Trump: Help me, Jesus…help me vanquish my enemies and lend a hand. I mean, I won and they’re trying to steal it.
Jesus: You sure?
Trump: I won it all. Georgia, Florida, North Carolina…look at the map. A wonderful, glorious thing.
Jesus: But Georgia’s still in play, no? The Atlanta vote is being counted as we speak.
Trump: But they’re trying to steal Pennsylvania, and it’s mine. I won it and they’re crooked thieves.
Jesus: Is Philly counted? Not until Friday or Saturday, I’ve heard.
Trump: The Democrats are evil. They’re manufacturing fake votes and throwing my ballots out.
Jesus: What’s my name?
Trump: Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus: Do you really expect me to step in and just…what, change your life with a wave of my hand?
Trump: It would be a good thing. The right thing.
Jesus: I don’t fix elections. I’m here to help you spiritually.
Trump: Can you get the Southern District of New York prosecutors off my back?
Jesus: I don’t do that either.
Trump: But I need your help. Or…you know, your guidance. I need to serve for another four years. I’m trying to fulfill God’s plan, as you know.
Jesus: You think?
Trump: The Evangelicals love me. They want me to strike down Roe vs. Wade. It’s my destiny.

I am a true lover and dedicated fan of Italian and French cuisine.

I tasted my first French dish in 1998, during my first and most unforgettable visit to Paris. I’ve been back since then, but I distinctly remember the first-time aroma of magical Paris streets. This most beautiful city in the world smelled so wonderful and romantic. Quiche, ratatouille, rooster in wine, snails, foie gras, truffles, cheeses. Quel délicieux repas!

I tried Italian cuisine later. and fell in love desperately, irrevocably and forever. Ravioli, Lasagna, tortellini, fritata, risotto, tortelloni. Che pasti deliziosi!

Italian and French cuisine is the most exquisite and balanced for me. In all respects.

I don’t know how to cook and frankly don’t enjoy it. But I admire men who know how, and who love the business of cooking and serving.

In the below photo is a pasta dish I prepared in a Roman apartment (via di Monserrato, 154). It was a rare case when the cooking spirit was suddenly upon me on Italian ground. I bought some handmade pasta in Venice but didn’t prepare it until we moved into our Rome abode.

Click here for the remainder of the essay at tatiana-pravda.com.

Pesto Tatiana, prepared and served in Rome in May 2017.

Paris — May 2019.

This is a brief apology for not caring all that much about seeing Scott Frank and Allan Scott‘s The Queen’s Gambit, a seven-episode Netflix miniseries that began almost two weeks ago (on Friday, 10.23).

I was initially intrigued when I realized it was an adaptation of a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, author of three novels that became noteworthy films — The Hustler, The Color of Money and The Man Who Fell To Earth. But somehow the idea of a period saga about a young chess wizard (Ana Taylor Joy) who stands up to entrenched sexism but succumbs to drug and alcohol dependency when she enters her late teens or whenever…somehow it just didn’t flip the light switch.

It nonetheless has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating and is no doubt worth the effort. I’ve admired and respected Frank’s work for many years. I’ll drop in soon.

Kanye West, 43, is a mentally unstable an eccentric celebrity rapper. For most of us his half-assed campaign for President wasn’t even worth deriding as a joke. And yet 60,000 idiots voted for him. I could understand 600 or 6000 votes, but 60K? Imagine all of them packed into a sports stadium and singing spiritual hymns.

According to the AP, Kanye’s biggest state-wide vote tally — 10,216 — came from Tennessee. The second largest was Minnesota, where he received 7,789 votes. The third and fourth highest counts happened in Kentucky and Colorado — 6,259 and 6254, respectively.

Kanye quote #1: “I don’t give a fuck if I win the presidency or not. I am in service to God. God has a plan for us and his people to be finally free. Trump, Biden, or Kanye West cannot free us.”

Kanye quote #2: “When I’m president, let’s also have some fun. Let’s get past all the racism conversation, let’s empower people with 40 acres and a mule, let’s give some land, that’s the plan.”

From Thomas Friedman‘s “There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 11.4.20:

“But Democrats have a lot to rethink as well, notes Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of ‘The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.’

