little fucking internet douchebag pussy," which makes it painfully obvious that we are not aviators. We are on the internet.

We are flying at an altitude of 39,000 feet/Captain High at your service...

We are all little fucking internet douchebag pussies now. What are you going to do about it? Go to Colorado/Washington, where pot has magically become legal... except to the extent it's a federal crime? You don't need that "med" modifier anymore. And you don't need a note from your little fucking internet douchebag pussy doctor.

When you make pancakes, "all creativity is disallowed. There are no variations to pancakes."

Says Chip Ahoy in last night's Lavender Café:

Homemade pancakes are like a thick batter. The batter will have milk and flour salt and sugar and probably vanilla. Extrapolate from that. Blueberries bleed and turn the batter a weird color. You can hold off and toss the berries onto the pancake after the batter is poured onto the pan. Very specific ratios must be followed. If the batter is too thick or too thin then adjustments are not allowed. In fact, all creativity is disallowed. There are no variations to pancakes. If you change one single thing, this kitten here get's it.

21 trillion eggs
17 B-52's of milk pasteurized to minus 27 degrees Celsius
1 light year vanilla extract
487 billion salts
18 pretzels
42 giraffes of green and yellow wines
bake for 400 trees and smash flat with a box of toothpicks.

Serves 81 for 18 minutes each. Serve with ratchets and propellers. Surplus can be frozen for 76 years.

I meant to mention, this only works for the little over half of you guys here who live on the planet were twenty trillion dollars in national debt is not a deciding factor in national elections. I heard you guys were here and thought, hey, maybe they'd like some pancakes bon appétit.

Bon appétit! 

Everything Mark Twain wanted to eat...

... when he arrived home in the United States of America after traveling around in France and Italy in 1870:

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie hens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry.

Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Funny about the frogs! I thought that's what they ate in France that we think is yucky.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

ADDED: I've redone the text so it looks the way it appears in my Kindle version of 300 works of Mark Twain. It's not written in list/poem form. It still, however, says "Prairie liens, from Illinois," which Nichevo, in the comments, surmises is a misscanned Prairie hens, from Illinois. Ah, yes, here's an article about "The 'Prairie Hens' of Illinois" with the subtitle "Mark Twain’s favorite birds ... to eat." I'm going to correct the text above.

"There. You'd better take a picture of that one, so people don't think I just make ugly half-pancakes."

So said Meade, delivering this, and thinking about this.

And when I use the search-this-blog tool on "pancake," I get:

"Can't I just eat my waffle?" said Meade, channeling Obama.

Actually, he was eating a pancake. (Meade makes pancakes nearly every morning. When he gave me mine this morning, he said "Here's your circle of grain for the morning," because the evening circle of grain, Meade-made, is pizza.)

Ah! That was a year ago, when Meade was on a pizza kick. The pancake kick continues, but the pizza is long gone.

Also in the search results on "pancake": "Things I Can't Stand About the Presidential Campaign./(A new regular feature here.)" Hey! I should have done more of those, because there are so many things I can't stand. That was from the 2004 election. I should revive the not-so-regular "regular feature." What was bugging me 8 years ago that was pancake related?

Our wartime President, six months before the election, is riding around in a bus, going to small towns in Ohio. (Search term used to find the article I read in the paper NYT in the NYT on line: "pancake"--something I recount here because it's part of the problem. The President is flipping pancakes to justify his reelection?)

At the Leap Year Café...

... it's really something.

I don't know about you, but we had orange juice and pancakes for breakfast.

It's pretty much like that around Meadhouse on a typical morning.

(Via Metafilter.)

Sting, "Girl from the North Country"... Mark Knopfler – "Restless Farewell"...

Jackson Browne, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit
"...  Bryan Ferry, "Bob Dylan’s Dream"... Carly Simon, "Just Like a Woman
"... Bad Religion, "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue"... My Chemical Romance, "Desolation Row"... Ke$ha, "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
... Taj Mahal, "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream"... Dave Matthews Band, "All Along the Watchtower"... Kris Kristofferson, "Quinn The Eskimo"... Eric Burdon, "Gotta Serve Somebody"... Marianne Faithful, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"... Pete Seeger, "Forever Young"...

The full list. The one I'd be most interested in hearing? Oddly enough, it's Taj Mahal doing "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream"... which just by chance is kind of Thanksgiving-appropriate:

I was riding on the Mayflower
When I thought I spied some land...
“I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Here at Meadhouse, it's pre-dawn and we're eating pancakes. (We just invented peanut butter pancakes.) I'd give you an Amazon link for that Bob Dylan cover songs album so you could buy it, but it's not available yet. Feel free to buy something else at Amazon. For example, here's Taj Mahal album I really like. Listen to the title track.