Something so basic, yet so different stands between us

Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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You’d think it should be this easy: just take a bread machine, throw in all the ingredients listed in the recipe, push a button, wait, remove loaf and eat. Yum. Nah, of course not. Never is. And there are reasons for this, I’ve been learning. I have an old bread machine – must be 20 years old or near as dammit – and my results were always mixed, using the recipes in the manual. I constantly tinkered with them. The best loaves were qualified successes. I ate them, Susan balked. The worst were, well, inedible, even for a guy who ……… click below for more ↓

1927, a Year to Remember

Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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1927. It was the year America sent troops to Nicaragua, forcing a US-supervised election. The year Alfred Hitchcock released his first movie. And the year when Fritz Lang released his masterpiece, Metropolis. Buster Keaton released The General that year, although it bombed at the box office. Clara Bow starred in Wings. Sergei Eisenstein released October: Ten Days That Shook the World. Silent films, all, although the Movietone sound system came out that year at Fox Studios, presaging a new world of talkies in another few months when The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, premiered in New York City. That same year, the Academy ……… click below for more ↓

Why do so few Canadians get a flu shot?

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Internet & Social Media / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

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That’s the headline for a recent Toronto Star story. It suggests that as few as one third of Canadians get a flu vaccine, and in some place the number may be as low as 20 percent. This despite Ontario having the world’s first universal free flu shot program, introduced in 2000. The 2013-14 vaccine is on its way to doctors’ offices now. It’s also available at pharmacists’ offices. It’s free, easily accessible, it prevents and helps stop the spread of many kinds of influenza, it can save the life of anyone at risk – so why don’t people get one? ……… click below for more ↓

Poor Lao Tzu: He Gets Blamed for So Much

Atheism & Spirituality / Balderdash & Hoaxes / History & Biography / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes7 Comments

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Poor Lao Tzu. He gets saddled with the most atrocious of the New Age codswallop. As if it wasn’t enough to be for founder of one of the most obscure  philosophies (not a religion, since it has no deity), he gets to be the poster boy for all sorts of twaddle from people who clearly have never read his actual writing. This time it’s a mushy feel-good quote on Facebook (mercifully without kittens or angels) that reads, If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are ……… click below for more ↓

Internet Surveys: Bad Data, Bad Science and Big Bias

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Politics / Provincial Politics / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / US Politics5 Comments

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Back in 2012, I wrote a blog piece about internet polls and surveys, asking whether internet polls and surveys could be – or should be – considered valid or scientific. I concluded, after researching the question, that, since the vast majority lack any scientific basis and are created by amateurs – often with a goal to direct rather than measure public opinion – that, Most internet polls are merely for entertainment purposes. They harmlessly allow us to believe we are being engaged and are participating in the process, and they make pollsters happy to receive the attention. They are, however, ……… click below for more ↓

The Eyes Have It

Education & Learning / Personal Reminiscences / Psychology & Sociology / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

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This summer my mother was diagnosed with macular degeneration. There is no cure. It is irreversible. It simply progresses. Science has some hope for future cures, and has some treatments to slow the progress, but a cure likely won’t come soon enough for her. At 93, one expects that the body will fail, that organs and parts won’t work as well, will lose efficiency, will fail. But this is particularly tough on her. It was clear during our visit today that this diagnosis troubles her. My parents were both voracious readers, and they passed along a love for books, reading ……… click below for more ↓

Digital Attachments

Games & Gaming / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

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It’s tough to lose a solider. Especially one like Dimitri. A fine sniper, with a good kill record. I had trained him for so long, raised him from a lowly private to sergeant, then to lieutenant. He was equipped with the best gear. His accuracy had improved to a deadly asset. He was a cornerstone to my tactical approach. He was also an investment in time and materiel. And as such, he was headed for greatness. Captain, maybe major. Until the aliens got him. That was nasty. Three of them swarmed his position, flanking his protection and taking him down ……… click below for more ↓

I Didn’t Know That…

Books & Reviews / Education & Learning / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / US PoliticsOne Comment

