Week in Review

 Politics This Week

Trump responded to a woman reporter who asked a reasonable question: “Quiet, Piggy.”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, defended Trump’s insult as “frankness.” There were many reactions to the President’s outburst. Here’s a quote from columnist Rachel Leingang in an article titled  “‘Unforgivable’: Trump’s ‘piggy’ insult is stoking more outrage than usual: 

“In Trump 2.0, you never know which affronts to decency will stick in people’s minds. This one, though, has a symbolism that seems to be resonating.”

And columnisit Margaret Sullivan on Trump’s anti-women actions:

“Nothing changes – it only worsens – because Trump gets away with it. His stalwart supporters don’t seem to care. The members of the press corps may write a sternly worded letter (or not), but they normalize it, too, by their inaction.

“Will this ‘quiet, piggy’ moment make a difference? Only for those who care about decency in public officials and in American society.

“Maybe that’s an old-fashioned notion. And I’m not sure there are enough of us who remember that it matters.”

 

My Reading This Week

World Pacific is in my opinion a terrible book. I gave up after the first half. The review that unfortunately caused me to buy it noted that its central character was a fictionalized version of  Richard Halliburton (1900-1939), author of several runaway best sellers about his travel adventures. The central character of World Pacific is a pathetic wanker (nasty word choice is intentional). The plots of both of the novel’s alternate stories are boring. Don’t waste any time with this book. 

The real Richard Halliburton preparing for his final adventure aboard this ship that disappeared with Halliburton and his crew during a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean.

As I have said, I was absorbed in every one of Richard Halliburton’s books when I was a young teen, and recently visited some of the sights in Greece that enchanted me back then (link). I’m now mature enough that the breathless style of this once-very-popular author is less appealing to me after all these years. However, I know a bad imitation when I see it, and World Pacific is a very bad imitation.

A More Entertaining Book…

Author Louis Sachar is known for his children’s books, especially Holes. His newest book, The Magician of Tiger Castle is promoted as his first adult book. I found it nevertheless as being rather childish, both in the way the action was developed, and in the way the author constantly explained cultural references that in my opinion any adult reader would already know. I would say that the plot and characters are all right but not super compelling, the way that I think fantasy plots and characters should be.

Looking forward to next week

"Over the River to Grandma's House on Thanksgiving Day" by Grandma Moses, the American primitive painter. Date: 1943 (source)

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with ReaderBuzz,

Sami’s Murals,

and Eileen’s Critters

Falafel Past and Present

 Dinner Tonight

Falafel that Alice made from a recipe starting with dried chickpeas.

Eating Falafel

Falafel in Dearborn, Michigan, around 20 years ago
(from an earlier blog post).

Most famous falafel in Paris on Rue des Rosiers, the famous Jewish neighborhood for at least a century.

Israeli Falafel as I enjoyed it in Abu Gosh.

Lunch including falafel in Abu Gosh (near Jerusalem), 2018.

From 2016: Falafel (from Trader Joe's), a Turkish eggplant salad, and a cabbage salad with tahini dressing

Where Did Falafel Come From?

Many cultures claim Falafel as their own, often implying a very long history for the dish. Asconsumed today, its history isn’t really very long: one plausible theory is that it was invented in the late 19th century in Egypt at the request of British officers looking for a local version of Indian fried croquettes. In Israel in the mid-20th century, Jewish refugees from Yemen found a way to make a living by selling falafel as street food; thus, Israeli version of the dish is associated with Yemen although in fact it didn’t exist there, only later with the immigrant community.

Here’s one summary of the status of the dish in Israel, where I really got to know the dish:

“Consider falafel, Israel’s most popular fast food — as culturally synonymous with the country as burgers and fries are with the United States. Just as hamburgers are not technically an American invention (origin: Hamburg, Germany), falafel, deep-fried balls of fava beans or chickpeas, can be traced to India, where frying fritters made of chana dal was a common cooking practice, thought to have been brought west by Turkish or Arab traders.

“Another theory about the origins of falafel is that it was invented by Egyptians using fava beans, a vegetarian alternative to meat for Egypt’s Christian population to eat during Lent. Food historians speculate that when the dish migrated toward the Levant, the fava beans were replaced by the more common chickpea, which lends credence to the notion that falafel made of chickpeas may have roots in Jewish Yemenite cuisine.” (source)

Weekend

 

Windows of the People’s Food Co-op.

Ann Cleeves: another Inspector Ramsay novel.
Not a very good book! Too many hints make it seem contrived.

Marina Chang: Tastes of the Pyrenees
Appealing recipes — I may try some of them.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Doing Things

 In Ann Arbor

A cup of coffee at Argus

… we told them to find another way to trim the trees away from the power lines!

Favorite News Item

In the Salish Sea near Seattle — AP photo:
A little seal escapes a pod of orcas that wanted to have it for dinner.

Story of the seal in the Guardian. (This is only a screen shot of the video).

When we were there…

We saw seals furiously barking at a pod of orcas when we took a National Geographic cruise
 there: my photo (© 2018).

