perfidy

Having returned from flyover country seventeen pairs of socks richer, and bearing the bounty of "The Family Guy" on DVD as well as a new television, I welcome all and sundry back from their nondenominational yet subtly Judeo-Christian state-supported holidays.

Best gift: Rose Beranbaum Levy's "The Bread Bible", which contains enough wonkery for ten cookbooks (want to compensate, gram for gram, for the hydration levels of the salt you're adding to a recipe? Ever wondered how to convert recipes calling for active dry yeast into instant yeast? Ever wondered what the gluten-content difference was between Gold Medal and King Arthur all-purpose flours?), and makes incredibly good bread to boot. Well, I made incredibly good bread, but it was Levy's recipes. Highly, highly recommended.

Most necessary gift: Seventeen. Pairs. Of Socks.

And so, let's awaken from our tryptophan and sucrose slumbers to kick off the new year by reading this powerful and insightful piece by Aziz Poonawalla on being Muslim and being hated by other Muslims for your beliefs. On a pilgrimage to a holy spot in Yemen, he ran into trouble. Excerpt:

Inside... stood the young men, one armed with a nasty-looking rock. He made it clear in no uncertain terms (and despite the language barrier) that if we bent to our knees to prostrate, they would attack us. We were a small group of a half-dozen pilgrims surrounded by an entire village - but it was still enough to make me almost blind with rage. I could have snapped this fanatic in two, given his relative undernourished size. But even if we survived a confrontation, there would have been serious repercussions for the other pilgrims who were arriving later that day and the rest of the week. We were forced to grudgingly retreat, humiliated and seething with frustration at having our simple desire to express our devotion thwarted.

On the way out of the building, I deliberately dropped something I was holding right near the gravesite and then knelt to pick it up. In so doing I sneaked a hurried pseudo-prostration into my action. It escaped the notice of the rock-wielding fanatic and was, in retrospect, a foolish thing to have done. We encountered no resistance as we made our way back to our useless driver and vehicle, and began the long and bruising drive back to Hutaib.