Has Juan the Andean spectacled bear been channeling the shade of Steve McQueen?
Finally, a political movement I think I could get behind.
Marginally apropos of the discussion below about color perception, the August 23 edition of the New Yorker contains a fascinating article by neurologist Oliver Sacks (sadly unlinkable, but here is his website) about the way that we perceive the passage of time. Of particular interest to me was the section on hypnic jerks, which, as my long-suffering partner could attest, I suffer from regularly. If you've ever experienced a hypnic jerk at the moment of falling asleep you'll know that it's commonly accompanied by a dream sequence which "explains" the sensation as falling over, tripping, etc. This dream can often be quite detailed and involve a complicated backstory to the eventual fall. The really weird thing, however, is that the whole dream is generated at the moment of the hypnic jerk - in other words, the story which you think has been taking place for some time is delivered to your brain instantly and just seems to antedate the jerk; it's like the TV version of the Godfather trilogy, where material from the sequel is edited in ahead of the first movie even though it was filmed later. Bizarre.
Things are a little sleepy at Horizon in these dog-days of summer, and likely to remain so at least until September; but let me just throw in a passing comment about Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. Extolling the Anglo-American intellectual tradition at the expense of the French (which appears to be the book's main selling point, if not its thesis) is the kind of pointless pissing contest that history could do without - one might as well ask which is more important to the engine, the oil or the petrol? - but I was intrigued by Himmelfarb's suggestion that religion is a dividing line between the Anglo- and Francophone Enlightenments. The retrofitting of long-dead conservative heroes with 21st Century values is hardly a novelty, but it seems particularly outrageous in this case. Take, for example, the three signal figures of the Scottish Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume. Hutcheson developed a theory of utilitarian ethics which the Glasgow presbytery condemned for its suggestion that "a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God" was possible. Smith was a borderline Deist who wrote a biographical treatment of Hume that has been described as "a powerful blow against Christianity." As for Hume himself, his skepticism towards natural and revealed religion extended famously to his deathbed and brought him the honor of proscription in the Index. Still, misrepresentation can have amusing results. I hope Himmelfarb's book encourages an exploratory reading of, say, Hume's Of Miracles at the next White House Bible Study group...
Just a fluffy language question here:
I take the UK expression "the penny dropped" to convey the moment when a previously confused or mistaken person finally understands something. Generally something important and maybe something painfully obvious to others. E.g. this in the Guardian:
The penny's dropped, says minister
It did not take another disappointing summer of sports results - including the opening contests at the Athens Olympics - for Tony Blair's ministers to realise they had been naively optimistic about the challenge they face in raising the country's game.So here's my question: is there a North American expression that conveys this precise sense of a realization reached after foolish delay? The best I can think of is a children's joke from the northeast U.S.: "Light dawns on (M)arble (H)ead." But is there a more formal equivalent?
And BTW what's the derivation of the English expression? Maybe those old coin-fed household gas meters?
An article on a new study which seems to support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says in so many words that one's language determines what it is possible to think.
Whorf's idea does not seem to have had a lot of respect lately. The standard old saw about Inuit having a large number of words for "snow" (once mentioned by Whorf himself as evidence for his hypothesis) has turned out to be inaccurate, if not completely irrelevant, and certain older studies seem to have disproved the hypothesis.
This one set out to test numeric ability among the Pirahã, whose language has only two or three numbers, and seems to suggest that humans may innately recognize numbers up to three, but that beyond this numbers are not distinguished unless one's language defines them.
This seems to be making a lot of people happy, but I don't believe that this is the vindication of Whorf that some think it is. In one study of color recognition, researchers tested the ability to distinguish colors among people who spoke a language with only two color-words which roughly corresponded to "black/dark" and "white/light". It turned out the subjects could distinguish between many more colors than they had names for. Not only that, the subjects had a much easier time learning to distinguish primary colors than other hues, suggesting that in this case the categories are not linguistically determined at all, and that some categories are in some sense "natural". (Abstracts for some interesting color studies by the same anthropologist are here.)
