Welcome to Sunday (the Sabbath that was made for goyische cats), November 9, 2025, and National Scrapple Day. If you don’t know this food (and you won’t if you’re not American, it’s “a traditional mush of fried pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices.” I happen to love the stuff, traditionally served with eggs at breakfast, but many people shy away. They’re wrong. As are the people who have it but cover it with maple syrup. But here it is, fried on the right and unfried on the left (it’s always fried, a slab of crispy porkiness).
It’s also British Pudding Day (the best is sticky toffee pudding), National Pupusa Day (they’re this comestible), Carl Sagan Day (he was born on this day in 1934), National Fried Chicken Sandwich Day, National Greek Yogurt Day, and International Tongue Twister Day. Here’s a Welsh tongue twister. (I’m sure someone from Wales would have no trouble with it.)
Ydy dy dei du di yn dy dŷ du di neu ydy dy dad di yn dy dŷ du di?
(Translation: Is your black tie in your black house or is your dad in your black house?)
And here’s how it sounds (it took me a while to find this). Click on the microphone that will appear at the bottom left or go to the original video here; there are bonus Welsh tongue twisters as well.
@bfdavies 👀🏴
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Here’s a case of the Supreme Court stopping Trump from doing something positive that he was already going to do: release the money in full for food-stamp benefits: money that had been held up by the government shut down. A lower court ordered all the dosh to be released, but the Supreme Court stopped that. In fact, it wasn’t the full court, but Ketanji Brown Jackson, the wokest of all the justices!
Earlier Friday, the Trump administration had said it was working to release the benefits to comply with a judge’s order, suggesting that the money would indeed be disbursed. But the administration also asked the high court to halt that order, pushing to avoid releasing the funds as directed.
In her brief order, Jackson said she was granting an administrative stay and pausing the lower court’s directives to allow an appeals court time to issue a ruling on the matter.
. . .SNAP benefits, which are the country’s largest anti-hunger program, provide aid to about 42 million people, mostly children, the elderly and adults with disabilities. The funding holdup has left families across the country in a state of agonized uncertainty and stretched budgets as they wait for aid.
A federal judge Thursday ordered the Trump administration to release the full benefits for November, writing that he “found that irreparable harm would occur if millions of people were forced to go without funds for food.”
In his order, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island directed the administration to make full payments by Friday by using other funds. He also admonished federal officials for opting to make partial payments, saying they knew this would only further delay getting aid to people.
The Supreme Court’s administrative order paused McConnell’s ruling until the appeals court panel rules on the motion. Jackson is the Supreme Court justice assigned to the 1st Circuit.
In her brief order, Jackson did not rule on the merits of the case before her but said a stay was needed “to facilitate the First Circuit’s expeditious resolution of the pending stay motion.”
Jackson ordered McConnell’s rulings paused until the 1st Circuit rules or if she or the Supreme Court issue further orders. The administrative stay would expire 48 hours after the 1st Circuit’s ruling, which it “is expected to issue with dispatch,” Jackson added.
Granted, Justice Jackson didn’t say that it was okay to cut food benefits, but given his low approval rating, wouldn’t it be in Trump’s interest to release the full amount of the benefits? I’m sure he could find the money somewhere, and nobody is going to sue him for feeding the hungry. And people are hungry: look at the news showing lines of people on food banks. The whole matter is delayed now, and hunger doesn’t wait for court decisions. I do have a feeling, though, that the government shutdown will end next week.
*Andrew Sullivan’s new piece on The Weekly Dish, called “Dick Cheney: the Trump before Trump“, says that Trump wouldn’t be possible without Cheney having gone before.
There was something perfect about the Supreme Court’s review of President Trump’s tariff spree the week Dick Cheney passed away. What the court was weighing, after all, was Cheney’s core legacy: the limitless executive power now claimed by Cheney’s Frankenstein monster, Trump.
In that sense, Dick Cheney pioneered the Trump presidency. Without Cheney and Addington, no Trump and Vought. Cheney was never a constitutional conservative; he was always an extremist, a pioneer of an elected, unaccountable, and secret monarchy that has reached its zenith in the GOP today. His attempt to cast himself in recent years as some kind of principled, old-school constitutional Republican is classic Cheney: i.e. shameless misdirection, calculated spin, and a big fat lie.
