…so I brushed them both out thoroughly this morning, filling another grocery bag with fur. I trimmed around their paws as well, and clipped the nails that needed clipping. Newfs grow fur underneath their paws and down over their paw and behind them as well. Untrimmed, this fur does an excellent job of bringing the outside inside. Ellie Mae can track more sand into the house than you want to imagine.
Ellie loves being groomed. She lets me roll her every which way, trim what I want to trim, whatever. She just enjoys every second of it. Memphis on the other hand just tolerates it. Oh yeah, you’re brushing me, hurry up already. Oh no not the paws. Leave my paws be thank you very much. Must you trim? And my nails, I’m growing those out. Don’t touch, ok?
I don’t think their fall shedding is quite done yet. I’ll bet I can fill another bag with undercoat next week.
…we don’t have an ocean…just a big lake. So, we don’t have any real use for sea shanties. What we need are lake shanties. In the absence of lake shanties, here are some sea shanties. Just pretend they’re lake shanties, ok?
Somebody landed on my blog after searching “How do I cook Hydnum repandum wild mushrooms?”
Hydnum repandum is one of the two mushroom species we commonly call the Hedgehog mushroom. It has teeth rather than gills or pores. First let me say, never eat any wild mushroom you can’t identify 100% correctly. Hedgehogs are firm and delicious mushrooms that are similar to chanterelles in both texture and taste. You can cook them any number of ways. Simply frying them up in part butter and part oil is just fine. Try them on toast! As with any wild mushroom, be sure to cook them well.
Hedgehogs are among our tastiest mushrooms. When I find them, I feature them, rather than mix them with a lot of stuff in soups and stews. There are plenty of less interesting mushrooms to toss in the pot. However, on those days when I find quite a lot of them, I dry some in my dehydrator. They dry up and reconstitute quite well.
Ghost Riders in the Sky was written back in 1948 by Stan Jones. This song, about cowboys chasing the Devil’s herd, has been recorded by many many performers. Back in the day here in Toronto, I don’t know how many times I watched the late Handsome Ned perform his fantastic version of this song. Today I’m going to feature just a few of the many versions recorded over the years. Yippee-iy-ay.
Regular readers here know I occasionally enjoy a bit of surf guitar. Here’s Dick Dale.
Vaughn Monroe, live…nice
I had thought Vaughn Monroe’s was the first version but this suggests it was Burl Ives who recorded it first.
The research was conducted with 82 male subjects who were asked to inflict varying degrees of punishment on actors if they made errors while reading scripts. It was presented as a multi-tasking study to the subjects, who are sorting various pictures while the actors read.
The punishment was made by subjecting the script reader to various volumes of sound, the highest levels believed by the subjects to be painful for the reader. The subjects were less likely to attempt to inflict pain on the reader if it was an image of meat they were looking at while the mistake was made.
It was a typical type of test for assessing aggression, the researchers said.
I wouldn’t expect those results since many people who don’t eat meat choose not to do so specifically to avoid cruelty to animals. But then, we have the notion of comfort food in our culture. For me, comfort foods include dishes made with meat and I’m sure at least part of that is that has to do with those foods harkening back to comfortable childhood times – mom’s meatloaf brings back warm memories of mom making dinner for our family, and pulling the wonderful smelling meatloaf from the oven.
Curiously, no major differences were reported in the responses of vegetarians in the experiments.
I wonder if there are practical applications to the study? For instance, would having pictures of meat in a room used for mediations ease the aggression of participants? Strange idea.
…that the line between news and entertainment and now even celebrity gossip has disappeared?
There was a time when news was news. Then newscasts started adding entertainment features, separated from the news proper but still within the confines of a newscast. Now it seems all bets are off. For instance, I heard in a single radio newscast:
Burmese election results trickle in…
Missing woman found dead…
Shooting in Mississauga…
Canada considering training role in Afghanistan…
Conan O’Brien returns to television…
Which one doesn’t belong? I think today’s example is mild. I’ve heard “news stories” about celebrity infidelities, celebrity drug addictions and so on. Our media outlets push us to care increasingly about celebrities and what they do. Phooey, I say.
Now I’ve also started to hear the line between news and opinion disappear. Of course newspapers, television and radio stations have points of view and that colours the way they present the news of the day. A local radio station, Newstalk 1010 has a guy reading the news now who presents his opinion as part of his newscast. He’ll read a headline, tell us what he thinks about it, then continue with the story, as if his opinion of it has the same value to the listener as the story, or perhaps as if his opinion of the story is more important than the story itself. It isn’t.
