French Toast

20220119 #breakfastdiary 327, -7°C/snow, 35min/exercise In a bowl, beat two eggs with sugar, salt, and cinnamon, then soak the bread slices well. In a pan with butter, cook the egg-soaked bread on both sides. Plate it up with the prettiest strawberries in the world, a generous pour of maple syrup, and a dusting of powdered sugar on top. #Frenchtoast, which, ironically, doesn't actually exist in France. "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World Since this was Carl Sagan's last book, published in the mid-1990s, it's striking how precisely it predicted today's America (and even our own country). Remembering his remark that studying astronomy tends to make you more humble, it's no wonder he had this kind of insight.