New and Old #276

World Cup tourism, the real first sushi (?), listening to vinyl, and a strange Lenten meal

The World Cup, Waffle House, and Other Symbols of the American Experience, Snack Stack, Doug Mack, June 29, 2026

This is nice.

People love soccer and they love this specific event, and all those videos (and photo galleries like the Guardian‘s recent “World Cup viewing parties around the globe”) highlight the beauties of both our shared humanity and the nuances of local differences. It’s charming, it’s uplifting, it’s a small world after all….

What’s taken me off guard, though—and what my kids most enjoy watching—is the dispatches from the USA itself, the content that makes this place feel shiny and bright and interesting and, dare I say it, hopeful.

This is a really neat point and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it quite expressed before. It’s kind of like getting to feel “the grass is greener” about your own place:

I love, most of all, that the World Cup tourists’ posts show a USA that feels real to me in a way that most political ads and Hollywood depictions do not.

So often, the American archetype is either a jarringly homogenous small town or literally New York City, with minimal room for anything else. (I’ve written previously, for example, about the bizarre, flawed political mythology of the American diner.) The World Cup tourists’ understanding of the USA covers so many more regional variations and lived experiences, with the hospitality of Lawrence as Exhibit A, an exemplar of this nation’s oft-overlooked midsize towns with bighearted people.

This is a big part of why I’m always writing about rundown-looking suburbs and commercial highway strips; those are places which in some ways best capture America’s diversity and dynamism.

And this. Really nice thoughts:

The older I get, the more confused I am about this country, never more so than right now. The World Cup tourists’ social media posts serve as a new American Studies text, one that makes me conflicted all over again but also reminds me anew of what I adore about this place. Every nation has its own dualities and complexities (there’s a reason “land of contrasts” is a travel-writing cliche) but I can’t think of anywhere else that quite matches us in having so many cultures and identities and regions on fractaling regions. There’s no singular Real America but even a hundred different towns or foods or accents seem an insufficient starting point for sorting out who we are.

The great joy of the USA is its jumble. It’s long past time for us to understand that and appreciate it, to lean into being a sprawling, confusing place.

The Great Sushi Craze of 1905, Part 1, An Eccentric Culinary History, H.D. Miller, January 15, 2022

There are a lot of surprises in this and in the second half, and a lot of it kind of comes down to the distinction between the absolute first technically speaking and the “first” that ended up mattering. But it is really a fun read, and a great reminder of how much popular history smooths things over or simplifies them and misses lots of fascinating twists and turns. Check it out.

Turntable Reviews: Technics SL-1200GME/SL-1210GME turntable, Stereophile, Tom Fine, July 23, 2026

My wife and I just bought a couple of new vinyl records from Barnes & Noble to try on my proper stereo setup in my retro room. I don’t know very much about playing them, to be honest—my turntable is one I got free back in high school, and I don’t know what cartridge is on it—but it plays well enough.

In this review, the author hints at just how much money you can pour into this:

I bought the SL-1210GME I reviewed. That’s the strongest endorsement I can give. Was it worth thousands of extra dollars compared to the G, GR2, SL-1300, and so on? I concluded yes, for the following reasons: It has every bit of Technics’s latest turntable technology in one package; its design and aesthetics are pinnacle for long-time SL-1200 fans like me; it’s a limited edition, so its value isn’t likely to drop over time; it’s going to be my lifetime turntable.

I could spend thousands and thousands more dollars to maybe eke out another degree or two of record-playing refinement, but I’m not going to. As soon as I heard that near-silent background with trademark Technics rock-steady speed/pitch and blazing fast dynamics, I decided this turntable is the right price-performance point to squeeze every bit of music out of my hundreds of records, and I’m going to enjoy hearing all of them fresh with the SL-1210GME.

I’m not sure, at that point, why you wouldn’t just use CDs. Isn’t vinyl with none of the artifacts of its needle-and-disk technology pretty much what a CD sounds like? But I do appreciate the hobby aspect—it reminds me of coffee or wine, a little bit—and also the appeal of something that works mechanically, which you can actually see working with your own eyes and on some level understand.

