So what to do with a beef round roast? It’s tough, it’s very lean, and it can be kind of flavorless. Yet roasts can be comfort food, and comfort is what I’d kind of like given recent events, which include freezing weather for the last week, and a tomorrow promised to remain below freezing all […]

French pro-Axis poster from the Second World War. Churchill smiles at a starving French family while surrounded by the slogan, “Monster, you make us suffer!” Churchill looks more like a film comedian than a statesman, let alone a monstre. The poster is intended to encourage the French public to forget that it was the Germans, […]

A Viking grave in a Scottish churchyard. (I don’t remember the name of the village, but it was very near Loch Lomond.) The gravestone is carved so as to resemble an overturned boat— boat burials were still a thing. The “viking funeral,” with the ship set on fire and pushed out to sea, is a […]

A reconstruction of the turret of the USS Monitor, open to allow a view of the mechanism and one of the two 11-inch guns. The turret was designed by American inventor Theodore Timby, and the rest of the ship by the Swedish-born John Ericsson. A problem with the turret was that there was no brake— […]