Coventry Carol
Posted: December 15, 2025 Filed under: Christmas Leave a commentIf you think that song is called “Loo Lay,” you are not a true Christmashead.
The carol was traditionally performed in Coventry in England as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors.
A leather mask thought to be a surviving example of those worn by some performers in the Coventry Plays is held in the collections of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.
(Thanks Wikipedia user Geni)
Although the Coventry mystery play cycle was traditionally performed in summer, the lullaby has, in modern times, been regarded as a Christmas carol. It was brought to a wider audience after being featured in the BBC’s Empire Broadcast at Christmas 1940, shortly after the Bombing of Coventry in World War II, when the broadcast concluded with the singing of the carol in the bombed-out ruins of the Cathedral.
Here’s a recording (apparently) of that broadcast.
Christmas at its best is a little spooky, really.
Correction
Posted: December 15, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentI strive for a high editorial standard here at Helytimes. I’m the writer, editor and publisher, and the occasional typo will slip through, but all factual information should be correct.
In a recent post, Todd Graves/ Raising Cane’s and Staying Craveable, I fell beneath that standard, incorrectly claiming that the Box Combo is the largest combo offered at Raising Cane’s. The largest combo (outside of the tailgate platters) is of course the Caniac.
This was a careless error, I just didn’t study the menu enough. The post has been corrected. Thank you.
NFL
Posted: December 14, 2025 Filed under: sports Leave a comment
I’m with Rob: just a fan of the whole league.
JASON: Is any sport ever going to come close to NFL? No, it’s not. And here’s why. No other sport plays this many games at one time. At the NFL one o’clock time slot and the four o’clock time slot, you know you’re going to get so much action in the span of eight hours. It’s the greatest. That’s why everybody looks forward to it every single week. It’s all at the same time. I’m sitting in the stadium, and I’m trying to watch the game, and I’m also on my app watching YouTube TV, other games. I’m checking the scores on ESPN. I’m like, Dude, being a fan, you don’t know this yet because you’re still playing. Being a fan is fucking incredible. You can watch so much shit.
Travis: I’ve been a fan first. You’re acting like, I haven’t been a fan of this my entire fucking life.
Jason: You’re going to find out. You’re going to be seeing it a lot more when you’re fucking at the game at one o’clock and all this shit’s happening across the league and you’re fucking- That was at your fucking one o’clock games. All right, whatever. But you don’t appreciate it the same way until you’re done. You’re still so focused into the Chiefs. I still love the Eagles, but now I’m looking at more of everything happening across the league. One o’clock on Sunday is like, fucking, let’s go, baby. God damn, that’s a fun time to watch a football.
Travis: Power me up, man.
Doesn’t baseball play many games at the same time? No matter. The Kelce brothers, on their podcast, praising the NFL product. Their 1pm in 10am on the West Coast.
To this casual fan? The NFL is a fantastic product. Every catch is impressive. Every tackle. Every time a player stands up after getting drilled into the ground by 300 lbs of pure muscle. It’s compelling.
I only know it as TV, and it’s good TV. This NYT piece captures the effort, skill, money, thought and energy that goes into storytelling the NFL’s marquee Sunday Night Football broadcast.
Take away the NFL and broadcast television would be dead.
CBS said a record 57.2 million viewers tuned in for the Thanksgiving Day NFL match between the Dallas Cowboys and the Kansas City Chiefs, demonstrating again the sport’s popularity with US audiences.
from Bloomberg.
And then there’s college football! Where every game has meaning. A potential national champion can’t lose a single game without risk. And each broadcast is also a travel show about Gainesville, Tuscaloosa, Knoxville. There’s pageantry and 80,000 excited kids!
On an October Sunday Night Football broadcast (Lions/Chiefs) Chris Collinsworth said something like “well you know the season really starts at Thanksgiving…” was a funny thing to say. Why did I just watch this then? But I had, and I enjoyed it, because it was a tense battle of 70 odd extreme athletes with various skillsets, fighting and performing at the highest levels.
The American public has responded. TV is football:
Around 2015, with the release of the movie Concussion, came the peak of a moral panic about head injuries, CTE and the terrible human costs associated with getting smashed this much. These gladiator games. At least one NFL player was a straight up murderer, did that have anything to do with his banged up head? Maybe that was an unrelated matter (even worse?).
The problem hasn’t gone away. On a recent Thursday Night Football game, you could see Cowboys receiver Ceedee Lamb’s head hit the ground, and then he has an unsettling reaction that could be some kind of brain glitch. It’s distressing to watch.
