Welcome to the butt end of the work week: it’s Friday, November 13. 2026 and it’s National Indian Pudding Day—my favorite indigenous American dessert. I have eaten many of these, mostly at the now-extinct Durgin Park Restaurant in Boston, but I’m told that the still extant Union Oyster House still has it. Here’s a description and a photo from Wikipedia (it’s basically a thick slurry of cornmeal, eggs, molasses, and milk with some spices).
Indian pudding is a traditional American dessert, “a cold-weather classic” in the cuisine of New England. It was commonplace in the colonial era and enjoyed a revival as part of Thanksgiving Day celebrations in the late 19th century. It was found in most American cookbooks before 1900. The 20th century’s commercial puddings with their industrially perfect smooth consistency displaced Indian pudding, and its cooking time had little appeal for the modern home cook. It is still associated with autumn holidays and occasionally revived by restaurants. It is usually served warm and sometimes accompanied by vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.
Yes, don’t forget the ice cream. The one below looks weird to me: it should be a uniform dark brown with no raisins or nuts. You can find a good recipe here along with pmore accurate photos and tips as well as a section called “What makes Indian Pudding so incredible?” It is!.
It’s also National Bread Pudding Day, which is also good, World Kindness Day, and Sadie Hawkins Day. the day in the Li’L Abner comic strip that goes like this (from Wikipedia):
In Li’l Abner, Sadie Hawkins was the daughter of Mayor Hekzebiah Hawkins, one of Dogpatch‘s earliest settlers and the “homeliest gal in all them hills”. She grew frantic waiting for suitors until she reached age 35 and was still a spinster, and her father was worried about her living at home for the rest of her life. In desperation, he called together all the unmarried men of Dogpatch and declared it “Sadie Hawkins Day”. A foot race was decreed with Sadie pursuing the town’s eligible bachelors. If Sadie caught one of them, he would be forced to marry her. She was specifically interested in a handsome boy named Adam who was already in a courtship with Theresa, whose father was the area’s largest potato farmer. Unlike Sadie, Theresa had a number of courtship offers.
As the event became a tradition in the comic strip, Capp added more story elements. Each year, the Sadie Hawkins storyline begins with a prophecy by Old Man Mose, who gives Li’l Abner a cryptic clue about the end of the storyline, which always comes true in a roundabout, surprising way. The storyline sometimes also includes the Sadie Hawkins Eve Dance which is held on the previous evening, when the young women wear hobnailed boots and stomp on their partners’ feet, to make the bachelors run slower during the event.
This storyline would never appear today, but I remember it from when I was a kid. Here’s a cover of the comic from The Pioneer; the original Sadie Hawkins is at the lower right.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT notes that 11 Democrats were absent during the vote on Pete Hegseth’s impeachment, and had they shown up but not many of the 7 missing Republicans did, then Hegseth would have been impeached (remember “impeachment” just means to bring charges; the trial is in the Senate, where the Democrats would lose. This is causing recriminations in my party!
Democrats, fresh off their sweeping victories in last week’s elections, faced bitter criticism and recriminations on Wednesday from within their own ranks after 11 of their members missed a vote on the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The absences, which boosted Republicans’ successful effort to block the impeachment on Tuesday, cast a shadow over what was otherwise a triumphant week for Democrats that was supposed to be focused on savoring their electoral wins, welcoming new members and plotting out their agenda for when they take the helm of both chambers of Congress.
Instead, Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 Democrat in charge of tracking votes among her members, began a closed-door party meeting on Wednesday morning scolding lawmakers who had been absent for the impeachment vote, as others chastised their colleagues in public.
“Show up and do your job,” Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, Democrat of Michigan, said bluntly on CNN Tuesday evening.
Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Democrat of California, appeared to be seething as she left the Capitol following the vote Tuesday night, telling the MeidasTouch Network that Democrats had squandered the opportunity to push the impeachment charges forward over Republican opposition. “People should have gotten their raggedy selves up these steps to vote,” she said.