It seems reasonable to suppose that the enthusiasm greeting this study has something to do with the fact that the hypothesis is seen by some as a basis for a strong form of relativism.
It's Christopher Isherwood's 100th birthday but you'd never know it.
Here's David Kipen in the SF Chronicle on Isherwood's California and war writing, and here's Kipen again on Isherwood on NPR. Elsewhere there's not a whole lot of news coverage, tho there's a commemorative site with many links.
Weird, actually, that Mr. Isherwood's famous Berlin cabaret is on so many minds lately but the man himself isn't getting much commemoration.
Here is an interesting list of Japanese onomatopoeias and other sound-symbols. Great for the useless trivia part of your brain (you know you have one), with insights such as:
paku paku = opening and closing mouth, eating, gobbling. This is where Pac-man came from! (see also hau, gatsu)
Many pointless speculative arguments could have been quashed in the eighties if I'd known this all along.
Louis Menand's timely, somewhat uncomfortable New Yorker essay on the incoherence of voter choices is recommended reading. Here he lays out the essential problem:
Three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, “fire alarms” (sensational news), “October surprises” (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and “gotchas.” Even when people think that they are thinking in political terms, even when they believe that they are analyzing candidates on the basis of their positions on issues, they are usually operating behind a veil of political ignorance. They simply don’t understand, as a practical matter, what it means to be “fiscally conservative,” or to have “faith in the private sector,” or to pursue an “interventionist foreign policy.” They can’t hook up positions with policies. From the point of view of democratic theory, American political history is just a random walk through a series of electoral options. Some years, things turn up red; some years, they turn up blue.
A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion. Political campaigns, on this theory, are essentially struggles among the élite, the fraction of a fraction of voters who have the knowledge and the ideological chops to understand the substantive differences between the candidates and to argue their policy implications. These voters communicate their preferences to the rest of the electorate by various cues, low-content phrases and images (warm colors, for instance) to which voters can relate, and these cues determine the outcome of the race. Democracies are really oligarchies with a populist face.
The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts—the social-scientific term is “heuristics”—to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty. Voters use what Samuel Popkin, one of the proponents of this third theory, calls “low-information rationality”—in other words, gut reasoning—to reach political decisions; and this intuitive form of judgment proves a good enough substitute for its high-information counterpart in reflecting what people want.
In the U.S. we can't get Times texts online without subscription, so here's the Guardian/Observer review instead. There's another review at The Agonist.
In the Times review, Taylor calls Larkin's work "an odd hybrid of a book: half a companion guide to the twentysomething Orwell's time in the East; half a series of dispatches from a country in a state of internal siege..." The most informative part from Taylor (about Orwell, as opposed to the godawful state of present-day Burma) is this:
...the scent has gone somewhat cold. Much of the architecture of Orwell's time remains, however: the police-training school at Mandalay with its haunted room, whose legends Larkin investigates, and the gruesome prison at Insein, the population now swollen to four times its size in the 1920s. Any disappointment the reader may feel at the lack of fresh Orwell material is swiftly anaesthetised by the glosses of local Orwell-fanciers. From the textual sleuth who deduces that the elephant in Shooting an Elephant is a giant metaphor for Imperialism itself to the retired elephant hunter who criticises Orwell's inability to put the beast out of its misery -- apparently the trick is to aim for the point where the two eye-ear lines cross -- these are never less than fascinating: a sudden sulphurous whiff from a world in which a writer finds himself turned into a glowing personal presence in the lives of thousands of ordinary people....(Beats me what'd be "sulphurous" about that, but anyhow...)
He also says Larkin "takes a welcome look at" the notes Orwell wrote late in life for A Smoking-Room Story, about English passengers on a ship returning from Burma.
How A Smoking-Room Story was going to come out is one of these mysteries that could use a Time Lord's help. Per the notes, it appeared Orwell's protagonist was to be a kind of Lord Jim figure being sent home because of a shameful incident that was already formed in Orwell's own mind, and probably the subject of the "story" in the title, but not yet set out in the notes themselves.
