Unsolicited Thornburgh

madillac:

suicideblonde:

THEIR KID IS AWESOME!

They have a child?

(Source: fokyeahyolandi)

uglyrenaissancebabies:

British Library, Harley 4425, f. 140.

Fuck you, baby.

(via cmonstah)

roadsandkingdoms:

[Photo by Glenna Gordon]

Follow this photographer. Her photoessay from Monvrovia on Roads & Kingdoms today is sad/beautiful, and she Tumbls well, too: great stuff from West Africa and beyond at scarlettlion.tumblr.com

Today’s Tumblr recommendation from Roads & Kingdoms. I second it.

roadsandkingdoms:

Foodporn for Peace: Chicken Liver Salad, Jack Fry’s, Louisville, KY

On the weekend, I went to Louisville for the Christian wedding of one US Army intelligence officer to another US Army intelligence officer. The night before the ceremony, I had gone nearly straight from the airport to an American bistro called Jack Fry’s in the Highlands, and at Jack Fry’s I went straight for an Old Fashioned and for this dish, sauteed chicken livers with poached egg, brioche croutons in a vinaigrette of red wine, bacon and shallot.

Liver is not usually my first call. The last time I faced a plate of chicken liver, it was a year ago in the Pankisi Gorge in eastern Georgia at a Chechen roadside restaurant. Pankisi is pacified now, but not that long ago it was one of the rougher places on earth, a hideout for the Muslim insurgents fighting the Russians on the other side of the mountains in Chechnya, a den of gangsters and heroin cookers and arms dealers.

And yet then as now, in a roadside restaurant serving Chechen food, you get a food that I had always known as the particular domain of the Jews: chicken liver. My father makes a ridiculously good and simple chopped liver in his home in San Francisco, just onion, hard-boiled egg, chicken liver, pepper. Making that dish is perhaps the most Jewish thing he does, and eating it is certainly the most Jewish thing I do.

And no, my father’s version doesn’t include a bacon vinaigrette, nor does the sauteed onion, pepper and liver combination of the Muslims in Pankisi. But forget the accessories: it’s worth celebrating the fact that we all share this food—California half-Jews, Muslim insurgents, bourbon-loving Kentucky Christians—like we share Abraham. We are People of the Book. We eat chicken liver.

Yes, liver. Helluva dish, too.

cmonstah:

The most aesthetically pleasing cupcakes in the world. (Taken with instagram)

They look terrified

roadsandkingdoms:

Sweet, sour, bitter, boozy: Peru’s national cocktail ranks high on the list of world’s greatest adult beverages

Master the mix with R&K’s Pisco Sour video from the bar at Central Restaurante, Lima, Peru

roadsandkingdoms:

Privyet, says the crawfish. This one is Russian—you can tell by the red of his carapace. He waves at you from the end of the kind of meal not easily forgotten, Moscow chef Ivan Shishkin’s Fat Party, held last year around the long table at Tapa de Comida not far from Trubnaya Station.

Shishkin—journalist, photographer, chef and raconteur—managed to make delicious a multiple course feast featuring dishes that were all or mostly fat. And here at the end, was this lean and lithe river creature, like a palate-cleanser, an after-dinner mint.

—

You may have heard about the news from Moscow this week. I have never met President Putin, but I have sat my hours in the Kremlin with his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who is a delightfully diligent smoker (I don’t want to imagine what would happen if I tried to light up in Jay Carney’s office). Peskov is also a master of the art, to quote Luke Harding’s excellent post Why So Sad, Vlad, of ”You know I’m lying, and I know I’m lying, but—hey!—that’s the game”. So Peskov said that Putin was crying during his victory speech because of the bitter cold and wind.

What Peskov will not say is that those tears were a sign of pressure, a slight fissure in the iron. Simply put: it is no longer fun being Alpha Dog (as US Embassy cables called Putin). He may have won strongly and avoided an election run-off with one of the scabrous curs who were allowed to run against him, but he will have to be a different leader now. He no longer has political capital to blow on powergrabs and graft. So while the real opposition—the blogger Navalnys and old guard Limonovs—who got detained in the streets for protesting after the elections, may be in a dark mood, I think they have won already. Putin 3.0 will be different, because of them and the people that joined them. If he isn’t, then these people will rise and keep rising until Project Putin is over, for good.

—

Which brings me back to our friendly dinner mint from the river here. Shishkin’s other restaurant, a small speakeasy of a restaurant called Delikatessen located in some back Hof off the Ring, has become something of Stammtisch for me to call home in Moscow. It serves umami burgers and cherry-infused Bourbon to a mix of artists and photographers and tech entrepreneurs and retail workers and whomever else thinks it’s okay to put on a scarf instead of a mink when they go out to eat in Moscow. It is, in other words, just my kind of place. But it’s also, I think, a bit of a canary in the coal mine of Russian life. Not that that particular restaurant needs to survive—indeed, after being a complete sensation when it opened, it has now settled into a more regular crowd, not always crowded, but still always good. But that kind of place needs to survive, the kind of business that opens up because of a feeling that someone had that was unrelated to the structures of power and rivers of money or the national agenda set by Putin and his Kremlin. Maybe I’m not explaining it well, but Delikatessen is independent and that is a terribly important thing for Russian business, culture, life. There is so much of it now in Moscow, even the billions that the Kremlin is sending into high-tech haven’t overwhelmed the true entrepreneurial energy. Putin cannot control, or shakedown, or expropriate this feeling. He does not own the Fat Party. He never has. And if this crawfish had a middle finger, I know he would be raising it toward the Kremlin.