A Sad Case of Excessive Trust

‘World peace’ hitcher is murdered

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

Caffeine = Life

Daily caffeine ‘protects brain’

Not that I’m addicted, mind you. I could quit at any time. Really. I just have not yet chosen to do so. Really.

Cat Shots from my Blackberry Pearl Camera

Wolly taking a rest on my arm

Tiggy helping me with chores

Slow Down!

From Engrish.com. Enjoy.

Another Wasted Life

Expert On Anteaters Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters

See How Much the Disney Cartoonists Got Right

Two Cool New Sports I've Just Learned About

ATTN: Kids — Don’t Try This at Home! (Unless you really like extreme sports and have something to prove.)

Some Practice

I can’t keep my weapons in the District of Columbia just yet, so I was out in 19 degree Fahrenheit (-7.2 C) weather today at a range. I got to shoot my .38 and a friend’s .454. The latter was remarkably smooth and had virtually no kick at all, since it has “porting” vents along the top that shoot the gas upwards as the bullet is sent out, thus substantially counterbalancing the upward kick.

(For the curious: At 100 feet with the .38, I hit the target once out of five shots. At 21 feet I hit the kill zone consistently with the .38. At 100 feet with the scope-mounted .454 I hit the kill zone consistently.)

Kitty Korner?

Acworth Kitten Almost Set In Stone. Photo here.

(I am owned by two cats myself, and I can easily imagine them doing something like that. I look forward to seeing them when I get back; I will be rebuked for my long absence, but that will be followed by joy and much happiness.)

Two Views on Technological Change

Via Andrew Sullivan, I saw this delightful 1982 essay by James Fallows on the wonders of “The Electric Pen,” which reminded me of my own first gigantic “luggable” Compaq computer, which I think I got in 1984. It had no hard drive and two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives, one for the program disk and one for the storage disk. In the word processor, all formatting had to be done by entering various odd characters. (My screen, unlike James Fallows’, was gold, rather than green.)

And via Nathalie Vogel, I was directed to this very funny video on a medieval help desk:

Not Very Bright

School ‘rejects boy called Hell’

Mr Hell claimed the priest refused to accept his son as Hell, and was told by the school’s head he had “made a rod for your son’s back”.

Very Cool

I’m looking forward to flying on a lighter, cheaper-to-fuel, more luxurious Boeing 787! Imagine a firm in a highly state-subsidized industry thinking like this:

“Our journey began some six years ago when we knew we were on the cusp of delivering valuable new technologies that would make an economic difference to our airline customers,” Mike Bair, vice president and general manager of the 787 program, told the crowd.

Only a Brit Could Write Such Clever Satire

Craig Brown’s column from the Daily Telegraph, “10 key facts about books on Diana,” is simply brilliant.

Have They Nothing Better to Do with Their Time?

Do you have a right to force people to introduce you to other people for romance? According to a Californian in search of love (and her lawyers) the answer is yes: “eHarmony Sued In California For Excluding Gays.” Good grief!

Surely, They Saw the Pun

Study: Female cheetahs sleep around.

Philosophers with Balls

Andrew Sullivan mentioned it, but I found a much better version on Google video: the Monty Python football matchup between the German philosophers and the Greek philosophers.

Part I Part II

From the District of Columbia Department of Redundancy Department

It’s struck me for some time as, well, puzzling that the District of Columbia government requires taxi drivers to post notices in their cabs informing passengers that,

District of Columbia law requires mandatory use of Seat belts. There is a fifty dollar ($50) penalty for noncompliance. D.C. Law 11-244 (04-09-97)

Would I be fined $50 if I were wearing a seat belt, but if I were not wearing it because I had been forced to wear it? What on Earth does it mean to make the mandatory use of seat belts required? Government can mandate acts, but how can it require that they be mandated?

Oh, Come On... (UPDATED)

I have no opinion about whether he’s a good fellow or not, but this is one of the most absurd reasons for a forced resignation from government I’ve seen: “State Department official resigns over ‘D.C. madam’.”

UPDATE: Well, I do see a good reason now:

As a top official overseeing global AIDS funding to other countries, Tobias was responsible for enforcing a U.S. policy, enacted during the Bush administration, that requires recipients to swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. USAID adopted a similar policy in 2004.

