"Well, now we finally know what would happen if The Wall Street Journal and Us Weekly had a baby. In a piece titled 'Everyone in Trump’s Cabinet Is Eating Sauerkraut'..."

"... the Journal reports that various White House officials are shedding pounds thanks to a hot new diet that involves eating lots of fermented foods, like sauerkraut and kimchi.... There’s just one drawback: 'sulferous odors' have caused some 'friction at home.'... HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was, naturally, the first to jump on the trend. Now he’s converted Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice-President J.D. Vance. We’re told that the men have been getting compliments on their 'glowing skin' and seeing various health benefits, including dramatic weight loss.... [S]everal Cabinet members have been looking svelter, and what other explanation could there be? It’s not like there’s some new magical weight-loss drug out there!"

Writes Margaret Hartmann, in "Sure, the Trump Cabinet’s Weight-Loss Secret Is Definitely 'Sauerkraut'" (New York Magazine).

"'Rutabaga' comes from rotabagge, the plant’s Swedish name, meaning 'baggy root.'"

"This is, perhaps, the reason that it’s sometimes called a Swedish turnip or simply a swede. Dense and sweetly earthy, a spheroid that can grow to the size of a human head, with a mottled, brown-and-white surface and a buttery, yellow interior, the rutabaga looks like an overgrown turnip—which it is, sort of, at least on its mother’s side. A reproductive quirk of the Brassica genus allows for uncommonly easy hybridization (see the evidence in your local grocery store: kalettes, the frilly little greens that were 2014’s sexy new vegetable, are a cross between kale and Brussels sprouts). Somewhere, in the misty meadows of Central Europe, a turnip got frisky with a cabbage, and the rutabaga was born. This genetic history was confirmed only recently, in 1935, by the Korean-Japanese agricultural scientist Woo Jang-choon. But, three hundred years before, Bauhin, with his eye for botanical detail, saw to name the plant napobrassica, the turnip-cabbage."

From "What Rutabaga Does Better Than Anything Else" (The New Yorker).

I might buy a rutabaga and attempt to make the recipe for Rutabaga Noodles Cacio e Pepe. But if I do, playing in my head the entire time I'm making it will be the yodeling section of "Call Any Vegetable."

"Epperly’s off-the-wall theory says that the root of all disease is a gut parasite called 'candida,' and the solution is 'Jilly Juice.'"

"The beverage is made by combining salt, water, and kale or cabbage in a blender and allowing it to ferment at room temperature over a few days. She advocates consuming up to a gallon a day — the juice would rid the gut of the fungus, expelled in bouts of diarrhea that she refers to as 'waterfalls.' 'I'm proud of being a leader of a poop cult,' she joked in a post on her Facebook page, adopting a moniker from her critics.... For $30 annually, customers have access to private forums to share experiences and ask questions. Epperly also conducts phone consults for $70 an hour...."

From "The Ohio Attorney General Is Demanding Answers From The Woman Who Started A Facebook Cabbage Juice Cult/Jillian Epperly preached to thousands about a homebrew cabbage juice, claiming that explosive diarrhea expels dangerous parasites" (Buzzfeed).

Too bad this story wasn't around in December 2004 when I was deliberately cabbage-blogging and promoting cabbage-blogging.

From that old post:

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

Also:

Speaking of ugly, did you know you can get a Donald Trump Cabbage Patch Doll?

ADDED: Isn't Epperly just carrying on the folk tradition of sauerkraut juice?

"Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor."

"The word is derived from the French verb bricoler ('to tinker'), with the English term DIY ('Do-it-yourself') being the closest equivalent...."

Instrumental bricolage in music includes the use of found objects as instruments... In art, bricolage is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand... Bricolage is considered the jumbled effect produced by the close proximity of buildings from different periods and in different architectural styles... In literature, bricolage is affected by intertextuality, the shaping of a text's meanings by reference to other texts.... In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities....

AKA cultural appropriation.

In his book The Savage Mind (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used "bricolage" to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought...

In her book Life on the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle discusses the concept of bricolage as it applies to problem solving in code projects and workspace productivity. She advocates the "bricoleur style" of programming as a valid and underexamined alternative to what she describes as the conventional structured "planner" approach...

The fashion industry uses bricolage-like styles by incorporating items typically utilized for other purposes. For example, candy wrappers are woven together to produce a purse. The movie Zoolander parodies this concept with "Derelicte", a line of clothing made from trash.

MacGyver is a television series in which the protagonist is the paragon of a bricoleur...

