Boxing Day Pie

 

Spot the Etonian flag :)

After the festive fun and family conviv. of Christmas, Boxing Day comes as pleasant "breather," time to relax and take it easy. 

Walk the dog to the nearest Pick 'n Steal, reflect on Stephen the Martyr, it's his Feast today, as you stroll down the boulevards of Olde Dallas, and return to HQ for an easy lunch. Warm bread, cheese, dates and grapes, raise a glass to the Incarnate Word, slumber over books on antedeluvia and then...

Return to the fray to make pie. Yes, beef and mushroom pie from the leftovers of yesterday's feast, it's not hard. Cut the beef off the bone(s), chop up an onion, some garlic and celery and saute in 3 Tbs butter till tender and fragrant. Add three Tbs of flour and stir it up, then add beef stock. Well done, you've got this far, but you're not there yet.

A typical Dallas Light Cavalry Mess scene. Keen-eyed readers will spot LL, WSF, Old NFO, drjim, Jim, Wild, 

Ed, Doktor Swankenstein, DOS, Ed. C, Mike C, Manhattan Infidel, Seamus, GenX, Paul M, 

RHT, Adrienne (out of frame) and so many more.

Let everything simmer and stir, like a faculty revolt at Harvard, and add the beef. This is key, obviously. While the meat's simmering in the mix, saute some mushrooms in butter till golden and add those too, along with some red wine, and let it all cook to desired consistency. 

That done, turn off the heat, add yesterdays cooked carrots to the mix and allow the delicious pie filling to rest and cool. Have a glass of the right stuff, listen to Handel, shoot some 5.56, sharpen a kukri, whatever, your call, no rule, and in God's good time roll out some pastry. Good work, fill a pie dish with its filling, cover with jolly old pastry and fire it all into the oven at 400.

Let that beast cook for 20 minutes or so until golden brown, you can even glaze the pastry with an egg yolk if you like, then fall upon your scoff.

Like a Warrior,

LSP

Karahan Tepe

 

Everyone's familiar with Gobekli Tepe, the astonishingly ancient megalithic temple in Turkey originally excavated by Klaus Schmidt from 1995-2014. But we're less familiar with Karahan Tepe, 46 km south east of Gobekli Tepe and equally ancient, being some 11,500 years old, maybe older.

Both sites are remarkable for their extreme age, being built at the end end of the Younger Dryas and the dawning of the Holocene Age, at a time archeologists assumed humans were hunter gatherers and incapable of monumental architecture.

It's a fair assumption. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, what were humans doing beyond drawing pictograms on cave walls, gnawing bark, collecting roots, berries and, if they were lucky, driving the odd bison off a cliff. They were like, so the theory went, North American Indians or their equivalents in Africa.

Gobekli Tepe and now Karahan Tepe change all that. These prehistoric humans were well capable of monumental architecture and art, to say nothing of astronomy. They were clearly much more advanced than supposed. For that matter, were they, in fact, hunter gatherers who came together to build and then settled in one place with agriculture and civic life rising in the wake, or the other way around or both?

We don't know, but we do know this. The larger sculpted stones of the "T-Builders" at Gobleki Tepe weighed around 15 tons and these are the earliest, dating to approximately 9,500 BC, apparently the same holds true for Karahan Tepe. Later structures at both sites are smaller, with older construction being back-filled and replaced by lesser architecture. What does this suggest?

Shockingly, that the earlier builders were more advanced as a civilization than their descendants. They initiated the building and did so massively, later generations didn't. This implies a civilization in decline, for whatever reason, and begs the question, who were the original builders and what did they come from?

It's tempting to imagine an architectural people, and all that goes with it, somehow surviving the Younger Dryas glacial period and emerging in diminished form in what we now call Turkey as the climate mercifully warmed.

But again, we don't know, and with apologies to Graham Hancock, there's precious little evidence. That said, wouldn't it be strange if humanity, whose origins keep getting pushed back into the mists of prehistory, weren't able in hundreds and thousands of years to move beyond rock chucking and grubbing for roots to something better? An antedeluvian megalithic civilization of which little if anything remains, except their heirs in Anatolia around 11,500 BC.

Well, that's as maybe. Perhaps there's a parable in Gobekli Tepe and its twin at Karahan. Viz. They devolved.

Antedeluvia Forever,

LSP

The Adamites?

Around 7000 years before Christ (BC) we're told that mankind, which had been living a jolly hunter-gather sort of life, suddenly domesticated wheat, became farmers and settled down. Nuts, berries and the odd Mastodon steak, so delicious, didn't cut it for them anymore. No, they wanted to farm.

With that, the whole edifice of civilization began, Pyramids, temples, Emperors, armies, philosophers, the FBI, lying, venal, slick, aggressive mainstream media, all of what we know today as civilization came into being. Thanks to wheat at 7000 BC.

Then a German archeologist discovered Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a temple complex of monumental masonry that dates back to 10,000 BC or 12,000 years before now. 

There they were, the Flintsones, scavenging about for roots, bark, the occasionally unfortunate saber tooth tiger and, as a side hobby, building huge stone temples with sophisticated lithic art. And then, waiting some three thousand years to start farming.

Something doesn't seem right with this picture but there it is. An obviously civilized, stonebuilding, aesthetically skilled culture putting up temples(?) when they should have been foraging about for nuts and wondering why their uncured animal skin clothes smelled so bad. And then, three millennia later, getting it together to grow wheat.

Weird, right? Some speculate that a comet or fragments of one, smashed into or burst above the North American ice sheet around 13,000 years ago, causing massive flooding and an influx of cold, glacial water into the Atlantic. Hence the Younger Dryas cooling and mega fauna extinctions.

Long story short, it would have been a cataclysmic event, characterized by huge flooding, a rise in sea level, die-off level conflagration and global cooling. 

This, some believe, was the Deluge and from it emerged rare survivors from an Ice Age civilization who started afresh, with the seeds, literally, of a previous world. They did so in places such as Gobekli Tepe.

But then, just as civilization began to flourish again, the earth passed through the orbital train of cometary debris from the previous disaster, shutting down sites like Gobekli Tepe, notoriously backfilled around 9,500 BC for no apparent reason. Were they attempting to save their temples from the coming catastrophe?

Who knows, but thanks to intrepid Germans, we can see the mute testimony of their culture today and wonder at the tenacity of the people, the Adamites?, who made it through earthquake, fire and flood to domesticate wheat and build the pyramids.

The rest, of course, is history.

Your Friend,

LSP