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Monthly Archives: September 2022

Tofu foo yung

Monday, September 19, 2022

I was having a protein craving, which caused me to think of egg foo yung. When I had my own chickens, I used to make it. But it occurred to me that mashed tofu, with the right seasonings and some sort of binder, might make a nice foo yung. After Googling, I saw that tofu […]

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How much does cursive matter anymore?

Friday, September 16, 2022

⬆︎ Spencerian script, 1884. This was the ideal in business correspondence. Source: Wikipedia. The Atlantic has an interesting piece this morning by a former Harvard president: “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive: How will they interpret the past?” The article mentions that learning to write in cursive was dropped from the standard American curriculum […]

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Balmoral

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Source: Wikimedia Commons The media are so full of pieces about Queen Elizabeth II that I hesitate out of modesty and the risk of redundancy to add to it. We Americans may be more interested in royalty than the British, probably because we don’t have royalty. But, as other pieces about Elizabeth II have said, […]

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My cat’s death-defying leap

Saturday, September 3, 2022

Click here for high resolution version. I was upstairs at the computer. Lily was in the stairwell yelling. I yelled back at her to shut up until I realized that something was wrong and went to check. She had trapped herself up in the dormer window that lights the stairs, a place where in the […]

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Scots: Language? Or dialect?

Saturday, September 3, 2022

Concise Scots Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Second edition; first published 1985. 852 pages. In the academic debate about whether Scots is a language or just a dialect, it had seemed more likely to me as a mere reader and non-academic that Scots is a dialect. This was only because I can understand it, or […]

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The Royal family (of writing instruments)

Thursday, September 1, 2022

⬆︎ A Parker Duofold Centenntial fountain pen, first bought in London in 1995, now in my hands Earlier today, Henry, who frequently comments here, sent me a link to a Washington Post story that I had almost missed. It’s “Beyond the keyboard: Fountain pen collectors find beauty in ink.” I was about three weeks ahead […]

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