. . .Eleven Democrats missed the vote, while seven Republicans did. Had all of those lawmakers voted along party lines, the G.O.P. effort to shelve the impeachment effort would still have succeeded.
Still, it was an embarrassing stumble that left many Democrats livid.
The New Republic names the missing Democrats, which include Nancy Pelosi:
- Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico)
- Marilyn Strickland (Washington)
- Julia Brownley (California)
- Lou Correa (California)
- Laura Gillen (New York)
- Steven Horsford (Nevada)
- Jonathan Jackson (Illinois)
- Nancy Pelosi (California)
- Brittany Pettersen (Colorado)
- Haley Stevens (Michigan)
- Frederica Wilson (Florida)
So it goes. The Congress will get another chance to impeach Hegseth after January, and they’ll be in the majority. But the Senate will not vote to convict unless some Republicans join the Democrats, for it takes 67 votes (a 2/3 majority) to convict. The entire exercise will be futile.
*I’ve not written about Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chip company Nvidia, who was in trouble because he had two extramarital relationships, one with a Chinese woman accused of being a spy for China (they want our chip technology). This story seemed a bit sordid, but the fact is that Nvidia is the second company in the world (after Apple). And now Huang has been ousted by Nvidia’s board. Although the headline says he was “ousted”, the text says he “resigned”. You know what that means: he was voted out but told he could save face.
Nvidia NVDA -4.54%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Jensen Huang has resigned after two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee.
The company said Thursday that finance chief Colette Kress had agreed to serve as interim CEO until a permanent successor is named. The board is starting a search for the company’s next CEO and will consider internal and external candidates.
Nvidia’s board also appointed longtime director Harvey C. Jones to become its first ever chair. Jones, a venture investor and chip-design executive, joined Nvidia’s board in 1993, the year the company was founded.
“I recognize that this has been an extraordinarily difficult period,” Kress wrote in an internal email to Nvidia staff seen by The Wall Street Journal. She promised employees more information in coming days about “our future together” and said she would host a company meeting on Nov. 18.
“We play a vital role in building the technology that is powering the AI revolution, and we have important work ahead of us,” Kress added.
. . . The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that the board was preparing to oust Huang.
His exit brings down the curtain on an era during which he stoked the global artificial-intelligence boom and became a geopolitical star. It leaves one of the world’s most valuable companies in need of a new leader.
. . .The chipmaker’s importance to global customers made Huang a worldwide celebrity. He frequently met with top U.S. and Chinese officials, and was regularly mobbed by adoring fans when he visited Taiwan, his birthplace and the global manufacturing hub of the chip industry.
Then, on Sunday, Huang acknowledged in a letter to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologized for violating his family’s and his employees’ trust. That affair involved Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore-based data company Megaspeed, which has been a major Nvidia customer and who U.S. intelligence officials believe is working for China’s intelligence services.
The Nvidia CEO also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, a senior executive at Nvidia who runs the company’s healthcare business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The New York Times earlier reported the second affair. Powell didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Alice Huang and the CEO have the same last names but aren’t related. And while the company has the right to oust anyone who’s eroding its reputation, I wouldn’t have thought that adultery was a good reason. But it was adultery not only with someone accused of being a spy (there’s no proof of that yet), but also a work subordinate. The problem is that there’s nobody at Nvidia ready to step into Huang’s shoes, and it will be very hard to find another CEO. So it goes.
*Just a few days ago Trump implied he was still negotiating with Iran over a cease-fire. Now he says that no more diplomacy is needed, but a tightening of the naval blockade and imposition of a land blockade to increase the economic strangulation of the country. But other countries in the Middle East don’t like that.
From the WaPo:
The war — and the jump in gas and food prices that has come with it — is deeply unpopular among U.S. voters, who delivered a historic defeat to Republicans in the midterm elections last week. The day after the election, Vance made an unusual public break with the president, writing that the war had been one of the causes of the election loss.