A skirmish in the great culture war has broken out in Australia over the publication of Keith Windschuttle's provocative book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. I know virtually nothing about the subject and can't comment on the specifics (more background information is available here and here). But I do think as a matter of enlightened self-interest that if you're being accused of a conspiracy it's probably not a good idea to start one up. There is much silly stuff bandied around about "PC academia", but I don't think that a pas devant les domestiques code of ethics is going to help the profession's reputation much. And while it's true that anyone can make honest mistakes, I think anyone dabbling in a controversial topic is a fool if he doesn't make damn sure that his research is watertight beforehand (a bit of media savvy wouldn't hurt either).
With no resolution in sight to the problem of the anachronistic electoral college, at least one bright spark has shown the true way forward - reorganize the 50 United States completely. Wouldn't it be refreshing to swear fealty to Rocky Mountain High rather than boring old Montana? Hasn't Orange County deserved its own state bird for too long? (Proposals on a postcard, please).
Posted in an SF natural food grocery:
Existential Handyman
Voids Filled
Karma Adjusted
Reality Pondered
Refreshing to see someone who not only charges by the hour for pondering but admits it.
A slight letdown, however, to find there are three Google results as of this posting for the phrase "Existential Handyman," two of them including versions of the other phrases, and at least one of them outside San Francisco. Maybe not "Only in..." after all.
Hm. Wonder what they're asking for a karma clutch job...
Talking of falling standards ...
Can anyone make sense of the following sentence from Ron Fournier, an AP "political writer"?
"Kerry's remarks came as The Washington Post reported that records concerning a Vietnam veteran who claims in the anti-Kerry ad that the Massachusetts senator lied about being under fire was under constant attack himself during the same skirmish."
There must be a word missing somewhere. But really, could that bloated slug of a sentence stand any more convolution?
Was reminded recently of an article by Camille Paglia claiming that society in general these days does not have the attention span, etc., to appreciate culture.
I ran across a few rebuttals on the excellent Languagelog, notably this, this and this. Like most linguists, dedicated to anti-prescriptivism, Liberman has little time for the idea, and makes some excellent points.
Personally, I find it impossible to believe that culture is in decline without some kind of evidence. We have been treated to the same story by, so it seems, every generation that has ever lived, always sung in the same tones. I don't believe that anything would be left by now if culture had been in constant decline since the bronze age. If so many could be fooled by subjective impression, I assume I can be too.
The question in such debates tends to slide around, as Martha mentioned. The real question here is not whether appreciation of high culture is currently rare, but whether it was more common in the past. And that is an extremely sticky question, starting with the relative lack of historical knowledge of anything but the upper classes in most periods of history.
Today, Erin O'Connor has a wonderful entry on historical fiction, and its use as an instrument for exploring real history. This obviously has its perils, but I've found that often a fictional backdrop is better than nothing for connecting with a place. My own experience of wandering around London this summer was like that -- the Monument conjured up images from Neal Stephenson; and the London Stone brought back Geoffrey of Monmouth.
In the past, I've only really had this type of connection through genealogy. Much bad history is written by genealogists, but genealogy does provide a person with characters to follow. Great Men haven't been in fashion for decades, but their passing robbed readers of individuals to experience history alongside. Genealogy provides an alternate cast of characters, less at the center of events, but more representative because they are rarely "Great". O'Connor's tracking down the experience of her distant ancestors through historical fiction, so I imagine that she's getting a double-whammy.
By pure chance I have come across a surprisingly interesting article by Stanley Fish from 2000 about, of all things, what it takes to make a good university administrator. But he starts off succinctly appraising poststructuralism from a pragmatic point of view, and moves on to an interesting comparison between poststrucuralism and the thought of Machiavelli.
Teaser:
I think that the poststructuralist account of how things work (or don't work) is right, but I also think that its rightness doesn't matter, is of no consequence. Indeed, given the argument of poststructuralism, its rightness could not have any consequences, at least not the consequence of generating a program or a strategy or even a minimal list of dos and don'ts. To put the matter as concisely as possible, poststructuralism can't tell you what to do or what not to do. Its lesson is a modern and somewhat inflated update of the proverbial "the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray"; but that lesson cannot, without contradiction, be made into a basis for future action.
