If you get your dose of Making Chutney by coming directly to the website (as opposed to the RSS feeds), be sure to check out the Asides section in the sidebar. It’s updated with new linky goodness much more often than the main, meatier post section.

Asides: quick side dish links. Main section: meaty essays. And, of course, both are great with Chutney!

Sarah Silverman—of “Jesus Is Magic” fame—will soon be debuting her own “programme” on Comedy Central. My expectations aren’t high at all: I only want the best cringe-comedy-with-a-point television has ever seen. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Garrison Keiller goes to town on Bernad-Henri Levy’s new book on America: “In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You’ve lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don’t own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There’s no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.”

Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes — but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains…

This is a song. It’s a song about Chutney. The first of many, I am sure. And now Making Chutney has an unofficial theme song! (Hat tip.)

Germs beware: Yale bought soap! Harvard has to be so jealous.