The A-Team, the 80s television series, uses bricolage as a means to create alternative escapes or weapons in every episode, for example, building from scrap a tank that fired cabbages.

I got to that Wikipedia article after looking up the word "bricoleur" in this 1982 NYT review of Paul Theroux's "Mosquito  Coast" (which I recently read and am rereading). From the review:

[The main character, Allie Fox] is, by his own account, a kind of industrial Darwinist, a comber of beaches and dumps: ''The things that get to this beach are indestructible remnants that survived the storms and tides and the bite of the sea. They've proved themselves - stood the test of weather and time. By putting them to use, we are making a settlement that can't be destroyed. Your average Crusoe castaway lives like a monkey. But I'm no fool. Take those toilet seats. That's natural selection.'' But if Father's theories are suspect, his practice is astonishingly effective. As the centerpiece of his creation at Jeronimo, this inspired bricoleur constructs his masterwork, a gigantic edifice of old pipes and boilerplate which, in effect, transforms fire into ice.

Question that occurred to me, reading the Wikipedia bricolage about bricolage: What is bricolage in politics? Is Trump a bricoleur?

Abe Sauer — blogging at The Awl — goes on a bizarre rampage about Meade getting in to see Scott Walker's budget address.

This wasn't anything sneaky. Remember? I blogged a couple photos Meade iPhoned from the assembly chamber just before the speech began. And this guy Abe Sauer imagines he's uncovering some kid of scandal:

What kind of special access was granted to the assembly chamber that day? How did everyone get in? Let's look at Larry Meade...

His name isn't "Larry," Abe. Abe Sauerkraut.

Meade did not have press credentials. When I asked Althouse about how he got in, she told me, "Legislators had tickets to give out, and he was given one. With a ticket, you got in for the speech."

Which legislator let Meade in? Althouse and Meade live in the University Heights area of Madison, which is represented by Brett Hulsey (D-77). Their Senator, Democrat Fred Risser, is currently in Illinois to prevent a quorum and was not the source of the pass....

Representative Hulsey's office confirmed that it did not let Meade in—what's more, that "no tickets were allotted to Rep. Hulsey."

Ann Althouse did not respond to further questions about Meade's presence in the gallery or who let him in.

Abe Sauer published that after sending me 2 emails, the first, which I answered as quoted, and the follow up, which I hadn't noticed yet in my overflowing email inbox. He makes it look like I was covering up. Meanwhile, it seems he's calling my representative's office and asking personal questions about me and Meade! That's pretty creepy.

Meade spoke to Hulsey's office yesterday, and they said they would not disclose such information about their constituents. Maybe Sauerkraut thinks it's important, newsworthy information about me and Meade. Is it? I think you'd first want to know what the procedure is for getting into a Governor's speeches and whether there's anything amiss if a legislator gives a ticket to someone outside of his district.

Sauer didn't bother to do the research before he began flinging mud shredded pickled cabbage around. Meade, however, did the research. It turns out the Governor's office controls the tickets to his speeches. That's true now, and it was true in the past when there were Democratic Governors. The Governor's office distributes some tickets directly and gives other to the majority and minority leaders of both houses, who then pass those out however they want. (If Hulsey, a freshman, didn't get any tickets, it was, I think, his own party leader's decision.) Now, the minority leader of the senate is one of the fleebaggers. So no tickets went that way. Anyway, one of the legislators who had tickets to distribute offered me 2, and I accepted the one for Meade. (I had to teach a class.)

The idea that legislators must only give tickets to their own constituents is a figment of Abe Sauer's imagination. Several legislative staff members told Meade that tickets are distributed to nonconstituents all the time and have been for years, by Democratic and Republican legislators! If Abe Sauer's made-up ethical rule were in place, that would mean that someone like me, who lives in a Democratic district but looks unfriendly to the Democratic agenda, couldn't get access. And if you were a Democrat in a Republican district, you'd have a hard time. It would be an access-restricting rule.

So: two prominent local cheerleaders of Governor Scott Walker had access to the address, without going through their Representative (who was, interestingly, provided with no tickets, in any event), while thousands of Wisconsin citizens remained locked outside. This is the sort of thing that raises questions about the extent of special access in Madison, in light of Walker's relationship with Koch Industries and the makeup of the audience in general for the budget address.

There's the conspiracy thinking tell: Koch. And if it's so interesting that Hulsey didn't get tickets, why didn't Abe Sauer try to find out why? The answer lies with the assembly minority leader, a Democrat. But why find out the fact? It's so much more exciting to take a few data points and fantasize.