The league has taken this seriously. The history of football is evolutions to keep it acceptably risky. Here’s a historical essay from Granta that reviews all that (didn’t realize Dwight Eisenhower played football against Jim Thorpe.)
We, the American people, accept some amount of possible lifetime damage to the players. After all, they accept it! They love it! We the people watching vote with our eyeballs. Give us our circus! The danger aspect might be part of why we like it. This is high risk!
Take the dark aspects of football and invert: is it possible this regulated controlled game and ritual might be a healthy release valve for deep, troubling urges in the American spirit? Without football, might all that gladiatorial energy, intensity and violence blow out in much more harmful ways?
Maybe believing that is just a way to rationalize my enjoyment.
I don’t even really have a team. When I was a kid I liked the Patriots so much I got Irving Friar’s autograph at training camp. I still root for the Patties, Drake Maye and Mike Vrabel are fun, but they don’t move my heart. Should I root for the Chargers? I like handsome Justin Herbert, son of Eugene Oregon and former Oregon star, who just won a game with a broken hand after Hart tipped the ball to Jefferson to beat the Eagles. (There was good drama when he was impatient about his postgame interview.)
Who’s playing doesn’t matter that much to me. Like John McCain I’d watch the bedwetters play the thumbsuckers. I like the acoustic quality, the sound of the broadcast, the rhythm of it. The announcers have gotten so good at finding and developing narratives, stories of personalities, characters, stakes.
I was watching UNLV play Boise State the other day in the Mountain West championship. I was struck by the quality of the color commentator, he could really lay out missed coverage, the nature of the plays, who screwed up what, intentions vs. execution. I looked it up and it was RGIII!
I found Bill Belichick’s book, The Art of Winning, to be not urgent to finish. Belichick’s central message of work hard, do your job, just isn’t that interesting to read about. It’s not hard to understand, it just takes discipline to execute every day. There aren’t enough anecdotes. Belichick, we know, can be really interesting on the details of football strategy and the history of the game. We know that he’s probably read every book on football strategy out there (see our review of Halberstam’s book on Belichick, Education of a Coach.) He could’ve made real contribution with a dense book of football knowledge, even if that doesn’t seem likely to be popular as a book on “winning.”
Pete Carroll’s book is fun, like drinking a fountain soda. Invigorating. Maybe I’m just more of a Pete Carroll type.
If Belichick wrote a book about his personal life, that was a true My Heart Laid Bare, I’d be first in line to buy the hardcover.
The job I want in the NFL is owner.
Now why didn’t Chuck Klosterman’s book about football come out in time for Christmas? I guess it’ll be out in time for the Super Bowl?
The Hely-Hutchinsons
Posted: December 13, 2025 Filed under: hely, Ireland Leave a commentEvery year Christmas season rolls around, and everyone asks me if I’m any relation to the composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson, of “The Carol Symphony.”
No, I can’t claim it. Perhaps 500 years ago we were all part of some proto Hely clan, who can know. Perplexity AI estimates there are some 60,000-100,000 “Healys” and hundreds/low thousands of “Helys” worldwide.
The Hely-Hutchinsons are their own deal, a semi-distinguished Anglo-Irish family. They start with John Hely:
In 1751 married Christina Nickson:
and took on the name of her rich uncle, Richard Hutchinson.
He added Hutchinson to his surname in consequence of the marriage, which brought him her considerable fortune.
says the 1911 Encylopedia Britannica:
He was a man of brilliant and versatile ability, whom Lord Townshend, the Lord Lieutenant, described as by far the most powerful man in parliament. William Gerard Hamilton said of him that Ireland never bred a more able, nor any country a more honest man. Hely-Hutchinson was, however, an inveterate place-hunter, and there was a point in Lord North’s witticism that if you were to give him the whole of Great Britain and Ireland for an estate, he would ask the Isle of Man for a potato garden.
Hely-Hutchinson ended up becoming provost of Trinity College, Dublin:
For this great academic position Hely-Hutchinson was in no way qualified, and his appointment to it for purely political service to the government was justly criticised with much asperity.
Too bad he didn’t keep his hands on Frescati House.
Mrs. Hely-Hutchinson became the Baroness Donoughmore. Their kids had interesting careers. Richard Hely Hely-Hutchinson commissioned Knocklofty House:
(source)
which has sadly lost its grandeur due to abandonment. Here’s a YouTube. I fear it’s beyond repair.
Richard’s brother, grumpy looking John, was at the Battle of Alexandria
and took command after Abercromby was killed. He never married. The Earlship passed along.