This and That

On Thursday I secured the rights to translate into Arabic the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics for Misbahalhurriyya.org (the Lamp of Liberty), a project that has great potential for the spread of economic literacy in an important part of the world.

I was up in New York on Friday to film a short interview about the right to self defense.

And I’m going to be giving some talks soon in Morocco on classical liberal political economy.

Several projects are in various stages of becoming….

Paris's "Cathedrals of Commerce"

Today’s New York Times has a delightful essay on the mid-nineteenth century arcades of Paris, “Making a Pilgrimage to Cathedrals of Commerce.”

Some More African Pictures

I took these photos with Fred Young, a Cato Institute Board Member and all-round Friend o’ Freedom, after the end of the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Nairobi The first are, well, hungry giraffes, who will headbutt you quite hard if you don’t feed them, and the second are lazy warthogs who were just hanging out by the side of the road. (Fred tried to get a photo of me close to another one’s backside, evidently for purposes of comparison; I declined.)

And here’s Fred, with Scott Beaulier, soon to be of Beloit College, pushing our bus out of the mud in the Kenyan National Park:

Furðulegu!

Icelandic in one week! Yikes!

Hat tip: Nathalie Vogel, who — sadly, poor thing — took more than one week to learn Icelandic.

Freedom and Enlightenment

C’est vrai!

Consider this interesting story about a young person who left the closed life of an ultra-orthodox community for a secular life, “Young Jews walk out on religious life.” Some may simply celebrate his choice to leave his religious community and leave it at that, but it’s important to note that membership in the religious community he left is voluntary, that he had no legal right not to be shunned, and that he had the freedom to choose to make a very difficult choice to lead a different life.

I had a long conversation tonight with a Muslim friend that touched on similar issues that are being confronted in the Muslim world, as well as in some parts of the Christian and Jewish worlds (and, I presume others, as well). Friends of liberty should remember that state enforced secularism is oppressive, just as state-enforced religiosity is. Freedom to choose is what characterizes just societies. Not because what one chooses is irrelevant, but precisely because the choices we make are important. Were they irrelevant or insignificant, it would be just as good to have them assigned to us as to make the choices ourselves. I choose a life without religion, but I respect the right of others to choose religious lives, not because I am indifferent (I consider religious faith to be unreasonable), but because I believe that respect for human reason, individuality, and responsibility requires respect for the right of others to choose for themselves.

P.S. I was recently involved in working with an editor on an article I wrote on religious freedom, in which the editor had suggested changing the words “What matters is freedom of speech…” to “what was said is insignificant,” to which I pointed out that the reason that freedom matters is not because the content of censored speech is insignificant, but precisely because it is so significant. (The editor did not dispute the point.) Moral relativism is as much an enemy to freedom as the myriad forms of moral absolutism are, for if it’s all “relative” or arbitrary, then why oppose coercion? It’s only because freedom is a positive value that freedom should be defended, and it’s a positive value because the choices that we make are important. Were they insignificant, on what grounds might one oppose the replacement of one choice by another?

Only 5 Years? How About Extra Helpings of Soup?

Man poison’s soup for his children, hoping to sue soup company.

Write, write, write....

I’m going to be burning the midnight oil, so to speak, on several delayed writing projects. The most challenging is a paper on “Myths of Markets” that I am scheduled to deliver at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Nairobi. I’m late, which is terribly embarrassing, but I’ll get it to the commentators by Monday. (So far, I’ve come up with 21 myths, some of which are related; each will get its own short essay.)

UPDATE: Well, I snicked it down to an even twenty (I figured one of them was a special application of another) and finished up my first draft, which came to 8,902 words. I’ll go over it a few more times and then….send it off!

More Evidence that the World Is a Very Weird Place

CNN: “Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, ‘were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy,’ Quayle said.”

Sickening, too.

TV Tales

An Expensive Paperweight

I guess it’s a good thing I don’t watch television (other than CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, one of which is usually on in the background when I’m in my apartment). I was admiring some online ads for high definition plasma TVs and wondering whether I should ever get one. I even browsed various discount electronics sites (TigerDirect, Amazon.com, Bestbuy, etc.) Uh uh, no way, especially not after I read this article in the Washington Post, “High-Def Disconnect.” (Anyway, I can’t even bring myself to watch DVDs anymore, since I find sitting still to watch anything longer than 10 minutes too boring; there’s always something I should be doing, writing, editing, or reading.)

