Scripturient

The Lore of Tea

Whoa! Down the rabbit hole I tumbled this week. I started reading about tea in several books I recently purchased. What a story. What a delight! Many hours spent between the pages absorbing culture, history, types, classifications, production, terroirs and marketing.* I’ve read bits and pieces about tea before; mostly history and cultural notes; some tidbits about specific types and specific bits I’ve gleaned from online sources. I never read any significantly detailled work about picking, grading and production previously. Nor was I fully aware of the range and depth of teas, the complex terroir of tea and the variations in ……… click below for more ↓

Lawrence in Arabia

2014-07-10 2020-11-11 Culture / Film & Reviews / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / War & MilitaryOne Comment

I recall with some vividness seeing David Lean’s masterpiece film, Lawrence of Arabia, when it was first shown in Canadian theatres. I was 12 and utterly astounded by the movie. Not simply the great, sprawling, adventurous tale that meandered through 220 minutes (plus the intermission), but by the incredible scenery. It was a world totally alien from my cultivated, manicured suburbia: wild, dangerous, exotic. And stunningly beautiful. So much of an impression did it make on my young mind that today I can still remember sitting in the Golden Mile theatre with my parents as the curtain rose and the lights ……… click below for more ↓

A Compassionate Buddha?

2014-07-06 2014-07-07 Books & Reviews / Buddhism / Faith / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

There’s a story in Valerie Roebuck’s translation of the Dhammapada (Penguin Classics, 2010, commentary on verse 6, p 115-116) that caught my eye recently, and it made me wonder what the moral or ethical precept was buried in it. And it makes me question what it says about the supposed compassion of the Buddha and his attitude towards animals.* I have not found online the story exactly as Ms. Roebuck tells it**, but I have found many variations on it. It even has its own holiday: Madhu Purnima. In essence the story goes like this: The Buddha is at the Kosambi ……… click below for more ↓

A Cup of Dragon Well

2014-07-05 2014-07-05 Books & Reviews / Food & Drink / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

Legend has it that, in the Qing Dynasty, Qianlong (1711-1799 CE), the grandson of the Emperor Kangxi, went on a holiday to the West Lake district, in the Hangzhou area of Zhejiang province, China. He stopped at the Hu Gong Temple, nestled under the Lion Peak Mountain (Shi Feng Shan). There, he was presented by the monks with a cup of green tea made from the temple’s own tea bushes. He was so impressed with the tea that, when he became Emperor himself, Qianlong gave these 18 tea bushes special imperial status and the tea became “Gong Cha,” or Imperial ……… click below for more ↓

Reading the Dhammapada

2014-07-03 2014-07-03 Books & Reviews / Buddhism / Faith4 Comments

One of the most inspirational, moving books in my library is the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, originally from the Pali canon. I’ve had a version of the Dhammapada in my library since the late 1960s, and read it through many times. It’s good to reread it often. My first copy I recall was Irving Babbit’s edition, published by New Directions press in 1965. It may still be hiding on a bookshelf upstairs for all I know. It’s one of my desert island books. You know: one of the list of 10 books you’d want to have ……… click below for more ↓

May and June Breads

2014-07-02 2014-07-02 Bread & Baking / Food & DrinkLeave a comment

The past month I haven’t done as much baking as usual – just been too busy to do much, plus I was away for a long weekend holiday in Toronto. So June saw a mere two loaves baked. I made a few others in late May, however. The two most recent loaves were a poolish-levain combination done in the oven, and a jalapeño-cheese bread done in the machine. The former was a typical bread for me: nicely solid for sandwiches and toast, but the levain added the sourdourgh flavour and a hint of acidity. Both crust and crumb were acceptable. ……… click below for more ↓

The Death of Handwriting?

2014-06-26 2017-11-11 Books & Reviews / Culture / My Writing / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / Writing & cursive2 Comments

I almost cried in pleasure when I watched this video; the handwriting is so beautiful. Apparently some viewers have, as Jesus Diaz writes. On Gizmodo he says that it’s: …a video that caused many to discover autonomous sensory meridian response, a perceptual phenomenon that gives a pleasing tingling sensation. Some said they got it watching people writing. Well, put your headphones on, because this is the mother of all calligraphy ASMR videos. Okay, maybe it is for me because I was raised with handwriting and still delight in it. Penmanship was taught in school at least for a few years when ……… click below for more ↓

