With all the celebration of the first major-party African American candidate and the first GOP female candidate for president or vicepresident, has anyone noticed that this is first time that a candidate from either of our most recent states (Hawaii, Alaska) has been nominated by either party? (Footnote: Obama was actually born in Hawaii while Palin was born in Idaho and moved to Alaska as a baby.) Curious. Altogether, I'd guess this is the westernmost presidential contest in history.

As anyone who has spoken Spanish in more than one Latin American country could tell you, the word "barbacoa" is hardly a legend or an invention of the OED. It is still used daily in a variety of senses in a large number of countries, and the common sense that they all have is something like "framework of sticks" (or, you might say, "grill").

In Havana today, a barbacoa is an illegal loft built inside an old, tall-ceiling apartment to provide extra living space in a city where legitimate new construction has been insufficient to keep pace with the number of people who want to live in the city. This usage derives directly from a much older use of the word, to refer to a framework placed high in the room and used to keep food or tools off the ground.

The latter sense is still used in the Andes (where it was spread by Spanish settlers who had passed through Cuba), but there the word has developed in other directions, to refer also to a rack for kitchen utensils; or to the boards of a dance floor (and hence to tap dancing).

Elsewhere, a barbacoa is a bed frame.

As far as I know, barbacoa is only used to refer to cooked meat in Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela. In northern Mexico, the word barbacoa was applied to a local way of cooking meat that had relatively little to do with wooden frameworks. A deep pit is dug; a big bonfire is built in the pit; a goat (usually) is slaughtered, marinated (in beer and/or pulque), and put in a huge pot (more recently, in what I would an aluminum garbage can); when the bonfire has burned down to red-hot coals, the pot goes in and dirt is shoveled on top to trap the heat as in an oven. Twenty-four hours or so later, the meat is done. In other parts of Mexico, you will find a variety of other styles of barbacoa.

The British (and French) found the Antillean style of grilling barbacoa in Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. The earliest citations of barbecue in the OED (the oldest dates to 1660) refer to this type of barbacoa. Planters in South Carolina and (I'm guessing here) Virginia had close connections with the British Caribbean, and my guess would be that they brought that style of barbecue from Jamaica.

Mexican barbacoa met Anglo settlers in Texas, and Texan barbecue reflects a quite separate Mexican cuisine. Texan "barbecue sauce" is simply a regional variation of Mexican "chilmole" (chile sauce).

The two streams of barbecued meat (Caribbean, Mexican) met and mingled in the US South, where new and distinctly local forms of barbecue where invented and passed down.

Does the author of this book touch on any of this? I doubt it. Like most amateurs, he probably leaps from DeBry and Columbus in the 1500s, to Jefferson in the late 1700s, to Jim Crow in the 1900s, to today. Leaps of time and logic without any sense of historical connections or continuity.

1. This is really sad, and saddest of all, it is really predictable. The GOP will stop at nothing to prevent any disruption of their choreographed infomercial (cf. NYC police riot, 2004).

2. Whoever shot the video seriously needs to get some basic training in how to hold a camera. Focusing on people, not walls or the floor, is always a good first step.

So Barney Google and Fred Basset are still around? I haven't seen them since I was a kid.... nearly forty years ago! Yikes, they must be multigenerational by now.

But my childhood favorite, Pogo, is long gone, alas!

Mr. Breathed, if this strip is about you (I hope I'm reading too much into it...), you have my heartfelt best wishes.

If the media had any integrity, they would spend the next week commenting nonstop on the comparison between Katrina in 2005 (a non-election year) and Gustav in 2008 (two months before the election). In 2005, Bush and Cheney couldn't be bothered even days and weeks after the disaster. Today, it's suddenly a red-light emergency BEFORE the hurricane has even hit, and the mighty duo is already making plans to be on the scene (sandbagging and clearing brush, no doubt).

Do I expect the media to even mention this? Well, only if they had any integrity...

The "maverick" brand: what a perfect metaphor for the emptiness of McCain's rhetoric. The original mavericks were the cattle of Samuel Maverick (1803-1870), a Texas land baron and politician who never branded his calves. So the "maverick brand" is, literally speaking, nothing at all.

Doug... Doug...!

All that, and Jude Law too!

I'm only surprised he was passed over for a VP nomination.

Are they trying to goad Biden by plagiarizing his hit line from the DNC, "that's not change, that's more of the same"? My guess: they're probably just fishing for an opportunity to dredge up the much overblown "plagiarism" pseudocontroversy from twenty years ago.