Personal Reminiscences – Page 23

Saving Fubsy from Lexicographical Caliginosity

2014-01-16 2014-01-16 Arts / Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / My WritingLeave a comment

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain: Naked women! naked women! What about that, eh? A fubsy window? A short ……… click below for more ↓

The Wild Women of Wongo

2014-01-14 2014-01-14 Arts / Film & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Who can resist a film with a title like that? Or Zontar, the Thing From Venus? Robot Monster? Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet? The Atomic Brain? Clearly, I can’t. I love this stuff. B-films, especially scifi B-films. But I am a tad disappointed with this Mill Creek package.* I recently received the set of SciFi Classics Collection: 50 Movie Pack, a 12-DVD collection, cover shown on the left. It turned out to be the same set I already had, just with a different cover, and a substitution of four films from the original lineup. Damn, that was $10 wasted. Okay, ……… click below for more ↓

Brands, Buzz & Going Viral

2014-01-14 2014-01-14 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Literary pretensions / Municipal Politics / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

My third book for Municipal World, Brands, Buzz & Going Viral, has just been published as part of the Municipal Information Series. I received my author’s copies yesterday. I am very proud of this book; it took a lot of work to research and write. I enjoyed writing it. I hope my municipal readers find it both informative and interesting. I am also delighted to be able to share my knowledge and experience with others in the municipal governance realm across Canada. It’s a humbling experience to be among the respected authors and experts in MW’s stable – authors whose books ……… click below for more ↓

Two more loaves, new lessons learned

2014-01-12 2014-01-12 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

Following up on my desire to make homemade raisin-cinnamon bread for Susan, I spent several hours collecting recipes online and entering their ingredients into a spreadsheet so i could compare them. Quite a range in the amounts of some (like cinnamon and sugar). Then an Amazon order arrived, which included a 2012 book called 300 Best Canadian Bread Machine Recipes, by Donna Washburn and Heather Butt. Good book, lots of great stuff in it and many ideas to try. And it’s by far the best bread machine book I’ve encountered. If you get it, be sure to read the introduction – ……… click below for more ↓

Archiving past posts

2014-01-05 2014-01-09 Blog & Blogging / Books & Reviews / My Writing / Personal Reminiscences / Theme & CodingLeave a comment

I spent a busy weekend copying posts from my previous blog (hundreds of posts, currently archived on another server awaiting my resolution) onto my hard drive. I plan to resurrect some of these posts – maybe with a bit of updating or editing – in a WordPress archive site here so I can keep them alive in that digital manner the Net provides. But first I have to sort through a lot of old material. A lot. And the corruption of the old database in the move to that server has created some technical issues I need to resolve, too. ……… click below for more ↓

A Tale of Two Loaves

2014-01-04 2014-01-04 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

An interesting experiment this week: using the same basic set of ingredients to make bread, but one made by hand, the other in the bread machine, both made the same day. I’ve been curious about this ever since I got the machine. Would the two methods create similar breads if I used roughly the same ingredients? I say roughly because I used a bread machine recipe found in a book, including all of the ingredients listed (substituting a small amount of honey for the sugar listed, and avocado oil for generic vegetable oil.) In the handmade loaf, however, I included ……… click below for more ↓

Collingwood: 2114

2014-01-01 2014-01-01 Collingwood / Humour & Satire / Municipal PoliticsOne Comment

I had one of those odd dreams recently; a crazy mix of future and past, where rotary dial phones and smart phones co-existed, where past and future intersected. A retro-future dream. I was in Collingwood, an odd Collingwood, but it was still my home town: recognizable,familiar, but also changed. Modernized in striking ways, old-fashioned in others. A calendar told me it was 2114. It looked a bit like 1964, too. Odd how dreams do that. I thought I’d share some images of that dream, of what Collingwood might be like in a century. Using a combination of arcane and highly ……… click below for more ↓

Looking back on 2013

2013-12-31 2014-01-02 Blog & Blogging / Bread & Baking / Games & Gaming / Municipal Politics / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

