I am unlikely to become a vegan, but I do enjoy vegan food, and one special time for vegans is the winter, in which many wonderful squash are available for vegan dishes. My wife has developed a wonderful “formula” for vegan dinners which involves a squash (today, spaghetti squash), a filling (today I think mujudara, a rice and lentil Lebanese dish she picked up from me and ran with), a topping (mushroom jerky and mushroom marinara sauce) and some kind of bread or pasta (today, vegan sourdough from Whole Foods).
An assist on today’s meal are some Lebanese pickled hot peppers that I made which are … okay. The recipe I used said they’d be ready in about a month, but these are one and a half months old and they’re not too pickled so far. Flavor is fine, not too exciting, but the ones my mom and dad made were always a bit more pickled and soft, whereas these are still crunchy. I’d probably research whatever it is that makes them more soft and do more of that, and probably up the amount of spices (turmeric and garlic and more) in the mix.
But! A perfectly good meal.
Today’s challenges included blogging (yasss, this post), drawing (1 drawing), writing (~1900 words on Tales of the Spookymurk), working on a scientific paper (on prosocial robotics), and some reading.
Also in today’s news, America seems to be grasping at starting a Western Hemisphere empire, and to justify it, Stephen Miller demonstrated his lack of grasp of basic history:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/us/politics/stephen-miller-greenland-venezuela.html
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Real cute, Steveo, but ignorant. Since you’re interested in the beginning of history – I know you said time, but I’m just going to interpolate what you really meant there, since it isn’t coherent enough to be parsed on its own merits – you might look up the chaps Hitler, Napoleon and Alexander. The iron law of the world is that setting the whole world against you never goes well, and even if things seem to be looking up for you for a bit, an empire put together by pure force will fall apart as soon as it slips from a tyrant’s dead fingers.
Realpolitik is neither real nor politic – it’s a childish emotional response to situations which is directly contradicted by readily available facts. I’m prepared to justify that in depth, but then, the proponents of realpolitik generally don’t know what it actually meant and are simply grasping at a word to justify their emotional desire to do something harmful and stupid that feels good to them, rather than, say, looking at what the actual consequences of pulling that bullshit on counter-acting actors generally turns out to be.
-the Centaur
Pictured: dinner with Sandi, and the pickled peppers when I bottled them.
