Mixing up the clichés at the NYT: "Will Trump Trade the Future for a Hill of Beans?"

That's the headline for a piece by The Editorial Board, with the subtitle "The outlines of a potential trade deal with China suggest President Trump once again is prioritizing superficial gains over America’s long-term economic interests."

The bean cliché never comes up in the text of the column, though actual beans — soybeans — are part of the discussion, which created the temptation to use a bean cliché in the headline.

His decision to go it alone, rather than making common cause with longstanding allies, was ill advised, and his tit-for-tat trade war has caused significant pain for many Americans.... But Mr. Trump was right to argue that China has engaged in unfair competition. The question is whether he can win significant concessions....

This is a surprising amount of support for Trump from the NYT.  Mr. Trump was right...

The failure of previous administrations to hold China to account on [currency manipulation] has passed beyond remedy.... The looming risk... is that Mr. Trump will accept a deal that allows him to claim a superficial triumph without forcing China to make enduring changes.

Trump is the one who's willing to walk away from deals, and though the NYT doesn't give recognition to that strength of his, the NYT is showing some support. How about if you, NYT, don't attack him when he does walk away from a deal? You have the power to remove some of the pressure to claim "a superficial triumph." Stop undermining him. Give him half the support you gave the "previous adminstration[]," which escapes even getting named as you mildly observe its "failure."

In particular, the United States should reject any Chinese offer to guarantee large-scale purchases of American agricultural products like soybeans or energy products like liquid natural gas — indeed, guaranteed purchases of any kind.... 

Now, about that cliché — trading X for a hill of beans. First, the cliché is especially bad because we have the soybeans, so if X equals "the Future" and we trade, we get the Future, which would make it a great deal, and that's not what you mean to say.

But put that problem aside. And put aside the problem of using clichés generally. I disapprove, but I'm not going to harp on that. You're trying to use a cliché, but you've got the wrong bean cliché. You trade X for a handful of beans. It's from the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. The "hill of beans" cliché is doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Use "handful" when referring to a trade and "hill" when you're just looking at something that's supposed to be big and judging it to be small.

I don't know where "hill of beans" got started. According to The Farmer's Almanac the phrase "not worth a bean" was around as far back as 1297. A bean is worth even less than a hill of beans, so it's odd that "not worth a hill of beans" developed later, "around 1863," when "'a hill of' was often inserted into phrases to emphasize their meaning." I get the sense that "beans" was a euphemism for "shit." I'm seeing (in the OED):

1874 Hotten's Slang Dict. (rev. ed.) 171 Full of beans, arrogant, purseproud. A person whom sudden prosperity has made offensive and conceited, is said to be too ‘full of beans’. Originally stable slang.

Anyway, "doesn't amount to a hill of beans" was a well-worn colloquialism when Humphrey Bogart deployed it in World War II in the name of personal sacrifice for the greater good:



By the way, in "Jack and the Beanstalk," Jack is a fool who is tricked into selling his family's cow for a handful of beans he's told are magic. But in the story the beans actually do turn out to be magic, and in the end his family gets rich. So there's good reason to shy away from the "handful of beans" cliché.

Indeed, Trump often looks like the hero in this story, seeming to be a fool, and our story-addled minds may fall into believing things will work out great for him in the end. Jack was vindicated, after all.

"What utter nonsense. If this many men were thinking about the Roman Empire every day, they would not be voting for Republicans..."

"... who are working hard to cause the collapse of the American Empire. They're thinking about Rome as depicted in Marvel movies and other pop culture fluff. They think the NLF [sic] are gladiators and so are they as they watch from their couches or tailgates. They don't know beans about the Roman Empire because that would require reading and studying and learning to look at the world with a contextual perspective. The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. And dumber. And dumber."

That's the top-rated comment — from someone named Paula — on the NYT article, "Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire? Yes, Say Men. Women are asking the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome. Their responses, posted online, can be startling in their frequency."

