Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the splendid table.

And you know, I just want to tell you that our show is a great place to come to for some holiday sanity.

We're getting cooking help from amazing people this holiday season,

including Chef Kristen Kish, Errik Prepare, Aberber-book authors, Jocelyn Jelk Adams, Dan Pelosi, and Amy Felon.

We have cooking, eating, and gifting ideas for anyone you're going to have at your table.

But listen to the splendid table wherever you get your podcast.

Talk to you soon. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown.

When I first met my friend Carl to the question, where did you grow up? He said, Harvard.

Two seconds later, Harvard, Illinois.

It was a joke he had long told to new acquaintances which inevitably drew a snicker.

In a poem he describes the Midwestern city in a single line as snow falling in a barrel of engine parts.

It's a starkly forelorn image of a post-industrial town, far from the image of students bustling the classes through Ivy-covered

courtyards in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Not to be outdone, our country also boasts Princeton, Kentucky and Yale, Oklahoma.

Neither were named for their educational counterparts, but one cannot help but make the mental leap to tree-lined campuses suddenly

in the heartland.

Harvard, Illinois is among a host of American cities and towns named for locales with more illustrious histories and associations.

Paris, Texas, Rome, Maine, Athens, Georgia, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Well, my home state certainly delivers on creative town names,

like the aspirational of, Pennsylvania,

or minimalists like rough and ready Pennsylvania,

...