...and we've also lost Julia Child. A great lady in her own way, and a goodhearted person too.
The California State Supreme Court's decision yesterday to void the 4,000-odd same-sex marriage licenses that the city of San Francisco has issued since the beginning of the year has naturally generated a great deal of Net 'chatter', as I believe the intelligence authorities call it. As someone who (a) doesn't live in San Francisco, (b) isn't planning on marrying another man, and (c) doesn't have strong feelings per se either way, I have nothing to say about what we might call the "underlying issue". But I am interested in the narrower technical point about San Francisco's unique legal defense of its initiative. To me, Stanford Professor Richard Thompson Ford's February critique of the city's actions still seems unassailable. The gist of his argument is here:
It's simple black-letter law that otherwise valid legislation is presumed to be constitutional until and unless judicially invalidated. Until a court decides otherwise, then, local officials are bound to uphold state law.
There's a good reason that courts and not elected officials are in charge of invalidating legislation under constitutional norms. Not only are many local officials legally untrained and thus practically incompetent to make judgments on matters of constitutional law, but all local officials are subject to political pressures and thus likely to reach politically expedient conclusions about their constitutional duties. It's no accident that the constitutional epiphany that allowed gay marriage took place in a city with a large and politically powerful gay community: This particular Damascus road was paved with votes.
And that's why the city's argument—that local officials can act in contravention of state law based on their own untested interpretation of the constitution—is dangerous. My sympathies lie with the city—this time. But I worry about the types of constitutional revelations we might expect in other cities with different political constituencies. Employing San Francisco's argument, a local school board official who personally believes that the constitutional right to religious freedom entitles teachers to lead their classes in prayer could order school principals to allow the practice. A local official who personally believes affirmative action is unconstitutional could refuse to implement a state law requiring it.
And there's a more fundamental problem for the city's position: Ultimately it's the state and not the city that has the power to marry—the city performs marriages as an agent of the state. In the legal metaphysics of local power, the city simply doesn't have any authority in this area that the state doesn't give it. A city can't license marriages that the state does not recognize. So the real problem for the city is not so much that local officials violated the law when they ordered the marriages (in the way that I violate the law when I double park in front of the dry cleaners); it's that they exceeded their authority (just as I would if I were to print up "marriage licenses" and start issuing them out of my back door). In purporting to license same-sex marriages, the city is less scofflaw than charlatan.
Now, I know that one contributor to this blog probably has a lot to say about this particular issue. So I suppose I'm inviting her (whoops, gave it away) to convince me, a floating and relatively disinterested voter so to speak, that Professor Ford's argument is flawed. (Not that other comments aren't welcome too, naturally).
Mischievous Constructions, which is new to Horizon's blogroll, has an update for fans of the poet McGonagall and his devotion to the local landmarks of Dundee. Warning: the works of William McGonagall are not for the poetically soft of stomach. He's kind of a nineteenth-century Scottish Vogon.
Add another haughty evocation of the virtues of traditional rote education to the list. This one, while not completely silly, sports most of the tropes, unexamined assumptions, educational "theories" and elitist euphemisms common to its genre.
As usual, the credulous reader is left wondering how western civ has managed not to crumble into a new dark age (people who write these pieces inevitably have a 19th century, Edward Gibbon-style moralist's understanding of history), for the article leaves you with an image of a small cadre of civilized citizens (you can spot them cause they are able to quote Shelley) awash in a tide of "inner-city", linguistically disabled thugs.
Not to have certain works of art in your mental inventory—Macbeth, for example, or “Ozymandias” or Psalm 23—is to be shut out, to some degree, from the community of civilized conversation.
Am I the only one who finds this an odd definition of "civilized"?