PS Does anyone care about tv talk shows anymore?
PPS The fact that I mention Conan O’Brien’s name here will likely up my hit count. If I really wanted to work that, I’d also work in other celeb names like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift and on and on. I used to get loads of his whenever I mentioned Amy Winehouse, but I think folks are mostly bored with her now. She used to be in the news almost every day.
The Nephew suggested we meet at a Green P parking lot at Spadina and Cecil and grab a bit to eat before the show. As I left Long Branch and steered the Anchovymobile in that general direction, I thought, geez, Spadina and Cecil, that’s Grossman’s Tavern. There’s no Green P there. The nearest one is a bit south and on the other side of the road, in Kensington Market. I waited there for a while but no sign of The Nephew. An entrepreneur selling dope on the corner glared at me after ten minutes. Maybe he thought I was muscling in on his corner.
It turned out that traffic on the Don Wally was thicker than expected (The Nephew lives in the hinterlands) and after a short while I received a phone call. He had arrived and was actually at a hidden parking lot, off a lane-way off Cecil, not a Green P lot. It had been years since I was at that lot. I forgot it even existed. We walked back to the market and agreed on a Burrito place for dinner.
We arrived at Convocation Hall plenty early and found our seat. For those not from Toronto, Convocation Hall is on the University of Toronto campus. It’s a lovely hall with a tall domed roof, staffed by students wearing, you guessed it, convocation robes. Nice touch.
In our seats, we watched the rest of the crowd file in, an audience of all ages it turned out. What surprised us were the number of audience members who brought their ukeleles to the concert. That’s how you tell a ukelele freak from a casual listener. There were dozens of people carrying their ukeleles, mostly in fancy little uke cases. A few had broken them out. Three people a few feet from us were playing a Beatles tune with enthusiasm.
After the brief introduction, six men and one woman walked on stage, the men in tuxes and the woman in a black gown, six ukes and one bass uke. They started the show in homage to the British ukelele music hall tradition, then moved right into Born to be Wild.
The do a delightful piece they call Fly me off the Handel. I found a version on YouTube:
We heard themes from Pulp Fiction and from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and the theme from Shaft. We heard Rock around the Clock, Orange Blossom Special, Teenage Dirtbag, Hot Tamales, a fantastic version of that lovely Sex Pistols ditty, Anarchy in the UK (perhaps my fave of the night…they even included “get pissed – destroy” at the end). They played a classical piece I didn’t know and a blues called Limehouse Blues I also didn’t know. Oh, and did I mention Psycho Killer? And the Nirvana tune, Smells Like Teen Spirit? Pinball Wizard? They played those and several more I didn’t mention in two generous sets.
The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain has been at it for 25 years now. They are very, very good at what they do. There is a strong comedic element, beginning with the concept of a uke orchestra playing mostly covers of very well-known tunes not normally played with ukeleles. The comedy is successful because the music is remarkable and exceptionally well-played. By using a variety of ukes and tunings along with clever musical and vocal arrangements, the Orchestra musters up a musical range way beyond anything you might expect a bunch of ukelele players to ever achieve.
The group also brings together music from wildly disparate genres using a generous helping of ukelele glue, and they make is seems as if it is most reasonable thing.
We had a great time. The show was fabulous and it was fun to spend some time with The Nephew as well.
Here’s another from YouTube, the theme from The Good The Bad and The Ugly.
Here’s Jerry Jeff Walker singing about a boot-maker down in Texas named Charlie Dunn…
….just cause I love this song.
I used to have a pair of cowboy boots I bought many years ago on a trip to Seattle with Candy Minx and the Underground Baker. I wore them all the time, and then my feet changed or the boots changed and suddenly I couldn’t wear them any more.
Suddenly and for no apparent reason, the old soul tune, Groove Me popped into my head. It may be there for a while. Here’s my favourite version of it, by Leroy Sibbles.
Newfs shed twice each year, in spring and in fall. There’s a little residual shedding in between, but mostly they blow their coat twice each year and when they do, a lot of hair comes off. I brushed Ellie Mae today and stuffed a grocery store bag with her hair. I did the same a few days ago, and I don’t think we’re done yet.
27th Street 