The politics of leftovers smoothed relations between rich and poor for centuries. When it was scrapped, things got crummy. In Chile I once ate a bull's testicle. My family and I were staying in Santiago when our second night there we received a dinner invitation from a colleague of my father's, a stout, mirthful industrial engineer who was reportedly a crony of the dictator, Augusto Pinochet. The meal consisted of quail eggs and arugula for the adults, and for the children a dish that I took to be baked apples dusted with cinnamon. I eagerly popped one in my mouth. What met my bite, however, was tough, cartilaginous, and had a slight metallic tang. I must have grimaced because a maid rushed over, took my hand and led me to a toilet into which I could spit the offending morsel.… Read More...

The life and loves of one Victorian butterfly enthusiast go to show how hard it is for a lepidopterist to change her spots. Men were like butterflies to Margaret Fountaine: They were apt to flit away without warning or leave-taking. Either creature she nevertheless pursued with vigor, and she recorded her experiences in thick leather-bound diaries she took with her everywhere. They contained accounts of her bicycle trip through France and her motorcar excursion across Tenerife, which she made with eight young Spaniards. In Corsica she took up with a gang of bandits before sailing for Cuba and Chile. Her many affairs she characterized as "so many gates leading on, through paths of sorrow, to ultimate disaster and final loss." This sense of disappointment attached only to her wingless loves, however. For the other kind her affection went undiminished. No… Read More...

Love Laplander-style requires thawing frosty relations--with lots of brandy and boiled meat. The first days of September summon the Lappish hunter to his yearly ritual. He puts on reindeer-skin coat and cap (camouflage that serves to fool his quarry) and searches out a copse of pine trees to use as a place of ambush. Once situated, he bellows lustily. In sight there eventually wanders a reindeer whose curiosity has gotten the better of it.  Arriving to discover the source of the noise so like the one it itself makes, the creature discovers instead that its fate is sealed. The hunter flings his weapon--an arrow, a spear, sometimes a stone--and it strikes fatally home. A similar knack for deception the Lappish man brings to a hunt of another sort. Should a woman turn his head, he shows no overt signs of… Read More...

"Early bird" or "night owl"--most modern individuals consider themselves one or the other. People who lived before the Industrial Age were both. Enviable is the sleeper who sleeps, who sinks into nothingness and remains there for a good seven to ten hours, rising again only with the sun. Enviable and perhaps contemptible. "I hate a man who goes to sleep at once," complains Mark Twain. Provoking his hatred is nothing specific, rather only "a sort of indefinable something" that comes across as "not exactly an insult," but more of "an insolence" that he nonetheless finds "hard to bear." The object of odium--a traveling companion who goes to bed directly after dinner, leaving a wakeful Twain no one to talk with--stands guilty of that typical lack of consideration the sleepy show the sleepless by indulging their sleepiness. (more…) Read More...