Brilliant idea

We're starting to believe we have the last kitchen built since about 1990 that isn't an integral part of a great room, separated at most by an island.  As usual, however, we're finding that our fuddy-duddy ways will put us on the cutting edge with enough patience.  If ever we sell this house (instead of being carried out feet-first, my current ambition), we will market it as featuring the newest trend, a "discrete kitchen."

Rather than combining living, dining and kitchen in one open space, Beckford’s more traditional floor plans have created a new amenity, in addition to the development’s rooftop terrace, yoga rooms and private piano bar and lounge—the discrete kitchen. 

“People like that you’re not looking at your kitchens from other rooms,” Ms. Russo said. “So many of these open kitchens, I think people are tiring of them and they are going back to the old school, the old architecture.”

It goes along with another hot trend we saw developing a few years back: "away rooms" for people who originally thought they needed unobstructed sightlines from one end of the house to the other, so that their young children could be under constant surveillance. One of the few things I'd do differently if I were building this house again is pay more attention to the need for soundproofing at least one room. Either that or I need to develop some control over my dogs' barking when I'm trying to talk on the phone.

Anything I don't like is cruel and unusual

This is only a county court, so I'm not going to get too excited about it, but that doesn't mean I'll miss a chance to make fun of the mindset.  A Denver local court struck down the city's ban on "urban camping" on the ground that it violates the 8th Amendment, because it would be cruel (and maybe unusual?) to criminalize camping on the street by people who have "nowhere else to go."

There's no limit to this approach, which focuses not on the particular punishment enacted by a callous public, but instead on the whole question whether it's a good idea to criminalize something.

Denver and San Francisco are providing a valuable public service as petri dishes.

Feast of the Holy Family

Do all these continual feasts seem, er, 'problematic'? The early Medieval church thought so as well.

Sure, If You Work in Sherwood Forest

Question:  Why not wear leggings (meaning yoga pants, I suppose) to work?

I don’t remember what specific combo of frustration and busyness led me to wear leggings to the office one day recently, but I do remember it felt magical. With nothing but a stretchy band and Nulu(™) fabric holding me in, I felt freer, like I was dancing through my duties, rather than trudging through them encased in polyester and wool. My computer seemed to run more quickly; my sources were more responsive; the PR people were less angry....

Most everyone at my office is nicely dressed, from the occasional TV-ready suit-wearer to our fashion-conscious female editors. Occasionally, some mayor or other VIP stops by. Leggings are not part of this world. In fact, when I told my colleagues I was working on this article, several of them came to my desk, in their traditional slacks, and registered their complaints. “Tights are not pants,” people told me....

The other place where leggings are deemed unacceptable today: church.

Why not? It's appropriately gender-neutral, right?

Everything's A Problem, Ph.D.

For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow

“Liberal miserablism is a turn-off.”

Scary Scary Less Likely

But you should still be scared, says The Atlantic.

“It might not happen,” Fricker said. “But if there’s a chance that it could happen, then shouldn’t you involve that in your planning? If you’re hosting a picnic and it might rain, you don’t necessarily move the whole event, but you probably do make a Plan B. If you’re planning a city … you might as well keep this in the back of your mind.”

OK. I'll pencil in a contingency plan for massive sea-level rise, like moving to a mountaintop in western North Carolina.

A Church Shooting in White Settlement, Texas

Attacks on religious celebrations continue to be in the news.  After yesterday's stabbing spree at an Orthodox Jewish Hanukkah celebration (during a week in NYC that featured near-daily attacks on Orthodox Jews), today the attack was on a Church of Christ celebration.

A witness told CBS 11 News the gunman walked up to a server during communion with a shotgun and then opened fire. According to the witness, another church member shot the suspect....

During the incident, two men died from their injuries and another man was critically injured. Authorities believe the gunman is among the three but it’s unknown if he was killed or is injured.

It is better, all the way around, for a religious community to be able to defend itself from these attacks. The attacks may not stop; hatred for the religion or simply for the religious may be too broad and too deep in our culture today. This is not new. Raymond Lull wrote about it in the Middle Ages.

Then if a knight use not his office, he is contrary to his order and to the beginning of chivalry. *** The office of a knight is to maintain and defend the holy catholic faith by which God the Father sent his Son into the world to take human flesh in the glorious Virgin, our Lady Saint Mary; and for to honor and multiply the faith, suffered in this world many travails, despites, and anguishous death. Then in like wise as our Lord God hath chosen the clerks for to maintain the holy catholic faith with scripture and reasons against the miscreaunts and unbelievers, in like wise God of glory hath chosen knights because that by force of arms they vanquish the miscreaunts, which daily labor for to destroy holy church, and such knights God holdeth them for his friends honored in the world and in that other when they keep and maintain the faith by the which we intend to be saved....