It’s been quite a year, both personally and politically. The best of times, the worst of times, to paraphrase Dickens. Looking back on 2103, it was a busy, eventful, successful, and yet often challenging year. I accomplished many things on different levels – personal and professional – and, I believe, overcame some of the challenges I faced. A lot happened locally, too, much of which development I take pride in having been a party to. Collingwood Council has been very productive, pro-active and progressive this term; more so than any council I’ve ever participated in or reported on when in the ……… click below for more ↓

The last loaves of 2013

2013-12-26 2013-12-26 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

As my stock of bread dwindles, I’m contemplating what breads to bake this weekend, as well as what I may want to try before the New Year. I’m also pondering my baking successes and failures these past few months. Mostly successes, although a few have been “qualified” successes – edible but not optimal. First my levain – sourdough – mix got dumped last week. It went off and really stank. Unpleasant. I suspected it was struggling for a couple of weeks, ever since I tried – and failed – to make a decent sourdough bread with it as a starter. ……… click below for more ↓

Dictionaries: Concise, Compact, and dacoit

2013-12-23 2022-05-21 Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

Dacoit: noun; one of a class of criminals in India and Burma who rob and murder in roving gangs. A member of a band of armed robbers in India or Burma. A bandit. Origin: Hindi and Urdu. I love dictionaries. I like opening them up to a random page and just reading, discovering words and uses that I didn’t know. I love finding origins of words and phrases; linguistic connections between past and present. I will happily spend hours reading through Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, or a glossary of Shakespeare’s or Chaucer’s words. I’ll open any dictionary at random and read ……… click below for more ↓

Salt and bread making

2013-12-22 2013-12-22 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Salt is one of the four essential ingredients in making bread, along with flour, yeast and water. Nothing more is needed, although often a lot more is added. Salt is listed in all the recipes. Only one bread I’ve ever read about is salt-free (a Tuscan specialty mentioned in William Alexander’s book, 52 Loaves). We tend to assume salt is simply for flavour, but it is also part of our basic biology: I find it easiest to think of salt as one half of the body’s water-regulation system, the other half being potassium. The membranes of every cell in the body ……… click below for more ↓

How hot is your oven?

2013-12-22 2013-12-22 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Seems like a silly question: the answer would be it’s as hot as I set it to be. Isn’t it? Well, no, it may actually be rather different from what you expect, based on my recent tests. I was reading on several bread-baking forums about oven temperatures and the effects on baking. Specifically on the crust: higher temperatures (450F and up) lead to crunchy crusts as the sugars caramelize rapidly. Then there’s “non-enzymatic browning:” the Maillard reaction that happens at a range of temperatures: The reactive carbonyl group of the sugar reacts with the nucleophilic amino group of the amino acid, ……… click below for more ↓

Selling the electric upright bass

2013-12-17 2013-12-17 Arts / Musical Instruments / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

My first experience playing a bass guitar came when I was asked to join a local garage band in the mid-1960s. I was learning rhythm guitar back then, inspired by the Beatles and the wave of British pop bands that flooded the airwaves from around 1962. But they already had two of those. They didn’t have a bass player, though, so I became the bass player. Not a terribly good one, mind you, but it was a fun experience. As soon as I left, a year or two later, I went back to rhythm guitar. But bass stuck with me ……… click below for more ↓

Art, Science & Baking

2013-12-11 2013-12-11 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

You gotta love breadmaking. It’s an opportunity to get the right and left hemispheres of the brain working together, not racing about in different directions like they do most times. The logical and the creative sides working in lockstep. Bread making combines the logic of science with the freedom of expression in art. Well, that’s really true of all cooking, but it seems more evident in baking. You get your hands into the mix, with bread. It’s a visceral thing to do. Like pottery. Breadmaking combines four sciences, too: physics, chemistry, biology and botany. They all come into play when ……… click below for more ↓

Ah, Hubris…

2013-11-29 2013-11-29 Bread & Baking / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Annabeth: My fatal flaw. That’s what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris. Percy: The brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches? Annabeth: No, Seaweed Brain. That’s HUMMUS. Hubris is worse. Percy: What could be worse than hummus? Annabeth: Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else… Even the gods. Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters You think you know it all, and so you try to show off your talents. That’s when hubris makes you fall. So today, with company for the weekend, in between chess games, ukulele songs and great conversation, ……… click below for more ↓