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One of the great delights of learning is to be able to read or hear something new, something unknown, something that challenges the mind or your previously formed ideas and opinions. Something that fascinates and delights you. That “ah ha!” moment. Last week I stumbled across a website called History of England and I felt like that when I started to read through it. Better yet, I spent an hour downloading the 104 free podcasts of his history (plus the eight or so supplementary ones) to listen to while I walk my dogs.* The site is a blog created by ……… click below for more ↓

The (sometimes violent) urge to write

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Literary pretensions / My Writing4 Comments

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As of this writing, I will have published 253 posts since I began this blog at the ending week of December, 2011. Two hundred and fifty three posts in 21 months. Just over one post every two-and-a-half days, on average. Plus 30 or so still in draft mode. Another half-dozen scribbled in word processing notes or notebooks. And that doesn’t include the six years of blog posts – a list of 91 pages – on my previous blog site (still available in archive format, although some formatting issues have developed after some code updates). “Scribble, scribble, scribble,” as Prince William ……… click below for more ↓

50 Years: Has Anything Changed?

Personal Reminiscences / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsOne Comment

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I remember that day, in 1963. I was in high school. Penmanship class, after lunch. I think it was the last year for penmanship in Ontario high school, but even if not, I never took it again.* We used those long wooden pens with the fancy metal nibs, removable nibs that had to be periodically cleaned to keep the ink from clogging the narrow slot that fed the nib. There was a small bottle of ink. Black, I recall. Desks were designed to hold the bottles, with little inserts or holes on the upper right of the top. The notebook ……… click below for more ↓

Why Spelling Matters

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Language & Grammar / My Writing / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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Sometimes I despair when I surf through the social media. Technology has empowered everyone to be able to comment, to post their stories, to share their opinion. Yet it has not enabled their ability to compose a sentence, or to spell the words correctly. It has not made us better grammarians, better spellers. And in my despair, I’m not alone. Others take exception to the general dumbing down and its accelerating spread online. It’s not just the easily-confused homophones like they’re, their and there, board and bored, your and you’re. What’s heartbreaking about those mistakes is that the differences are ……… click below for more ↓

A Cup of Pu-Erh

Culture / Food & DrinkLeave a comment

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It’s dark in the cup, but in the glass pot for brewing, it’s a deep copper. It smells of earth and age, a hint of horses and leather. A rich, slightly sweet and crisp taste. Black, no milk. With milk, it changes to a hot-chocolate light brown, and the flavour mellows. I prefer the slightly sharper black taste. * “For hundreds of years,” reads the Whittard’s package, “mule loads of precious Pu-Erh tea travelled the Ancient Tea Horse Road from China, risking the dangers of Tiger Leaping Gorge to reach the towering mountains of Tibet.” It has that aroma and ……… click below for more ↓

The Unknown Monk Meme

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes / What I'm Reading Now4 Comments

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This pseudo-poem popped up on Facebook today. It’s been around the Net for a few years, without any source attributed to the quote, but it seems to be making its comeback in the way these falsely-attributed things do: When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an ……… click below for more ↓

The Moral Compass

Atheism & Spirituality / Critical Thinking / Faith / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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I have a laminated card beside me, wallet-sized so it can be carried around easily. I made it at my shop a few years ago; just a simple, two-sided business card with some text. It’s part of my personal moral compass. We all benefit from some guidance, at times, something to remind us of the higher things. I look at it frequently through the day, as a reminder when I find myself in Dante’s dark wood. Every problem, every concern, every moment of doubt can be worked through using these basic principles, if you step outside the flow and think them ……… click below for more ↓

Chemtrails redux: the attack of the tin-foil hat brigade

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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My earlier post on the nonsensical chemtrail conspiracy has generated quite a lot of activity recently (more than 1,000 views in a few days – thanks!). So much so that I decided to look online again to see why – had this silliness abated? Were people waking up and laughing at their former craziness? Or was it spreading more among the hard-of-thinking and the anti-science crowd? Sadly, it seems the latter is the case. And after a bit of research, I became deeply distressed that it seems to be spreading rapidly. Or maybe the overall number of gullibles is simply ……… click below for more ↓

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