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Monthly Archives: January 2024

War worry in Europe

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Nov. 29, 2023. Source: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons. One of my sources of information is Apple News, which includes subscriptions to a good many newspapers that are otherwise behind paywalls. During the past few weeks, I have been seeing a lot of stories with scary headlines in […]

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UFOs, Pooh, and Webster’s

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences. D.W. Pasulka, St. Martin’s, 2023. 248 pages. This book didn’t do it for me. Because I’m a UFO witness (seeing is believing!), I understand UFOs as material phenomena that should be investigated by the material sciences. D.W. Pasulka, who is a religion professor, sees UFOs as the focus of some […]

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A big win for Trump?? Who says?

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Trump in New Hampshire. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Do the American political media actually believe their own delusional spin — that Trump is so powerful that he may actually get back into the White House? Or is it, as not a few people on the left (including me) see it, that the media have a strong […]

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The wages of neoliberalism

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

A Boeing 737 Max: Why isn’t there a mass movement to refuse to fly on them? Source: Wikimedia Commons. This morning in the news, we learned that a front wheel fell off of a Boeing 757 as the jet was preparing to take off from Atlanta for Bogotá. The FAA is investigating. Also this morning […]

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Tomato pudding

Thursday, January 18, 2024

I rarely make tomato pudding. But, when I do, I wonder why I don’t make it more often. It’s a comfort food. Irma Rombauer’s recipe from the 1943 The Joy of Cooking is very basic. It’s canned tomatoes, bread crumbs tossed in melted butter, and brown sugar. The pudding goes into the oven for 25 […]

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Can this old book be saved?

Saturday, January 13, 2024

The 1943 wartime edition of The Joy of Cooking, worn out. It takes a lot to wear out a book, but I wore out my copy of The Joy of Cooking that I had bought back in the 1970s. Even when I bought it it wasn’t a young book. It’s the 1943 wartime edition, probably […]

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Those outer leaves of cabbage

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

A good head of cabbage is almost two separate vegetables. There are the dark green outer leaves that are difficult to shred for slaw. And there is the cabbage head after the outer leaves are removed. It’s easy to waste the outer leaves, but it’s a shame to waste that intense green. A solution is […]

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Yes, someone still writes rags

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

I haven’t had a musical post for a while… If you do a YouTube survey of ragtime playing, I think you’ll find that, like country music, ragtime playing is an area in which a great many poorly trained musicians are in it a for a good time and wearing bowties and funny hats. I’m all […]

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