All things are a part

Look who wins election

Hat-tip egalia.

Murder, premeditated, first degree

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• Do not martyr prisoners

Six days of creation

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• Five cups of wine

Three monkeys

On the death of a president

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• Interregnum

Say hello

to Spare a thought…..

Games without frontiers

Olvlzl pointed me to a site with lots of good suggestions for non-competitive games for children, here’s an example:

Wizards: All close eyes while a wizard is chosen in secret. Open eyes and all move around or dance. Wizard tries to tig without being discovered by running hand down backs. Tigged freeze but can be untigged by a hug from the untigged..

Adults need to figure out our own versions of these games.

Fine herbs for bread making

As any decent person knows, hops had nothing whatsoever to do with sinful chemistry; they just kept bad company. They did not prevent, sustain, catalyze, or effect in any way the process of alcohol formation from various sugars, cellulose, starch, taters, beans, seaweed, or from whatever else human folk have attempted its secretion. Except that when hops are included in a bread recipe, the dough is, for some reason, the more ecstatic. Hop cones ground to a fine grayish powder, rendered then to a tea, this in turn stirred into bread yeast, caused the carbon dioxide that spewed forth from asexual torment to come off in the most exquisite bubbles. Not belching, gargantuan bubbles that lift the crust of the bread so horribly that the result is bread with gopher holes. Hops do for white bread what only an extra half hour of intensive hand-to-hand combat with the bread board could equally bestow. A fine-stranded gluten that gives farm bread an unblemished texture, almost silken smooth was the flesh of this oven varmint. Hops in my grandmother’s bread recipe brought about the same result as three rounds on the wrestling mat.

Excerpted from The Hop Pole, by Justin Isherwood. The whole story is well worth reading.

I haven’t yet tried adding hops to my starter.

Movie time

What’s going on in Madrid?

A poem that shows

The rose is a rose
and was always a rose;
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose,
but were always a rose.

- Robert Frost, “The Rose Family”.

No more war between the roses, I say.

Taken from Wikipedia’s entry on Rosaceae, the order of which is called Rosales, of which it is said within,

In the APG classification, well-known members of Rosales include: roses; strawberries, blackberries and raspberries; apples and pears; plums, peaches and apricots; almonds; rowan and hawthorn; elms; figs; nettles; and hops and cannabis.

So there you have it, and enjoy them all.

From someone who goes, but comes in repose.