- The $35 Atlantis word processor (see my entry for June 18, 2010) installs effortlessly under Wine and runs without a glitch under Linux. (It has a Platinum compatibility rating, and they don’t get any better than that.) If you’re doing or considering ebook development under Linux, it generates a very good EPub file, and is quite fast and extremely low-profile. (1.5 MB!)
- Doesn’t Popular Science tell us this (and just as emphatically) every three or four years? I’ll believe it when I actually see zepps flying over my house.
- From Bob Fegert comes word that Ray Kurzweil hopes to shake up the ebook business with his still-unreleased Blio reader. I’ve known of Blio for some time; what’s new is the partnership with Toshiba to create a Blio ebook store supporting PDF, XPS, and EPub books. However, what may make Ray the new kingmaker in the ebook world is a recent Federal requirement that universities make their e-readers accessible to the blind. Blio will do that very well (as you might expect, given Kurzweil’s history) and the reader is capable of rendering textbooks to an extent that most other ebook software/hardware combos simply can’t. Much to watch here.
- Having just spent a great deal of money changing out my glasses to a new prescription, I think this Android eye-test app is clearly and crisply brilliant.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Cyberlocker, a cloud-based file-hosting site. The term is generally used of sites like Rapidshare, which are coming to be seen by Big Content as the greatest single offenders in the file-sharing wars.
- Just as Shrek is selling Vidalia onions, I heard from a reader that Wallace & Gromit not only put the Wensleydale cheeses on the map, but with the power of cartoon branding brought the cheeses’ producer back from the brink of bankruptcy.
- Rich Dailey N8UX writes to tell us that the original Idle-Tyme rolling ball clock is back in production again, after 25 years. I saw one in a store window I don’t know how many years ago and giggled a little at the product’s inherent audacity, but it had a following, and I bought a plastic knockoff in the late 70s. The clock broke, but I still have the balls in a drawer somewhere. Read the history page; the inventor (like a lot of inventors) was a very interesting man.
food
Odd Lots
Daywander
Well, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map or a piece of paper but a hatchet. (In fact, it looks a lot more like a meat cleaver.) There’s also a girl-version of the icon, with a ponytail, but what we saw on the gate of a pickup truck was almost precisely what I show above left.
We had a relatively small gathering last night, but that was all right, as there were few enough of us to all sit on the two couches and talk about everything from dogs to SF to classic aircraft of the Strategic Air Command. We spoke of that lunatic Lt. Col. Bud Holland, whose lifelong ambition appears to have been to roll a B-52. (Detailed discussion here.) He tried, he failed, and you can see a video of the results here. Eric Bowersox and Sabrina Hoyt brought some Mountain Dew Throwback, made with real sugar instead of corn leavins’, and the original product artwork on the cans. There were intermittent thunderstorms all afternoon, but we had enough time between microcells to grill a batch of smoked brats and Ranch Food Direct burgers. By sheer coincidence both Mike Reith and Peggy Sargent brought cream puffs, and it had been so long since I’d had one that I’d mostly forgotten what cream puffs were. That memory came back in a big hurry, heh.
Alas, the thunderstorms prevented me from getting any Field Day time in yesterday, and with less than an hour remaining in the contest and yet another thunderboomer passing overhead as I write, I doubt I’ll get any time in this year at all. I created what I had hoped to be a low-profile inverted vee, and in truth, when I told people I had antenna off the back deck, several people looked and just didn’t see it, when when I was pointing right at it. It’s designed to be portable, and is attached to the deck railing with bungee cords. I’ll try to get a couple of days’ contacts with it, then roll it up and put it back in the garage.
There was more bear action yesterday. Late afternoon, our doorbell rang, and it was our new neighbors from across the street. Heather and Glen had gone for a walk with their two small boys, aged two and four, and left their garage door open. When they returned, sho’nuff, a bear was in their garage ransacking their garbage can. Heather asked to bring her boys inside, but about then Glen came back and said he’d driven the bear off by throwing rocks at it, after which it vanished up the street and ran between two other houses. (Glen’s an Army officer. Spend some time in Iraq and bears lose a lot of their mystique.) I’m guessing it was the same bear I saw yesterday about lunchtime, eating dog food down in our gully near our back door. It seems a little too comfortable with people and a little too willing to be out and around during the day to stay here, and if it comes back too much we’re going to have to put a call in and see if it can be relocated.
