Fats as honorary grand marshal of Krewe of Orpheus

"Fats" Domino

The latest seasonal photo of Fats

Reminded of his legacy and the inspiration he has been for so many musicians, Fat’s simply said, “That’s nice.”

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Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey

new orleans

Corby Kummer reports:

Here are the three chef’s minds you need to look into this year: Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey: Recipes From My Three Favorite Food Groups (and Then Some) (Andrews McMeel), by John Currence, who reinvents Southern food at his City Grocery, the culinary heart of Oxford, Mississippi, a place with plenty of heart. Currence, a native New Orleanian, knows the ingredients of the South, and so will use, say, Steen’s cane syrup (which I wrote about after visiting a Louisiana plant) with pork belly braised in ham stock, or emblematic yellow cornmeal in chicken-skin cornbread.

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Adam Smith’s Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments

adam smith, Jack Weinstein

My chum Jack Weinstein’s book that I trailed some six months ago is garnering some amazing press coverage — amazing not only because it’s an academic philosophy book — but because it’s on Adam Smith and in the LA Times — and certainly not the Adam Smith of the ideologues or their “anti-liberty” vulgarian counterparts. Anyway, I’m so pleased that Jack has agreed to be a part of a symposium on his book for Cosmos + Taxis. (Oh yes, and another plug for the fact that he’s a part of this project — my co-authored contribution (not with Jack) is not out of tune with the sentiment expressed by the LA Times reviewer):

There are worse fates. Consider Adam Smith. His philosophy — indeed, the fact he was a philosopher — has been obscured by the “invisible hand.” That phrase occurs just three times in his entire corpus and only once in his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations. Nevertheless, it has become a symbol for the “caricaturish libertarian” whose philosophy (if we may call it that) has supplanted the “holistic picture of human agency” Smith spent his adult life describing.

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A New Guide to the Derby: How to Pick the Winner

a companion to michael oakeshott

After some twenty-two years I finally have the complete suite of Oakeshottiana. Given that copies are pretty pricey, this was a most generous Christmas gift. And in case you’re wondering who Guy Griffith was, here is his British Academy entry.

To this period also belongs the book that Oakeshott co-authored with Guy Griffith, A Guide to the Classics (1936), which, to the disappointment of many an earnest student of political philosophy, turned out to be not about Plato and Aristotle but about the fine art of judging horseflesh and picking a Derby winner (Introduction to A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, p. 3).

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Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology

hayek

It’s been two years since this volume was published.

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A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 40

A Confederacy of Dunces

Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers.

Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pendant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron. Although your days are numbered, you will not die as a martyr — for you further no holy cause — but as the total ass which you really are (pp. 110-111).

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