What We Take for Granted....

I’ve had a bad string lately. After the nasty (and still lingering) virus, I woke up yesterday with one of those sore throats that threatens to squeeze tears from the corners of your eyes every time you swallow. That’s turning into a nice cold. And last night I managed to crack a molar from crown to gum with a hairline crack, which is giving me little electric feelings whenever anything touches it, so I’m scheduled for emergency dental care this morning. (The latter doesn’t really hurt a lot now, but the dental assistant told me that I’d be writhing in agony soon if I didn’t get it fixed today.)

Be Forewarned: This Flu is Nasty

I’ve been deathly ill for the last several days with the worst flu (I think that’s what it is) I’ve had in years: fever, gasto-distress, nausea, headaches, and more. Don’t get it.

UPDATE: The doc told me today that it almost certainly not flu, but an acute case of viral gastroenteritis. Ugh. It’s going around and it’s highly contagious, but only for the first 24 hours or so, so it’s safe for me to see other people again.

FURTHER UPDATE: I’m on the mend, but this really makes you weak. I weighed myself on Tuesday and found that from Thursday night to Tuesday night I had lost 7 pounds. Tonight (Wednesday) was my first trip back to the gym, and my heart really wasn’t in it.

Al Jazeera (and the American Public) Parodied

This spoof is brilliant!

Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan

New Year's Resolution

As 2007 is about to launch itself, I’ve made my first New Year’s Resolution. (Not the first of the year, but the first of my life; I’ve never done that before, but the rather artificial/conventional break between years seems as good an occasion as any to make changes in one’s life.)

I’m resolved to be more focused on two things: 1) the advancement of my projects related to the defense or advance of liberty, especially in places where things are difficult for our friends, and 2) becoming a more socially involved and less inward-looking person. This has not been the best of years for me, but I hope that 2007 will be better, for me and for everyone else.

An Ill Wind Doesn't Blow So Hot

I’ve been quite ill and unable to get much work done for the last few days. I hope to be better soon and able to concentrate. If so, I may respond to some of the comments that have been posted to various blog entries.

Now This Is Cool: Ancient Computers

The delicate workings at the heart of a 2,000-year-old analogue computer have been revealed by scientists.

And Now For Something Different

With all the horrors in the world, the assassinations, the wars, the murders, the oppression, and the resulting poverty and suffering, it’s hard to focus on the merely personal. But I took notice when I saw that the New York Times had an important article about the bane of so many of us: agonizing back pain, “Study Questions Need to Operate on Disk Injuries.” If you suffer from back pain like I have, you’ll pay attention. And if you think that some day you might, you’ll also pay attention. (And believe me, you might…)

When it hit me I thought that I would rather be dead. I had suffered lots of unpleasant tingling from the waist down for some months, much like when an arm or a leg “goes to sleep.” Then when I was doing some pullups I felt a jab like someone had stabbed me in the spine with an ice pick….that was hooked up to the battery of a Mack Truck. The pain got worse and worse (and worse) until I could barely drag myself to the front door in less than 15 minutes. I had no idea anything could hurt that much without involving walls splattered with blood and bone chips. I lost control of my left leg, which atrophied due to the nerve damage, and the phantom pains were, unfortunately, describable: it felt alternately like my leg was being boiled, smashed with sledge hammers, and eaten by millions of ants. I knew that that wasn’t in fact happening, but it still wasn’t nice. After a quick trip to an MRI clinic (thank God for for-profit medicine, as I was able to arrange one in an hour, not months and months) I certainly considered surgery, but the head of spinal treatments at Georgetown University cautioned me against it. As he said, it has risks and his experience over two decades had shown that most people who follow a regimen of treatment recover without surgery. So, I visited a few pain clinics for specialized treatment and then rehabilitation therapy, followed by intensive (and still maintained) physical stretching and exercise. It worked and my pain is generally under control. (The experience led me to write a short essay on “For-Profit Medicine and the Compassion Motive.”)

If you want to avoid back pain, get and read Bob Anderson’s simple and straightforward book, Stretching. It’ll help you to avoid the agony I underwent. (That’s the first hint. The seond is that you shouldn’t walk around with forty or fifty pounds of books hanging from one shoulder, as it bends the spine in an unhealthy way and causes a disk to push out on the other side). If you do experience a back injury or back pain, it’ll help you to recover.