Lots of leftovers from last night, and I’ll be grilling Ranch Food Direct burgers again this evening if the rain will just stop for half an hour. The West is getting soaked this year. Our local reservoirs are full, and western Nebraska’s massive Lake McConaughy is refilling (after a 9-year drought that the doomsayers warned would be permanent) at a rate of two feet per week. When we first saw it we marveled at the broad sand beaches, which were not in fact beaches at all but recently exposed lake bottom. It was about 30% full when we first saw it several years ago. It’s now over 80% full and the water level is rising fast. (Note the end of the curve on the graph, and then see this graph to get a sense for the insane amount of water flowing into it this year.) We hope to take a long weekend up there before the summer’s over.
This coming week should be fairly peaceful. I intend to do some fiction writing and perhaps even finish an experiment I have on the bench downstairs, concerning how well IN23A microwave diodes serve as AM BCB detectors. What I know of detector theory tells me that such detectors should be socko. We’ll find out–that’s what science is for.
Rant: Eat Food. Not Too Much. And Sometimes Plants.
Oh me, oh my, oh me, oh my…I’m just such a bad boy. Last year, I violated the Laws of Thermodynamics by eating more calories…and losing weight. Now, since we all know that every calorie is exactly like every other calorie (settled science!) and since we know that if you take in more calories than you burn, you gain weight, well, what other conclusion can I draw? The Laws of Thermodynamics are wrong! And by next week I’ll have this unbalanced wheel spinning away here! Somebody please wire NIST for me; my FAX machine is broken. They can send the Nobel Prize to my Stanwell St. address.
I’ve had to drill new holes in all my belts. I’m not kidding; you can still see the leather shreds on my 3/16″ bit.
Other weirdnesses are besetting me. My blood pressure is down. It wasn’t all that high to begin with (let’s call it high-normal; Carol doesn’t want me to post precise numbers) and now it’s normal-normal. My blood numbers are good, and haven’t changed a whole lot since I gave up habitual sugar in 1997, at which point they abruptly went from worrisomely high to…low-normal. So how did I do it? What’s the magic method?
Simple. Read this very carefully:
Eat food. Not too much. And sometimes plants.
Or, if you’d prefer the shorter, hipper, periods-for-emphasis version:
Eat. More. Animal. Fat.
I eat an egg fried in butter every morning, and I don’t skimp on the butter. I eat full-fat Greek-style yogurt with breakfast. I eat great mounds of several kinds of cheese. I have everybody-knows-are-hideous things like bratwurst for lunch and sometimes supper, especially in good weather when I can toss them on the grill. I eat steak, ground buffalo, pork roast, and chicken deep-fried in lard, when I can find it. (Alas, the poor lards have been hunted nearly to extinction by cruel activists bearing rapid-fire lawsuits and campaign dollars.)
And most recently, I’ve discovered extra-rich milk. It’s not easy to find, but it’s worth the search. Hereabouts, you can get it in half gallons or gallons at Farm Crest milk stores. Farm Crest milk comes from cows not treated with antibiotics or growth hormone, which is why I started drinking their lower-fat versions to begin with. And it is the whitest, creamiest, most delicious milk I’ve ever tasted. 4.5% milkfat, wow.
So why am I not dead? Am I some kind of alien fluke, or zombie? (If so, I’m coming for your brains, which are deliciously high in fat.) By all the objective measures that we have, I’m healthy and apparently getting healthier. (And most recently, I discovered during a routine eye exam that my vision is getting better. Not so much better as to obviate the need for glasses, but my prescription went down almost half a diopter. No clue why–even I won’t blame it on a low-carb regime–just tossing it on the table.)
That’s the more. Here’s the flipside: I eat a lot less pasta and rice than I used to, love it though I may. I have refined sugar only occasionally, and then only as dessert after a high-fat meal. And little by little, I’m trying to give up refined grains and starches, though that’s a much tougher climb. I do eat vegetables that don’t make me gag or bloat, admitting that it’s a short list. I eat fresh fruit only in moderation, since fruit is mostly sugar. I snack on peanuts or almonds, chased by a glass of extra-rich milk. Once it goes down, I’m not hungry anymore. (Bet I can stop eatin’ em!)
