“At my local Whole Foods in Brooklyn...”

In the writer’s defense, if there is any editorial direction on this site anymore, this post might not have been voluntary. Look at how many comments it garnered compared to the anemic response to 90% of the other posts (5 comments, 1 in the gray seems to be about the norm.)

Thank you for replying! New York social history of all kinds (I haunt the Tenement Museum and the New-York Historical Society) is my hobby. If you go further back, the Astors were once considered nouveau-riche parvenus because they made their money trading in beaver furs and real estate speculation. I mean, it goes on…

This comment will probably never be seen but there was a time when the Vanderbilts were shunned as crass new money. “The Gilded Age” has the real Mrs. Astor in it, and the Russell upstarts are standing in for the Vanderbilts. The scheming, social-climbing Mom is based on Alva Vanderbilt. The season finale, where the “R…

I kind of enjoy it when The New York Times goes on an Ohio Diner Safari and chats up the blue collar retirees who pass their days in one. The condescension is often palpable (even though the reporter themself may be an Ohio native, but thanks to four+ years at a small and very expensive East Coast liberal arts college…

Oh I’m fine! I made it thru the last couple of years OK. I kind of abandoned Jez because once my hard drive died and I returned to the grays it’s almost impossible to be seen, so why bother. Plus, let’s face it, Jez goes up and down, doesn’t it.

It might make more sense if it were pointed out that that’s only the woman’s last name. Her first name is Helle, as the CNN link correctly notes.

I’m not going to reply to Omid Scobie or whoever CountessLivesOn really is, but I will point out that under something called, I think, the Letters Patent, anyway something dreamed up by King George V in 1917, there was a rule change to streamline the monarchy. All the children of the Monarch got titles, and then all…

No, it’s just sloppy writing by someone who doesn’t understand the meaning of the colloquialism they’ve recently overheard or read somewhere.

I heard about the plagiarism too. He was just grabbing stuff off Reddit, wasn’t he? 

I still cherish my brief interaction with CA Pinkham. When I was in the blacks under a different username (I didn’t get banned; my hard drive died and I never wrote down my Jez password, and by that point they stopped promoting people into the black) I commented on one of his Behind Closed Ovens posts.

But I wonder if he’s going to offer the corn and chorizo option? As far as I know, something like that only works in northern Europe (including, of course, the British Isles.) DC can’t have that many northern European nationals. Plenty, of course, the embassies and the international lawyers and consultants and other…

This rousing success of an experiment was carried out in central London. Repeat the experiment somewhere like Manchester’s inner suburbs or rural Scotland and get back to us.

“[Aspiring] Writer” is a good one for the working-age house hunter whose spouse gets transferred abroad. I remember one episode where the husband got shipped off to Belgium or the Netherlands and one of the must-haves was a clear, sunny writing room for the wife, who was finally going to focus on her craft. During the…

Diet Coke (maybe a whole class of diet soda) was unavailable in certain countries in the 1980s. You could get it in Germany so when we’d visit American friends in France we’d load up the trunk with it and smuggle it across. I used to drink a lot of Diet Coke so when I’d drive up to Canada to visit relatives I’d pack…

The photo is lame but color photography in newspapers (where you’d be most likely find a photo of a local Taco Bell opening) is more recent than you’d think. The NY Times didn’t print color photos until October of 1997.

In northern Europe they serve sausages with a side of aioli, and it is very tasty.

Your burger sounds delicious (to me). Almost like Thai or “Polynesian.” Grilled beef with a peanut sauce and pineapple. In fact I feel like I’ve had this in a different form, maybe as a salad with cabbage?

I’ve had far too many pizzas in northern Europe. I can just imagine what pizza in Russia is like.

That’s very true. I’m a superfan (just look at my screen name) and friends and I were emailing around trying to find a mutually acceptable date to see this exhibition. So an ad popped up for me maybe four times total, but in this instance...I also think this is the only time an ad for this appeared for me across any…