This post continues a discussion begun yesterday, about a trend on TikTok of women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire and expressing amazement at the answer.

"Speaking of bean, didn't Ronald Reagan promote jelly beans, specifically the brand Jelly Belly?"

My comment in a Facebook discussion about the Politico article "Trump tweet on L.L.Bean would break White House rule/Current policy prohibits the president from endorsing specific companies." From the article:

[T]he Office of Government Ethics prohibits executive officials from using their position to endorse an organization, product or person. While this regulation technically does not apply to the president, President Barack Obama put in place a White House policy that expanded it to also apply to the Oval Office.

"We strictly forbade this when I was in the White House for the President and everyone else,” Norm Eisen, Obama's former ethics czar, told POLITICO. “How can you ask others to follow it if he doesn’t?”

Trump urged supporters to patronize L.L.Bean after the retailer’s founder’s granddaughter, Linda Bean, illegally donated to a PAC supporting Trump, leading to calls for a boycott. (Her $60,000 donation exceeded the amount that the PAC could accept from any one contributor.)

"People will support you even more now,” Trump said before encouraging Americans to snap up the company’s preppy products.

So Trump tweeted to counter the effect of a call for a boycott that aimed at hurting someone who'd supported Trump. That's a surgical strike — undoing a harm.

I hadn't realized Presidents couldn't express love of particular products and encourage people to share his pleasure. Back in the 80s, the news media often talked of Reagan and his jelly beans. Here's how the Reagan Library presents is:

"What 'Beans' says, basically, is that people don't listen at all."

That's Len Chandler, who "never achieved the name recognition of some of those with whom he shared stages and causes" but "did write at least one song with lasting appeal: 'Beans in My Ears,' which the Serendipity Singers turned into a Top 30 hit in 1964."

"One of Ann-Margret’s most famous moments in 'Tommy' involved geysers of baked beans being shot directly at her."

"'They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!' she said. 'And it smelled!' She recalled that [Ken] Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. 'That’s fine with me!' she added brightly. Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. 'Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,' he said. 'Let’s just do it again!' For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. 'My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,' he said."

From "At 81, Ann-Margret Is Finally Living Her Rock ’n’ Roll Dream/The actress and musician, who first burst out in 'Bye Bye Birdie' in 1963, is releasing a new album of old rock covers featuring guests like her 'Tommy' co-star Pete Townshend" (NYT).

ADDED: As for the beans — to add to the endless succession of beans — Roger Daltrey got there first. Here's Rolling Stone in 1967:

About those Cincinnati sandwiches.

Trooper York has quite a picture — in a post that's about the Althouse Cincinnati meet-up (which I talk about minimally, with pictures, here). In Trooper's comments:

An Edjamikated Redneck said...

Now dag nab it Trooper; I ate the Hot Brown (which was actually more like a Hot White -- being chicken & all and not the original Roast Beef -- but the chicken is healthier, not that I'm worried about my health, but... Where was I? Oh, yeah).

(Ha ha. Hot White. Here's my pic of the Hot (supposedly) Brown.)

Any way, it was not a crap sandwich as you have portrayed (yeah it did look pretty wild when it came out of the kitchen with a knife stuck in it -- and this was a classy place; well classier anyway -- I mean it is usually the dives where something comes out of the kitchen with a knife in it- and its usually the cook... Where was I? Oh, yeah).

It was a pretty good sandwich (I mean the comments over at Althouse; Heart attack on a bun! It was CHICKEN for cryin' out loud! It’s the original white meat! Not like it was pork or something… Where was I? Oh, yeah).

And I was with some classy folks (not that I would meet and tell you understand, but you know Althouse was there; how much classier can you get? And the place actually served long neck PBRs! Do you expect a place like that to serve a crap sandwich? I mean hell, it’s not the Congressional Dining Room for Pete’s sake! I mean there they KNOW a carp sandwich when they serve one… Where was I? Oh, yeah).