Utter conspiracy bullshit from Abe Sauer and The Awl.

UPDATE: Sauerkraut Balls.

Sauerkraut Balls.

Would it be bad of me to say I don't want to eat here? What are you having? The gumbo? I'll have the cheeseburger with nothing on it — except the cheese...

Greta Van Susteren interviews Sarah Palin.

You can watch it all here. It was a relaxing, friendly interview. I noticed:

1. Palin thinks bloggers probably live in their mother's basement and wear pajamas ... at least the bloggers who said maybe Trig was not her baby.

2. She worked terribly hard concocting some sausage and cheese food for the camera.

3. She thinks well of herself and ill of the media.

4. She had nothing at all to do with any of those clothes you've heard talk about, they were foisted on her, and she prefers her own clothes.

5. In Alaska, they have a diverse economy including cabbages as large as basketballs, and Greta would like you to know that in Wisconsin, the pumpkins are very large. That is, the 2 women got into competitive vegetables.

"Harsh, noteless, enormous noise, a growling, low-pitched, screaming sound … drain[s] out like a sob lasting fully a minute."

Roald Dahl described the pain of an axed beech tree, heard by "The Sound Machine." For some reason, we're fascinated by this question whether plants feel pain.

Almost 30 years ago, the trippy flower-power film The Secret Life of Plants claimed pot plants could read minds, cabbages were easily annoyed and a cactus could learn the Japanese alphabet. Then just last year, a parliamentary panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians in Switzerland, charged with devising new rules for genetic testing, published a treatise on preserving the "dignity of plants". Its edicts included that it was "morally impermissible" to decapitate a wildflower by the roadside without rational reason.

But while such fanciful claims continue to take root at the margins, scientists in Australia and abroad are quietly discovering plants are more sophisticated and complex than the wildest imaginings. Plants can navigate a maze, trade food for sex, sniff out and hunt down prey, use cost-benefit analysis, learn from past experiences and recognise friend from foe.

Ha ha. I enjoyed reading this article, especially after listening to the entire book "The Botany of Desire" last night while I slept. Ah, but did I understand it?

I woke during the chapter on marijuana, having slept through the apple tree, the tulip, and the potato. Michael Pollan was talking about a passage in Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception." Here's that passage:

[T]hat very morning... I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture.

... Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say....

"This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers....

And here's a little clip from "The Secret Life of Plants":



What is this post about? Ha ha. I always hated questions like that on the reading portion of the SAT. Does the test still have questions like that? Here, let me construct one for you.

What is the blogger's thesis in this post?
	Plants and people are weird.
	It's important to pay attention to things.
	Art is better than science.
	Just say no to drugs.
	The human mind needs weeding.
pollcode.com free polls

"I ate orange slices topped with crushed olives, oil, and fennel seeds... I ate cabbage and beans with garlic and oil, and even that was mesmerizing."

Posh vegetarian cookery.

[Marco] Folicaldi believes in using “too much” garlic, and he’s not shy about large quantities of olive oil or cheese either, so the food is consistently strong-flavored and rich.

Vegetarianism is no more a weight-loss strategy than meat-eating.

"Hryhoriy put his long life down to the fact he never married."

The world's oldest man dies.

In accordance with his wish that there should be no crying, a hearty meal was served of his favourite dishes: warm potato and herring, and cabbage with home-made sausage....

Oksana, one of the relations with whom he lived, said he had led an active life to the last, helping around the house, whether it was making dumplings or tending the chickens....

"He didn't find himself a mate because he was a short man and never had money," Oksana believes.

ADDED: Commenter ricpic writes another poem (and wins the title — it's been fought over you know! — of Poet Laureate of the Althouse Blog):

The commies came, the commies went,
Hryhoriy hardly noticed;
Earthbound, barefoot, his life was spent
Sausage, not Stalin, focused.

"Kraft singles on white bread was one of this President's most requested lunch items."

Writes Walter Scheib, former White House Executive Chef, fired by Laura Bush in 2005. Don't mess with the chef. He knows those embarrassing facts about you, like the way you like processed cheese and white bread, and is not afraid to tell the world.

Scheib, a professionally trained cook with an outstanding CV even before he started work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, tells me flatly that making lunch for Bush was "not very challenging and didn't really require any of my professional training".

But according to Scheib, this is not a making a partisan or political statement. During our conversation over coffee in a swish New York bar, he does refer to the burgers and 'dogs to which his first Presidential employer, Bill Clinton, was partial. Yet Scheib's book, White House Chef, part memoir, part cookbook, clearly shows who he preferred working for, and why, during his 11 years in the basement kitchen, even if his professionalism - and presumably his desire to work for the big guns again - rule out any the dishing of any serious dirt....