His discussion of inner-city (read: black) kids' linguistic abilities is typically ignorant of all the research done in the last so many years (at least since William Labov's famous article on the once-fashionable Cultural Deficit theory of education, "Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence", which is unfortunately no longer available online*). He implicitly assumes that someone who says "Where you at?" instead of "Where are you?" can only be speaking in this fashion because they don't know any better. He also pulls that by now familiar trick of blaming black kids' lack of achievement on the lack of rote memorization instead of, say, dismally funded schools, etc.
Although there are benefits to learning canonical literature, and even to memorizing it, it's also good to eat your vegetables. His claims for rote memorization are grossly overstated. But I do think he is right to stress that aesthetic experience in general has great cognitive benefits. This only makes sense when you consider that the bulk of what makes an aesthetic experience is itself cognitive. Comprehending a reasonably complicated work of art or literature is a kind of pleasant mental acrobatics on a formal level. The classics are classics in part because they are very good for this, but to a large extent this is true of all art.
*I'll email the text to anyone who wants to see it.
Horizon's favourite megalomaniac dictator, President Niyazov of Turkmenistan, has a new wheeze up his sleeve: building a giant ice palace in his parched central Asian country.
The woman with the best scream in Hollywood has sadly died, aged 96.
Shame that Peter Jackson didn't start his version of King Kong earlier, as I'm sure he'd have tried to find a cameo role for her if she was still up to it.
Not that I'm looking to test Godwin's Law again, but there's a worth-reading article on Fahrenheit 9/11 in the latest NYRB. I think O'Brien's analysis of Moore as a filmmaker and his approach to the movie is sensible and is a welcome change from the storm of bombast which greeted the film.
Seems as though the Germans are backing out of their late-1990s language reforms. Is this kind of legislated philological evolution inherently doomed?
I forgot to mention an invaluable resource yesterday: the Daily Mail-o-matic, every Fleet Street hack's dream, producing darkly insinuating (but, for libel purposes, harmlessly speculative) headlines at the click of a button!
(Don't miss the David Blunkett Policy Maker while you're there).
I suppose this is arguably in bad taste, but the correspondence between the last name of disgraced Private Lynndie England and a well-known northwestern European country is generating headlines which would have been perfect for any Dail Mail cover of the last 30 years or so:
Testimony Paints England As Disobedient
England Ignored Orders
England's Lifestyle Questioned
Witnesses tell of England's Disobedience, Sexual Misdeeds
England Disobedient, Promiscuous
England's Work Criticized
England Portrayed as ‘Having Fun' in Photos (this sounds more like HELLO!)
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
- Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
While it might be flattering to think that the 98.97% of Gibraltarians who voted to remain British in a 2002 poll were doing so for reasons of sentimental attachment, the colony's current status as a VAT-exempt enclave within the EU probably had more to do with it. And it's a legitimate question whether a tiny number of people ought to be able to exercise a permanent veto over two much larger democratic states. But really, the Spaniards are pretty wretched when it comes to wooing their reluctant neighbors. And isn't Madrid guilty of more than a touch of hypocrisy when it comes to ancient colonial vestiges?
Cingular Wireless has this service that allows you to receive at a pre-ordained time a recorded call to enable you to schedule a "rescue" phone call at a pre-set time.
As my high school biology teacher was fond of saying, this reminds me of a story. Or two.
I once went out on what I thought was a date with the rather attractive receptionist where I once worked about seven years ago. She had a friend meet us there--the sort of friend who suddenly makes everything about herself and her dramas. Eventually, the friend left. I took my receptionist date somewhere for dinner. Just before we ordered, like clockwork, Ring, ring, it's the friend. She needs my receptionist date. It's an emergency. One had the sense with her everything was an emergency. But my receptionist date, sadly, had to go.
It wasn't until I got home that my flatmate pointed out the whole thing was likely set up. Subsequent evidence seemed to bear this theory out. I've been kind of stupid like that for most of my life.
Not that I haven't done the same thing. When I lived in Britain, I once went out to a friend's house in Ladbroke Grove--miles from where I lived-- and quickly discovered said friend had intentions I did not reciprocate. I called my flat and got my best friend, Rob, on the other line. We had friends of ours flying in to see us the next day.