Carp sandwich?

So, I want y’all to lay off my dinner; it was a great place and a helluva good time (you know the place has been open since 1861? My Great-Granddad ran a hotel on that block in the 1870’s; most likely he probably had at least one beer there himself, back in the day. He was German ya know we seem to have some sort of reputation as beer drinkers… Where was I? Oh, yeah).

Redneck responds to Darcy's request for details about the meet-up:

Any way Darcy, as much I would like to accommodate you and spill the beans on last night (now there’s a meal that would deserve comments! What if I would have had a plate of beans and rice? Not like a place classy as that, and on the northern side of the river would even serve beans, but… Dag nab it; did it again! Where was I? Oh, yeah).

A gentleman never tells the details. We had a good time, ate a good meal and all parted amicably.

One detail I will spill; Not only did I get to meet Althouse; I also got to meet Silvio.

And he took me at the light. I got to admit THAT was not the highlight of the evening (no redneck, even us edjamikated ones, like to admit that we lost a drag race, but her ‘chauffer’ caught me flat-footed trying to retune the radio when the light changed. First I knew the light was green was when I heard the roar of an Audi’s exhaust… Where was I? Oh, yeah).

The End.

Ha ha. Makes me think of this:

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.

"If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that carbs are evil. This is probably the silliest of all the silly, pop-culture propaganda about diet and health."

"All plant foods are carbohydrate sources. Yeah, but: Carbs are evil. Everything from lentils to lollipops, pinto beans to jelly beans, tree nuts to doughnuts, is a carbohydrate source. Most plant foods are mostly carbohydrate. So if 'all carbs' are evil, then so are vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds. Sure, but, I should still avoid carbs, right? Exactly the opposite is true. You cannot have a complete or healthful diet without carbohydrate sources. Why have I been led to believe that carbs are evil? Highly processed grains and added sugar are bad, not because they are carbohydrate, but because they’ve been robbed of nutrients, they raise insulin levels, and they’re often high in added fats, sodium, and weird ingredients. Carbs are not evil; junk food is evil."

From "The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right/Mark Bittman and doctor David L. Katz patiently answer pretty much every question we could think of about healthy food" (New York Magazine). Lots more at the link.

Is it the beans?!

Yesterday, I fell into #beantok:

Like many Boomers, I got enamored of Frances Moore Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet" — the meticulous vegetarianism that entailed "completing" proteins.

I'm reading "‘Diet for a Small Planet’ helped spark a food revolution. 50 years later, it’s evolving" in The Washington Post. 

Key paragraph:

But it was with the 50th-anniversary edition of “Diet for a Small Planet” that [Moore's daughter] Anna took on a specific goal of adding more recipes from Black, Indigenous and people of color and taking a serious look, with the expert help of nutritionist Wendy Lopez, at both culling and updating the recipes from the original edition. Ingredients such as soy flour and margarine and ideas such as “protein combining” (designed to alleviate the fears of skeptics of vegetarian diets) from the original book were scrapped, while the overall focus continues to stay on eating whole fruits and vegetables.

How can there be an "edition" of the book that omits the main idea?! That book didn't just "alleviate the fears of skeptics." It informed us about the completeness of the protein in eggs and meat and gave us a formula for building a complete protein from vegetarian elements. For example beans with rice made something like a complete protein. If you've taken that idea out, it's not what "Diet for a Small Planet" has meant to us devotées and former devotées for half a century. 

The WaPo article links to a 2015 WaPo article that scoffs at the old "completing the protein" idea: "The best reason to eat beans and grains together: They’re delicious."

There’s a persistent myth involved, though: the idea that you have to combine the two to get a so-called “complete protein,” or protein that contains all the essential amino acids found in animal protein. In fact, some legumes, grains and other plant-based foods can be complete sources of protein on their own. Moreover, researchers have learned that you don’t have to eat complementary foods in the same meal to get the benefit.