Vance’s outreach effort to Iran was one of the ways in which he was trying to resolve the war — and potentially rescue his chances of a successful 2028 presidential run.
“We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday.
He said he was asking Vance to focus his attention elsewhere.
Vance isn’t going to like that. Trump’s still trying to financially squeeze Iran into a deal, but many of our “allies” in the Middle East aren’t on board. From the NYT:
The first step in the United States’ campaign to economically strangle Iran was a naval blockade of its ports, cutting off Iranian trade by sea. Next came a raft of new sanctions, grounding much of the country’s air transport network.
Now, the United States is going after Iran’s last economic artery: its land routes. Only there, Washington has hit upon a problem.
For weeks, U.S. officials have tried — and failed — to diplomatically pressure Iran’s neighbors into shuttering their border crossings, according to three Iraqi officials and one U.S. official with knowledge of the talks, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
Those neighboring states, primarily Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan, are increasingly wary and disgruntled by U.S. policies they say could hurt them as much as Tehran.
So, on Saturday, the U.S. military joined the effort, announcing Task Force Iron Gate, which it says will work on “preventing the movement of advanced weapons systems, dual-use technologies, sanctioned materials, and illegal revenue streams across Iran’s land borders and the Caspian Sea.”
It is unclear how the task force will operate in practice, and it is unusual for such an economic and security campaign to be run by U.S. Central Command, known as Centcom, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.
To me it looks like Trump has lost interest in the war, and that’s why he’s proclaiming in American victory. But it isn’t, and I still think we should continue going after Iran without committing ground troops. True, most Americans want us to surrender and stop fighting, but down the line I think they’ll regret it. And if Iran gets the bomb, well, they’ll have tremendous leverage and you can say goodbye to Israel.
*Believe it or not, homosexuality and lesbianism were crimes in Trinidad and Tobago—until this week, when a British court struck down that law. But similar laws remain in other Western countries:
A ruling by a British-based court has invalidated laws criminalizing homosexuality in Trinidad and Tobago, setting a precedent for those challenging similar laws in other nations in the Caribbean and possibly beyond.
The ruling was handed down on Tuesday by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, which serves as the highest court of appeal for dozens of crown dependencies, overseas territories and former British colonies.
Five British judges unanimously upheld a 2018 decision by a lower court in Trinidad that had found two sections of the Caribbean country’s 1986 law targeting private, consensual same-sex relations to be unconstitutional. An appeals court in Trinidad had reversed the lower-court decision in 2025.
Trinidad’s attorney general had argued that the law preserved traditional family values in the country, and had leaned on a legal mechanism called “savings provisions,” which kept many laws from the British colonial era.
The decision delivered a hard-fought victory to advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Trinidad. Jason Jones, an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who had been a key plaintiff against the law since 2015, called the ruling a “vindication.” He said it would provide hope to young L.G.B.T.Q. people in his country who are living in fear of legal and societal discrimination.
Still, Mr. Jones noted ruefully, to challenge the colonial-era law, his lawyers had to seek intervention from a court based in Britain — decades after Trinidad gained independence, in 1962.
Why go to a British court if Trinidad was independent? The article explains:
During the colonial period, Britain imposed its system of laws across a global empire spanning nations in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
Many laws on the books in Trinidad and Tobago are left over from before the island nation of 1.5 million people left the British monarchy and became a republic in 1976. While laws criminalizing homosexuality in Trinidad stemmed from colonial-era legislation, they were amended to be even stricter in 1986.
One of the vestiges of the British Empire is the Privy Council, which serves as the court of last resort for some of those nations. Caribbean countries have the power to leave the Privy Council system, said Téa Braun, chief executive of Human Dignity Trust, an international legal organization focused on eradicating anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws. And many have done so, moving to regional bodies like the Caribbean Court of Justice.
