Greetings on this gray and drizzly Chicago day of Thursday, January 19, 2023, and National Popcorn Day. On a diet but want a filling and tasty meal? Make a big bowl of popcorn, which has almost no calories, add salt, and drizzle it with olive oil.
It’s also World Quark Day, Tin Can Day, Women’s Healthy Weight Day (I thought that all weights were healthy), Gun Appreciation Day (a right-wing-created holiday that’s not for me), Husband’s Day in Iceland (men are given gifts and a special lamb dish, Hangikjöt, is served). Here’s the dish:

Finally, it’s Theophany / Epiphany (Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy), and its related observances:
Timkat, or 20 during Leap Year (Ethiopian Orthodox)
Vodici or Baptism of Jesus (North Macedonia)
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 19 Wikipedia page.
Wine of the Day: Chateau Guirard is best known for its lovely (and pricey) Sauternes, a luscious sweet wine that is France’s best “sticky”—and perhaps the world’s. (Sauternes is made in Bordeaux from sémillon and sauvignon grapes that have been infected with mold, which sucks the water out of the grape and concentrates the sweetness.)
I didn’t even know that Guirard made a dry white wine, but when I saw a bottle for $17, and learned that it was made organically from both semillon and sauvignon blanc, I snapped it up. (You can also buy wines of similar composition made in America, and some of them are okay, but you can’t taste the semillon.) In this bottle was hoping to get the honeyed flavor of the semillon grape without the sweetness, and I drank the bottle (half per night) with a dinner of chicken thighs (the best part of the bird), rice, and green peppers.
The nose reminded me of pears and lemons; the wine was a pale straw color. I don’t drink much white Bordeaux, and I was surprised at how different this tasted from my usual white wines. It had stuffing and a lovely perfume that was better the second day than the first. This is a wine probably best enjoyed with richer seafood, like smoked salmon, but it was also good with chicken thighs. It’s usually more expensive than what I paid, at at higher price points I would consider another wine: perhaps a sauvignon blanc or chinon blanc. But if you can find it at less than $20, try a bottle.
Da Nooz:
*Good Lord, I hadn’t heard of this plan but I can’t say I oppose it. According to the New York Times, the U.S. is starting to talk to Ukraine about reclaiming Crimea, which of course the Russians simply annexed nine years ago. The Russians might finish this war with less territory than they started with! (I still think Ukraine is going to lose land, though.):
For years, the United States has insisted that Crimea is still part of Ukraine. Yet the Biden administration has held to a hard line since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, refusing to provide Kyiv with the weapons it needs to target the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia has been using as a base for launching devastating strikes.
Now that line is starting to soften.
After months of discussions with Ukrainian officials, the Biden administration is finally starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation, according to several U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive debate. Crimea, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is home to tens of thousands of dug-in Russian troops and numerous Russian military bases.
The moderation in position has come about as the Biden administration has come to believe that if the Ukrainian military can show Russia that its control of Crimea can be threatened, that would strengthen Kyiv’s position in any future negotiations. In addition, fears that the Kremlin would retaliate using a tactical nuclear weapon have dimmed, U.S. officials and experts said — though they cautioned that the risk remained.
. . .The new thinking on Crimea — annexed illegally by Russia in 2014 — shows how far Biden administration officials have come from the start of the war, when they were wary of even acknowledging publicly that the United States was providing Stinger anti-aircraft missiles for Ukrainian troops.
But over the course of the conflict, the United States and its NATO allies have been steadily loosening the handcuffs they put on themselves, moving from providing Javelins and Stingers to advanced missile systems, Patriot air defense systems, armored fighting vehicles and even some Western tanks to give Ukraine the capacity to strike against Russia’s onslaught.
Now, the Biden administration is considering what would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.
Now it’s not absolutely clear that these plans would wind up putting Crimea into Ukrainian hands, but I can’t imagine that the plan is just to show Russia how vulnerable it is. And let’s throw in some American made tanks for Zelensky, just as a Christmas present.
*In a column at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin pins the rise of American anti-Semitism, which is a real phenomenon, on the political Right. She says “the cause is no mystery, either. What is it? The answer is in the first sentence above:
Right-wing Republicans have their fingerprints all over the rise of antisemitism in the United States. The latest data make this clear.
