"The lone star tick... was first found on Martha’s Vineyard in 1985 but has become more established in recent years, feeding and breeding on the thousands of deer..."

"... that roam the island’s lush woods and beach grass.This is reflected in the rising number of alpha-gal diagnoses. Some 523 new cases were reported on Martha’s Vineyard last year.... [E]xperts fear the situation on Martha’s Vineyard is only going to get worse due to the island’s growing deer population. [Biologist Patrick] Roden-Reynolds said there are anywhere from 55 to 75 deer per square mile — up from 40 to 60 in 2011. This is up to ten times the amount of deer needed for a healthy forest ecosystem, he said, adding: “Each deer this time of year probably has a couple of hundred ticks on them that are attached and feeding and producing new ticks for the next year.” Locals have called for an increase in deer hunting to manage the island’s population. 'Even doing some sort of hunting tourism-promotion thing here would be helpful in a way,' said [Kate Sudarsky, a 26-year-old teacher on the island who was diagnosed with alpha-gal]."

I'm reading "'We can no longer eat burgers or ice cream — all because of a tick bite'/A bug-borne disease has taken over Martha’s Vineyard and is turning people vegan, locals claim" (London Times).

Not enough deer hunters on the island. Hard to imagine the kind of tourism they could set up that would bring in enough deer hunters to do the kind of thinning they'd need. Hire professional sharpshooters. 

Before you riff on the rich-people problems of Martha's Vineyard, take a look at this map showing the range of the lone star tick in the U.S.

"Skeptics doubted that diners would pay hundreds of dollars for vegetables and fruit, no matter how artfully prepared."

"Others dismissed it as another high-end stunt from a chef who had taken the restaurant through a series of different menus since he took over in 2006, including one that required waiters to perform card tricks.... The meat-free menu met with mixed reviews. Although the restaurant retained the three stars that Michelin first awarded it in 2012, other critics were not as impressed. Pete Wells, then The Times’s restaurant critic, described vegetable dishes that... 'are so obviously standing in for meat or fish... that you almost feel sorry for them.'"

From "Meat Is Back at Eleven Madison Park, After 4 Vegan Years/The Manhattan restaurant drew global praise and skepticism with its climate-minded, all-plant menu. Now its chef wants to be more welcoming — and popular" (NYT).

"The restaurant has had varying levels of financial success since introducing the vegan menu.... Bookings for private events, an essential stream of income, have been particularly sparse. 'It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant'...."

Maybe there's just no way to be expensive and vegan. Pick one. It is, apparently, too much of a strain to shore up the customer's delusion that nonmeat items are very, very posh. We're told there was "tonburi, the seeds some call land caviar."

I caught a glimpse of my own obituary.

In the email this morning, the Google alert I've had on my name for decades brings this:

I send that image to Meade (along with the link to the website the alert wants me to click), and this conversation follows:

"Five years ago, meat hit a wall. Plant-based burgers were catching on, and the amount of meat the average American ate..."

"... per year started to wane. By 2022, it was down to 264 pounds — a drop of 10 pounds in two years. Editors at the recipe website Epicurious announced in 2021 that beef would be banished from all future content, citing its contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. That same year, the chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park in New York City — considered one of the world’s top restaurants — retooled his $335 tasting menu to eliminate animal products. Restaurants of all sorts added vegetarian dishes for environment- and health-minded diners. Meat’s rebound surprised researchers.... The research showed that nearly 98 percent of households buy meat and 73 percent consider it a healthy choice, up 10 percent since 2020."

From "Meat Is Back, on Plates and in Politics/After years in which 'plant-based' was the mantra, meat once again dominates the national conversation about dinner" (NYT).

"Occasionally [Balzac] took a boiled egg at about nine o’clock in the morning or sardines mashed with butter if he was hungry; then a chicken wing or a slice of roast lamb..."

"... in the evening, and he ended his meal with a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar."

That was while writing a book. When he was done, “he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters as a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole, not to mention extravagances like dessert and special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen. Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.”

From "A Hungry Little Boy/Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar)" (NYRB).

