Essays in Idleness

Those would be egg noodles, of course, with pressed cottage cheese: very nutritious. Too, they help bring out your inner central European peasant (who is not a “liberal”). I have no German or Slavic ancestry myself, but I’m willing to pretend. You put on the face, and get in the mindset. Add a dash of Mongol.

Lately, since the world went crazy, or rather confirmed that it had long been so, I have taken a renewed delight in “comfort food.” I believe that I confessed this the other day; but if one is going to write nearly daily Idleposts, one must acclimatize to constant repetition. Since most people read at half-attention (the way they do everything else), this is just as well. A point may not be picked up until the tenth time it is mentioned; and then soon forgotten again. The Idleposter keeps banging away. He’s just like that himself.

Not so with food. I got the point of cottage cheese and noodles, the very first time. Some diced onion or shallot fried in butter, salt, and blackpepper to excess, then dump it in boiled noodles with the cheese, and sour cream. The more the merrier, in my view (I am pro-life), but if you’re poor, you’re poor.

In my humble but persistent opinion, the socialists in high office have conspired with dairy farmers almost everywhere to make cheese ludicrously expensive. This is an outrage. I used to be able to recite enough statistics to make your ears curl; but hell, just trust me. Should the world return to the sort of freedom that was normal only a few centuries ago, we could all go back to eating bread and cheese. Or, noodles and cheese in the fast lane. To say nothing of meat, when we resume keeping animals.

With wine, or beer, according to the climate. Why, I recall buying wine in Paris only one half-century ago, and noticing it was cheaper than milk. Both of them were aged.

It was a simple life, I was young and happy, reading books I could hardly understand, because they were in French. Often I had to read things ten times to get the point, but then I noticed it was just the same in English.

Owing to politics, I was not in Prague. Why, at that moment, I wanted to be there, is a secret I will take to my grave. But not being there didn’t bother me, much; indeed it spared me the walk, for I used to find trains too expensive, and horses inconvenient to park. Still, I longed for noodles; and Czech dumplings.

The French seemed to do noodles with chicken and wine; I was capable of adapting. In their countryside, they seemed to do a better job at being peasants than, say, the English. But neither seemed conversant with pressed cottage cheese. Fairness compels me to admit that the French had other cheeses, however. And the English, a whole lot of cheddar.

To be poor, ideally to be young on top of it; to have noodles and cheese. This is the secret of being happy. The books are probably optional. But these kids today, they don’t understand.

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P.S. the plainest proof that The Election was stolen from Trump, is currently being provided by that country’s Left “mainstream” meejah, now including, or course, “Big Tech.” The speed at which they joined forces to blot out reporting on the numerous, very plausible court challenges to the counting in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, &c — each of which Trump was clinching until late votes started pouring in — and the many anecdotal reports of monkey-business in Dem-controlled cities, known to be extremely corrupt — contrasts brightly with their glacial patience when e.g. Gore was challenging a few unfallen chads in select counties of Florida, a few years ago. That they had, all, falsified the polls leading up to the election was anyway proved by the overall result. That was a psy-ops game: Biden did not win by up to seventeen points. The statistical anomalies in his local spikes, in precisely the states he had to take to squeak home, are in the same genre. I do not think Trump can overcome the headwinds now set against him. But the truth remains the truth, even when it is suppressed.

Note, I am not alleging “a vast leftwing conspiracy.” This is hardly necessary among the sort of people who do these sorts of things: our “progressive intelligentsia.” The end justifies the means for them, and the attraction to dishonest means comes quite naturally. We must pray for their intentions.