January 24 2022

The Matt Gaetz Show

And Finally

The French have made a hash of the hashtag

"So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,” wrote Samuel Pepys on January 13, 1667. They were eight. “I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits, a lamb and a rare chine of beef. Next a great dish of roasted fowl, cost me about 30 shillings, and a tart, and then fruit and cheese. My dinner was noble and enough.” My husband said he liked the sound of this and asked if I might manage something similar out of doors, for six, duly distanced. I noticed he had doodled in the margin of his Times #rabbits. Hash sign shares an origin with rabbit hash, both being related to the French hacher, “cut in pieces.

Isabel Hardman

Cold water swimming

The woman on the path has come to a dead stop. She’d been shuffling along in that bunched-up posture we all developed when we bought smartphones, a two-fingered salute to the millennia of evolution that managed to pull humans into an upright position. Now she’s staring, open-mouthed, at her surroundings. I rather enjoy the shocked faces of passersby who catch sight of us swimmers at the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park in our flimsy suits as we lower ourselves into the cold water each morning. I look still more shocking when I get out. My skin turns from its normal skimmed-milk color to bright neon, as though it has been slapped. And it has in a way: when you first enter water thats barely above freezing, you do get a shock.