Oh, and if you have some extra scratch to invest in pain avoidance, try the Freedom Chair, on one of which I’m sitting right now:

Our Metastasizing Nanny State

Excise This Tumor
This morning I heard an interview with with some guy from the “Federal Administration for Families and Children.” I knew that the federal government was expanding (just look at the budget numbers), but I have to confess that I seeing the growths that have spread so much is horrifying. It’s the difference between being told that someone has cancer and seeing the tumors on an MRI.

A Nice Twist

Television actor denies vicious rumors.

No Sympathy

His Own Petard
Much could be said — and God knows, much will be said — about the sleazy behavior of Rep. Mark Foley of Florida toward Capitol Hill pages. Any tiny twinges of sympathy anyone might possibly feel for some lonely politician who couldn’t control his urge to have raunchy conversations online with teenagers should remember the bill Rep. Foley co-sponsored, H.R. 4472, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, as described and linked to by Glenn Greenwald.

Foley’s case is worse than Clinton’s. I had some sympathy for President Clinton when he argued that no one should ever be prosecuted for what he was accused of, …. until it was brought out by his prosecutors that he had campaigned for changing the laws to allow testimony of the sort he objected to to be raised in such cases and that there were people in prison for lying under oath about sexual laisons who had been prosecuted by Clinton’s own department of justice. If it’s a law for me, it’s a law for thee, especially if thou art the one who hath sponsored the law.

Definition of the phrase, “hoist by his own petard.”

I Really Wanted to Take This Liberal Cat Home....

One of the participants in our conference with a kitten that was looking for a little love.

…but I’m not sure my two girls (a “blue point Siamese” and a “pixie bob”) would approve.

As Usual, It's the Americans Who Are Responsible ...

Greedy Americans?
The BBC has an article, ” Norway’s future Arctic oil bonanza,” with an all-too common twist. Set out a story about economic demands vs. the environment:

Both Norwegian and Russian authorities say the potential for future fossil energy exploration here is enormous, while environmentalists warn of the danger to the fragile Arctic environment.

Then point the finger:

The processed gas will be shipped to energy-hungry Americans.

It doesn’t occur to the writer that natural gas is a commodity that is sold on world markets. If demand goes up in China or India or Italy or the US, it affects world prices. Where this or that cubic meter of gas goes is of little import (so to speak).

Too Sensitive?

Hateful Racism? Not the Way I Remember It
I’d always understood that the phrase “tar baby” referred to a problem from which it was difficult or impossible to unstick yourself. It turns out that Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has caught hell for using the phrase, attributed to African-American folklore, actually is a derogatory term for an African-American! Those who are complaining of “racism” sound rather like the pot calling…er, no, that might not do….. Well, it sounds like people who have race on their minds much too much and would eagerly read every reference to a dark cloud as evidence of racism.

At Least We Don't Have to Handle Scorpions

While helping young libertarians gathered together at Cambridge University to appreciate the tradition of liberty and to engage cognitive tools to understand and improve the world, I learned that Cambridge scientists have published evidence in Science that meerkats actively teach their young. According to the BBC,

Writing in the journal Science, the scientists suggest meerkats are only the second non-human animal species found to teach its young actively.

That raises a question. If meerkats were to fail to train succeeding generations in how to hunt and eat, they might die out. What happens when humans fail to teach succeeding generations the principles of social cooperation, such as toleration, several property, freedom of trade, and the rule of law? I think we already know the answer….the last century was choked with the bodies of the dead.

A Sad Story,... One of Many

Yoshiteru Nakagawa is one of the last victims of the Soviet tyranny to come to light. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union fed military prisoners of war, civilians deemed potential enemies, and hundreds of thousands of random people — of dozens of nationalities — into the maw of their vast slave labor system. German conscripts who were captured were enslaved and worked to death in the camps, as were Koreans, Poles, Japanese, Latvians, Chinese, Estonians, Ukrainians, and many others. Many perished and others were forcibly relocated to obscure places. Some married and continued their lives far from where they were abducted. Such sad tag ends of Stalinism are still resurfacing. The story of has a bittersweet ending: after the war he was taken to the Soviet mainland, but never repatriated to his home in Japan until the present, when he has returned for a two-week visit. The BBC’s description speaks volumes.

