Sheila and I have made another book of collages. This one is called, Please answer “Yes”. If you’re interested in a taste, I made the little video below.
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Bright Moments
More music for our times. We need some Bright Moments. Rahsaan Roland Kirk…
Paska-licious
Making paska, or Easter bread, has become a tradition at 27th Street. Usually we make 2 batches, or about 8 loaves so we can make lots of people around us happy, but seeing as we’re in the midst of a pandemic, we scaled back to one batch this year.
We were down to the the last bit of some sad old yeast which wasn’t too interested in raising anything, much less a batch of paska, but the last time I ventured out shopping, I was able to buy some good fresh yeast at Adonis.
We make our paska in coffee tins because that’s the way Sheila’s mom always made it, and that’s good enough for me. We’ve used the same tins for several years, and we have different sizes too. We grease the inside of the tins and then coat with breadcrumbs – again, because that’s how Sheila’s mom always did it. This year, though, we had no breadcrumbs, so I substituted corn meal and that worked out just fine.
Today’s paska was one of the best batches we’ve done, light, slightly lemony and delicious.
Troubles
A tune for our times.
This is autoharp master Kilby Snow, from YouTube.
Mr. Snow has been gone for 40 years, but his music lives on.
Oh Lordy me and oh Lordy my
see when you haven’t got a dime
when your trouble is so deep that
you can’t eat nor sleep Lord
see when your trouble’s just like mine
see when your trouble’s just like mine
Snobby tea?
Back in late summer of last year, when Candy Minx and I started The Agency Podcast, I took to having a cup of tea during the podcast. I learned quickly that having a beverage handy is important if you’re going to record a conversation often lasting between an hour and an hour and a half.
Along the way, I read articles about most tea bags being made of a plastic that leaves behind micro-particles of plastic which get into your body. While there may not be evidence of this plastic being nasty, the idea freaked me out and I figured it was easy enough to switch to loose-leaf teas. I don’t have much experience with different teas. Years ago I made some herbal tea with chamomile, lemon balm and catnip from the garden and that was OK, but not great enough that I kept it up. Mostly my tea experience is with generic teabags, enjoyed with milk and sugar.
At Christmas, we were given a gift basket which contained a tin of Earl Grey tea and I discovered I loved this stuff. This tea is named after Charles Grey, who was a British Prime Minister in the 1830s. It’s a black tea which has been flavoured with oil of bergamot, which gives it some citrus flavour. I typically add a half teaspoon of honey.
I may continue to try some other teas along the way. One pre-virus day when I was having lunch up the street at Tasty Korea, I tried some lapsang souchong, a tea that is smoke-dried over pine fires. It was really unique and very interesting. It turns out it’s also pretty expensive. The stuff comes compressed into a pie-shaped thick wafer. Maybe one day I’ll go crazy and buy a little.
Go with Vox
One good thing about playing Go online as opposed to over-the-board is that, by eliminating travel time, it’s easy to get a few games in. Tonight I played 6 games with my friend Vox.
We’ve been using a generous time limit of 20 minutes for each player + 30 seconds byo yomi 3 times. For non-go players, that means that once you’ve used up your main time, you have 30 seconds to play each subsequent move, but if you use up that time, you lose one of your byo yomi periods, so you have 2 X 30 second periods left and so on. For our online games, this has been plenty of time. Maybe that means we should learn to slow down and consider our moves longer.
In recent weeks, I’ve burst ahead in terms wins and I haven’t been quite sure what to think of that. For quite a long time, Vox has been the stronger player. At one point he was offering me 3 stones handicap and I needed them to beat him. However, slowly but surely I’ve evened things up. Now for the 3rd evening in a row, I’ve really dominated play, winning 5 of the 6 games tonight. Two of them were by resignation. Another was by a lot of points. Vox won one game by 6.5 points and one of our games was so close – I won by half a point. We each played the black stones 3 times tonight, and komi was 6.5, meaning black goes first and to balance that, white gets an additional 6.5 points.
I’m convinced that studying, watching teaching videos and especially doing life and death problems recently has strengthened my reading and given me an advantage.
In the game pictured above, Vox resigned when he could not save the large black group in the centre top half of the board. Even if that group survived, I think I was in control of this game.
It will be most interesting to see if I can continue to dominate our games. I know (because I’ve been in the same situation plenty enough), it’s very difficult to see what you need to do to win when you’re on a losing streak. It’s easy to fall back into play that is too defensive and that just makes matters worse. However, Vox is a tenacious player and in our history playing, anytime I’ve found an advantage, he’s usually figured it out and negated it fairly quickly, and many times just when I have thought I’ve gained an advantage, he’s punished me. If the difference is really that I’ve upped my reading skill and jumped a level or two, he’s going to have to do the same to even things out.
Corn Bread
Mark Twain famously wrote, “The North thinks it knows how to make cornbread, but this is gross superstition”. Once can only imagine how dreadful Canadian cornbread is, eh?
I will make some confessions up front. I add wheat flour to my cornbread. It’s true, I really do. I not only cook it in a cast iron skillet in bacon fat, I also crumble bacon into the batter. I have been known (gasp!) to add a little sugar, although, this time I didn’t. Sometimes, like today, I pound some corn kernels with a mortar and pestle and toss them into the batter. And finally, while I held back this time, I have even been known to add cheese.
I assume Mr. Twain, who was right about many things, was also right about cornbread. You should remember this in case I offer you a piece, still warm from the oven, and I recommend you just say no. No, Eugene, I can’t eat made in Canada cornbread. You should have listened to Mr. Twain. You and Sheila finish it up.
Reluctantly I’ll agree.
John Prine RIP
More Brains
The latest episode of The Agency is More Brains. Find it here, or in the usual places. We discuss experts vs conspiracy theories and an uncertain future. Candy recommends one of her heroes, Slavoj Žižek and his film, The Perverts Guide to Ideology. Plus loads of movie reviews, including The Rider, Late Night, and Leave No Trace.
Unintended Consequences?
Has anyone else noticed that since we’ve all been lying low and staying away from one another, the spam calls have dried up. No more duct cleaning calls. No more computer voices from the fake Service Canada telling me there is a warrant out for my arrest. Nada.
I guess the spam call centres aren’t essential services.
27th Street 