Like a lot of people, I went on the low-fat, high-carb diet recommended by our all-wise, benevolent Federal government in the 70s, and that’s when I started to put on weight. Middle age accelerated the process, and I’d probably be over 200 by now if I hadn’t figured it out.
So let me beat you shamelessly over the head with it, while reminding you that this is one of my clearly labeled and tightly self-rationed rants:
1. Government low-fat dietary guidelines are bullshit, all of them anchored in the bogus work of Right Man Dr. Ancel Keys, who may well be the most damaging fraud in the entire history of science. He had data for 22 countries. He picked the six countries that supported his hypothesis, that fat is bad for you. Then he attacked his critics until the government raised him to sainthood. Over the next thirty years, humanity gained the weight of a minor planet.
2. We know a great deal less about health and nutrition than we think we do, and as with all science, what we know gets old fast. For a quick catch-up, read Gary Taubes‘ book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Breaking news: Human biochemistry is complicated! Story at 11!
3. You may be the fluke, and thrive without effort on a low-fat diet. Maybe we’re all flukes–human beings are not identical. (I love the word “fluke”! I had it printed right on my VOM!) Makes no nevermind: You have the power to find out. You are the experiment. Do the science. I did.
Good luck. Butter is delicious.
I Plum Forgot…
…to tell you that we’d gone to Hawaii. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. But after five years without a real vacation (and by “real” I mean “with a salt-water beach and palm trees”) we just packed up and went, no regrets and little time spent packing. I mean, they have Wal-Marts in Hawaii, so whatever we might fail to bring can be had without much anguish.
No anguish necessary. We brought everything we had to have (like, how badly does anybody need socks in Hawaii?) and Maui suits me just fine: Ten minutes after we got into our room overlooking Polo Beach, Carol was out on the balcony staring at the blue ocean, when she yells, “A whale!” And by cracky, one of them 40-ton bass yodelers had just thrown itself out of the depths and most of the way up into the sunlight. For another half an hour we watched, and they were out there in force, frolicking, flapping their flukes, and finding it all a fine, fine time.
Didn’t expect whales. And after five years, I’d forgotten a certain amount of beach discipline. That blue water looked so damned good after a deep frozen winter that simply won’t end (and still hasn’t) that I just waded in, forgetting I was wearing my expensive titanium-frame prescription sunglasses until a seven-foot wave crested over my head and knocked them off, simultaneously sending twin columns of high-pressure saline solution up my nose. Once I could breathe again I realized that my sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, and Carol and I spent another half an hour examining the ocean bottom during the wave troughs. We found a hotel key card and then somebody else’s sunglasses, as well as a heavily corroded penny and a sea urchin spine, before Carol sang out that she had them. That was a helluva break, considering how the waves were stirring up the sand on the bottom. The lenses picked up a few pits and scratches but are otherwise intact, and that is a mistake I doubt I will make again any time soon.
To celebrate our unlikely victory, I returned to my hard-drinking ways at dinner that evening, and had not one but two margaritas with my grilled walu.
Not much more to report. You all know what Hawaii looks like, and if I had had the presence of mind to install a photo editor on my new laptop before we left, I might have been able to post a picture or two here. The weather has been perfect, if a little windy. The food’s good, the bed’s great, the company sans pareille. I vacation as men might choose, though if I do get to choose, I choose not to wait another five years to do it again!
Odd Lots
- Here’s the best discussion I’ve yet seen on why Flash may never work well–or perhaps at all–on touchscreen devices like the iPad.
- Most recent laser printers have Ethernet ports, and some older printers (like my Laserjet 2100TN) can accept a JetDirect network adapter. Installing a printer on a network port means you don’t have to worry about whether the machine it’s attached to is turned on. If you’d like to do this but you’re not a network geek, here’s the best XP-based step-by-step on the topic I’ve ever run across. Same tutorial for Windows 2000.
- Bruce Baker passed me a link to a nice item on the issue of broadening publisher book production to allow all formats to be generated from a single master file. Follow and read the link to The New Sleekness as well. Pablo should take it down a notch; XML is not a markup language; it’s a general mechanism for creating markup languages, and what may happen eventually (perhaps in ten years or so) is a standard book-production markup language derived from XML and built into a new generation of word processors. Still, what nobody in either article mentions is the problem of pages verses reflowable, which is the 9 trillion pound gorilla in the business. If you don’t solve that problem, absolutely nothing else matters. (And it is not as easy to solve as some may claim–I’ve been thinking about it for several years now and see no solution whatsoever on the horizon .)