"A major influence on Jimmy Wales’s conception of [Wikipedia] was an essay by Friedrich Hayek called 'The Use of Knowledge in Society'..."

"... published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism.... Hayek’s argument about knowledge is... markets are self-optimizing mechanisms.... This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge...." 

 From "Wikipedia, 'Jeopardy!,' and the Fate of the Fact/In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge" by Louis Menard (The New Yorker).

"There are two reasons we shouldn’t shift away from a system where most calories come from staples and few from vegetables, even if we could..."

"Vegetables are too expensive, and they require too much land," writes Tamar Haspel, and oyster farmer and food-policy commentator (in WaPo).

For last month’s column on whether nutritious food is more expensive than junky food, I looked at the costs involved in growing broccoli and corn. One estimate from the University of California at Davis estimates the costs of growing broccoli at about $5,000 per acre, whereas corn is about $700. Factor in that corn delivers 15 million calories per acre to broccoli’s 2-ish million, and the cost to grow broccoli (25 cents per 100 calories) is 50 times larger than corn (half a cent per hundred calories). And that’s just the difference on the farm. After harvest, that broccoli needs to be refrigerated and transported to where it’s going before it spoils. Broccoli has nutrients that corn doesn’t, of course, so it’s a good thing that we eat some. But an all-vegetable, or mostly vegetable, diet is prohibitively expensive for most people.

The land issue is directly related. When you can grow many more calories per acre, you need fewer acres. The closer we get to maxing out our farmland, the more important that calculation becomes.....

The inescapable reality is that the inherent costs involved in growing, storing and shipping vegetables often make them a luxury food. The backbone of a diet good for both people and planet is whole grains and legumes: oats, barley, wheat, corn, beans, peanuts, lentils.

So is eat your vegetables terrible advice? I looked into the comments section over there for the answer I expected and found it as the second "most liked" one:

I think this is a valuable discussion when it comes to food security, aka making sure people aren't starving to death.... But if you're talking about the average American and those around the world with an increasingly American/western diet, I think it's a disservice to our health and economy to think that we can continue with grains and cereals as a nutritional backbone....

It's one thing to feed the billions of people in the world. Give them their oats, barley, wheat, corn, beans, peanuts, lentils....



... but we Americans expect better things — a well-balanced, nutritious, healthful, tasty, and virtuous diet. And please don't bother us with notions of virtue that demand that we live like those people out there somewhere in the world where it's a struggle to pack in enough calories to get by.

"Shakespeare didn't have coffee!"

"But Beethoven did. He cared so much about his coffee that he counted out the beans. He had to have 60 beans per cup."

I've noticed that the search-this-blog box in the upper right corner of this page works much better than it used to. You get search results going all the way back to the beginning, ordered by relevance (or date, if you prefer), and I tested it with the word "coffee" — and that came up first.

"I’ve come to lean on the daily mechanics of the kitchen for much-needed meditation, and on my kitchen meditation — if it can be called that — for the energy to cook...."

"It’s exactly what makes daily cooking so demanding — the volatility of the materials, metal pans that conduct frighteningly high heat, the perishability of vegetables and meat and milk — that shapes it into such good material for noticing.... Find a time when the sun is low and, without self-censure, take an inquisitive inventory of the flotsam beneath your kitchen table. Mine is an elaborate collage. There are two kinds of beans.... There’s a chunk of sourdough bread. There’s a chink off a chestnut, a piece of apple core, some leaves, a coil of thin white thread. Beneath my table is a topographic model of my family’s life, painted in golden light: the beans and leaves and string that we’ve shelled and tracked in and with which we’ve sewed. It looks, suddenly, too sweet to alter, too poignant to sweep up. Who dropped the bread and decided, absorbed in conversation, to leave it there?"

Writes Tamar Adler, in "My Antidote to Early Evening Despair" (NYT), which is adapted from her book "Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day" (commission earned).