Fifty Years Ago

2014-06-21 2014-06-21 Culture / Film & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Pop CultureOne Comment

In mid-August, 1964, a modest-budget, British black-and-white comedy movie hit the theatres. And instantly exploded to being the most popular film of the year. It was the Richard Lester flick, A Hard Day’s Night, starring the young Beatles in their debut on the silver screen. It was a paradigm changer in so many ways. It was a madcap, faux-autobiographical/mockumentary story – a style of filmmaking not previously seen on the big screen – punctuated by the Beatles’ music, including several new songs not yet released on vinyl. They would soon be, though and the soundtrack album would rise to number ……… click below for more ↓

The Food Babe and other nonsense

2014-06-19 2014-06-20 Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery18 Comments

She’s been called the “Jenny McCarthy of food.” That’s not a compliment and should warn anyone with half a brain to beware of her. She’s a New Age wingnut helping turn the public from science to superstition. She’s also been described as the “latest quack making a name for herself on the Internet by peddling pseudoscience” and a “meme terrorist.” Meet “Food babe” Vani Hari. The latest darling of an increasingly lame and ill-educated national media that focuses on spectacle and controversy. She’s an attention-seeker who knows how to work the media and get coverage and ratchet herself to celebrity status ……… click below for more ↓

The Strange World of E-Writers

2014-06-18 2014-06-18 Books & Reviews / E-books & E-readers / Literary pretensions / Technology & GadgetsLeave a comment

There’s always been a place for amateur or new writers to present their efforts and hope to see print: publications where you could submit your work and hope the editors found it good enough to print in an upcoming issue. That’s how some famous writers got their start, in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s: Robert Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov and many more. But all of these depended on getting past the gatekeeper, someone like John Campbell: an editor who set standards – slim as they may sometimes be – and wrangled clumsy prose into shape for ……… click below for more ↓

Our 21st Century Library

2014-06-17 2014-06-17 Collingwood / Culture / Municipal Politics / Provincial Politics2 Comments

In the 20-plus years I’ve been on the Collingwood Library board, I have watched the functions of the library and its role in the community evolve and change to keep pace with the needs and demands of its growing number of users. It’s been a remarkable, exciting journey. Of all our civic institutions, I believe the library has best adapted to the new technologies and the changing community demographics. In sheer numbers, it is our most popular, most well-used community facility. And the library continues to grow in popularity as visits, uses and borrowing expands in leaps and bounds. From the Collingwood ……… click below for more ↓

Why Term Limits Are a Bad Idea for Municipal Government

2014-06-14 2026-10-12 Collingwood / Municipal Politics / PoliticsOne Comment

Update in late 2026: I wrote this piece more than a decade ago. Back then, I believed in democracy and the wisdom of the electorate. That was before Trump and MAGA, before PoiLIEvre and his Maple MAGA, before COVID and the anti-vaxxers, before Doug Ford, and before our gormless ex-mayor-now-MPP Brian Saunderson. My faith in voters being smart and making informed choices based on the greater good has been shattered. I am now firmly in the camp of term limits for all politicians and political appointees. Mea culpa for my naivete, but for historical purposes, I leave this for you ……… click below for more ↓

When good people do bad things in groups

2014-06-13 2014-06-13 Behaviour & Psychology / Philosophy / Psychology & Sociology / Science & Technology / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

The headline is taken from a piece on Science Daily on a study about how groups change personal behaviour and morality. The study is reported on the MIT website. I’ve seen that change myself, many times over the years, and most recently locally. The study adds intelligence on the neurology of how such group activity changed people. The report itself is called “Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup competition predicts competitor harm,” which of course would have most people’s eyes glazing over. But the authors of the report start by asking a salient question: Why do interactions become more hostile when social ……… click below for more ↓

The Hollow Crown: Henry V

2014-06-12 2016-07-05 Books & Reviews / Culture / England and Britain / Film & ReviewsOne Comment

As I started to watch the last film in the Hollow Crown series, I wasn’t sure whether Tom Hiddleston was up to playing the iconic role in Shakespeare’s most patriotic (and jingoistic) play. I thought Hiddleston’s Prince Hal in Henry IV had just a little too much of Loki – and maybe the bully – in it for me to see him as a majestic king. But I was quickly won over. Whether the movie itself was good Shakespeare is another question. First a note on the lighting and sets: in Richard II, it was all light, bright and colour ……… click below for more ↓