Anyway, it was interesting to read such an in-depth review of a turntable, as I didn’t really ever know if the sound quality could truly be distinguished between a top-of-the-line turntable and anything better than one of those ceramic-cartridge suitcase things. I suppose so!

Are there liturgical practices retained by Lutheran churches that are no longer present in Roman Catholicism or Orthodox?, Reddit, May 7, 2026

This is a neat question; the idea that being that might some older Catholic practices present in/inherited by Lutheranism, which Roman Catholicism later revised. It’s like evolution, and how traits kind of depend on when a split occurred. (An example from another form of Protestantism is the retention of communion rails in Anglican and even Methodist churches, which have largely disappeared in Roman Catholic parishes.)

There are a couple of interesting answers, like:

The Church of Sweden maintained a more original (medieval) form of Gregorian chant, while the Roman Church began to change its liturgical music in accordance with the taste of the times from the end of the 16th century and onwards.

And this:

Evangelical-Lutheran churches have retained chancel rails (with the Eucharist received while kneeling) and the Mass celebrated ad orientem.

Ad orientem is where the priest and the congregants face the same direction, a practice which has also pretty much disappeared in Roman Catholicism, at least in the United States.

And some church calendar stuff which I can’t say I know too much about:

Though out of the ordinary, some Lutheran parishes still observed pre-Lent/ Gesimatide, rather than the longer Epiphany season. The “Three Gesima Sundays” [Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima].

The old calendar retention of prayers for harvest, Ember Days, fasting, Rotation Days, may not be widely observed among Catholics, though Anglicans cling to these customs.

However, this was the most interesting answer for me, personally:

Not liturgical, but the Roman Catholic churches of the Downriver communities of Detroit were given special dispensation to eat muskrat on Fridays in Lent. The only churches that have muskrat dinners are Lutheran now.

Say what? Apparently this is a well-known local custom, one I have never heard of. Here is an article about it from a Detroit-based publication:

It’s not your typical church fish fry fundraiser. In fact, it’s more successful. Willis served his first muskrat dinner at Trinity Lutheran seven years ago. At the time, other members of the church had just hosted a pork roast dinner. “They laughed at us about our muskrats,” he says.

But the joke was over when Willis sold the evening’s final muskrat. “Our first year, I think we made $1,000,” he says. “They were like, ‘I can’t believe it! We only sold $150 worth of stuff!’”

The history:

For generations of metro Detroiters, mostly of French-Canadian fur trapper descent, muskrats are considered a special meal — a kind of folk tradition. This “muskrat belt” follows the Detroit river south to the region commonly known as “Downriver,” through nearby Wyandotte, down to Monroe, and into Ohio.

And on the question of Catholics eating it for Lent:

According to local lore, the custom goes back to at least the early 1800s, when an early missionary named Father Gabriel Richard decided to allow his flock of fur trappers to eat muskrat during Lent rather than go hungry during the rugged times — the reasoning being that muskrats, like fish, also come from the water.

Whether the story is fact or fiction is up to debate. According to a 2007 article in the Catholic News Service, “The Detroit archdiocesan communications department said there is a standing dispensation for Catholics Downriver — in Detroit’s southern suburbs and below — to eat muskrat on Fridays, although no documentation of the original dispensation could be found.” The practice of Catholics eating semiaquatic rodents during Lent, however, is not unprecedented. In the 17th century, the church allowed the Bishop of Quebec to tell his flock they could eat beaver. In Venezuela, Catholics eat capybara — the world’s largest rodent, at up to 4 1/2 feet long.

In metro Detroit, the practice has survived as a folk tradition. People who live Downriver have eaten muskrat for Lent as long as anyone can remember.

Now it’s interesting that this let’s-pretend-it’s-not-meat Lenten meal would persist among Lutherans, who to my knowledge don’t require fasting or giving up meat during Lent at all! Tradition is a powerful thing. And things like this keep our country fascinating.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #238

New and Old #239

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