But resistance libs have lapped it up. I understand the impulse not to speak ill of the newly dead … but there is no excuse for lies. The NYT still refuses to use the word “torture” to describe the literal Gestapo techniques Cheney backed; Robert Draper even claims Cheney “appreciated Congress’s stature as an independent body” and allows Bill Kristol to argue that Cheney “remained pretty much the same person throughout it all. It was his party and conservatism that changed.” Please. It was Cheney who changed conservatism over many decades — precisely to make it safe for autocracy.
No surprise then that Cheney endorsed Trump as early as May 2016, voted for him that year, and was silent in 2020. Cheney did draw the line, it’s true … eight years later, after January 6. We should be grateful for small mercies, I suppose, and Cheney never believed a president could overturn an election. But the power-grabs of Trump before January 6 and since? Cheney pioneered all of them, and believed in all of them.
. . . . Count them. Cheney believed the president could spend money on things the Congress forbade and impound money the Congress mandated be spent. He believed that laws passed by the Congress need not be obeyed by the president, attaching “signing statements” to them that deeply eroded the separation of powers. He pioneered the abuse of the pardon power for political purposes, trying to get his buddy, Lewis Libby, off the hook. (Bush refused to follow Cheney; Trump, naturally, obliged.) He believed that a president could militarily attack anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason — outside international and domestic law and the laws of war.
If you want to see the kind of thing Cheney believed in, check out Trump’s current illegal, unaccountable, and largely secret deployment in the Caribbean. So far, the US has murdered 70 people there for “smuggling drugs” (with no due process and no actual drug hauls), and sent our largest aircraft carrier along with five destroyers to the region to foment regime change in Venezuela. Who knows what Trump could do next — since the law and the Congress are irrelevant? That’s the arbitrary, murderous monarchy that Americans once fought a revolution against, but that Dick Cheney deeply believed in and methodically built.
. . . . King Donald is the logical endpoint of Cheney’s entire political career. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
It goes on, and Sullivan may well be right, but, as with all post facto historical interpretations, this is an untestable hypothesis. And I’m dubious. Do you really think that if Cheney hadn’t taken power, Trump wouldn’t be doing so now. Trump’s behavior now is of a piece with what he’s done for decades, and I doubt that his program came from the view, “Well, Cheney got away with it, so I can, too,”
*You may have wondered, like me, how the Trump administration knew that the small boats from South America that they incinerated (the death toll is over 40 now) were really carrying drugs. Well an AP reported tracked down the facts as best he could, and it turns out they were—but the drivers were not “narco-terrorists.”
Regina Garcia Cano was the reporter behind The Associated Press story that provided the first comprehensive account and identifies of some of the men killed in recent U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats.
In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives told Garcia Cano the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists, as alleged by the Trump administration, or leaders of a cartel or gang.
Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. The four dead men included a fisherman, a down-on-his-luck bus driver, a former military cadet and a local crime boss. Others included laborers and a motorcycle driver.
This is an interview of Garcia Cano by Del Quentin Wilber, her editor on the story.
How did you verify what people told you?
We talked with several people in multiple communities who knew the men at different stages of their lives. We used social media posts and publicly available information to corroborate some of the information.
Did anything, in particular, leave a lasting impression on you?
The lack of information has affected the lives of everyone in these villages. Relatives have not been able to properly mourn loved ones, even though they know they died, because the government won’t confirm the deaths and might punish them if they hold a funeral.
I know how important mourning can be. I’ve lost loved ones in recent years, and mourning rituals helped make sense of each loss. These families may never get that chance.
Relatives of some of the men expressed anguish over what they described as an ambiguous loss.
Based on this, it seems that the cartels are hiring poor people to drive the boats and take the risks. Further, I don’t think that America should be killing people without giving them a chance to surrender, and then give them their day in court. Every night, it seems, I see boats exploding in the water, with Trump claiming that each such strike saves 50,000 American lives. Really? How does he know what kind of and how much drugs they were carrying, or if every boat they incinerated had drugs on it? What Trump is doing is imposing the death penalty on traffickers without even inspecting their cargo. It’s not right.
*The Paulick Report (a website “shining a light on the horse industry”) recounts how the jaw of a thoroughbred has been extensively replaced with an artificial implant (h/t Reese). She was suffering from recurrent bone cysts, possibly promoted by the breeder’s laxness with respect to her halter so that she broke her jaw on a board. Amazingly, they printed a replacement for part of her jaw:
One of the first Thoroughbreds she bred, a chestnut filly foaled on April 15, 2022, was on the verge of having to be humanely euthanized. Veterinarians had few options to offer Banford as the filly, Annunaki, or “Anu” for short, was suffering from recurrent aneurysmal bone cysts on the left side of her lower jaw.