“I’m so overwhelmed with joy I don’t even know how to express it in words,” Mr Nakagawa said in Russian, translated through an interpreter. He also spoke a few words in his native language.

(Note: The BBC states that “one of his sisters was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying Russian forces had mistaken him for a Japanese soldier and taken him to the mainland” from Sakhalin, but the Sakhalin Times tells the story a bit differently:

Nakagawa served as a fighter pilot in the vicinity of the Philippines and later moved to Sakhalin, according to an interview he gave to Kyodo News in 2002. He was taken prisoner the Soviet Union toward the end of the war but was later given permission to return to Japan. Instead, he chose to stay. Nakagawa married a Russian woman but subsequently divorced, according to the interview. A few Japanese who stayed on in the Soviet Union after the end of the war lived in Sakhalin. Between 1989 and the end of last month, 63 of them had returned to Japan permanently, the ministry officials said.

In the absence of further information, and with some knowledge of how many survivors were forbidden to return home, I suspect that the BBC’s account is closer to the truth. The stories of Japanese kidnap victims returning from North Korea are sadly similar: since they were unable to return home, they did their best to survive and make lives as prisoners.

Business Seeks Gay Employees and Customers, While Governments Tend to Promote Hatred and Oppression

The Dollar Packs a Lot of Weight
It can be really interesting to observe how people react when they reap the benefits and bear the costs of their own actions, compared to how they react when they can benefit at the expense of others and force others to bear the costs of their preferences. This article on the different behavior toward gay people of business and government is instructive. (Caveat for finicky readers: although I don’t endorse all of the things the author favors, he has identified an important trend.)

Hither and Yon

A Firm That’s Dedicated to Freedom

I’m going to be giving some talks (“Crises, Government and History” and a discussion of the state of freedom in the Middle East) this week at the “Freedom School” organized by Freedom Communications, the media company founded by the courageous libertarian R. C. Hoiles. (There is a lovely page about R. C. on the Orange County Register’s website.) After that, I’ll be going to Vienna for a short trip to attend the meeting of the European Resource Bank, hosted by the F. A. v. Hayek Institute of Vienna, where I’ll have a chance to meet with friends from a variety of European think tanks, including my colleagues from the New Economic School of Georgia, with whom I’m organizing a Eurasia-wide conference in Tbilisi in October on “Freedom, Commerce, and Peace: A Regional Agenda.”

Somehow This Seems a Bit Contrived...

I was interested to read the very breathless article from CNN titled ” U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world, report says.” (Note that “modern world” means “wealthy world,” not “contemporary world,” which is more than a bit misleading.) I wonder whether that has anything to do with a few factors that might be relevant: A) much greater rates of immigration of very poor people to the U.S., such that early deaths (due to low birth weight or other factors) that would have happened in Tegucigalpa are now happening in LA (note the emphasis on the disproportionate rate of early infant death among minorities), whereas rather than happening in Lyon they are still happening in Niger; B) the great emphasis on delivery of low birth weight infants in the U.S.

There is certainly something that needs explaining here, but I am suspicious about breathless news releases from groups such as Save the Children.

The Curious Puzzle of British Behavior

The British are famous for elevated conversation, politeness, and refinement and for drunken vomit-splattered rants, battering foreign soccer fans to death, and a coarseness that defies verbal description. This report from the BBC is symptomatic of the problem, which I have always found puzzling. (And a problem on the receiving end of which I found myself at Oxford, when I was beaten rather badly — starting with having a bicycle crashed onto my head from behind, and followed by having my tie grabbed and then being kicked in the head and sides by 9 or 10 young men [Yobs} with booted feet — one day when coming out of one of the colleges in academic gown, apparently just for the fun of it.) I discussed the issue with some Portuguese and Dutch and American colleagues last night and none of us, it seemed, had a good explanation.

SMS Spam! Ack!

We’ve all long battled email spam. Then there was blog comment spam. And today I got my first sms (text messaging) spam. (It was for discount meds.) I have a bad feeling about this.

That's the Last Time I Refer to a Stupid Person as "Thick"....

According to Dr. Judith Rapoport, “IQ is related to the dynamics of cortex maturation.”

The Importance of....

A Simple Instructional Video.

(Note: It’s ok if you don’t understand German…..)

