At least no one can accuse me of being knee-jerk pro-French

Posted on by

My goodness, talking about the headscarf law has brought up some interesting discussion on the blogs. It appears that my mistake was to think that this was ever about improving the lives of Muslim girls. From the responses there is one thing that is clear – this law is about legislating conformity.

For example, from Lilli Marleen:

So who is wetting their pants about what French do in their schools and Germany – hopefully – will do soon after? The girls can go to school, all they have to do is to behave like anyone else.

I’m sure that will make a stirring addition to the EU constitution: You have the right to be just like everyone else, especially if you’re under age. Any failure to take advantage of this right will be punished in the law. It is exactly this sentiment that leads people to think xenophobia towards non-Europeans is a deep seated problem.
Continue reading →

Yoghurt scones

Posted on by

Over at normblog, which is where I more usually hang out, there is a character variously known as WotN and Wife of the Norm, and who is known in her own right as Ad?le. With a name like that she could be French but isn’t, and yet I feel it’s admissible to bring her over here to A Fistful of Euros, she being Ad?le, and having a grave accent over the ‘e’ in her name. Getting to the point, now – and not before time – Ad?le noticed a recipe for yoghurt scones linked to on The Daily Bread by Jackie D, and originating with Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini; Clotilde who surely does gain entry to A Fistful of Euros, being as she is, I am told, authentically French; and so she – Ad?le, that is, not Clotilde, not Jackie – made us some of these scones today. And I had two of them, and most excellent they were. I can do no better than to quote Jackie:

[They] are unbelievably light, moist, and airy, with a very slight sweetness.

Not that Jackie had any of the scones Ad?le baked. She did not. But she somehow knew. It’s like with a map, a recipe. Anyway, what Jackie says is what I thought. Nice scones. Try ’em.

Stardust

Posted on by

Yesterday I woke up and opened my front door to find a guy sitting on our garden wall playing a harmonica. Well, not in fact. Was it in a dream, then? No, not that either. It was a thought that just came into my head as I woke up and I lay there contemplating the day ahead. What could it mean?

By the end of the day I knew. I was playing Artie Shaw later and came to his rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’. That’s as recorded in Hollywood on October 7, 1940, and included on this collection. You only gotta listen to it and you know. According to The Rough Guide to Jazz:

[it’s] arguably… the greatest-ever version of “Stardust”, with Billy Butterfield plus Shaw’s incomparable clarinet chorus.

Greatest ever? Maybe it is. But maybe it also isn’t. Because there’s also the version by Nat King Cole – the one here.

I’m not saying which is the better. Same song but two different ballgames, both brilliant. It would be like trying to compare horses and Saturdays.

And the guy on my garden wall playing the harmonica? You might get to see him sitting on your garden wall if you don’t make time to listen to these two versions of ‘Stardust’.

Item

Posted on by

If Der Spiegel has its facts right, Elizabeth II is a pretender and the true King a beer-drinking Australian farmer. If so, this would clear things up for the Scots, who wonder how they can have an Elizabeth ‘the second’ when they never had a first one: Good Queen Bess would’ve had as little claim to the throne as her latter-day namesake. The putative King Mike I, though, would just as soon stay on in Oz with his mates. (Report in German.)

On ‘understanding’ evil

Posted on by

This post is a follow-up to the one below on Hannah Arendt and the notion of the banality of evil. I fear, from one or two of the comments, that the reservations I expressed about her arguments may have led to misunderstanding. My point was certainly not to suggest that one shouldn’t try to understand and explain why and how these horrors happen, how people can come to commit, or be indirectly involved in, them. This is why I said, for example:

We have to understand what they [the perpetrators] did precisely as a fact about the evil human beings can do. Not only were they not devils or monsters psychologically speaking; for the most part they were not even abnormally sadistic or inherently brutal, or killers ‘by nature’, and so forth.

Continue reading →