There is always a dog story on the home page of The NYT and The Washington Post.

Watch. You'll see. And it's some of the most inane material.

For example, today, at The NYT, there's "Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?" and at The Washington Post, there's "This love letter to dogs praises them as 'creatures of commitment.'"

Obviously, they know there are readers who click for every dog. I am not one of those readers, and I won't even click through to get links. Every day, the story is the same: Dogs continue to be dogs.

And, no, there is no equal treatment for cats. A search for "cat" on the WaPo home page came up with nothing, and on the NYT home page, it got "Biden Awards Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis/President Biden, a Catholic, awarded the medal with distinction to the pontiff, to whom he has turned for personal guidance" and "Hams in the Belfry: How a Cash-Poor French Cathedral Fixed Its Organ/A dispute over a project to cure hams in a bell tower underscored the difficulties that churches in France face trying to pay for restorations."

If Althouse were to make a free-access link to one of those articles, which one would you want?

Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?

This love letter to dogs praises them as "creatures of commitment."

Biden Awards Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis

Hams in the Belfry: How a Cash-Poor French Cathedral Fixed Its Organ

 

pollcode.com free polls

"'Did you hear that guy order milk? Who orders milk?'... Their meal came — including the milk — and Milk Man went to town: taking big swigs..."

"... between chomps of steak with such gusto that my blood ran cold. That hairy, masculine hand. The glass of frothy milk. The pure delight. The cow two ways.... I couldn’t ignore it.... I interrupted his conversation. 'I don’t mean to be rude,' I said, 'but what’s with the milk?' 'Oh, I know it’s weird, right?” he responded, self-aware but not ashamed. Then he leaned over and drawled, 'I can’t explain it. I just love a big glass of cold milk with a rare steak. Mmmmm-mm!' Milk Man’s date didn’t seem to feel weird about it; she gave a 'Yes, my man is a freak' smile as he finished his Big Ol’ Glass of Cold Milk.... Milk symbolizes innocence and purity, and the adult who continues to indulge in it — nay, cling to it — long after their loss of innocence provokes light repulsion, confusion, and fascination in the observer...."

Writes Allison P. Davis, in "The Pervert’s Beverage/From Babygirl to Fellow Travelers, milk is for freaks" (Vulture).

"Nicola Guess is a dietitian and researcher at the University of Oxford. She also runs a private clinic and has worked as a consultant for food companies, including Beyond Meat."

I'm reading the fine print at the bottom of the New York Times article, "Why Ultraprocessed Foods Aren’t Always Bad," by Nicola Guess. 

The problem is that the category of ultraprocessed foods, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet by some estimates, is so broad that it borders on useless. It lumps store-bought whole-grain bread and hummus in with cookies, potato chips and soda. While many ultraprocessed foods are associated with poor health, others, like breakfast cereals and yogurt, aren’t.

Processing can also create products suitable for people with food intolerances or ones that have a lower environmental footprint. (Full disclosure: I have consulted for food companies that I feel make beneficial products, including Beyond Meat, which makes ultraprocessed meat alternatives that I believe are better for the planet.)...

So, there is also disclosure in the body of the text of the article.

I love the author's name, Nicola Guess. I have to guess about the usefulness of any of the assertions here.

"Everybody says this who meets with him, but like, he's, he's an incredible host. So we, we met with him at Bedminster Golf Club in, in New Jersey...

"... which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful, you know, we had a great time.... [What did Trump serve at dinner?] Oh, he said, he said what do you guys want to eat? And I, I just, I, for some reason I was just like, I, I, I, I know exactly what to say and I'm like, meat, I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. And, and by the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. [There were no sides?] There were no sides.... It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don't think there was room on the table for sides. [Were there drinks or no alcohol?] There? It was a diet coke. He, he, he, he mainlines diet coke. And I was mainlining it right next to him."

Said Marc Andreessen — with questions from Bari Weiss in brackets — in this "Honestly" podcast episode. This is a great podcast. (Andreessen, to quote Weiss, "got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser... He then co-founded Netscape... [and] now runs a venture capital firm... [that] invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft and Oculus to name just a few.")