"The White House is a private home," says Scheib. "And the important thing is to achieve what residents want - whether that's a bowl of chicken soup when they're not well or a state dinner for 900 people. Each is important and I submit that the chicken soup may even be more critical to your long-term success."

Scheib, or "Cookie" as President Bush liked to call him, is frustratingly discreet when it comes to talking about his tête-à-têtes over toast with his employers.

Aw, Cookie. I guess he's not a rat. But now the book's no fun at all! Weren't you ready to go to the bookstore and check the index for all the Hillary stuff? Check out the acknowlegements:

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, for taking a chance on me - you literally changed my life and I'll be in your debt forever - and President William Jefferson Clinton, for your good humour and social grace - I actually believe it when you say you are happy to see me. President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush - it was my pleasure to serve you."

Miaow. But when I mention this to Scheib he mumbles and says only, "Well, the temperament of the two families is substantially different."

"Both first ladies had eclectic palates," Scheib reveals. "Both presidents on the other hand, if you'd opened a barbeque or rib joint in the basement, would have been happy as clams...."

And if you'd opened up a clam joint in the basement, they'd've been...

When Bill Clinton swept into the White House with his forceful wife at his side, it was Hillary who decided to bring a new type of cuisine to the White House and it's never ending stream of guests. Less than two years after moving in, she began searching for an experienced chef. "There was this idea that great cuisine should be driven not by complicated techniques but by tremendous, fresh, ripe, spectacular, seasonal ingredients. It should be a flavour-driven concept. She wanted someone who could modernise the White House menu by moving away from the traditional French style and towards modern American cuisine." Scheib says.

In other words, Hillary was up on what had been the most well-known food trend of the previous 20 years. She's so amazing!

Surprisingly neither Bill nor Hillary ever asked for any cooking tips.

So Hillary didn't want to make cookies, Cookie?

Bill liked smoked mozzarella and pepperoni calzones with spicy tomato sauce, Southern fried chicken and Porterhouse steak (24 ounces, no less) with béarnaise sauce, while Hillary requested dishes such as curried Cornish hen, tuna melt with no-fat cheese, and cabbage rolls with shredded turkey and mixed vegetables.

Which food preference suggests better aptitude for the Presidency?

While the Clintons had been an inclusive group, who made staff a part of their extended family, the situation was distinctly different with the Bushes - from day one.

"With Laura it was simply, You're in a domestic position. We respect your professionalism, we like what you've done, everything is fine, but you're not our friend,'" says Scheib. "And a lot of my classic training was suddenly no longer necessary."...

The new President was into simpler food than his predecessor. "He didn't like soup or salad, or anything green," says Scheib. "He really just wanted beef and anything that could be prepared in Tex-Mex style. There was little challenge in preparing the President's lunch."

He really just wanted beef and anything that could be prepared in Tex-Mex style. Actually, that food preference seems really presidential to me. I mean if you were a PR person and it was your job to make up a lie about what your candidate eats, wouldn't that be the best lie?

President Bush was also reluctant to dine with his wife if she had friends over for lunch or if she was having anything fancy'. "He wanted one of his go-to items such as a cheese sandwich or a peanut butter and honey sandwich on white toast with potato chips," says Scheib.

Sounds right to me. I remember reading that Jackie Kennedy liked to have just a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. Suddenly, it seems completely elegant, doesn't it?

The book is "White House Chef."

"'The Wall' is where you don't want to put any more in your mouth."

Said Ian Hickman, who competes in eating contests. You have to train for these things!

First he'll fill up on liquids. Then "I'll practice eating hot dogs when I'm full. The contest is going to be won not by someone who's hungry but by someone who's able to eat when they're full."

Others rely on "guzzling large volumes of water or chowing down low-calorie foods, such as cabbage, in the weeks leading up to an event."

And note that the best contestants these days are not fat!

"About eight out of the top 10 are svelte, athletic," said an eater who goes by the name "Crazy Legs" Conti, who stands 6-foot-3, weighs 210 pounds, and runs marathons. [Sonya Thomas, 5' 5" and 98 pounds] beat him handily last month at a Buffalo wing contest in Bethesda.

He and others buy into what they call the belt-of-fat theory, which supposes that abdominal fat inhibits the stomach from ballooning. "A thinner person has much more room for expansion. An eater like myself, unfortunately, is struggling to catch up," Conti said.