The fourth earl was president of the Board of Trade and makes a brief cameo in Shelby Foote’s Civil War.
The fourth Earl’s second son was Walter, who became governor of the Cape Colony. His wife was May, Lady Hely-Hutchinson:
In 1902, she published the article “Female Emigration to South Africa”, where she bluntly and at length complained about the quality of available domestic servants:
[…] each class has its allotted duties, and the woman who deliberately neglects or ignores the more delicate or involved social duties of her class is quite as blameworthy as the servant who, instead of attending to her duties, spends what she considers her own, but what is really her mistress’s time, in gazing out of a window or reading a ‘penny dreadful.’
They were the parents of the composer.
The winter of 1947 was very long-lasting and to save fuel (which was still rationed), Hely-Hutchinson refused to switch on the radiators in his office. He developed a cold, which became influenza.
(Family trait? maybe we are related.)
Just to finish off the Earls: the fifth earl was this guy:
And the sixth was this big boi:
His son was the 7th Earl, whose most memorable moment came when he was kidnapped by the IRA from Knocklofty House in 1974. Luckily this kidnapping was more comic than tragic. From a 2008 Irish Independent article, “Couple Formed Unlikely Bond with Kidnappers“:
The RTE documentary series, Hostage, reveals how there was a good-humoured clash of cultures during the kidnapping, with Lady Donoughmore sending her compliments to the chef for a fry cooked for them by the head of the gang. On another occasion, their son revealed, one of their guards blurted out the answer to a Gaelic games crossword question.
“My mother was working on a crossword puzzle and one of the questions was, ‘Whose colours are black and amber in Gaelic games?’ There were a couple of people guarding them who were local volunteers and told never to speak to them. My father had gone through about eight counties and the man said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t you know it’s Kilkenny’?”
The 8th Earl was the last of the earls, because the 1999 House of Lords Act reformed things. The 8th Earl’s kids include the painter Nicholas (his gallery) and the publisher Tim, and his grandkids include Alex the London restauranteur.
Thus the Hely-Hutchinsons. Let’s all listen to The Carol Symphony together!
Sidequest: on Christiana Hely-Hutchinson’s wikipedia page, it claims she’s an ancestress of Katharine, Duchess of Kent:
but I can’t follow the connection if there is one. Katharine is the mother of Lady Helen Taylor:
The British press is savage. They’re just calling a Lady “Melons.”
Todd Graves / Raising Cane’s, and staying craveable
Posted: December 11, 2025 Filed under: food Leave a comment
listening to Raising Canes founder Todd Graves on David Senra podcast. The man’s intensity about chicken fingers:
Todd Graves: Yeah, you have to focus on doing one thing and do it better than anybody else. And so, since I have that singular product focus, right? And so, some people call it, like, a simple menu. I say, “Well, it’s not simple. It’s focused.” And here’s why it’s not simple. Because our chicken has to be exactly right. Look, it comes from the weight of the bird that we want to get the size tender we want. It comes from the species of bird that gives the most tender and flavorful chicken. There’s a lot of technical stuff. Rigor mortis on the bone after the chicken’s slaughtered.
David Senra: Mm-hmm.
Todd Graves: Then it stays on the bone a certain amount of time. Then you get it fresh. Then you brine it for 24 hours. Like, all those things are that. Like, our fries, right? So, we have crinkle-cut fry, but a thinner crinkle-cut fry. You get fries from different times of the year, right? They do the crop harvest, and it sits in the warehouses. At certain times of the year, you get more sugar tips in the fries. Those sugar tips have to come out, so we have to remind our crew, “Hey, when you see those black sugar tip ends, take those out. It’s not visually pleasing.”
Todd Graves: Our bread. So, we get bread made by bakeries all over the country, but that recipe has to be exactly right. And it’s little dough balls put together and baked together, so it’s pull-apart bread. It’s not sliced loaves. Sliced loaves end up being more stale. This is dense, moist, flavorful bread. Our coleslaw, we secure all over the country. We have to make sure all those vendors have the right type of slaw that we want, from the right type of growers, grown in a certain amount of time. In that slaw, you have cabbage, but you also have purple cabbage. You have carrots. All those things.
Todd Graves: And so, you go down to your tea. Our tea gets brought from three different countries, the tea leaves, but we have to get it at the right time of the year. We might pay more for that, but it’s that focus on that. So, my team can focus on those menu items and deliver it every time to where it tastes exactly the same around every Cane’s across the country. So, since we’re focused, it’s not a simple thing, we can focus on those things.