There's a nice "lightning round" at the end of the podcast. After asking about the food Trump, the "incredible host," served at Bedminster, Weiss asks: "Tomorrow you wake up and you're the DNC chair, what's the first thing you would do?"

"This is repulsive to me. I mean, that anyone would do this to an animal. And an animal’s like a child. I don’t know if you understand that or not."

Said the judge, quoted in "Disgusted judge puts away woman who ate cat in stomach-turning video: 'You’ve embarrassed this nation'" (NY Post).

Reading the rabbit's mind.

I'm reading "We take our dogs everywhere. Maybe we shouldn’t," by the Portland, Oregon writer Tove Danovich:

After pausing to take a photo of a flower along the trail, I looked up to see a doe standing directly in the path in front of me.... Later on, while sitting to take in a quiet moment, I watched as a rabbit popped out of the bush onto the trail, ears twitching. The two of us stayed there together for a minute, maybe two. Then she ran off a second before I heard the dog coming toward us. It wasn’t safe for a rabbit with a potential predator close by....

I see rabbits all the time, in our yard and along the nearby woodland trails, and the rabbits are always the same. They freeze at first, and then they suddenly bolt. It doesn't take a dog to trigger the shift from frozen to hopping the hell out of there. The rabbit has 2 modes. The column writer interprets it her way, flattering herself by imagining the rabbit is communing with her, followed by fear of the dog. But I think I've seen far more rabbits than the author. That doesn't make my reading of the rabbit's mind perfect. But I'm thinking that the rabbit isn't thinking anything at all, but is programmed by evolution to alternate between 2 strategies: 1. Look invisible, 2. Become invisible. That is: 1. Freeze, 2. Run. The rabbit does the same thing every time.

And, by the way, no matter how gently you may move through the woods and how fondly you may regard bunnies, when you, the human being, are around, for the rabbit, there is "a potential predator close by."

"When you guys wrote this song — you know, 'we'll make good pets' — you were talking about if these aliens came and visited us and we suddenly became a planet of pets."

Said Howard Stern to Perry Farrell in 1997:

I found that because I've been reading about Perry Farrell this week and it intersected in my head with all the loose talk about newcomers eating the pets of the people who live there in Ohio.

Here's the NYT story if you need to catch up on Perry Farrell's problems: "Jane’s Addiction to Cancel Tour After Onstage Fight/In a social media post, the rock band said it was halting its reunion tour after the group’s singer, Perry Farrell, hit its guitarist at a Boston show" ("Farrell’s wife, Etty Lau Farrell, said on Instagram after the concert that her husband had been upset throughout the tour about the band’s sound levels drowning out his vocals. He was suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat.... 'He was screaming just to be heard,' she said.")

Lyrics from the song "Pets": "Will there be another race/To come along and take over for us?/Maybe Martians could do better than we've done/We'll make great pets!"

There's always the question whether Martians will eat their pets. I come from the "Twilight Zone"/"To Serve Man" era of thinking about the aliens....

"A liverwurst sandwich with mustard is quite possibly the perfect lunch for me. It tastes somewhere between bologna and bacon."

"It's just such a rich flavor … the texture is great, too."

Said one admirer of liverwurst, perhaps liverwurst's biggest fan, quoted in "Boar's Head ditches liverwurst, a once-popular sandwich staple that Americans no longer stomach/Liverwurst is dropped from product line in wake of product recall and declining popularity" (Fox News).

Boar's Head discovered — so luckily — that its listeria problem was entirely located within a facility that made liverwurst, the product no one liked anyway.

Kind of makes you wonder how anyone got infected, but obviously some people were clinging to liverwurst. 

"15 Countries where people eat dogs and cats."

From Taazakhabar News Bureau.

Highlights:

10. Canada: Dog meat is legally sold at restaurants in Canada.... Food animals are “mammal or bird raised in captivity–whose meat or meat or by-products were for human consumption.” So to obtain a license you have to prove that the dogs were raised explicitly for food and not keep as pets....