The filly’s left mandible was significantly enlarged, and she’d already undergone surgery to remove the bony growths as a weanling. A year later, the cysts had returned and were beginning to interfere with the filly’s ability to eat.
Initially, it appeared that Anu would recover from the fracture without significant complications. Then the area began to swell and to develop recurring abscesses or pockets of infection; Anu was eventually diagnosed with extremely uncommon aneurysmal bone cysts, a non-cancerous, tumor-like lesion of the bone that can cause pain, swelling, and a visible lump.
The first surgery, completed on the Thursday before Breeders’ Cup in 2022, removed as much of the bony growth as possible, and surgeons hoped for the best. Unfortunately, the cysts and the abscesses came back even bigger, growing to take up a six-to-seven-inch segment of Anu’s jaw.
The initial veterinary team had no answers and suggested euthanasia. The cysts had invaded an area too large for removal alone to be a viable option; the bone would simply never have healed.
Banford reached out to Dr. Jack Easley of Kentucky Equine Veterinary Dentistry, sending the board-certified equine dentist all of Anu’s x-rays and begging him to take her case.
Easley, in turn, reached out to his son, Dr. Jeremiah Easley, a board-certified large animal veterinary surgeon who is the director of the Preclinical Surgical Research Laboratory at Colorado State University, which specializes in large and small animal translational models for evaluation of new medical devices/therapies in orthopaedic, sports medicine, and neurosurgery.
The younger Easley had been testing specialized 3-D printed scaffolding, designed to mend large bone breaks that won’t heal on their own, with Yunzhi Peter Yang, a Stanford professor of orthopedic surgery.
“A lot of this work has actually been funded by the Department of Defense,” said the younger Easley. “We are seeing blast injuries for soldiers that have a large piece of bone destroyed, so there’s a big area of research in trying to help them heal their injuries so that they don’t have to have their limb amputated.”
Yang explained that the current standard in human medicine is to repair large sections of missing bone with a graft, either from another part of the human body or from a cadaver. Taking the graft from another area of bone, of course, causes a defect that needs to be healed in a second area, whereas using a cadaver bone opens up the possibility of infection or tissue rejection.
Neither of those options is a viable choice for a horse, Easley said, especially in an area like the jaw that requires significant stability to function correctly.
. . . Thus, Yang’s product — a mix of bioabsorbable polymer with a calcium-based ceramic akin to bone mineral — is unique because its porous structure mimics the underlying bone structure, allowing new bone to grow over top of the scaffold. The scaffolding also features a freeze-dried coat of hydrogel containing bone-growth-inducing protein, which Yang likened to an SOS signal to bone-building stem cells.
On Oct. 12, 2023, both Drs. Easley and a talented team of veterinary surgeons and anesthetists performed the groundbreaking surgery at Hagyard Equine Hospital in Lexington, Ky. They removed the damaged portion of her jawbone, replacing it with the scaffolding, and hoped for the best.
Anu’s teeth were left in place while the bone grew over the scaffolding, but three molars had to be removed in the ensuing months as her healing progressed. Nonetheless, Anu was able to make a full recovery. It helped that Anu has a huge appetite and rarely misses an oat in the feed tub!
The hole in Anu’s jawbone filled in with healthy new bone over the six-to-twelve months following the procedure. Once healed, the new bone growth has continued to function as “normal” bone, growing and changing over the filly’s life cycle.
Even better, the filly is now racing again. Here’s some of the scaffolding material from the site with photo credit:
*Moar science in a NYT article by Adeel Hassan: the discovery of the world’s largest spider web in a cave below Albania and Greece. The amazing part is that it harbors two species of spiders living cooperatively, and normally they don’t get along because one species eats the other.
Even in a pitch-black cave, what appears to be the world’s largest spider web is hard to miss.
It stretches for about 1,140 square feet, about the size of a small home, hanging in a low and narrow passage in a cave spanning the border between Albania and Greece.
But what scientists recently found in Sulfur Cave, a network of rooms and passages carved from limestone by the Sarantaporos River, surprised them even more than the size of the web.
Inside the spider metropolis — population 111,000 — were two species that had not been known to live together harmoniously, mainly because one species tends to eat the other.
The team of scientists discovered that 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the barn funnel weaver, were living with about 42,000 Prinerigone vagans, which inhabit wet places. Usually the barn funnel weavers prey on P. vagans, which are smaller.