“Over three-quarters of Americans (85 percent) believe at least one anti-Jewish trope, as opposed to 61 percent found in 2019,” the Anti-Defamation League recently reported. “Twenty percent of Americans believe six or more tropes, which is significantly more than the 11 percent that ADL found in 2019 and is the highest level measured in decades.” The report continues:
The ADL notes that the number of Americans accepting anti-Semitic tropes, like saying the “Jews stick together” and have “dual loyalty to Israel and the U.S.” And this, to Rubin, is familiar rhetoric:
Much of this sounds like the rhetoric coming from the MAGA movement, and specifically its leader, defeated former president Donald Trump. How many times have you heard Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, prattle on about George Soros, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, as if he is the chief string-puller controlling the Democratic Party? Trump meanwhile routinely demonizes Jewish Democrats for not supporting him and the Israeli government.
The far left is not blameless for the rise of antisemitism, of course. But the entire project of white Christian nationalism is to marginalize those who are not White and/or not Christian as something less than real Americans. (More than one-third of those who responded to the ADL survey said “Jews do not share my values.”) The chant “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in August 2017 was a visible reminder that the right wing considers Jews as much a threat to their vision of democracy as immigrants from Central America. Hatred of “elites” and suspicion about urban dwellers often is a thinly disguised swipe at Jews. (“New York values” is often the buzz phrase.)
But although the Far Right is indeed anti-Semitic this way, at least Rubin doesn’t exculpate the Left, much of which, especially the so-called “progressives”, are anti-Semitic in a more subtle way:
The far left makes its own contribution to antisemitism through its over-the-top denunciations of Israel. Not all criticism of Israel is wrong, of course. Plenty of objections to current government policies are legitimate — including its inclusion of rabidly anti-Arab nationalists, its attempt to curtail civil rights and the ultra-Orthodox groups’ attempt to write non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews out of the worldwide community of Jewish people. However, there is a point at which criticism of Israel can veer into abject antisemitism. This includes the suggestion that Israel “treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated Jews” (a view held by a stunning 40 percent of the ADL survey respondents) or “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media” (nearly one-fourth of those surveyed agreed).
For example, the BDS movement is, I think, anti-Semitic, since one of its aims is removal of Israel as a state: “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That, in effect, is a recipe for genocide of the Jews. As far as I know, every member of the Democratic Congressional “squad” endorses BDS. It’s ironic that two signs of the progressive Left, with the Left as a whole traditionally inclusive, are dissing the Jews as “Zionists” on one hand and ignoring the oppression imposed by Islamic countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and Palestine on the other.
*A woman and a boy were killed in a rare polar bear attack in Alaska. That must be a painful way to die, and the miscreant bear was going after a whole village:
A polar bear killed a woman and her year-old son in a remote village in western Alaska on Tuesday after it chased “multiple residents,” officials said in one of the few fatal polar bear attacks to take place in the past century.
The attack occurred near a school in the remote village of Wales, Alaska, which is on the western edge of the Seward Peninsula that juts into the Bering Sea toward Russia. About 170 people live in Wales, according to the Census Bureau, and most residents are Inupiaq.
A spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers identified the victims as Summer Myomick, 24, and her son, Clyde Ongtowasruk, 1. Ms. Myomick was a resident of St. Michael, Alaska, about 230 miles southeast of Wales, the spokesman, Austin McDaniel, said.
A local resident shot and killed the polar bear as it was attacking the pair, the Alaska State Troopers said in a statement. State troopers said that they were notified of the attack at 2:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday.
. . . While attacks on humans are extremely rare, polar bears are more likely to attack a person when they are “nutritionally stressed” and in “below-average body condition,” according to a 2017 study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin.
You know what tthat means: the bears are hungry because the sea ice, from which they hunt seals, is shrinking due to global warming. Polar bears are already listed as “threatened”, but they could become “endangered”. And the more endangered they are, the more Alaskans are endangered as well.
*Speaking of global warming, Greenland is rapidly becoming the canary in the coal mine for global warming. A report in the WaPo (by Chris Mooney—remember him?) says that Greenland is getting hotter and losing ice, and it’s happening quickly:
“We find the 2001-2011 decade the warmest of the whole period of 1,000 years,” said Maria Hörhold, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.
And since warming has only continued since that time, the finding is probably an underestimate of how much the climate inthe high-altitude areas of northern and central Greenland has changed. That is bad news for the planet’s coastlines, because it suggests a long-term process of melting is being set in motion that could ultimately deliver some significant, if hard to quantify, fraction of Greenland’s total mass into the oceans.Overall, Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 20 feet.
A 20-foot rise in sea levels would be a disaster. Much of New York would be underwater (blue is underwater):
. . . and Miami would be completely inundated:
. . . and goodbye to much of Florida’s coast, not to mention the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans. :
*Finally, the world’s oldest person has died. It was a woman, of course, as they live longer than men, and she was a French nun, Lucile Randon. The AP reports:
A French nun who was believed to be the world’s oldest person but had been reportedly growing weary of the burdens of age has died a few weeks before her 119th birthday, her nursing home in southern France said Wednesday.
