Books & Reviews – Page 24

Bread Tales, Continued

2013-10-31 2013-11-11 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

This week I started a small batch of dough to bake later in the week, or on the weekend while I figure out a few details on my baking odyssey (and do some online research on a number of related issues). Probably just a small loaf this time, and I’ll likely do it in a pan. I plan to start a larger batch of dough, Sunday with the goal of a longer-term cold fermentation. And possibly a sourdough starter. The last loaf I made, a mere three days ago, is almost gone. Funny how homemade bread gets eaten so quickly. ……… click below for more ↓

Burning Books, Burning Bibles

2013-10-30 2018-05-28 Atheism & Spirituality / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Religion / Social Order & Disorder / US Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Pastor Marc Grizzard, of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC is back in the news this week, but I’m not really sure if it’s because of something he did or something that was dredged up online from a few years back and has just been regurgitated. This week, a story in The Telegraph about Grizzard resurfaced on Facebook. But it’s from 2009, not dated 2013. I’m unable to find a contemporary reference that doesn’t refer back to the 2009 story. Mayhap it’s a hoax. But it’s fun and informative to revisit, anyway. Back then, the Telegraph reported that Grizzard intended to ……… click below for more ↓

The Circuitous Path from Bulge to Budget

2013-10-28 2013-10-28 Arts / Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQO7e_a-gvU] If tinkers may have leave to live, And bear the sow-skin budget, Then my account I well may, give, And in the stocks avouch it. Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Sc. III, Shakespeare These lines got me thinking about the town’s finances. Sow-skin budget? What does that mean? And how does that relate to the financial plan for the coming year staff is preparing for council’s review? I did some reading (of course…). In Shakespeare’s time, the online etymological dictionary tells us the word budget meant something quite different:* “leather pouch,” from Middle French bougette, diminutive of Old French ……… click below for more ↓

Anti-Intellectualism: The New Elitism

2013-10-27 2013-10-27 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Books & Reviews / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Science & Technology11 Comments

There’s a growing – and disturbing – trend in modern culture: anti-intellectual elitism. The dismissal of art, science, culture, philosophy, of rhetoric and debate, of literature and poetry, and their replacement by entertainment, spectacle, self-righteous self ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. These are usually followed by vituperative ridicule and angry caterwauling when anyone challenges the populist ideals or ideologies. As if having a brain, as if having any aspirations to culture, to art, to learning – or worse, to science – was an evil, malicious thing that must be stomped upon. As if the literati were plotting world domination by quoting ……… click below for more ↓

Words, words, words

2013-10-24 2013-10-24 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Internet & Social Media / Language & Grammar / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Writing before the arrival of the internet*, Bob Blackburn commented on the nature of exchange on then-prevalent BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), words that could as easily be written today about the internet: “…the BBS medium reveals not only a widespread inability to use English as a means of communication but also a widespread ignorance of that inability, and, in consequence, a lack of interest in doing anything about it.” Words that were prescient. As if he could foresee Facebook. Blackburn also wrote that most people thought they spoke and wrote well… “The majority of English-speaking people I’ve come across…think they ……… click below for more ↓

Survival of the Fittest

2013-10-23 2013-10-23 Books & Reviews / Evolution & Paleontology / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Science & Technology / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Charles Darwin has long been associated with the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” For a century and a half people have used it to refer to their understanding of his explanation of how species evolved. But it wasn’t his. And it has obscured the understanding of Darwin’s own theory. It came from a contemporary, Herbert Spencer. Spencer was a contemporary of Darwin – an English polymath: philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, economist liberal political theorist, utilitarian – and, by some accounts, an early libertarian. His ideas came from people like Malthus and Adam Smith (read more about his philosophy here). Wikipedia tells us: For ……… click below for more ↓

We are Stardust… and Viral Genes

2013-10-15 2013-10-15 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Science & Technology / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

In her classic song, Woodstock, Joni Mitchell ended with the chorus: We are stardust Billion-year-old carbon We are golden Caught in the devil’s bargain And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the garden Which most people assume is merely poetic licence. Well, Joni wasn’t wrong: we – and every living thing on our planet – are made of stardust. As we learn at Physics Central: If we know how many hydrogen atoms are in our body, then we can say that the rest is stardust. Our body is composed of roughly 7×1027 atoms. That is a lot of atoms! ……… click below for more ↓

1927: Ads, Layout and Typography

2013-10-15 2014-04-18 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

As promised, here are the first 20 scans of the ads from the 1927 North American Almanac I recently mentioned. If there is interest, I’ll do another set later this week. There are probably another 40 or 50 pages of ads in the book. I think these ads give us a wonderful window into the daily, household life of the time, into cultural views and medical thinking. As well, they show the state of advertising, layout and typography. It’s fascinating to look at the mix of typefaces and their placement. Click on the image to load a larger version and ……… click below for more ↓

Hijack the Starship

2013-10-13 2013-11-11 Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsLeave a comment

Nineteen seventy. A great year for music, and a sad year, too. The death of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin.* Many of the great acts were kicked off their record labels and would struggle to find new publishers.** The great psychedelic band, Jefferson Airplane was breaking up, but before it did, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick put together a new band, named Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship (which would change its lineup before finalizing as the Jefferson Starship a few years later). They released a science fiction-counterculture concept album called Blows Against the Empire in 1970. It would go on ……… click below for more ↓

Something so basic, yet so different stands between us

2013-10-12 2013-11-11 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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 ↓

Poor Lao Tzu: He Gets Blamed for So Much

2013-10-09 2013-10-09 Atheism & Spirituality / Balderdash & Hoaxes / History & Biography / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes7 Comments

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 ↓

I Didn’t Know That…

2013-10-02 2013-10-02 Books & Reviews / Education & Learning / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / US PoliticsOne Comment

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 ↓

Why Spelling Matters

2013-09-29 2013-09-29 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Language & Grammar / My Writing / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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 ↓

The Unknown Monk Meme

2013-09-28 2014-11-01 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes / What I'm Reading Now4 Comments

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 ↓