Austrian puns
A fellow Rothbardian, whose name rhymes with Phil Filigree, was delighted when his wife told him she'd be making manicotti and steak for dinner. Then, she laughed. She was kidding. She just said it because it sounds like the title of a certain Austrian treatise.
He suggested I come up with a recipe, but I'm not sure our steak budget is generous enough for such experimentation.
I googled the phrase to see if anyone else had thought of it. Indeed, one Scott Lahti, who tried to destroy the evidence by deleting his blog, once wrote the following:
He suggested I come up with a recipe, but I'm not sure our steak budget is generous enough for such experimentation.
I googled the phrase to see if anyone else had thought of it. Indeed, one Scott Lahti, who tried to destroy the evidence by deleting his blog, once wrote the following:
... as an economist of the Austrian school, I would be remiss if I did not mention that far superior work on regional Chinese delicacies by one who was himself a master of epistemology - Hunan Action by Ludwig von Mises, whose great disciple, Murray Rothbard, refined his mentor's culinary-praxeologic insights from a vantage which diverged from the former in national cuisine and epistemology alike, in a work beloved of Brooklyn restaurateurs, the magisterial Manicotti and Steak, whose neo-Thomist epistemology found as much favor with local Jesuits as its Neapolitan pasta-and-beef offerings sated the appetites of two generations of libertarian mobsters.And here are the obligatory bookstore links for anyone who doesn't get the puns:
3 Comments:
Do I get a Mobster membership card?
No, Tim, but if you are willing to join the janitors' union, you will be eligible to join the Mopsters; and if you discover a talent with needle and thread, the Seamsters will be delighted to collect your dues.
I'm thunderstruck to find an old scrap from the earliest days of my deleted-at-six-months blog turning up here at B.K.'s blog - as much as I was
to have discovered I was alone until now in posting to the Google-able portion of the web the phrase "Manicotti and Steak", whether generically or as a Rothbard pun, especially since the phrase was first recited to me in this vein by a friend of a friend from my days at NYU over twenty years ago: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very Heaven."
Here are a few unposted originals of mine which have yet to see the light of Google:
"What has government done to our mummy?" - Pharoah's little son, after state interment of his late mother just outside Egyptian fiat-papyrus central bank
"What has government done to our honey?" - Ukrainian beekeepers resisting Stalinist collectivisation of hives
"What has government done to our Sonny?" - Mama Corleone, after her son's booking on assault charges
"What has government done to our bunny?" - Ukrainian tot, upon Stalinist suppression of Orthodox Easter celebrations/sculpted chocolate
Nice to see another C'ville resident in the Austrian fold - I lived there
from 1988 to 1992, while studying European history at the grad level and later working in a bookshop/cafe...nice city...remembered line from a talk I gave on Tomas Masaryk, first Czech president upon independence from the Austro-Hungarian empire after the First World War: "In his early years
near the turn of the century, he attended U.Va. - the University of Vienna"...
And furthermore -
Thanks to my praxeologist's
penchant for puissant-pun letters, I have another candidate in my series of improvised Austrian "word jazz" (apologies to Ken Nordine), the very incarnation of diminishing marginal utility: please allow me to introduce (not, per Sir "Rooster Lips" Jagger's immortal Satan-sympathetic ditty, "myself" but) that poetic ornament of Stuart-age English letters -
Mary Wroth, Bard (1587?-1651?),
at http://tinyurl.com/j2vja
If in my further excavation of the catacombs of libertarian genealogy I discover that her formative tutors included war-torn exiles from the Habsburg court, and neo-Thomist divines, and that she had family ties to Dutch colonies along the Hudson and East Rivers, and their first wave of immigrant Sons of Israel, I shall bolt from the tub instanter, raising my Archimedean you-shrieka alarums thus in a New Amsterdam Minuit.*
*As for Hebraic orthodoxy within the C17 Netherlands proper, every philosophy major has read of how the Pharisees among Dutch Jewry Amsterdamned their fledgling philosopher-immortal-to-be as a heretic, declaring their Tabernacle a no-Spinozone layer unto eternity...worldy redemption came soon enough, though, as the ostracized Baruch/Benedict moved downtown and formed the indie lute-distortion band Sophic Youth...speaking of excommuniques, I think at this rate I'm due any minute to be added to the Index of Scriptorum Prohibitum by the Popes of Auburn...
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