I liked that romanticizing of detritus. And the notion of kitchen meditation is a good counterbalance to the TikTok trend of de-normalizing cooking:

WaPo stoops to atrocious clickbait.

Look at this headline, and notice the sidebar "Most read" list:



The photo is captioned "E.coli bacteria." Screwworms are insects. The report is of a lawsuit:

A woman in south-central Texas is suing Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, claiming the restaurant’s red beans and rice contained flesh-eating New World screwworms that have ravaged her body over the past two years.

Karen Goode of San Antonio argued in a 10-page lawsuit filed last week that Popeyes and its franchisee Z&H Foods are responsible for feeding her food infested with the parasite in 2015. She said the bugs entered her digestive tract and laid eggs, which embedded into the interior lining of her small intestine, then hatched and started eating Goode “from the inside out.”

The article — which you can see is the #2 most-read thing at WaPo — goes on to explain how the claim cannot possibly be true, but ends with the brief notation: "This story has been updated." The oldest comment over there is:

I'm calling buncombe.

1) How did she know she got it from Popeye's? It's not like the effect happens before her next meal.

2) Screwwroms are only known to enter the bodies of animals through open wounds. Did she rub the red beans and rice on a cut?

3) She ALSO "was infected with E.coli and Helicobacter pylori"? From the same meal? What a fantastic coincidence.

Please apply critical thinking before publishing.

Here's an older version of the article, via The Wayback Machine, which I think is what the commenters saw. The newer version of the article does a good job of showing the scientific reason why the lawsuit must fail, but that demonstrates why the article ought never to have been published in the first place. Notice that the older headline has the name of the smeared business glaring in the headline: "Woman claims Popeyes meal gave her flesh-eating screwworms that ate her 'from the inside out.'"

"A crowbar, a candle, stale bread, dried beans, an iron spike, a drill, a stick with a cloth on the end of it, a bag of sand – and crucially, a tortoise."

The toolkit of a "secretive and highly organised group of medieval burglars" called The Banu Sasan.

"The tortoise is employed thus. The burglar has with him a flint-stone and a candle about as big as a little finger. He lights the candle and sticks it on the tortoise’s back. The tortoise is then introduced through the breach into the house, and it crawls slowly around, thereby illuminating the house and its contents."

Once the tortoise had been set up, the burglar employed his bag of sand to check for sleeping inhabitants elsewhere in the house. He would throw out handfuls of sand at intervals, and if no one stirred he entered the house.... [T]he burglar might chew noisily on some stale bread and beans to impersonate a cat eating a rat or mouse so as not alarm any sleeping people in the house.

That worked in the Middle Ages, apparently, when people practiced the art of sleeping through the maraudings of mice.

"With Venezuela in collapse, towns slip into primitive isolation."

A Reuters headline.

At the once-busy beach resort of Patanemo, tourism has evaporated.... These days, its Caribbean shoreline flanked by forested hills receives a different type of visitor: people who walk 10 minutes from a nearby town carrying rice, plantains or bananas in hopes of exchanging them for the fishermen’s latest catch....

“The fish that we catch is to exchange or give away,” said Yofran Arias, one of 15 fishermen who have grown accustomed to a rustic existence even though they live a 15-minute drive from Venezuela’s main port of Puerto Cabello. “Money doesn’t buy anything so it’s better for people to bring food so we can give them fish,” he said, while cleaning bonefish, known for abundant bones and limited commercial value....

“I haven’t been to the city center in almost two years. What would I do there? I don’t have enough (money) to buy a shirt or a pair of shorts,” said a fisherman in Patanemo who identified himself only as Luis. “I’m better off here swapping things to survive.”...

In the mountains of the central state of Lara, residents of the town of Guarico this year found a different way of paying bills - coffee beans. Residents of the coffee-growing region now exchange roasted beans for anything from haircuts to spare parts for agricultural machinery....

Inflation is more than a million percent. The "primitive isolation" is a barter economy. They have absolutely no money.