(Do you want rigor mortis?) The intensity, the focus. Later in the interview Graves tells about an early partner who quit because he just didn’t care about chicken fingers that much.
Graves reminded me of Kent Taylor of Texas Roadhouse. Listening to anyone who’s that passionate about anything is pretty compelling.
They’ve opened a Raising Cane’s on Sunset and Highland, directly opposite from the Chick-Fil-A, a brazen challenge. I have to drive by most days. Finally I couldn’t resist trying a Box Combo. It is indeed craveable. Two different staffers were speaking kindly with an apparently homeless man who was settled in. The music in the place is loud. The original target market for RC’s was college kids at LSU. The place still has a college kid feel.
The Box Combo was really damn good. Even the coleslaw tasted fresh. The fries were just perfect. The fingers, the one thing they do better than anyone, well, they do them excellently. Cane’s sauce is perfect. But, later, I did not feel amazing. Maybe you’re not supposed to eat this if you’re over age 40. The Box Combo is the second biggest combo on the menu, behind the Caniac, and provides something like 1400 calories. I felt like I myself had been brined for 24 hours.
Sometimes I remember the book Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. When it came out in 2001, everybody read that book. But in the twenty five years since, fast food – “quick service restaurants” in the term the industry prefers – has only made itself more craveable. The worst aspects described in FFN had to do with the beef industry, so maybe a chicken-only restaurant is a net positive. I’m sure there’s gnarliness to the industrial production of chicken but it’s easier to handle mentally than the mass slaughter of mammals.
Surely there are some negatives to processing food at this speed and scale, but from the optimist side? Raising Cane’s is astounding. Consider Leander Stilwell’s memoir of his service in the Civil War. He remembers a chicken dinner:
Soon were audible the death squawks of chickens in the barn-yard, which we heard with much satisfaction.
In due time supper was announced, and we seated ourselves at the table. And what a banquet we had! Fried chicken, nice hot biscuits, butter, butter-milk, honey, (think of that!) preserved peaches, fresh cucumber pickles,-and so forth.
He was writing that in 1916, over fifty years after the events and he still remembers his meal, it was that remarkable. True, this was in the deprivations of wartime, but it sticks with him. Today you can get close to the equivalent (minus the peaches) at over 900 locations in the US, and 40 in the Middle East, for about the price of an hour’s labor at the California minimum wage. You don’t even have to get out of your car. That’s just an incredible system.
Tom Stoppard
Posted: December 6, 2025 Filed under: writing Leave a commentOne speech [in the play “Dirty Linen”} that gets an unfailing ovation, however, is the following tribute to the American people, paid by a senior British civil servant:
They don’t stand on ceremony. . . . They make no distinction about a man’s background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. . . . They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly good-humoured, ambitious and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I’ve got nothing against them.
from this 1977 New Yorker profile of Tom Stoppard by Kenneth Tynan. I used to buy used copies of Tom Stoppard plays at the Harvard Bookstore, in this way I read Arcadia, Travesties, Invention of Love, a bunch of the other ones, they’re all terrific. Salute to a real one. Since how much money writers make is always of interest:
When I asked him, not long ago, how much he thought he had earned from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” his answer was honestly vague: “About—a hundred and fifty thousand pounds?” To the same question, his agent, Kenneth Ewing, gave me the following reply: “‘Rosencrantz’ opened in London in 1967. Huge overnight success—it stayed in the National Theatre repertory for about four years. The Broadway production ran for a year. Metro bought the screen rights for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and paid Tom a hundred thousand to write the script, though the movie was never made. The play had a short run in Paris, with Delphine Seyrig as Gertrude, but it was quite a hit in Italy, where Rosencrantz was played by a girl. It did enormous business in Germany and Scandinavia and—oddly enough—Japan. On top of that, the book sold more than six hundred thousand copies in the English language alone. Up to now, out of ‘Rosencrantz’ I would guess that Tom had grossed well over three hundred thousand pounds.”
That’s in 1977!
go with the emotion
Posted: December 5, 2025 Filed under: actors Leave a commentI would just add that some directors, you have to fit into a context or a perception of a world they create. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of plots that are hard to unravel, that are very intricate, that doesn’t allow a lot of movement. But even those directors, if they allow you as an actor to say… Scorsese says this all the time. He says, I don’t care about plot. I don’t care about plot. He goes, I want to go with the emotion of what the actor does because that’s the story to me. Sometimes it could be less, sometimes it could be more. But When I watch a movie, those are the moments that I remember. I don’t think about, Oh, this happened in the plot. That happened. I was like, That moment with those actors, that felt like real life to me. It’s funny. It’s crazy. Joe Pesci and Goodfellas It was that moment. He’s trying to capture those moments of real life that make you feel something, that make you feel like you’re a part of the story in a way.