From Miriam in China

A mural on a street in Shanghai. More of Miriam’s photos will be posted here.

Recent Reading

The narrator of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (published 2014) seemed very unsympathetic to me, and so did almost all the other characters. The narrator was an assistant to a famous (obviously fictitious) pop singer: a woman with an enormous ego and not much else to her. The other assistants and employees were uniformly impressed by their employer, and utterly empty-headed. A major theme of the novel is race and its importance to the narrator, her friend, her employer and quite a few others, all of them brown or black individuals dealing with the emerging racism in England towards the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.

The novel alternates between the narrator’s description of her relationship with her employer and her childhood and friendship with a girl who eventually became a successful dancer and then a failure. Here’s her eventual insight into her friend, around half way through the book:

“She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by color, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities . . . In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.” (p. 215)

 I had to force myself to keep reading. In fact, I don’t know why I did, but I persisted. I remember liking her earlier book White Teeth.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters,

Sami’s Monday Murals, and 

Deb’s Sunday Salon

Political thought for the day

 What’s next? — From The Contrarian:

After gleefully inflicting pain on the American people, MAGA Republicans are stuck defending their Epstein coverup and a politically wounded president, a rotten economy, a self-inflicted affordability crisis, their determination to jack up healthcare premiums, a reverse Robin Hood scheme that takes from working people to enrich the mega-wealthy, and defense of a money grubbing, corrupt, low-functioning president.

The White House: symbol of America and its leadership.

Worrying about food

“The government shutdown is already the longest in American history. But it’s also perhaps the most punishing, in part because President Trump has taken actions no previous administration ever took during a shutdown.

“Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration cut food stamps for millions of low-income Americans. It tried to fire thousands of government workers and withhold back pay from others, while freezing or canceling money for projects in Democratic-led states.” (New York Times, November 10, 2025)

I am fortunate to have a secure life at the moment. However, I’m concerned about people throughout the country whose access to food is in jeopardy or is actually diminished by the cruel games being played by our president and his cronies in Congress. Here in Michigan, the state government has acted to continue food benefits (SNAP — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). 

If you live in a different part of the USA, benefits for SNAP recipients may be disrupted, with congressional action perhaps about to provide some help. At the same time as food aid is disrupted, medical programs run by the federal government are almost certain to be decreased, with many people cut off from benefits that they depend on. It’s a horrendous situation, part of the autocratic takeover of our former democracy. 

I’ve collected some headlines about the Michigan food situation — and I’m making a contribution to the main food bank in our town, but I feel totally helpless watching the destruction of what we thought was the American way.

From an article in the Guardian by a SNAP recipient in Oregon:

“But it still seems to me that we, America’s low-income people, have been treated like lab animals in a sick political experiment. Oh good, they’re giving us food! Oh wait, they’re not.

“When I say ‘giving us food,’ it makes it sound like we do not work or do for ourselves. That is simply not true. Even with a regular allotment of Snap benefits and a handout from the food bank, it takes true ingenuity to get through the month. And while we are cooking beans from scratch, we are also working or hustling to find work.” …

“I quit being choosy at the food bank, and started picking up stuff I would not normally eat – AKA stockpiling food. Off-brand mac and cheese, a can of peaches. The thing about food insecurity is that you are always worrying. You are always doing mental math, figuring out how to substitute key ingredients or spruce up the pot of lentils you have been eating all week.”

The Life of Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s recently published memoir, Book of Lives, was somewhat disappointing to me, though I am a lifelong fan of Atwood and I believe that I have bought and read almost every one of her novels and quite a few of her volumes of poetry. Some of the first editions that I have had all these years may even be worth a lot of money (but who knows? I don’t want to sell them.)

My Margaret Atwood shelves and a couple of my early editions of her novels.

A first US edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, which became very famous later.

Margaret Atwood’s description of her early life reminded me of many events and situations that I experienced a few years later when I was growing up. Here are some quotes that evoke my own memories of the life of a teenager —

We had school uniforms to combat the usual teenage girls’ urge to have the latest outfit so as not to appear ridiculous, but in me the sewing impulse was also constructivist: I wanted to see what I could make. I pored through pattern books in fabric stores and haunted remnants counters, and was eager to snap up bargains. Some of the lusher scraps—velvets, taffetas, silks, lace—I turned into sumptuous ballgowns for my sister’s proto-Barbie doll. I made my own formal dance dresses. One was pink chiffon, which ended up as cleaning cloths, says my sister. The next was an elegant Audrey Hepburn spaghetti-strap white brocade. Skirts could be very full, with crinolines underneath, or they could be pencil skirts, worn with cinch belts and sweaters with bat-wing sleeves. The cinch belts were not my friends: I was short-waisted, and with a cinch belt, looked like two tomatoes, one on top of the other. I also made a pleated plaid skirt—this must have been a school project, as I recall no love for it—and my father said, “You shouldn’t wear plaid. It makes you look broad in the beam.” How withering. (p 92)

Our Home Economics teacher, Miss Ricker, was a humourless person for whom dinner was a green thing, a white thing, a yellow thing, and a brown thing on every plate, no matter what they tasted like. Clothes were inner seam finishes and linings, not style. (p. 103)