12. Switzerland: A small percentage of Swiss population secretly eats cats, dogs, and horses. Eating cat and dog meat is part of Christmas celebrations. While there are no commercial slaughterhouses for cats and dogs, farmers kill the animals themselves.... Swiss cantons of Appenzell and St. Gallen have a tradition of eating dog meat, preserving it as sausages, as well as using it for medicinal purposes.

"[T]he burgeoning Nads were young Republicans. They had gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to drink cheap beer..."

"... in a room decorated with porcelain elephant statues and photographs of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. John McCain, and listen to a well-built man with a five o’clock shadow and an Australian accent tell them that '"nasty women" are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles!' In some ways, Adams’s shtick is conventionally conservative: He’s Christian, he’s very concerned about there being only two genders, he rails against 'woke.' In other ways, his version of MAGA manhood is so over-the-top, so uncanny that it almost seems like performance art.... He writes about how if your wife is 'high-maintenance' then you’re a 'loser' no matter how hot she is. And about his love of steak. 'Alpha males don’t care about time changes, we wake up at 4AM every single morning regardless of the circumstances,' he wrote on X last month, a few days after the clocks sprang forward for daylight saving time. '64oz tomahawk ribeyes aren’t going to eat themselves!' Is Nick Adams serious?... 'You remember Andy Kaufman?; Adams’s hired security guard told me, referring to the late comedian who was famous for never breaking character.... 'This is not a character,' Adams told me. 'This is not a bit. It’s not trolling. Anyone who thinks this is not me, that I don’t eat steak, that I don’t drink ice-cold domestics, that I don’t repel woke beer, they’re wrong. They’re absolutely wrong.”

Writes Ben Terris, in "The deeply silly, extremely serious rise of ‘Alpha Male’ Nick Adams/Meet the Trump-backed raconteur who is teaching America’s young men the art of being hard to deal with" (WaPo, free access link).

"Nads" = Nick Adams Disciples.

I hadn't heard of Nick Adams until this article. The issue of when a comedian is "serious" is kind of intriguing. I don't think the point of reference should be Andy Kaufman. It should be Andrew Dice Clay. I already lived through that. Another thing I lived through was the TV show "The Rebel." Don't reuse a name that already means something to some people who still roam through the west.

ADDED: As pointed out by William in the comments, there's also Nick Adams, the Hemingway fictional character. I don't have a problem with this new Nick Adams adopting the name in a reference to those stories from a century ago, just as I'd accept a comedian who called himself Hamlet or Captain Ahab. "Nick Adams" was taken as a showbiz name back in the 1950s, and I don't like seeing it reused. 

Found poetry.

I found "Incomplete Shopping List" by Siri:

"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

"It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat. I am not going anywhere."

Said Senator Robert Menendez, quoted in "Gold Bullion and Halal Meat: Inside the Menendez Investigation/Federal prosecutors have accused Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and his wife, Nadine, of accepting bribes in exchange for official actions by Mr. Menendez" (NYT).

I love the way this article begins. Unlike the other news reports I've seen, it doesn't forefront all the cash and gold found in Menendez's house. It sets up a woman-made-him-do-it narrative. We begin in January 2018, when Menendez had avoided conviction on federal bribery charges. There was a hung jury, and the government declined to pursue a new trial. "He was free...." He could return to his Senatorial career. But then:

In honor of his 80th birthday: 80 things about Mick Jagger.

At The Guardian.

A few that struck me the right way:

10. “You do tend to present a yobbish image.” One interviewer suggested this to him as the Stones were breaking through. “Moronic, I think, is a better word,” he replied, deliciously....

15. Great rock stars project vanity. And you don’t get more magnificently vain than Jagger singing “Tell me a story about how you adore me,” on Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?...

25. Jagger is the only middle-class Englishman from Kent who could sing “I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis / She tried to take me upstairs for a ride” without it sounding like cosplay....

True carnivores.

True carnivores just tear apart meat with their canine teeth & chew lowering their heads to one side so that the blood drips from their mouths without soiling their clothes. Sounds like you aren’t the real thing complaining about a knife. https://t.co/5cTmfq3t2O

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) June 22, 2023