Although the Caribbean court is headquartered in Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain, the country has not made it the final court of appeal. And Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has said she has no imminent plans to do so.
Oy! One would think that an independent country would have its ultimate laws adjudicated by court within the country. No so here! The Trinidadian laws remain on the books, but are deemed “void and unenforcable.” But laws like those remain in other Western countries: the paper names Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines . I doubt the laws are enforced there, either, but for the sake of human rights—the “optics”—they should be nullified as well.
*A newly-elected Congressman from Philadelphia has refused to comment on condemn last weekend’s antisemitic protests in his very district when bicyclists targeted six restaurants because they were Jewish. The Congressman, Chris Rabb, is, of course, a Democratic Socialist.
A bicycle protest in Philadelphia last weekend against several Jewish- and Israeli-owned businesses in the heart of Philadelphia set off a wave of condemnations from elected officials across the Keystone State — with some notable exceptions.
Most prominently, Rep.-elect Chris Rabb (D-PA), the Democratic Socialists of America member and state lawmaker who will represent the Philadelphia district where the protest took place, has not issued a statement or responded to numerous requests for comment from Jewish Insider throughout the week.
State Sen. Nikil Saval (D-PA), another DSA member who represents the district, had not publicly addressed the situation prior to initial publication of this piece but subsequently condemned it. But Rabb’s silence in particular has frustrated and disappointed members of Philadelphia’s Jewish community who had hoped for a better start to his relationship with his Jewish constituents, given that he has long been a vocal critic of Israel, and his candidacy raised concerns with members of the Jewish community.
Organizers of the bike rally are planning to repeat the demonstration on upcoming weekends.
Allan Domb, a former city council member and mayoral candidate and the owner of Schlesinger’s Deli, one of the restaurants targeted by the protesters, told JI, “I wish [Rabb] had spoken out, I’m not sure why he didn’t.”
“He’s going to be my congressman,” Domb continued. “When an owner of a business in his district, who happens to be Jewish, is threatened by a group of people who say they want to shut me down, it seems to me that my congressman should speak up about that.”
Others were sharper in their language.
“He’s a sack of s***, and that’s for the record, and I hope you’ll print it,” said Shanin Specter, a prominent attorney and son of former Sen. Arlen Specter, who began his career as a Democrat and became a Republican before ending his time in the Senate as a Democrat. “His silence speaks volumes, and it’s extremely regrettable that he is going to be representing Philadelphia in the United States Congress.”
Specter called Rabb’s silence a “declaration of war on the Jewish community in Philadelphia.”
As Melissa Steinberg Brodsky said, “Chris Rabb could’ve said one sentence. Jewish businesses in my district shouldn’t be targeted because they’re Jewish. How hard was that?”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili rests beneath a pear tree. And here’s a recycled Hili dialogue:
Hili: Am I bothering you well enough?
Andrzej: Exceptionally well.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy dobrze ci przeszkadzam?
Ja: Wręcz doskonale.
*******************
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From Funny and Strange Signs; a happy roll!
From CinEmma:
Masih’s quiet, but J. K. Rowling is explaining her position once again:
Nobody’s denying that you’re human or that you shouldn’t have the same rights as every other human. What you aren’t entitled to is everyone else’s agreement that you are what you claim to be, compliance with your quasi-religious views or the removal of women’s sex-based rights. https://t.co/cumYKp8T53
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 12, 2026
From the Number Ten Cat. No, Hegseth did not apologize, though he should have kept his group quiet (I don’t know who was laughing and talking loud). But he said nothing and let the Pentagon do the talking:
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, issued a statement later Wednesday acknowledging the incident.
“While commemorating this solemn day, a soldier correctly and respectfully reminded everyone to maintain decorum,” the statement read.
But then (see below) Hegseth tweeted and gave a medal to the soldier who reprimanded him.