There are some for whom such service is the most meaningful and proper way of expressing their faith. To deny them the right to do it is to deny them the expression of faith for which they are best fit, and which their soul finds its deepest and most worthy calling. Both the first and the second amendments should apply to the defenders of the faith, then; no government should stand between them and their sacred duty.

UPDATE: Some analysis and advice for those who would do likewise.

The Feast of Thomas a’ Beckett

The dispute over which he was killed makes King Henry seem like the good guy, especially given our own experience with the Church protecting violators in the clergy. Assassination was the wrong remedy, but the king was on the right side.

Pronouncing Written Irish

A rough guide.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

The Good Lord sent Sam Colt, after which none of us should ever have to fear our communities being threatened in this wise.  Except for the government of the state of New York, and California, and soon Virginia, which seek to undo the blessings laid upon us.

Well, we don't have to do what we are told, do we? After all, who are they to strive against the one who sent Col. Colt?

The Feast of Holy Innocents

A somber feast amid the celebrations.

Feasting in the Great Hall on Christmas Day

Some history as the Twelve Days continue.

A Dilemma

Not really, though.

Flateyarbók

A new history of medieval Norway, via Iceland and 600 missing years.

The historical writing in Flateyarbók spans the period from when Harald Fairhair was Norway's first king in the early 900s and almost until the Black Death struck Norway around the year 1350.

But 17-year-old King Olav IV Haakonsson never received the book. The boy died in what many believed to be a mysterious manner.

Now the entire book has finally been translated and published in Norwegian by a small publishing house in Stavanger.

Flateyjarbók (its Icelandic name) is three times as extensive as Snorre Sturlason's collection of sagas about Swedish and Norwegian kings, Heimskringla.

The English translation is just getting underway, I gather.

Stalinism in Canada

Cutting Donald Trump out of holiday film “Home Alone 2,” presumably to avoid causing trauma by even having to see him. (“Stalinism” is per the link.)

Did they cut Reagan out of his old movies? Or just stop playing those movies forever? I’ve seen a lot of old movies, now that I think of it, but only one I can recall featuring Reagan.

That one I’d understand the networks not playing in any recent cultural moment. It was “Santa Fe Trail,” in which Reagan plays George Armstrong Custer — still treated as a good guy by Hollywood — against Errol Flynn’s J.E.B. Stuart, who is also treated as a good guy. Somehow the dispute over John Brown’s raid is treated as fittingly symbolized by the two officer’s competition for the hand of a lovely young Kit Carson Holliday (played by Olivia de Havilland). John Brown is even kind of the bad guy, as his anti-slavery campaign is depicted as behind the violence in Kansas the officers are sent to stop. The whole plot is at this point going to be radically offensive to many viewers, and nearly all will be bothered by at least some aspects of it.

In the current case, all that is at stake is the guy offering directions to the lobby.

The Fimbulvinter: A Real Climate Disaster

The Fenris wolf swallows the sun. The climate disaster that began the year 536 was surely the most dramatic cooling of the Earth that humans, animals and plants have experienced in the last two thousand years. It was likely due to two large volcanic explosions, which every few years sent huge amounts of fine dust high into the atmosphere. There was dust for several years. The sun disappeared.... probably half of the populations of Norway and Sweden died.

A lot is known about the event now. It seems to have passed into myth as a cyclical warning of Ragnarok. Volcanoes do pose a real risk of sudden global cooling, and there are other similar risks that are massive. Solar EMPs, asteroid strikes, these things are real problems that will come up sooner or later.

Whee

From Instapundit: The Seattle Times warns us that “a man in a dress doesn’t cut it as a punch line in 2019 — not without serious and necessary conversations.” Which do you think sounds like more fun, a performance of "Mrs. Doubtfire," or a "serious and necessary conversation" with a wøkeskøld?

Religion is the Opiate of the Masses

...so said Marx, anyway. So how do you rewrite the Bible and the Quran to avoid contradicting socialism?

China will rewrite the Bible and Quran to 'reflect socialist values' amid crackdown on the country's religious groups, a report has revealed.

New editions must not contain any content that goes against the beliefs of the Communist Party, according to a top party official. Paragraphs deemed wrong by the censors will be amended or re-translated.

Like every paragraph violates the beliefs of the Communist Party, which belief system is called "scientific atheism." There was a formal school for training people in it at the university we lived at while living in China.

Wren Song

Happy St. Stephen's Day.