Look Who Popped Up in Beijing!!!!

It's my favorite Ultimate-playing, Oberlin-educated physics major, and one of many who kept HotHouse from imploding in the immediate weeks after the board suspended Marguerite Horberg.

Brady's fiance Peggy won an Oppenheimer Fellowship (I think), and the man - God Bless him - quit HotHouse, packed up his shit, and left to be with her. I received an e-mail from him yesterday, catching me up on things in China and pointing me to his and Peggy's blogs. She's taken to the medium a bit better than he, but they're both worth a perusal. I watched Brady grow up, from a student living in a collective in Hyde Park and part-time janitor, to a true leader of people. One of Marguerite's assets is that she recognized the talent of those around her, and utilized it to its fullest. Few epitomized this more than Brady. Peggy seems to perfectly complement him. It makes me remember why I miss them.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Creole cuisine is one of my mainstays for dinner parties and barbecues, so I was surprised when I found out about this article on New Orleans cuisine, post-Katrina, from the January issue of GQ (I found out about it thanks to Harry Shearer's "Le Show" podcast via KCRW). Alan Richman has written one of the most ill-conceived hack pieces in recent memory. It largely ignores fact, refutes Creole as a legitimate cuisine style, and reinforces many of the prejuidices and outright lies northerners have of the South and New Orleans (Mr. Richman would be wise to remember that many of the reasons he doesn't like New Orleans are attributed to the bad behavior of tourists. Northern tourists).

This article stands as an example for all writers, regardless of medium, on how to not go writing about a subject. It also reminds me of something Flannery O'Connor wrote about Southern Gothic, one of my favorite literary styles. O'Connor wrote, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." This is the main point that Richman fails to recognize and largely ignores in his article.