The family of that young guard should be very proud of him. Hegseth never misses an opportunity to besmirch his office and should apologise immediately.
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) November 11, 2026
A tweet from the “Secretary of War”:
We love soldiers.
We love standards.
Well done, Specialist.Carry on Patriots. https://t.co/Uk6ek6oOso
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) November 12, 2026
Two from my feed. First, what kind of parents would force their children into confronting soldiers and even striking them? (The filming is a giveaway; it’s almost as if they want their kids to be hurt!).
Palestinians claim that Israeli soldiers are cold-blooded baby killers. Then why do Palestinian parents push their own children to confront said soldiers while standing behind and filming?
There are dozens of videos like this. Something is not adding up. https://t.co/BkhU2D2WWK
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) November 11, 2026
Cat wins! Cat wins!
there is only one king 👑 https://t.co/ZSff1quLzL
— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) November 12, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
A Dutch Jewish girl, Liane, was gassecd together with her older sister Eva as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Liana was 5 years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-11-13T11:45:08.444Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. The first is a bit salacious. . .
If it weren't for the fact that my pension is probably tied up with the fate of Nvidia I’d be cackling about how the global economy maybe got borked because some fool couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-11-12T14:02:10.614Z
Monet indeed:
Monet.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-11-12T10:23:30.314Z
.
Is our society so stupid we don’t understand life? Evolution?
It isn’t news that wealthy, high-status and in this case good-looking men – Jensen Huang – like sexual variety as much as the rest of us, or have “tired” marriages (and often understanding wives). They can actually achieve it.
Mr. Huang’s story is far from unique he just got a little sloppy at the “filtering” stage IMHO. A man’s options scale neatly with his wealth/prestige in the same way a woman’s does with her beauty. Is this a new discovery for anybody? (a few female journalists, say?)
The spy thing is embarrassing but smart men want smart consorts/girlfriends and a PRC spy, CEO of a Singaporean semiconductor company… is surely no dummy. And she’s hot.
D.A.
NYC
I agree, the hand-wringing and moralizing is a bit ridiculous. During my own decades in various corporate and non-profit roles I’ve witnessed all sorts of indiscretions, flirtations and not-so-secret relationships. As long as someone isn’t using their supervisory role to leverage or harass someone, most people don’t care. IF Huang was warned that this woman was a possible spy and continued with the relationship, I could see the board firing him. Otherwise, ousting him was a foolish move IMO.
The real significance of this affair is lost on most people. Forget Trump, the PRC, Jensen Huang, Alice Huang, Nvidia, etc. The real story is the rise of the GPU. GPUs are ‘only’ millions of times faster than they were in 2000. GPUs have changed the world and will continue to change the world (a lot). Of course, paper, gunpowder, and the printing press (etc.) changed the world (a lot). I would add CPUs and GPUs (now TPUs) to that list.
I rank GPUs up their with the steam engine as great changers of the world.
It’s sort of ironic that GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) that were designed to accelerate often-mindless video games are now the centrepiece of artificial intelligence models. The connection is that GPUs do fast vector and matrix calculations to support 3-dimensional visual “linear transformations” (rotation, scaling, perspective, etc.), and the same vector and matrix operations (in thousands of dimensions) are foundational to LLM processing and training.
(And FWIW, “TPM” (Tensor Processing Unit) has nothing to do with tensor calculus but is marketing hype for Google’s modified GPU designed for higher volume but lower precision calculations. The human visual system is very sensitive to graphics imprecision, e.g. jaggies. The human language system is not.)
Of course, you are entirely correct. I should say that TPUs are really just the latest step in a process that started with the transistor (actually before the transistor).
For sure. The Edison Effect (discovered by Tom when mucking around with his lightbulb) led to vacuum tube electronics (known in UK English as “thermionic valves” 🙂), then to transistor electronics, then integrated circuits, then computers-on-a-chip, then …? “O wonder! … O brave new world, that has such [things] in’t!” (The Tempest).