Implausible, but Interesting....Verrryyy Interesting

China is presenting the world with a most interesting experiment, thanks to a radical and inhumane policy of one-child-per-couple, a preference for male children, and the murder of baby girls that has led to a lopsided ratio of males to females. Andrew M. Potts has a solution. It’s got to be better than waging war on neighboring countries to kidnap women.

Whoops!!

Russian Veterans’ Day Poster Features the U.S. Battleship Missouri.

Note the Zinger: “But, he [Eduard Baltin, former commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet] added: ‘It’s not such a big deal to confuse two great heroic ships. It’s much worse when [US Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld mixes up Iraq and Iran.’”

Satisfaction for Every Taste

Matisyahu

Thank G-d for C-pit-lism, which allows such flourishing of different forms of art. We now have Hasidic Reggae. I’m looking forward to Hasidic Hip Hop next!

(Matisyahu’s website here.)

TV 'n Kidz: No Worrz

I’m not a TV viewer (it’s on in another room so I can hear the news and when something alarming comes on, I go around the corner to see the images), but I don’t share the hand-wringing concern of lots of people about it. Now we have evidence that, in fact, television doesn’t cause brain damage or make kids stupid!

A Libertarian Ode to Coffee

True Love

I really, really, really love good coffee. Not watery, traditional American Maxwell House coffee (or, as it was referred to in the move Bagdad CafÃ?©, “nur braunes Wasser!”), but real coffee. That means in the Italian style (ground and with the water forced through it with 8 atmospheric pressures to make espresso and cappuccino), in the Turkish style (ground to a fine powder and then boiled with sugar and served bubbling hot into a tiny cup), in the German style (filtered, like old-style American, but a rich and flavorful brownish black), in the Austrian style (similar to Italian, but with greater variety and flair), in the French style (pressed through a plunger at the table, or hot and slightly bitter espresso drunk at the counter for half-price), and on and on. But not I-can-see-the-bottom-of-the-cup American style. (I should add that the only coffee I ever had that was worse was that served in Britain and the English-speaking parts of Canada.)

Fortunately, Americans can now benefit from decent coffee, thanks to�.the large accumulations of financial and human capital made possible by voluntarily formed limited liability corporations. My friend Jacob Grier has an ode to caffeinated capitalism at Smelling the Coffee.

MacAttack!

According to Reuters, the first computer worm designed to attack Apple Computer’s Mac OSX operating system has been detected. Yet another reason why hackers and designers of worms, trojan horses, and viruses should be hunted down and….well, something really, really bad should be done to them.

I don’t know the answer to the problem of the malicious harm done to others by such low life, but the damage done is serious and the penalties and countermeasures should be commensurate. (And, yes, I’m especially pissed now because I recently switched to the Mac platform. It’s personal.)

Interesting Niche Marketing

The apartment section of the Washington Post today carried a big ad for “The Flats at Dupont Circle” (Dupont Circle has been identified for years as D.C.’s major gay neighborhood) with a big photo of a multiracial group of handsome men with their arms around each other. Ok, pretty obvious niche marketing. But I wonder if the advertisers quite caught the double entendre in the list of amenities (also included in their web site, next to a photo of a perky lady):

Outdoor heated pool surrounded by misters and sundeck

The Green Fairy

I just got back from a trip during which I had very limited access to the internet (hence no blogging), but during some periods of travel I did manage to get a bit of reading done (manuscripts and other matters), including a very interesting book that mixes social history, pharmacology, and a dry British humor: The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History, by Phil Baker. It’s clever in the way that only books by English authors can be. It’s full of amusing vignettes about artists and poets (I especially enjoyed the description of the outrageous life of Alfred Jarry), enlightening insights about the role of ritual in enjoyment of drugs, and the sort of information that tends to undermine the exaggerated fears of the freedom to ingest what one wants that motivated the ban on absinthe (still illegal to make or sell in the U.S.) and motivates the failed “War on Drugs” today. (At the same time it contains rather chilling descriptions of the awful deaths of alcoholics.)

I tried some absinthe during a recent trip to Poland (it was fun, but not as wicked as its reputation) and brought some back for a small absinthe party in the near future. As an ad for a contemporary European brand of absinthe put it, “Let’s Party Like It’s 1899!”

Boozy Britain

One of the many delights of living in Oxford was the experience of stepping around the splattered sidewalk vomit known among the locals as “pavement pizzas.” The crazy pub closing law (since, thankfully,