"Now Ann has baited me into promiscuously spiking my anxiety stew with carnalized onions..."

Ha ha ha. My favorite kind of comment — taking an ingredient from an old post and adding it to the material in the post under discussion. It's fusion commenting, like fusion cooking... and the metaphor in the comment is cooking.

And I love that I've got a tag for "onions," though I see various posts with onions that did not get the tag, including posts with the tag "onion rings," onion rings being a special, niche topic here on the blog. Remember these carnalized onion rings? And of course, these ("I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol").

Speaking of comments, I can see some of you are saying I'm not giving you the kind of post you like anymore. There are at least 4 reasons for that:

1. The world is locked down, so things don't just happen anymore, not the kind of things that delight and intrigue. The usual places still have their articles, but they're filling space. They're doing what they have to do, and I can smell the fakeness, the ennui. I have my standard, and I'll read until something crosses the line for me. 

2. The standard on this blog is not big over small. I'm not here to repeat headlines about what the President just did. In fact, if the headline is big, I'd rather go small.

3. I'm not interested in throwing my weight onto one side or the other, and if I have nothing to add, there's no reason to write about these things. With Trump, I have distanced myself from the relentless haters, but I'm in no mood to encourage him either. I'm waiting for the next few weeks to pass, hunkering down. I could spring out and denounce him, but I don't join mobs. 

4. It's Christmas Eve. Talk about keeping a distance. What can you see from a distance? "When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, 'What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?'"

"In his fifteenth satire, Juvenal had scoffed at Egyptians for allegedly worshipping onions..."

"... 'What a holy race (o sanctas gentes) to have such divinities springing up in their gardens.'* Sir Walter Raleigh, in an anti-Catholic mood, compared such worship of food to the sacrament of Holy Communion, where Christians munch on their god. John Donne, George Herbert, and Robert Herrick all followed Raleigh’s lead, joking, as Herbert wrote, of anyone 'who makes a root his god.' Thus, [the scholar Tom] Tashiro notes, 'the lowly onion was touched with divinity and thereby entered into the works of a few great poets.' When Rome seemed less of a threat, onions seemed less ripe for poetry. 'Only with the passing of time,' Tashiro concludes, 'in the nineteenth century, on the Continent, would the onion again receive the attention of great writers—of the Scandinavians and of the Russians—for whom it became a symbol of the self and would have moral virtues.' Tashiro is presumably alluding to Grushenka’s parable in The Brothers Karamazov: a guardian angel gives a wicked woman in hell one last chance at salvation. Did she ever do one good deed? Yes, she once gave an onion to a beggar. The angel appeals to God who says, fine, take that onion and yank her out of the lake of fire with it. Other sinners hold onto her feet, hoping for a free ride, but she kicks them off. 'I’m the one who’s getting pulled out, not you,' she says. 'It’s my onion.' At that very moment, the onion breaks. For some reason, I think of this parable whenever I drive by the Colt Armory, on Interstate 91 in Hartford, with its incongruous onion dome, bright blue and studded with gold stars.** It’s my Second Amendment, I imagine someone saying."

From "Renoir’s Onions" by Christopher Benfey (in The New York Review of Onions).

Here are Renoir's Onions, in case you're wondering how Benfey got from Egypt to The Brothers Karamazov to the Second Amendment:



These are crazy times, but a man once took that much time to paint 6 onions, and now we have Trump... and no hell.

________________

* Juvenal wrote, "Who knows not... what monsters demented Egypt worships? One district adores the crocodile, another venerates the Ibis that gorges itself with snakes. In the place where magic chords are sounded by the truncated Memnon, and ancient hundred-gated Thebes lies in ruins, men worship the glittering golden image of the long-tailed ape. In one part cats are worshipped, in another a river fish, in another whole townships venerate a dog; none adore Diana, but it is an impious outrage to crunch leeks and onions with the teeth. What a holy race to have such divinities springing up in their gardens! No animal that grows wool may appear upon the dinner-table; it is forbidden there to slay the young of the goat; but it is lawful to feed on the flesh of man!"

** Here's an image of that dome (cc Onasill ~ Bill Badzo):

"At an emotional level, shunning onion powder feels like a meaningful rejection of the previous generation’s cooking ethos."

"Onion powder hasn’t been treated with quite the disdain of, say MSG or corn syrup, but it is part of the same emotional package. And while plenty of home cooks still use it, within the realm of chefs, food writers, and other tastemakers, it is generally regarded as old school—not in an exciting or authentic way, but in a snickering, 'Can you believe people used to cook with condensed mushroom soup?' way."

(Metafilter.)

"10 Reasons Falling For Shameless Click Bait Makes You A Bad Mother."

A 2013 Onion slideshow — funny enough... but you shouldn't click — that I ran across while casually researching the theory that the day is going to come when people will have acquired a robust resistance to clickbait.

I devised this theory after encountering (just now, in my Facebook feed) "Donald Trump gets into Twitter war with Modern Family writer—is obliterated" — which goes to a Daily Kos article from last summer that ends with "A reader brought to my attention that this twitter battle happened 2 years ago!"

My comment at Facebook:

Should we be promoting stories with clickbait headlines like "is obliterated"? Also, that's some ugly eliminationisticness, "obliterated." If we're supposed to loathe Trump for his brutish language, are we not hypocritical to jump at "obliterated"?

I'm quoting myself here because I like to use my civility bullshit tag.

"Apparently, two male customers ordered their sandwiches with diced onions, but when the sandwiches were presented the onions were not diced."

"The argument escalated until one of the men reached into the pocket of his friend's jacket 'pulled out a snake and threw it behind the counter.'"

I clicked on "Three sentences no one should forget about onions."

But it actually said "Three sentences no one should forget about unions." I would never have clicked on that. And now I'm sad not to have 3 sentences not to forget about onions. Please help me do better than this:

1. "Get those onions out of here!" (That's what Philo Kvetch said to "Onions" Oregano on "The Soupy Sales Show.")

2. "That was strange, having real onions and the rest of the stuff phony." (Andy Warhol's diary entry for Monday, August 27, 1979, commenting on a sandwich he ate at McDonald's.)

3. "Be an onion!" (According to Mark Twain, that's what a Bermudian says to his son.)