Is Alice Huang hot? I agree. The answer (in my opinion) is Yes.
He’s been well-Huang, drawn and quartered.
Naturalistic fallacy…
I agree with Matthew…keep it in your pants, dude.
Saint Augustine of Hippo was born on this day in 354. Art Malik was born on this day in 1952.
The saint of the day is Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini: useful because she is the patron saint of impossible causes and hospital administrators.
She did much her good work in Chicago. She died there in 1917, but was shifted east soon afterwards. Don’t know why.
I agree with you that the U.S. needs to keep going after Iran until their nuclear ambitions are brought to an end. It’s interesting that Trump reoriented Vance to focus his attentions on domestic corruption, rather than to trying reach an agreement with Iran. Some in the press are calling this a rebuke to Vance and even a veiled effort to reduce his influence. I’ve heard some say that this is Trump’s way of keeping Vance from getting all the attention or it’s his way of knocking Vance down a peg or two in the 2028 presidential race. OMG, the intrigue!
But there’s another, more parsimonious, explanation. Trump has finally come to realize that negotiations with Iran are futile and that the blockade will bring about the desired effect without Iran’s compliance. In other words, he changed his policy from negotiation to strangulation, telling Vance that negotiations are no longer American policy. There you have it. It’s a simple change of policy, and no palace intrigue is involved.
That would be a reasonable explanation if Trump had a much greater policy-to-brainfart ratio.
Let me get this straight. Invidious events at a giant company called Nvidia involve hanky-panky between the CEO Mr. Huang and another exec named Miss Huang, who might be a spy. Has the business world been taken over by Thomas Pynchon?
Very simulation-like to have Mr. Huang done in this way…
I haven’t heard confirmation that it was indeed someone from Hegseth’s entourage who made the guffaw or not, or whether Hegseth may have reprimanded him outside of that area, but I’m glad he recognized the guard. Of course it’s to try to save face for himself as well.
The majority of the Democrats who didn’t attend the impeachment vote used the excuse of heavy traffic in DC that day. They knew >18 hours in advance the time of the vote, and voting was kept open longer than scheduled. They all said they would have voted No to shelve the vote, meaning the impeachment vote would have passed. It’s a way to look good to the Party (I would have voted No, honest!) while maintaining status quo; in actuality, they voted to stop the impeachment by their absence.
Don’t be too worried, Prof. Cobb – Nvidia’s share price will bounce back. After all, they make silicon chips and does anyone think demand for them is going anywhere but due north for the foreseeable future? If I had the bucks, I’d be buying Nvidia shares hand over fist right now.
Recall Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack :
“Sell, sell sell! They’re all selling? Then buy, buy, buy!”
What a rib tickler that movie is🤣.
They design silicon chips (they don’t actually make them, that’s done by TMSC), so all it takes for NVIDIA to be in trouble is companies deciding that they like other designs of chip instead. In fact, it’s not so much that NVIDIA’s designs are preferred, it’s that they run on NVIDIA’s software suite, CUDA, which is indeed preferred. But, if competitors can simply use AI to write emulations of CUDA (as is rumoured), then NvIDIA loses its moat. In other words, NVIDIA could well lose its currently dominant position rather rapidly.
Ah, ok, I didn’t know that. Thanks Coel.
(Disclaimer: My limited experience as a speculator was a valuable life lesson. And free advice is sometimes worth less than you pay for it.)
With luck, the current AI boom/bubble “contraction” will work out very well. It will give some breathing space for sensible discussion about where the whole industry is heading and the deep social implications of that.
But we’re not that lucky. It will take an actual bursting of the bubble to get people’s attention away from all the shiny baubles. At least there is now some serious discussion about it. Today’s Counting the Cost panel on Al Jazeera was IMO particularly good. FWIW I expect to see the crash soon, but I’m an optimist 🙂.