Funny. I like watching a good eating contest. But maybe you think these displays are immoral or obscene. If your reason for objecting to these contests is that the food could have been used to feed someone who is hungry, should you not regard every fat person as embodying the same immorality?

Sunday cabbage-blogging.

Can you identify today's literary cabbage-quote (without Googling)?

"Come, and eat my strawberries. They are ripening fast."

... Donwell was famous for its strawberry-beds, which seemed a plea for the invitation: but no plea was necessary; cabbage-beds would have been enough to tempt the lady, who only wanted to be going somewhere.

The Right Cabbage.

"The Right Cabbage Can Win a Scholarship."

For good luck.

I'm not superstitious, really. But that last post makes me think I should look into some new year's good luck traditions.

You might want to buy traditional Japanese amulets -- omamori -- pictured here.

Maybe you just need to cook the right food. Maybe some Hoppin' John: black-eyed peas, salted ham, and rice. Some folks emphasize collard greens with the black-eyed peas and some form of pork. This seems related to what my mother used to make for the new year's meal: "pork and sauerkraut." It wasn't very good!

Hmmm... this could be considered cabbage-blogging.

Let's see. Here's a list of new year's luck traditions, including this info:

Many parts of the United States celebrate the new year by eating black-eyed peas. They are usually eaten with ham or some cut of pork meat. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog and its meat is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity.

Cabbage is another "good luck" vegetable that is consumed on New Year's Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity. Cabbage is representative of paper money!

Okay, now I'm definitely cabbage-blogging!

Here's to the new new year's tradition!

For good luck: cabbage-blog!

UPDATE: And there is also watermelon-seed-blogging, which is based on a Vietnamese tradition of eating red-dyed watermelon-seeds for the new year. Checking to make sure there really is such a Vietnamese tradition, I found this nice site describing a lot of new year's traditions. (And, yes, I realize January 1st is not necessarily the new year holiday.)

Cabbage-blogging.

An emailer, having read my last post, declares: Forget tire-blogging! The new thing is cabbage-blogging! I look into it the new trend. Hey! Just yesterday a head of cabbage was revealed as Fafblog's Man of the Year!

Well, maybe you are in the midst of making your Red Cabbage Christmas Salad. Maybe you are Croatian, celebrating a traditional Croatian Christmas, with some fine stuffed cabbage. Here's some Spanish Christmas cabbage. How many nationalities have a Christmas cabbage dish? Feel free to cabbage-blog!

Or maybe you have a Christmasy cabbage miracle to tell about.

Did you know broccoli is a type of cabbage?

Did you know "cole slaw" is just Dutch for sliced cabbage: koolsla?

Did you know Cabbage Patch Dolls are back this year? Maybe you've got one wrapped under the tree right now. Did you know there was an urban legend that the CIA or President Reagan had Cabbage Patch Dolls designed to get people used to loving ugly babies so humanity could carry on after a nuclear war?

Speaking of ugly, did you know you can get a Donald Trump Cabbage Patch Doll?

And then there is the cabbage of fable:

It is said that no sort of food causes so much thirst as cabbage, especially that called colewort. Pausanias tells us it first sprang from the sweat of Jupiter, some drops of which fell on the earth. Cœlius, Rhodiginus, Ovid, Suidas, and others repeat the same fable.

Rabelais: Pantagruel, book iv. (Prologue). “Some drops of sweat happening to light on the earth produced what mortals call cabbage.”—

The poets have lavished their attention on the lowly cabbage. Yeats:

All his happier dreams came true
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
“What then?”sang Plato’s ghost, “what then?”

Lewis Carrol:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

There is also the cabbage of politics. H.L. Mencken has good political wisdom framed in cabbage terms: "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

And George Orwell begins his "1984" with the reek of cabbage:

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.

Well, that reminds me what I don't like about cabbage. So maybe I won't get too carried away with the new cabbage-blogging craze. So don't hesitate to pick up the slack and cabbage-blog yourself.

A dialogue about food.

"What do you think is the best food? I mean, not taking health into account. If you had to pick one food and say that it is the best, what do you think it would be?"

"Ice cream."

"Really, because I had an idea..."

"Chocolate?"

"I was just thinking -- not because I really think it's the answer -- but it just came into my head as the answer ..."

"What?"

"Cole slaw."

UPDATE: The dialogue continues a half hour later:

"You know, I think cabbage is one of the most repulsive foods."

"I don't like cabbage either. It's cole slaw."

"If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If life gives you cabbage, make cole slaw."