“’Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,’ Sandel told me, ‘the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event as a pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

“‘Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do [so] many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.’

“Again, while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift. Maybe because many working-class Trump voters not only feel looked down upon, but they also resent what they see as cultural censorship from liberal elites, coming out of college campuses.”

In other words, wokester scolding.

“As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote in an Oct. 26 essay, ‘Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between.’

“’To put it in blunt terms,’ he continued, ‘for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture. This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.'”

And yet these assholes voted for him regardless. Despite all the horror and arrogance and the collossal pandemic mismanagement, they stuck with him. And that not only makes them idiots and fools but socially subversive chaos agents. They’re voting like children. Worse, like delinquents.

man… he called it WORD for WORD. pic.twitter.com/9uBn1Sm8xa

— hector (@onikasgivenchy) November 4, 2020

The vast majority of reasonable, fair-minded, non-psychotic humans out there understand that Donald Trump is a dangerous sociopath and a would-be totalitarian dictator who doesn’t give a damn for electoral fairness and Democratic procedure. But a significant portion of them, certainly those from the Great American Rural Region, voted for him anyway because they hate obnoxious progressives more than life itself.

They would rather live hand-to-mouth in a grubby trailer park than live under “socialism”, ridiculous as that equation may sound. Or to submit to the very real tyranny of cancel culture. They would rather tell “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo how much they despise her “anti-racism” message than vote for a better way of life in terms of wages, health care, affordable housing and fighting corporations. They would rather entertain a fantasy of jailing or at least baton-ing or fire-hosing the “Defund The Police” crowd…the BLM looters, Portland window smashers, store burners and the like rather than vote to incrementally better their own lives.

They hate you, wokesters…almost everyone does. It’s my honest belief that if not for your scintillating contributions to the national conversation over the last three or four years, Joe Biden would have probably won in a near-landslide last night.

You know how most wokesters are responding this morning? They’re shaking their heads and saying “wow, those toxic white rural racists just don’t get it, do they? Well, I guess we’re going to have to protest and condemn all the more until they wake up.”

I realize that Joe Biden‘s odds of winning appear to be reasonably good at this point. 264 electoral votes thus far, and he’ll be at 270 when he wins Nevada. But nothing substantial will be accomplished under a Biden administration with the Senate remaining in Republican hands.

I just can’t wrap my head around the loathsome Susan Collins and Lindsay Graham winning in their respective states (Maine, South Carolina).

So Biden has won Wisconsin and will almost certainly take Michigan and Nevada — 32 electoral votes. Still in doubt are Pennsyltucky (20) and Georgia (16) The idea is that the still-uncounted Atlanta vote eventually might tip Georgia in Biden’s favor, and that the same might eventually happen with the metropolitan Philadelphia vote in Pennsylvania.

Biden can afford to lose Pennsylvania if he wins Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s currently ahead in all three states.

He could also prevail by winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But Pennsylvania is looking dicey. (To me anyway.) If Biden loses Pennsylvania and either Michigan or Wisconsin, he can still win if (a) the Atlanta vote him a Georgia win and (b) holds on to the Arizona plurality. Right?

“The Remaining Vote in Pennsylvania Appears To Be Overwhelmingly For Biden,” posted three hours ago (6:30 am Pacific) by N.Y. Times Nate Cohen:

“Joe Biden has won absentee ballots counted in Pennsylvania by an overwhelming margin so far, according to data from the Secretary of State early Wednesday. If he carried the remaining absentee ballots by a similar margin, he would win the state.

“President Trump leads by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania as of 5 a.m. on Wednesday, and Mr. Biden’s chances depend on whether he can win a large percentage of the more than 1.4 million absentee ballots that remain to be counted.

“So far, Mr. Biden has won absentee voters in Pennsylvania, 78 percent to 21 percent, according to the Secretary of State’s office. The results comport with the findings of pre-election surveys and an analysis of absentee ballot requests, which all indicated that Mr. Biden held an overwhelming lead among absentee voters.

“If Mr. Biden won the more than 1.4 million absentee votes by such a large margin, he would net around 800,000 votes — enough to overcome his deficit statewide.”