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Apart from what Cain pointed out, I would beef up the Modernity 2 section. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Jaspers make up a big chunk of phenomenology from the second half of the 20th century. Maybe Michel Henri as well, though I don't really know how important he's considered outside of la francophonie.

Also, I would consider Fichte important enough to the Germany Ideology movement to put him in there.

Almost forgot! Super important: Hannah Arendt.

One more thing: you're dissection of Habermas only includes his political work, without making any mention of his epistemology (which is super exciting!).

Otherwise it's not bad

Yeah I would love to use fresh spinach, if only I could afford it

So Kasteel rouge is good? I've had a bottle sitting around for a month that I don't have so much interest in. I bought the rip-off package of the glass + the four different Kasteel beers with my girlfriend, but neither of us like kreik. I'm a big fan of the triple though, and the glass is so cool. I just might try the rouge tomorrow.

Hope your crew likes the recipes if you decide to try them out

[Savory French toast squares with spinach-curry creme sauce]

Lately I've been playing round with savory French toast, and I've got two recipes I'd like to share.

The first is ridiculously good, but takes a bit of time.


Savory French toast squares with spinach-curry creme sauce
Ingredients:
-old (or fresh) bread, cut into small squares [the French word for French toast is pain perdu, 'lost bread', because it was a way to use bred that had turned]. Personally, I keep the heels of all the bread I eat for things like this.

Egg mixture:
-eggs
-creme
-mustard (dark, with seeds in it)
-paprika
-garlic (powdered or paste)
-salt

mix all that shit together, let the bread soak for awhile if it's old, cook the pieces as you would a regular sweet French toast

Sauce:
So yeah at the same time, start working on a sauce that you'll pour over the pieces. You need:
-frozen chopped spinache
-creme
-milk
-butter
-flour
-curry
-salt
-garlic (if you're as addicted to garlic as I am)
-fresh ground black pepper

First melt the spinach, then do with the butter and flour as you would for a regular white sauce. The advantage of putting in the chopped spinach first is that you really don't need to worry about clumps forming, it's the easier white sauce you'll ever make. It's best to whisk it while adding in milk/cream, but really you could just mix it well with a spatula spreader and you'd get by. I like this sauce to be pretty thick, but that's up to you. Throw in the curry and salt.

Place the squares on a plate, smother in the spinach garlic curry sauce, throw a sprig of cilantro on top to make it look nice, et voilà.


French toast cheese:
This one is super simple. I just made it up 40 minutes ago, it took 10 minutes, and it's all sorts of wonderful. You make pretty much the same egg mixture as with the first recipe, but I always threw in some curry for this one. This time you need fresh bread, 2 slices per sandwich (seriously goddamn revolutionary, I know). Dip one side of a slice of bread in the mixture for 3-5 seconds, then throw it in the pan, no oil, no butter, no nothing. Put some cheese on top (I used double crème, which is kinda like camembert), then cover the pan with a lid so that the cheese melts a little better. Dip one side of the second slice, throw it on top, flip it over, you know the drill.

It's basically a grilled cheese, but with so many added benefits. The bread now has a ton of flavor, and a slightly different texture. Also, you don't use any oil/butter, which makes the whole thing less greasy, while not taking away from the deliciousness of the toast.



[yeah, today I went out and bought a whole bunch of those Paix-Dieu that I'd had last night]

The problem when you drink a couple of them is that they encourage your forgetting of them at 10% it only takes a few

It would have been very recently, from what I read it was released October 31st, I hadn't seen it until this afternoon.

and ohh was it good. Like I said my Rochefort tastes like Leffe now :P of course it's the 8 (70 eurocents cheaper than the 10!) but still

I am drinking one of the best beers I've ever had: Paix-Dieu. It's brewed by Caulier, the same brewery that made the Christmas beer with the special bottle I posted a couple pages back.

Same bottle type this time, but the flavor is off the charts. It's an excellent blond with a hint of a honey flavor which is balanced perfectly with it's 10% abv. The smell reminds me of wonderful.

This beer was brewed during the full moon in September, and they only made 12,000 bottles, which means I'm going back to the store tomorrow morning to stock up, they only had a dozen or so, I picked a bottle up because I'd never seen it before.


(On the little moon under the metal bar, it's written "Plein lune du 23 septembre 2010" (full moon of september 23rd).)