"Hey Rob it's Graeme."
"Hey Graeme, what's up."
"Not much. Just wondering if you've heard from Den and Christine"
"Nope."
"Have they called?"
"Ummmm...do you need me to say that they have called to get you out of something?"
(chirpily) "Yeah."
"Oh. Well, Dennis and Christine called.."
"What's up with them?"
"I don't know. I'm making this up so you can get out of something."
The genius of what Cingular has done is that now you needn't bring in third party into your life's dramas. That should be their slogan, perhaps: "No more heroics by friends".
Author Michael Chabon was the keynote speaker at this year's Eisner's Awards, the comic industry's presitigious award ceremony. Chabon's speech is well worth a read if you have any interest in comics. Chabon's speech is an appeal to the industry to take their eyes off adult 'legitimacy' for a moment and go back to doing really cool graphic literature, hell, comic books, for kids--the core audience which the medium increasingly has left behind as its market becomes ever more insular and smaller.
It's a position I most heartily agree with. (Indeed I have expressed similar sentiments in my own column on the death of the comic book editor Julius Schwartz). A couple of months ago I gave my 11 year-old Goddaughter, who loves Rowling and Pullman, a charming comic series from the eighties called Amethyst Princess of Gemworld. That I couldn't think of a modern equivalent to give her still depresses me.
One thing that amazes me about the whole US/UK dialect difference is the wholly separate vocabularies associated with driving. Usually new-technology words are the easiest to learn cross-linguistically, since they're either borrowed as pure loanwords hydrogen->Fr. hydrogène or as calques (Gm. Wasserstoff). Why didn't this happen with automotive terminology?
Except for the first sentance, Alan's examples are almost incomprehensible to an American. The "indicator" line is guessable because of the verb "blinking", and "junction" is pretty obvious until you realize that it could apply to railroad crossings, 4-way stops, or cloverleafs, but I've got no idea whether to look for pedestrians or a flood gauge at a "level-crossing"
I managed to live for 26 years without encountering the word "carriageway" in print or any other medium. It strikes me that the same might not be true for a Brit moving to North America, since so much American TV is both exported and automobile-based.
We've had occasion to write before about Turkmenistan's increasingly bizarre President Niyazov and his budget cult of personality; now it seems, would-be drivers in his central Asian country will have to take a written test that includes not only the usual stuff about braking distances and blind spots, but also questions on the great Turkmenbashi's philosophical ideas. Which does suggest a new departure for what is normally a pretty drab adolescent rite of passage. How about dabbling in a bit more logical positivism down at the DMV?
If a traffic light changes when there's no-one around, does it turn green?
What is the sound of one indicator blinking?
Must you take extra care at junctions?
What is the sign for a dual-carriageway ahead? What is the sign for a level-crossing ahead? What is the sign for a good life ahead?
In what is probably the least surprising bit of news I've heard all years, it turns out that Ted "God of Nightline" Koppel isn't a fan of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This article gives you the lowdown on an interview between Mr. Koppel and Mr. Stewart that I wish I had watched.
Mr. Koppel's implicit criticisms of Mr. Stewart makes this Daily Show interview (click on the celebrity interview Wolf Blitzer link on the side) between Mr. Stewart and Wolf "CNN" Blitzer all the more amusing, with the host of the fake news show that Koppel sneers at asking a real newsman why he was delivering fake news as part of the claque who believed in WMDs. And, frankly, doing a better job of it than Ted Koppel.
My mother, who has been in the travel business for twenty years, says you can get people to try anything new during most of a day so long as you give them what they're used to for breakfast. Most Americans, for example, will not face pickled herring or miso soup before noon.
In that spirit, let's do a breakfast poll. Contributors here cover at least a good part of North America plus Yorkshire, so we should get some variety. To narrow it down or at least start things off, do you eat eggs for breakfast and if so, cooked how, and how seasoned?
My answer: pan-fried, no yolks, with green or chipotle Tabasco or West Indies Creole Classic Red Pepper Sauce. What else ya got?