…A different take on the concept. (Click on the image for a larger version)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody!
I roared. An oldie-but-goodie from The Onion:
“Mary Gaughan, my mother’s father’s mother’s mother, was from a tiny village called Ballydesmond,” said the brown-eyed, brown-haired Kroeger, who is half German, one-quarter Swedish, one-eighth Dutch, one-sixteenth Belgian, and one-sixteenth Irish. “She married a sailor who was traveling from Rotterdam to America, and they settled in Milwaukee. Ever since, my family’s been proud to be Irish.”
…Meanwhile, I see that RTÉ is going live online with the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day Festival / Parade, for those of you who might be interested in watching.
Enjoy the Day That’s In It, everybody!
Just gorgeous. (Click here for the article.) Look at those dust storms!
Whatever else may be going on around here at the moment, there’s one event that I have to mention.
Twenty years ago, Peter and I were married.
If the past twenty have been anything to go by…the next twenty are going to be a blast.
Happy anniversary, sweetie!
Young Pip was killed by a car this morning: we just found him by the side of the road.
No more blogging for a while.
Cleolinda has a gift for finding the right word. Or, when necessary, inventing it.
Like the new word for July 21, 2007: Potterdämmerung.
Or, “The fear of death in literature.”
A British book retailer plans to set up a counseling hotline for all heartbroken fans of Harry Potter, in case he dies in the much awaited next book.
As a former psychiatric professional, I can kind of see the point. …But I do start wondering, sometimes… Are human beings actually less robust, more fragile, than they used to be — or are we just being encouraged to believe we are?
And I remember clearly the resilience and fortitude of my younger patients as compared to the so-called “adults”. The kids were endlessly more pragmatic and better at handling pain than the grownups. Any bets on the percentage of over-eighteens who wind up being counseled, as opposed to the under-eighteens?…
We take them for granted. We shouldn’t.
During my visit to Tapp’s apiary just outside Chapel Hill, I asked him, “I’m wondering, does fifteen billion dollars worth of food a year depend on a bunch of retired hobbyists?”
I fully expected him to tell me I was exaggerating. Tapp turned his head, looked me in the eye and with a straight face said, “Well, yeah.”
The New York Times food critic Frank Bruni walks all over Gordon Ramsay’s new place in NYC. Goodness!!
The cautious palette foreshadows a cautious menu, as reliant on default luxuries and flourishes like foie gras and black truffles as on real imagination. Most ingredients are predictable, most flavors polite, most effects muted. Mr. Ramsay may be a bad boy beyond the edges of the plate, but in its center, he’s more a goody-two-shoes.
And for all his brimstone and bravado, his strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one, built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less vaunted pedigrees.
Hooboy!
Chapter Six has now gone freerange for those of you who’re not subscribers. Enjoy, folks!
(Chapter Seven should be going up on Sunday for the subscribers. Check the Big Meow site for details.)
Those of you who’ve been following the The Big Meow project will have noticed some changes at the site as we’ve changed hosting providers and brought up the new Drupal installation. Now that that’s bedding in, I get to add some cool new stuff.
One new feature: research materials. I keep these on my home machine using Onfolio, which also makes it easy to publish stored material online. So here’s a link to where my Big Meow research material can now be found online.
The page material will automatically update as I add new items (which happens every now and then), remove stuff (ditto) or reorganize things. For those who’re interested in finding out right away when there’s something new, here’s a link to the page’s XML / RSS feed.
While going through this material the other day, I did notice that some sources (particularly the New York Times items) hadn’t stored correctly. I’ll be seeing what I can do about this.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of cool stuff in there. My favorite at the moment: a recording of the original LAPD officer who made the phrase “Calling all cars” famous nationwide.