“But in the cave, because it’s dark in there, our hypothesis was that they do not see each other,” Blerina Vrenozi, a biologist, zoologist and ecologist at the University of Tirana in Albania said in an interview. “So they do not attack.”
Dr. Vrenozi is one of the scientists who published their findings on the Sulfur Cave in the peer-reviewed journal Subterranean Biology last month.
But another reason for amity here is that the abundance of invertebrate prey is very large, so the spiders all get enough to eat. I’m a bit dubious of the “they can’t recognize each other” hypothesis, simply because spiders surely have more than visual recognition of each other. One test of this would be to take both spiders from an aboveground area where they eat each other, and move them into a large container in the dark. If they stop attacking each other, then, yes, the “we’re blind” hypothesis gets more credibility. Here’s a video showing “spider city”:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are in deep conversation:
Hili: What is progress?
Andrzej: Hard to say, but most often it’s the search for originality by parroting our great-grandfathers’ fanaticism.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest postęp?
Ja: Trudno powiedzieć, ale najczęściej to poszukiwanie oryginalności przez papugowanie fanatyzmu pradziadków.
*******************
From Wholesome Memes:
From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit: You can buy this on eBay, but it’s $75.
From The English Language Police, a useful guide:
Masih is busy and still celebrating, but here’s a tweet from her stand-in. Don Lemon is a t.v. journalist–from CNN, and Megyn Kelly doesn’t look at all like a man! Apparently this pair is in a social-media war.
They tell on themselves constantly when they say women who stand up for women’s rights look like men. It’s the new ‘I never met a pretty feminist.’ Like every other dangerous virus, misogyny mutates to survive. pic.twitter.com/QMNiNr5Iip
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 31, 2025
From Simon; James Bond kitties:
DNA of James Bond pic.twitter.com/VoofmNBsht
— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) August 2, 2025
From Luana, and the story is true:
Don’t let the Muslim Pakistani fool you with her Taqiyya.
Sharia Law is 100% an evil, misogynistic and medieval system.
Iran turned into a 7th century Islamic hell hole when Sharia Law took over in 1979.
I would know.
I’m Iranian.
I’ve experienced Sharia Law first hand. https://t.co/UL5s8H7xHS pic.twitter.com/buCjHD1BqF
— Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری (@gghamari) November 6, 2025
From Malcolm; how to tell Asian nationalities by the pronounciations of their surnames:
How to distinguish between different Asian backgrounds using last names.
[📹 realromanvice]pic.twitter.com/hPrNtSTjAk
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 5, 2025
One from my feed, and yes, this event just happened:
BREAKING: Islamists in Paris, stormed the Philharmonic Orchestra, igniting smoke bombs and attacking attendants and musicians.
What has happened to Europe?
pic.twitter.com/d0peKUXcoV— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) November 8, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old, and would be 90 today had he lived. https://t.co/xf1p6wc0QJ
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 9, 2025
Matthew sent me this photo on the day that Watson died; the Eagle in Cambridge is where Watson and Crick used to drink. And, according to the BBC and others, “The Eagle in Bene’t Street, Cambridge, is one of the university town’s best known pubs.In February 1953, a jubilant Francis Crick walked into this Grade II listed building and proclaimed he and James Watson had “found the secret of life”.” Matthew’s having a memorial tipple:
Part II of what Matthew says is, “Drinking in memory of Jim.” At least he had the right pint!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. -Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (9 Nov 1934-1996)
I’ve never had scrapple, but I would definitely look for it in southern restaurants. Now when I have bacon, eggs, and pancakes, the syrup of course will accidentally run over into the bacon and eggs, but the resulting breakfast is completely satisfying and evocative of memories of similar breakfasts as far back as I can remember. Old traditions die hard.
What I am saying is that I will probably let some syrup get into the scrapple. Even if I am not having pancakes. How did that get in there? Oh, well!
I think scrapple is from the Pennsylvania Dutch, and I’ve never seen it down here in NC. But sausage and grits, yes!!
Syrup probably would help, never hurts. It’s kind of the ranch dressing of breakfast. 😋
Yes. Pennsylvania Dutch. My mother lives in central Pennsylvania, where scrapple is a staple.
Does she make and/or eat pickled eggs?
In much of Pennsylvania scrapple is standard food. When I was a kid, my grandmother and uncle lived in a suburb of Philadelphia. I always loved the scrapple alongside my eggs for breakfast. Also, instead of a bacon burger you can make a scrapple burger that’s very good. I’ve never understood why scrapple didn’t get popular outside Pennsylvania. You can sometimes find scrapple in southern New Jersey and in Maryland and Delaware. But most of the country never heard of scrapple.
