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| January 15, 2025 |
We've seen this magazine cover previously in these pages but
that was a crude, low-res colorshifted
scan (and that was a long time ago). Just came across this
version, much nicer.
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| January 10, 2025 |
- An awesome chart from the Home Baking Association
shows variations in Chocolate Chip cookie results when you
change an ingredient,
Cookie
Science, Cookies 101.
- Check which team your favorite retail chains donate to at
GoodsUniteUs.com
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| January 6, 2025 |
- Looking
Forward is a short, contemplative video by Steven
Ascher. Does how you feel about
the future change how your life turns out?
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| December 31, 2024 |
2025 = 452
Happy New Year!
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| December 29, 2024 |
- In The Saturday Evening Post,
What
we ate 100 years ago.
- The Windham Hill videos are in the Internet Archive!
Autumn Portrait
Western
Light
Water's
Path
Winter and
China... I used to check these out from the video store, when I first moved to LA. At one point I transcribed all of them onto a single VHS tape labeled
"Soothing Image."
- Slate: America
invented the perfect grape, then banished it into obscurity. When
we first moved to the new house in 1960 these grapes
were growing along the back fence but at some point early
on, they either died or were torn out. Before, we'd stand
around back there eating them just as this article
describes...that flavor, it's true, not
the same as the red or green grapes at the store
these days; but some purple candy - exactly.
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| December 25, 2024 |
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Van Gogh and Christmas
calls this painting from 1890 'At Eternity's Gate' but I've also seen
it labeled simply 'A Man Mourning' and I first knew it as
'On the Threshold of Eternity'. Van Gogh
considered the image above to be a Christmas painting.
Happy Holidays!
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| December 24, 2024 |
- BBC:
Chocolate
maker Cadbury has been dropped from the list of royal warrants. Begone, pseudo-chocolate!
- Emily Wallace:
In
North Carolina, a cheese ball is the star around which all holiday
gatherings orbit.
- Sounds like a good name for a band, to me:
the
Positive Anymore occurs in some
varieties of North American English, especially in Philadelphia
and the Delaware Valley, Baltimore and its suburbs, as well
as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri; its
usage extends to Nevada, Utah and other western US states
but I've never heard this."I eat meat
anymore" = "I didn't eat meat before, and (but) I do
now", a meaning similar to 'nowadays' or 'from now on'.
- NPR's extensive listing,
In
Memoriam 2024: The Musicians We Lost.
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| December 21, 2024 - Solstice |
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| December 16, 2024 |
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| December 9, 2024 |
- According to Reader's Digest you can see
blue
Stop signs in Hawai'i, but doesn't really explain the phenomenon.
- The Cut: Things
Your Wedding Guests Secretly Despise. Maybe not so
secretly. A too-long gap between the ceremony and the reception. Open-mic
toasts. The garter belt, the cake smashing -- gross.
(archive link since The Cut is actually New York magazine)
- Earthscrapers -- proposal for a residential
step-well
in the D.F. A few levels, sure; but who'd go way down there? Ridiculous.
- The
Shape Of Things is a short story by Ray Bradbury, from 1948.
Surprisingly, out of copyright, doesn't appear to have been included
in any of his collections (but was in
this
Damon Knight anthology.) First line: He did
not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid.
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| December 8, 2024 |
- Absorbing this zany, new (to me) comic artist, Fletcher Hanks:
the
Most Twisted Comic Book Artist of All Time. Sample above, a
whole collection of Stardust (who flies through space by means of his Tubular Spacial) and Fantomah
available in the Internet Archive; his published work only between
1939-41 although he lived on until 1976, when his frozen body was
found one morning on a NYC park bench.
- Trying to understand the kids' new usage of
'flex'
but I'm not quite there yet. Something about bragging; but also
seems to be whatever you want it to mean.
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