Lucile Randon, known as Sister André, was born in the town of Ales, southern France, on Feb. 11, 1904, and lived through the two world wars. As a little girl she was astonished by her first contact with electric lighting at school and, more recently, survived COVID-19 without even realizing she’d been infected.
Spokesman David Tavella said she died at 2 a.m. on Tuesday at the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home in the southern port city of Toulon.
The Gerontology Research Group, which validates details of people thought to be 110 or older, listed her as the oldest known person in the world after the death of Japan’s Kane Tanaka, aged 119, last year.
The oldest living known person in the world listed by the Gerontology Research Group is now American-born Maria Branyas Morera, who is living in Spain, and is 115.
In better days, Sister Andre was known to enjoy a daily glass of wine and some chocolate. She toasted her 117th birthday in 2021 with Champagne, red wine and port.
“It made me very, very, very, very happy,” she said in a telephone interview at the time with The Associated Press. “Because I met all those I love and I thank the heavens for giving them to me. I thank God for the trouble they went to.”
She looks tired of living in the photo below, and the idea that this might happen to me is very scary. As the song “Old Man River” goes, “I’m tired of living, and scared of dyin’.”
If you want to know the verified record for longevity, Wikipedia says this under “oldest people‘:
The longest documented and verified human lifespan is that of Jeanne Calment of France (1875–1997), a woman who lived to age 122 years and 164 days. She claimed to have met Vincent van Gogh when she was 12 or 13.
All ten of the oldest documented people in history were women, as are all of the ten oldest living people.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sick of winter:
Hili: I’m coming inside.A: This is the third time today.Hili: I’m checking whether the winter has gone away.
Hili: Wracam do domu.Ja: To już dziś trzeci raz.Hili: Tak, sprawdzam, czy ta zima już sobie poszła.
************************
From Cat Attack via Merilee:
Something I found on Facebook:
From Malcolm, a great balancer. Be sure to watch all four balancing tricks.
A toot from God on Mastodon:
From Masih. Translation from Farsi:
A new video of Aida Rostami, a young doctor who secretly treated the wounded of the Iranian revolution in Ekbatan town, has recently been published. See Aida Rostami’s free and light dance on autumn leaves. This flame, this light and this beauty was extinguished by the criminals of the Islamic Republic on December 21
She’s gone.
ویدئوی جدیدی از آیدا رستمی، پزشک جوانی که در شهرک اکباتان مجروحان انقلاب ایران را به شکل پنهانی مداوا میکرد، به تازگی منتشر شده است.
رقص رها و سبکبالانه آیدا رستمی بر روی برگهای پاییزی را ببینید. این شعله، این نور و این زیبایی، ۲۱ آذرماه توسط جنایتکاران جمهوری اسلامی خاموش شد pic.twitter.com/594OKpNiii— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 18, 2023
This new statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. embracing his wife Coretta Scott King, just unveiled on the Boston Commons, is not a good one. Not only does it now show them, but it looks mildly salacious:
Friend of mine walked over to the new statue on the common today. Dear God it's awful. pic.twitter.com/FSSeNF5yaE
— Will ❤️🔥 (@NHBullmoose) January 14, 2023
From Malcolm. This bird IS doing a model’s walk!
How to walk the catwalkpic.twitter.com/OcOu9f7he0
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) January 16, 2023
From the Auschwitz Memorial, two siblings, four and six, were gassed upon arrival
19 January 1940 | A Hungarian Jewish girl, Sarolta Grünwald (pictured left), was born in Csongrad.
In June 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. She was 4 years old. Her two years older brother Sandor was killed with her. pic.twitter.com/hc5w1c8Cpl
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 19, 2023
Tweets from the world-renowned Professor Cobb. First, a really messed-up indoor soccer game. These guys should have their footy licenses confiscated.
I would pay to watch this pic.twitter.com/x3lPF4Thle
— Max Rushden 💛🖤 (@maxrushden) January 18, 2023
This guy is a fraud! The BBC must have been hard up for entertainment back then. . .
Probably my favourite clip of British TV ever.
A man who can jump on eggs without breaking them… pic.twitter.com/O2c3WgqyIl— Rae Earl (@RaeEarl) January 18, 2023
What’s wrong with her answer? Nothing!
She was so serious 😭 pic.twitter.com/65uuwOZdKA
— Mesh🇧🇧 (@rahsh33m) January 17, 2023