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A while back some attention was drawn to Pakistan due to the death penalty verdict in an blasphemy case against Aasia Noreen. A short while thereafter, Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was assasinated after he spoke up in her defense. What's happened in the time since then?

Overall it doesn't look good as a followup article by Time entitled Adding Insult to Injury: The Abduction of Shahbaz Taseer made clear:

In the ensuing months, not only has Qadri evaded conviction, but the Taseer family has also endured a series of further threats. Despite Qadri's confession, the court has convened only fitfully, dragging out the trial. "The government set a very bad precedent in the aftermath of Salmaan Taseer's death by not seeking to hold his murderer accountable," says Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director for Human Rights Watch. "There has been no movement on the case, and the failure to prosecute and convict the self-confessed murderer is a sign of both incompetence and an appeasement of extremists." It is this form of surrender, Hasan says, that emboldens further lawlessness in Pakistan.

I've got a ticket to see Starbuck a few weeks from now, a film that gets into some of the implications of the sexual revolution. The brief description of the film at IMDB:

At 42, David lives the life of an irresponsible adolescent. He coasts through life with minimal effort and maintains a complicated relationship with Valerie, a young policewoman. Just as she tells him she's pregnant, David's past resurfaces. Twenty years earlier, he began providing sperm to a fertility clinic in exchange for money. He discovers he's the father of 533 children, 142 of whom have filed a class action lawsuit to determine the identity of their biological father, known only by the pseudonym Starbuck.

Now it seems that the New York Times is also beginning to pay attention to the issues that this film raises.

(What is it with French-Canadian films? I caught Incendies last year, and thought it was a really interesting film).

HT: JT

Here's a quote from Grant Achatz: The Chef Who Lost His Sense Of Taste:

So there's something that we call the law of diminishing returns in our cooking. That's why the steak is only two ounces, because by your fifth bite you're really, you're done. You're done with that steak. You know what it's going to taste like. The actual flavor starts to deaden on the palate.

If we were to make you take 10 more bites, by the time you got to bite 15, the steak's just not that compelling anymore. So if we have a series of 23 small courses, where it's a burst of flavor on the palate, and then you move on to something completely different and then completely different, that helps us set up a more exciting meal, and it's something that is easier to kind of be compelled to go through a 23-course menu.

I can think of a number of ways to describe the above: delicious, time consuming, and completely impractical to make at home. If you're serving a 2-oz steak, you really do need all 23 courses to fill up it sounds like. All told it does appear to be a good way to spend an evening with friends.

HT: Managerial Econ