Victor Davis Hanson agrees with me about the Matthew Parris article I fisked a few days ago. Here's the link.

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson012605.html

Well, it's not like he agrees with me personally, but we did reach similar conclusions after reading Parris's piece.

It's cold. I have the heater on and made sure to get an extra tank of butane. The cats are in sort of a catpile in front of the heater. Remei's spending the night at her mother's--she does that a couple of times a week now, since my mother-in-law can't exactly live all by herself--somebody's got to mop the floor and bring home the heavy shopping--but isn't exactly stuck in bed all day, either. She gets out enough to walk the dog, though Remei and I are both afraid the dog's going to pull her down one of these days, buy her daily loaf of brown bread, and that kind of thing. My job is to hold down the home fort and make sure there's some food on the table when Wifey gets home. Rosa spends an occasional afternoon over here--I put on some jazz or some Western swing, which she likes, and she plays with the cats.

Tonight I cooked up a pot of pinto beans--my recipe, soak the beans for a few hours, add an onion and whatever you have in the way of fresh peppers, several cloves of garlic, a stalk of celery, half a can of crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, chili powder, cumin, oregano. Cook for an hour or so until beans are done--and some rice--my recipe, slice up an onion, some peppers, a carrot or two, some garlic, saute it up in olive oil, then add three cut-up tomatoes, saute it some more, add a splash of this absolutely evil Vietnamese chili sauce I've got, dump in one cup rice and saute it some more so the flavor gets in the rice, add 1/2 can drained peas mostly to add some green color to the red peppers and tomatoes and the orange carrots, add a good splash of vinegar and two and a half cups water, bring it to a boil and then let simmer 15-20 minutes until rice is done and water steamed away. It's really pretty good. Eat them together.