In the latest video, Exclusive 141, I start off the show in the shower. Some might wonder about the tattoo on my inner, upper arm written in Hebrew.
The reason it’s in Hebrew - ancient Hebrew, in fact - is that it’s taken directly from Ezekiel 34:25: “They shall dwell safely in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods.”
This was my first tattoo at age 35. I was holding out for the perfect idea. Some eagle-eyed viewers may notice that Eze 34:25 also shows up in some of my videos as a tin poster on my back wall.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