Leo DiCaprio talking on Kelce Bros “New Heights” podcast.
Shamans and Rabbis
Posted: December 3, 2025 Filed under: religion Leave a comment
The American anthropologist Franz Boas records the story of a powerful Kwakwaka’wakw shaman, Qā’sElid, who had embarked on his apprenticeship because he wanted to know whether the magic of shamans was real or if they were just pretending. So he learned the tricks of the trade, becoming especially proficient at a procedure in which a feather, concealed in the mouth and bloodied by biting one’s tongue, is ‘sucked out’ of a sick person during a ritual then proclaimed the cause of their illness. Having used this trick to cure a patient who had asked for him after seeing him in a dream, Qā’sElid’s renown spread, and soon neighbouring shamans started to beg for his secrets. He began to wonder whether the tricks he had learned were actually potent; they certainly seemed to effect more impressive cures than the charlatanry around him (some of his peers didn’t even bother with the bloody feather, merely sucking and blowing at their patients). Qā’sElid ends his narrative far less certain about magic than when he set out. What seemed false had become true.
from an LRB piece by Francis Gooding reviewing David Toop’s book about Dr. John’s 1967 album Gris-Gris. Recorded right here in LA with time stolen from Sonny & Cher.
In the same issue, a review of a new translation of Maimonides Guide to the Perplexed. What a great title. I hadn’t really known what was perplexing people, here’s a summary:
The work is addressed to Maimonides’s student Joseph Ibn Shimon, and by extension to anyone troubled by the same issue as Joseph – that is, the apparent conflict between Aristotelian science and Jewish religion. Aristotle’s God is an immaterial intellect, which gives rise to eternal celestial motion simply by thinking about itself. The God of the Torah, by contrast, is an emotional and wilful being, who created the world in a known span of time. This God seems to have a body, because he ‘sits’ and ‘stands’. He apparently has spatial location, since he is said to dwell ‘high in the heavens’ and then to ‘come near’. He is even compared to such tangible earthly phenomena as fire and rock.
Maimonides was born Córdoba in Islamic Spain, sometime around 1135 CE. He ended up in Cairo. From a 2010 LRB review of Maimonides In His World by Sarah Stroumsa:
Ibn Tumart attacked what he saw as the anthropomorphising and polytheistic tendencies of Islam in his day; the treatises he wrote were designed to provide his followers with the prophetic foundations for the pure monotheistic beliefs and practices incumbent on every Muslim, uncluttered by the later disputes of the learned. The Almohad movement he inspired – from the Arabic al-Muwahhidun, meaning the ‘proclaimers of God’s one-ness’ – swept to power throughout North Africa and Muslim Spain. The Almohads, unlike nearly all their predecessors in the history of Islam, did not tolerate the presence of Jews and Christians on their territory. With their arrival in Cordoba in 1147, when Maimonides was a child, the famously plural society of Muslim Spain came to an end. Many Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians fled to the northern Christian kingdoms. Others, like Maimonides’ family, accepted forced conversion to Islam and began a long series of displacements or exiles. The family seems to have spent 12 years wandering from city to city in Muslim Spain before settling for five years in Fez, where, according to a Muslim biographer, Maimonides learned the Quran by heart and studied Islamic law. He then escaped the Almohads’ orbit, moving briefly to Palestine and then to Egypt, where he could live openly as a Jew. He remained there until he died, in 1204.
On Stroumsa:
as early as 1213 Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides’ translator in southern France, pointed out that readers of the Mishneh Torah in Christian lands had been led astray by their ignorance of the Arabic and Islamic context of its vocabulary. But few have learned the Arabic necessary to investigate this claim. Stroumsa is one of the handful of modern scholars who has done so
Badass. From Wikipedia:
Maimonides then explains his views on the reasons for the 613 mitzvot, the 613 laws contained within the five books of Moses. Maimonides divides these laws into 14 sections—the same as in his Mishneh Torah. However, he departs from traditional Rabbinic explanations in favour of a more physical/pragmatic approach by explaining the purpose of the commandments (especially of sacrifices) as intending to help wean the Israelites away from idolatry.
Somewhat shocked to read circulation numbers for the London Review of Books, it’s like 29,000. That means 0.000689 % (?) of all subscribers are regularly lunching together in Pasadena.
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