Left Ear: Just give me a minute.
Charlie Croker: [impatiently] NOW?
Left Ear: I’m about to insert this detonator tube, and if the brass touches the sides, we’ll both be the last people we ever see.
Charlie Croker: [suddenly looking very nervous] Take all the time you need.

— The Italian Job

It’s amazing how quickly the annoying parts of your life fall away when you start to concentrate on what you’re doing.  Being able to turn to the people who want to tell you about the basketball game last night, or  the cute thing their dog did over the weekend, or how that new gadget they bought is making their life more complete and saying “I really need to do this.  I’ll catch up with you later.” is one of the great pleasures in life.

I got your four basic food groups! Beans, bacon, whisky and lard. — Atlantis, The Lost Empire

I love Southern cuisine, I really do.  It has wonderful flavor, and I’ve never come away from a properly cooked meal hungry.  But it’s going to kill me some day.  I will die happy and fat, but I will die from all this wonderful food.

Whisky is of particular importance to Irish Woman’s cooking.  There are grades of whisky when it comes to cooking, of course.  First, you have the sipping whisky, like Buffalo Trace, which is rarely, if ever, used as an ingredient.  Then, we have the good whisky, like Maker’s Mark, which is good enough to drink, but is primarily used to flavor food.  Finally, we have the cooking whisky, which in our house is Jim Beam.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen Irish Woman drink Jim Beam, but it shows up in a lot of dishes.  It’s used to flavor barbecue sauce, as the ‘secret ingredient’ in her apple pie preservers, and to add sweetness to desserts.

Lard’s high-rent cousin butter is a major component of cooking around here too.  Now that we have the ability to have high-quality cream delivered to the house every week, Irish Woman is making her own.  That means that a lot of my food has that wonderful, creamy, artery clogging flavor that we all love.

Bacon, well, what can I say about bacon?  Around here, bacon goes with breakfast, other meats, salads, vegetables, and sometimes even desserts.  Bacon grease is our food lubricant of choice when we are cooking.  I know Irish Woman is going to be in a good mood when I come home and the house smells of bacon.

Like I said, all this is going to kill me some day.  My curse is that I married a woman who loves to cook, and it’s a curse I think I can live with.

Ghettoes are the same all over the world. They stink. — Enter the Dragon

I have seen only two real castles in my life.  I have walked in 10 or 12 cathedrals or temples.  I have seen skyscrapers on three continents.  But everywhere I have gone, there has been a ghetto, or whatever they call the place where the poorest of the poor live.  It’s the part of town where the police don’t want to go, especially after dark.  It’s the part of town where the trash is either heaped up on the curb because there are no services this month, or the trash has been picked over and is what the people are wearing and what the buildings are made of.  A lot of times, it’s both.

There are super-rich in every country of the world, as far as I know.  There is also crushing poverty in every country in the world.  The way that I know a country has at least some economic freedom and a relatively clean political and business environment is that there is a big squishy middle class between them, and it is possible for someone from the slums to find their way out by working hard and staying out of trouble.  The true mark of a good society is that it encourages those who do better to come to the aid of those who live in the ghettoes.

I know a society is in trouble when there is a precipitous drop between those who live in ivory towers and palaces and the ghetto, with few places in between, and the knowledge that a child born in poverty has almost zero chance of having a decent life.

What worries me is that in our country, we are headed in that direction.  There is still a large middle-class in our country, and our ‘poor’ live like kings compared to most of the rest of the world.  Most of our poor are poor when compared to our rich, but not to other nations.  There is so much prosperity here that I cannot fathom why more people don’t find a way to work their way up the chain a few links.  But rather than work to move more people into the middle class, our society seems bound and determined to move more middle class people into the ghetto.  Our ghetto is a slave district of dependence and desperation, and every move by the government and ‘right thinking people’ of both sides of the political argument seems to push us closer to a two-tiered society, where the super rich gaze down on the ghetto.  We are fast becoming a society where a despondent and apathetic populace pick through the leavings of our ancestors to eek out enough of a living to dull the pain and numb the mind.

This isn’t the world I was born into, and it’s not the world I want to leave to my children.  If you want to ask me why I am so harsh about political, social, and economic freedom and equality of opportunity, it’s because I’ve seen too many ghettoes.