One of the men who worked in the kitchen, at the potato-peeling level, had a number tattooed on his arm. We counsellors all knew what it meant, but we didn’t talk about it, which you might find peculiar at a Jewish camp. Strange as it may seem today, the Holocaust was not much discussed publicly in the 1950s. (p. 103)

The Bohemian Embassy was a coffee house of the early 1960s kind pioneered by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. You climbed a set of worn stairs to find yourself in a large former storage room, with exposed brick walls and small tables and the first espresso machine any of us had ever seen. There were jazz nights and folk nights, and a poetry night, which was on Thursdays. A genial fellow named Don Cullen ran the whole shebang. I was invited to read poetry there, on the strength of my college publications, by John Robert Colombo, who curated—as they would now say—the poetry nights. (p. 149)

Phoebe borrowed a strapless, wired formal dress from one of her other roomies. It was a little too big for her, but because of the wiring the dress could stand up by itself. She put it into a dress bag and took the train to the boys’ school, as was the custom. Her date turned out to be the school’s champion rock ’n’ roll dancer. The floor cleared so everyone could watch his fancy steps. He gyrated around Phoebe and her dress, showing off. Then he put his hand on her waist and twirled her. “He twirled me right around inside the dress. The zipper was at the front, and at the back were the two wired…” “Phoebe! How devastating! What did you do?” “He twirled me back again.” (p. 302)

Margaret Atwood — like us — was a birder, and described visits to some of the birding sites that I’ve also been to. However, most of her life was very different from my experiences. She conveyed above all how Canada is very different from the USA, even though it’s also so close to us. Unfortunately, this memoir is very focused on her life outside of writing. She makes it clear that writing is totally a different level of activity than other life pursuits, and her narrative has its focus on the non-writing aspects, and goes through them in chronological order, almost compulsively. Ultimately, this made the book a bit tedious, in my opinion. I think it’s only addressed to fans like me, who know all her books.

To quote the New York Times review:

Margaret Atwood’s memoir, “Book of Lives,” is long, nearly 600 pages, and it doesn’t sit lightly on the lap. It’s a largely shapeless narrative spanning the entire life of Canada’s pre-eminent novelist, … It frequently reads like a Politburo speech, in the sense that it takes its audience for granted.

 

Animal Vegetable Mineral?

Animals

Buffalo!

A herd of Buffalo at Domino’s Farms, a hybrid office center and (sort of) zoo in Ann Arbor.

Another animal: a Magnificent Quetzel from a friend who went to Guatemala.
One more magnet for my refrigerator collection.

Vegetables

Cabbage Salad (and lamb chops)

Cabbage was our vegetable alongside lamb chops with roasted red pepper.

Autumn Leaves (Second Vegetable Item)

Minerals

Rocks beside the Huron River

A Lost Diamond Found This Week

From the New York Times: 

“To safeguard jewels that the ruling Hapsburgs had owned for centuries, [Emperor Charles I] had them transported to Switzerland. One gem in the collection was a particular prize, a 137-carat diamond admired not only for its pear shape and yellow hue but also for its illustrious history. Before the Hapsburgs … , it had been owned by the Medici family, the rulers of Florence.

According to the wishes of the last of the Hapsburgs, the diamond, along with a large collection of jewels, has been hidden in a Canadian bank vault for over 100 years. The vault was known only to two surviving members of the family, but they decided this week that it was time for the secret to be revealed.

British Baking Show Wrap Up (Contains Spoilers)

Competing.
(These and all images in this post are screen shots I made during the show.)

This morning we watched the finale of the current Great British Baking Show. We have faithfully watched all the other episodes from this year— as well as having watched most episodes during previous years. There wasn’t much suspense this time as one and only one contestant has won almost every week.

One of many very richly decorated and filled cakes.

Judging

With all the friends, family, and other contestants — about to announce the winner.

 

A Song for Our Time (Again?)

Pie in the Sky

Song by Joe Hill, 1911, Industrial Workers of the World

Long-haired preachers come out every night

To tell you what’s wrong and what’s right

They will answer in voices so sweet

But when asked about something to eat

"You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land up in the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die"

And the starvation army they play
They sing and they clap and they pray
'Til they get all your coin on the drum
Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum

"You're gonna eat, bye and bye, poor boy
In that glorious land up in the sky, way up high
Work and pray, and live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die", dirty lie

Holy rollers and jumpers come out
And they holler, they jump, Lord, they shout
"Give your money to Jesus", they say
"He will cure all your troubles today"

"And you will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land up in the sky, way up high
Work and pray, boy, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die"

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good from this life
"You're a sinner and bad man", they tell
"When you die, you will sure go to Hell"

"You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land up in the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die"

Working men of all countries unite
Side by side for freedom we will fight
When this world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters, we'll sing this refrain

"Well, you will eat, bye and bye
When you've learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, it'll do you good
You will eat in that sweet bye and bye"

"Yes, you'll eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land up in the sky, way up high
Work and pray, and live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die", that's a lie.