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Monthly Archives: November 2022

The heartache of not having any pubs

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

I’m always excited when I get a new cookbook, but I found this one particularly exciting. Where I live, I’ve adapted to living in a place dominated by Trump culture, shocked by how the insular suburban attitude has taken over rural America. My adaptation mostly involves staying home here in the woods. I chiefly encounter […]

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How is this even possible?

Thursday, November 24, 2022

When will we completely rethink our relationship with animals? Can there be any doubt that this horse not only hears and is working with the beat of the music, but that the horse also knows that what it’s doing is beautiful?

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Trump has no future other than prison

Thursday, November 24, 2022

A Facebook meme Polls from Quinnipiac University I always take with a grain of salt. And, actually, any single poll always should be taken with a grain of salt. But this particular Quinnipiac poll is so lopsided that I think it’s worth our confidence. The poll, released November 22, found that only 35 percent of […]

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Workouts for the brain

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

In a few days, I’ll turn 74. And though I don’t feel my memory or logic circuits slipping, I don’t want them to slip. I read an article recently that mentioned something that I should have known but didn’t know. Reading fiction is very good exercise for the memory, because one has to remember at […]

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Scott-Land

Monday, November 21, 2022

Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation. Stuart Kelly, Polygon (Edinburgh), 2010. 328 pages. First, a disclaimer. I did not read the entire book. By the time I was halfway through, so much of the book seemed only obliquely relevant to the subject of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that I scanned the remainder of the […]

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Miso broth

Sunday, November 20, 2022

One of my winter resolutions is to drink more warm drinks. Miso broth is a good choice. Miso, of course, is live and fermented, made mostly from soybeans. Miso broth is pretty salty, but no saltier than soup. To get the probiotic benefits of miso, it mustn’t be heated too much. Some sources say less […]

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Mushroom Wellington

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Click here for high-resolution version. Last week, the Washington Post’s food section had a recipe for vegetarian mushroom Wellington. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Today was a cold day, a good day for making puff pastry and for using the oven. So I did it. As always with recipes, I borrowed the concept and […]

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Western Union, now just an elegant ghost

Monday, November 14, 2022

Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845-1893. Joshua D. Wolff. Cambridge University Press, 2013. 306 pages. There probably are not many people who think about Western Union today, but I do. In many ways, the disruptive creation of Western Union in the middle of the 19th Century resembles the creation of […]

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The Trump show’s last season, canceled for bad ratings

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Source: Wikimedia Commons Is the Trump nightmare over? I would say no, not quite. There’s more craziness where that came from in the packed clown car of Trump wannabes and QAnon whack jobs. But I would argue that, now that the 2022 midterm election is over, we’ll be watching Trump through the rearview mirror. He’ll […]

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How cheap bandwidth is used against us

Saturday, November 5, 2022

When I was a newspaper copy boy back in 1966, I operated a Teletype Model 19 exactly like this one. Teletypes like this used long-distance telephone lines. If you remember how much long-distance telephone calls used to cost, then you can imagine how expensive it was to keep a long-distance telephone line connected 24 hours […]

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