Failure and Redemption
The past month has seen the rise, fall and rise again of my bread making efforts. Mid-month, in April, I was having some success making sourdough breads and was looking…
Ian Chadwick
Sometimes Our Opinions Just Don’t Matter
The headline for this piece comes from a recent article in Time Magazine: “Dear CNN: Sometimes Our Opinions Just Don’t Matter.” The article isn’t – as you might have thought…
How many chords?
How many chords does a musician need to know? How many does an amateur musician who plays mostly popular, folk and blues music, need to know? My first answer has…
Still hot and getting hotter
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a decade since I last updated my web page on hot sauces, and about 15 since I first wrote it. My, how…
Random grumblings for a Sunday afternoon
Why can’t I buy Yorkshire Gold tea in town? I can buy Barry’s tea, from Ireland, and Morse’s tea packaged in Nova Scotia locally. As well as other brands. Surely…
Reading music and music theory
I write about reading a lot, because I read a lot of books. There are other kinds of reading – other languages, too – that I don’t write much about.…
Irony and cognitive dissonance
Politics is as full of irony as it is full of cognitive dissonance. And I don’t mean simply in politicians and their agencies: it is everyone and every group, every…
More reasons to read
On the Inside Higher Ed website, Joshua Kim recently asked the question, When do you find the time and energy to read books? That surprised me. What energy does reading…
Seeing evolution in action
The pop-science notion is that evolution takes a long time. Millennia, many millennia; even millions of years. But is that always true? Can one actually see and measure evolution in…
Just Six Songs?
Author, musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says all music can be classified into a mere six types of song. That’s part of the premise in his 2009 book, The World…
Pseudo-patriotic madness
This is news, right from the CBC, not April Fool or The Onion: The Massachusetts House of Representatives has finally granted initial approval to a Bill naming the Fluffernutter the…
Manners, bloody manners
I was in a local grocery store not long ago, standing mid-aisle and peering at shelves of canned products, trying to find the ones I wanted for my cart. As…
The difficult art of reading poetry
Synecdoche. Metonymy. Not exactly words that trip lightly off the tongue. Unless, I suppose, you’re Harold Bloom. Those are two of the four fundamental tropes in literature, Bloom tells us.…
Lost Shakespeare play found?
Cardenio. Written by William Shakespeare. Based on an episode in Miguel Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. The novel was translated from Spanish into English in 1612. The play was known once,…
Spoon River: Smith, Goodman and Masters
VERY well, you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee…
Tudor politics: Elizabeth’s struggle
David Starkey’s book, Elizabeth: the Struggle for the Throne, is the best book I’ve read on the period of Elizabeth’s life between the death of Henry VIII and her own…
What do we know about Bell’s Palsy?
Bell’s Palsy is one of those rare ailments, and one that annoys more than threatens, but can be difficult and socially awkward for sufferers. It’s also one that still baffles…
Oooh, shiny….
Religious texts are full of admonitions about avoiding temptation. The Lord’s Prayer tells God to “lead us not into temptation.” Fat lot of good that does. Not only do we…
The dangerous idiocy of the anti-vax movement
Measles is on the rise in Canada. There have already been many cases in 2014: in PEI, London, Ottawa, southern Alberta, Regina, Qu’Apelle, Calgary, Fraser Valley (320 cases), Hamilton, Halton,…
April’s early breads
April has begun with three loaves of bread; generally successful efforts, although there’s still some tweaking to do with the recipes. As always. But I’m encouraged to try more –…