“…make you weak in the knees ’til you can hardly speak…”

[Photo Credit: Matteo Nazzari]

And it hurts…

[Photo Credit: New York Shitty]

Can it be any good? There have been Tintin movies before but this one is from Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg.

Here’s hoping…

Well this is just about the funniest site you’ll come across in a long time.

Believe it.

[Photo Credit: Gintare Dainelyte]

[Photo Credit: Harry Callahan: Chicago, 1948]

A sad day for Twins fans and the baseball community, as legendary slugger Harmon Killebrew passed away this morning at 74, from esophageal cancer.

Personally, Killebrew was on the down side of his career by the time I got into baseball, but I still vividly remember the Yankees yearbooks of the early 70s featuring pictures of the Twins masher as part of their “Visiting Stars”.

For what it was worth, Killebrew compiled a line of .239/.333/.455 with 22 homers in 121 career games at Yankee Stadium.

May he rest in peace.

(Over at SI.com, Steve Rushin has a nice obit.)

Simply pleasures are the best.

Like tomato sauce with butter and onion, adapted by the incredible food blog Smiten Kitchen from the Goddess Marcella Hazan.

Oh, Ursula. What an exotic-looking beauty. And what a name: Ursual Andress.

Man, John Derek must have been one smooth sombitch, huh?

Pasta Primavera, The Bittman Variations, in the Times Magazine.

I made peas and asparagus yesterday, with a serrano pepper, tarragon, chives, chicken stock and butter. No pasta but it was yummy. Love the spring vegies.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Times]

Sculptures by Yasuhiro Sakurai

Christopher Hitchens on “To End All Wars,” Adam Hochschild’s new book about WWI:

We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi. Again, Hochschild is an acute register. He has read the relevant passages of “Mein Kampf,” in which a gassed and wounded Austrian corporal began to incubate the idea of a ghastly revenge. He notes the increasing anti-Semitism of decaying wartime imperial Germany, with its vile rumors of Jewish cowardice and machination. And he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.

This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.

Click here for an excerpt...

I am a great admirer of Hochschild’s book “King Leopold’s Ghost” as well as his wonderful memoir, “Half the Way Home.”

His new one looks riveting.

First, dig this tune sung by Richie Allen.

Next, how about this groove from Banter-favorite, Cal Tjader:

Have a laugh…on the house.

It’s gray and wet out there today. Don’t let that stop you though. We’ll be back tonight for more of the raw.

[Photo Credit: Unknown]

Sweet Lou…

Saturday Smooch Edition…

Classic ’90s remixes from Tha ‘Liks:

Carving by Randall Rosenthal.

Eat your heart out, Josh Wilker.