Sadly, by the time you get to Pittsburgh, scrapple is nearly unknown. Not sure where the boundary is.
I love that picture of Matthew in front of the pub. Kind of poignant that both his book and the historical duo of Watson and Crick are finished at the same time. Also, I suppose that Watson must have been a significant source of information for his biography of Crick.
The whole SNAP thing is confusing and seems to have been badly reported on both sides. I don’t understand what the “emergency funds” are for and I don’t understand how a judge can order them to be spent. I also don’t know what would happen next month when the emergency are gone and a judge orders payments. Why doesn’t the judge just order that Congress end the shutdown? (sarcasm)
“Administrative law”, like “civil law” and “criminal law”, are adjudicated by the judiciary. (IANAL)
If Cheney set the standard that Trump is following, the it won’t do to skip over Obama and Biden and pretend that they didn’t also take their cues from him.
That’s right. One of my main beefs with the Obama admin is that he did just what the Orange Todder is doing; extra-judicial killings. Obama did it with drones and killed far people more than his targeted “combatants”.
Obama also overused executive orders.
Not a good comparison.
During the Obama admin., the US was still at “war” with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and force was authorized by Congress under the 2001 AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force). It wasn’t “extra-judicial killings”. The Obama admin was also transparent (though still criticized as being insufficient), requiring the Director of National Intelligence to release an annual summary of the strikes, assessing who died: combatant vs. civilian, and where in non-combat zones, etc.
Trump has no legal authorization from Congress to blow up boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, so he is engaged in extra-judicial killings. And Trump revoked the Obama-era requirement for public reporting on civilian casualties. Plus, it seems he’s just getting started.
Venezuela produces cocaine. The really lethal fentanyl comes from Mexico made from chemicals from China.
If Trump is so worried about illicit drugs why did he pardon Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road, where such drugs were sold?
And he also pardoned (after a big infusion of cash) CP Zhao of Binance, where drug money was laundered.
A friend of mine is a sniper in the Coast Guard and according to him, maritime law requires anyone arrested in international waters be taken to the nearest port.
Drug trafficking is a capital offense in many countries and the judge meets the traffickers and arresting individuals on the dock. The judge is shown the drugs and the traffickers, pronounces them guilty, and the trafficker is then shot in the head.
Prison is not much better for those where trafficking is not a capital offense and many prisons require families to provide food.
I do not agree with president Trump’s extrajudicial killings but don’t think anyone should be fooled into thinking available options are much better.
I applaud those Parisian audience members who stopped that concern interruption. These vandals will never be able to persuade anyone they and their movement aren’t psychopathic when they do things like this. If their secret goal is to generate more support of Israel, then they’re doing a great job.
I note that the Landlord is a “pale ale.” Is it really hoppy, like classic Ballantine’s?
Fighting words, Jerry! Bread and butter pudding* is clearly better.
*Not bread pudding.
Amazing that they can replace the entire jaw of a horse with a prosthesis. And, what a spider web!
The Cheney connection? Made up after the fact.
+1
The advances they are making in science are incredible. One of my tooth implants failed, and I had to have a sinus lift and graft material inserted into my jaw to encourage the growth of new bone so they could put in another implant. As the article mentions, I had the choice of animal, cadaver or synthetic graft. I didn’t want animal and was okay with either of the others.
The surgeon ended up using synthetic stuff and he described it like a scaffold for the new bone to grow on. A few months later an x ray show new bone, and the new implant screwed in perfectly.
My problem was very minor, but I’m sure the research you mention will benefit a lot of soldiers and people with major bone injuries.
The Paris concert attack tiktok didn’t show what happened next when they ejected the terrorist/protestor.
The orchestra played Hatikva! (Israeli national anthem)
It was sublime and supreme. A perfect riposte.
I’ll try to fish it out and sent it on.
D.A.
NYC
The last few seconds of the clip that Jerry embedded shows the orchestra playing the final bars of Hatikva. That’s why the musicians are all standing at their music desks.
That Asian last names bit is true, excellent and kind of funny. I think that guy has one on telling Asian written scripts apart also.
I don’t want to flex, but is it strange people need to be taught the above? Like… would most people think “Matsumoto” could be… Thai or Chinese?
D.A.
NYC
Does anyone know of a place that sells Landlord in the US?