If you come across a bottle of this, definitely get it.

ETA: I'd also gotten some Rochefort which I'll have tonight, but Paix-Dieu makes Rochefort look like Leffe.

I've been spending 1-2 hours a day for the last week reading this stuff, but I'm far too exasperated to say anything useful about it. Then you got Obama bending over to the republicans wishes on the tax cuts, it's a bad week to spend so much time looking at the news.

What I wonder is really how many people, among those who have opinions on the matter and are not a part of a government, actually think negatively about the Wikileaks organization, cos everyone I've talked to is just disgusted by the way they set up some bullshit rape charges that just happen to be at the same time as the release of these documents and then expect us to believe the two are not related. It's insulting. Why do they even bother hiding it?

je n'y peux plus

It spent all day snowing with ridiculous winds, now at midnight it sounds like it's raining, which just means more slush.

I love responding, when people ask me why I moved to Belgium, "for the weather".

[even more]

It has potentially huge ramifications in slowing the spread of HIV in underdeveloped countries.

Do you think so? I'm not so convinced. I know that many underdeveloped countries have already been worked over by missionaries a hundred or 2 years ago, but I'm not so sure they're Catholic, I feel like they're more protestant, though that's just a thought. I don't feel like the pope's change of opinion is going to do anything for the spread of HIV.

Where it will have an affect is in the church's PR. Either people will see it as positive, as they went from stubborn to even more hypocritical, but at least they recognize something, or people will see it as them just being more and more hypocritical.

Either way Catholicism is just a large cardboard box of shit.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/the-pope/8148899/Pope-approves-use-of-condoms-in-fight-against-Aids.html

[...] may be [...] a male prostitute uses a condom [...] to redevelop the understanding that [...] everything is permitted

aka
Catholicism takes back the easiest thing to point at when discussing the problems of organized religion.

Not sure how I feel about this. I don't really know how much influence the pope has when he says "don't use a condom", so I feel like this switch won't change much. This does make the Church look slightly less douchy though, which [very] slightly lessens the justification of my contempt for it. I don't feel any differently, but that was always a great line to throw out when discussing/arguing about organized vs disorganized religion with my girlfriend, which happens often enough.

Thoughts?

Found something interesting while reading a Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Wittgenstein. This quotation refers to his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 

[...]the Tractatus has gone over its own limits, and stands in danger of being nonsensical.

The "solution" to this tension is found in Wittgenstein's final remarks, where he uses the metaphor of the ladder to express the function of the Tractatus. It is to be used in order to climb on it, in order to "see the world rightly"; but thereafter it must be recognized as nonsense and be thrown away. Hence: "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".

[...]

More recent readings tend to take nonsense more seriously as exactly that — nonsense. This also entails taking seriously Wittgenstein's words in 6.54 — his famous ladder metaphor — and throwing out the Tractatus itself. The Tractatus, on this stance, beyond telling the reader about the ineffable (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logical form, pictorial form, etc.), is a part of the ineffable as well, and should be recognized as such. An accompanying discussion must then also deal with how this can be recognized, what this can possibly mean, and how it should be used, if at all.

This of course reminded me of the Pentabarf, specifically the 5th rule: A discordian is prohibited of believing what he reads. I get a similar vibe from this quote from Wittgenstein, talking about the Tractatus:

My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by my book; ... I've managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.

I don't really have any thoughts on all of this, but it rang a bell so I thought I'd share. I'm on an analytic philosophy kick right now, and it's rare to see an analytic philosopher as rigorous as Wittgenstein get all nonsensical. It's pleasant though, I find.

I'm in. I'll hit up the links after dinner.

Christmas is inching closer, which means only one thing: Christmas beers! I'm not a fan of the holiday itself, but I was happy when I saw this in the store yesterday.


Bon secours blonde de noël, mmmm. Last year I tried to stock up in December because they're gone by January but my stock emptied itself very quickly. This is a very good beer with a very cool bottle! And at 1.34€/bottle, it's barely more expensive than a Westmalle.

http://www.killmydaynow.com/2010/06/best-of-funny-tear-off-ads-9-pics.html

just stumbled upon this. I've seen most of these before, but there are some clever ones, like with the prime numbers

Courtesy of a friend on facebook that I haven't talked to for 10+ years:

Simpsons did it!