Here's an article from 2016 in The Atlantic, "The Myth of the Barter Economy/Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right."

The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money.

In Venezuela, barter is a successor to money, which is some evidence that barter was a precursor to money, but this Atlantic writer, Ilana Strauss, questions whether human beings really ever lived without currency:

[V]arious anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe.

That was back in 2016.

“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”...

When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to.

So barter as a successor to money doesn't tend to show that barter was ever a precursor to money....

There are 5 places in the world where people are exceptionally long-lived. We could try to eat like them.

I'm reading "Want to live a longer life? Try eating like a centenarian" (WaPo).

The 5 places are: 1. the Nicoyan Peninsula (in Costa Rica); 2. Loma Linda, California (with a high population of Seventh-Day Adventists (vegetarians)), 3. Okinawa (Japan), 4. Sardinia (Italy), and 5. Icaria (Greece).

I cooled on this topic when I saw that it was based on a new cookbook and that the first idea was: eat peas, lentils, or beans every day. That "every day" is such a downer! 

"What is Goya in the Latino community? It’s an icon, a statue. The left wants to destroy all icons."

Said Alexander Otaola, "a Cuban-American in Florida with 105,000 followers on Instagram," quoted in "How Buying Beans Became a Political Statement/The boycott and counter-boycott of Goya comes as the major political parties seek to energize Hispanic support ahead of the 2020 election" (NYT).

The Goya chief executive of Goya, Robert Unanue, appeared at the White House rollout of the the "Hispanic Prosperity Initiative" and said "We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder. And that’s what my grandfather did." That led to a boycott and a reaction to the boycott.

You probably know all that. I'm just blogging because of the beans/statue analogy.

Is Scott Walker's "fixation" on Reagan "creepy"?

The Capital Times writer Paul Fanlund says so, as he identifies "3 Themes" in Scott Walker's just-published book "Unintimidated." The other 2 themes are "He throws even his allies under the bus" and "His egocentricity is just bizarre." This is the Cap Times, appealing its readership of Madison liberals who've been hating Walker for the last 3 years and have been hating Reagan even longer.

On the Reagan "fixation," there's Walker's annual Reagan birthday party (which is also the anniversary of his wedding to his wife Tonette). Here's how Walker describes the party in 2011, which was just before the big Wisconsin protests began.

[On] Saturday, February 12, Tonette and I hosted a dinner at the Executive Residence to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday. (I had been in Dallas to see the Packers win the Super Bowl on the sixth, his actual birthday, so we postponed the celebration by a week.) 

Meade and I were reading the book out loud together last night, and at that parenthetical, I said: "Oh, yeah, the protests blotted out all the great afterglow feeling we were having over winning the Super Bowl." That was sad!

Tonette and I host a dinner each year on Reagan’s birthday. We serve his favorite foods— macaroni and cheese casserole, and red, white, and blue Jelly Belly jelly beans— and have musicians perform patriotic songs and Irish music. 

Aw, come on. That's creepy?! That's incredibly sweet. Who gives a party and serves mac-and-cheese and jelly beans? It's beyond unpretentious, and it's just charming and nice. Why shouldn't Republicans celebrate Ronald Reagan, their modern-day icon? And I give Walker credit for putting the celebration on February 6th (or 12th) instead of March 30th (in the style of the Democrats, with their icon JFK (see Rule #8, here)).

It is a wonderful evening, and serves as a reminder for me each year to be hopeful and optimistic just like Ronald Reagan. It happens to be a dual celebration because President Reagan’s birthday is also our wedding anniversary. Tonette jokes that I never forget our wedding anniversary because it is Reagan’s birthday.

Well, isn't that a really low-key and generous way to make your anniversary something that's fun for other people you know? But for Fanlund, that's part of a creepiness profile.

Hey, Fanlund, ever consider whether you're creepy? Maybe Walker seems creepy to you because deep down you know the way you look at him is creepy.