- Kompozer 0.8b2 has been released. I just got it installed in a VM and will be poking at it in coming days. According to Kaz, most of the changes are code cleanups, but any progress on the editor is a fine, fine thing.
- I’ve done model rocketry here and there over the (many) years, and I’ve seen some very odd things lofted on D engines. Back in high school, my friend George built a Harecules Guided Muscle (which was from the Beany & Cecil cartoon show) in the form of a big whittled balsa wood fist on a short, thick body. I’m amazed it flew as well as it did. Well, here’s a fire-’em-together pack of 8 rockets shaped and colored like Crayola crayons. The guy took his time (six years) but he did a great job–and created a spectacular Web page documenting the project.
- We rarely go to WalMart, but last time we did, I picked up a bottle of Diet Mountain Lightning. It has nothing on Kroger’s Diet Citrus Drop, easily the best of all the Diet Mountain Dew clones I’ve ever had the opportunity to try.
Odd Lots
- Several people have asked why I didn’t post any photos from the big 4-day dog show in Denver, and I must admit (with profound annoyance) that my camera bag vanished sometime on Monday, and both of my digital cameras were in it. That’s a Canon G10 and a Nikon CoolPix S630, and with the biggish SD cards I put in them, it’s close to a $1000 loss. Neither the hotel nor the National Western Complex recovered the bag, so I can only assume it was stolen during the show, and with it went all the photos we took through Sunday night.
- Slashdot reports that 80% of all software exploits during the fourth quarter of 2009 were malicious PDF documents. I’ve been a Foxit user for some time, but as Foxit becomes more popular, the bad guys will begin exploiting its flaws as well. (There is evidence that this has already happened.) It may be time to test software like Evince and Sumatra, both of which are available for Linux and Windows.
- As I write this, you have eight hours to bid on the Compaq II machine that Anders Hejlsberg used to develop Turbo Pascal 4.0. The proceeds from the auction go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. It’s one of those green-screen luggable that I always admired, but bidding is currently at $2025, yikes. (Thanks to the many who pointed this out, with Larry O’Brien being the first.)
- Something confirming a phenomenon that I’ve noticed: Food expiration dates are conservative, and most food is good for a reasonable period after they supposedly time out. Still, after expiry, your nose is your stomach’s best friend.
- For whatever it’s worth, here’s a list of the top-grossing movies of all time, with inflation-adjusted values. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) Unsurprisingly, Gone With the Wind still beats all comers with a mind-boggling 1.5 billion dollars, the though the original Star Wars is right behind it at $1.3B. What’s worth noting is that all but six films in the top 14 were either Disney animation or special-effects extravaganzas. (It’s all but five if you think the opticals in The Ten Commandments were significant, as I do.) Lesson: We don’t go to the movies to watch unpleasant people screaming at one another.
- Also from Frank comes a pointer to a short item suggesting that we kiss to enforce reproductive monogamy by developing immunities to one another’s specific viruses. I’m not sure I buy it either, but evolution has done far weirder things than this.
Victoria Duntemann’s Home-Made Beef Barley Soup
My mother was not a fantastic cook (as the youngest of eight kids, her older sisters did all the cooking and hence all the learning) but certain things she did very well. One of these was beef barley soup, and in her honor I made a pot of it today, according to her recipe as I best remember it, with only minor tweaks. My sister Gretchen pitched in on the remembering, reminding me that mother used tomato soup instead of diced tomatoes, but having imbibed a little too much of it in the early ’60s, I cannot abide tomato soup.
So here’s the recipe. It works, though it makes a lot, and in dinner-party portions probably serves 10 or 12. Carol and I will feast on it for a day or two and then freeze the rest.
- 1 pound stew meat
- 32 oz beef stock or broth
- 6 cups water
- 1 cup pearled barley
- 1 large onion
- 1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes
- 2 large carrots
- 3 large stalks celery
- 2 tblsp salt
Cut the beef up into small chunks, suitable for spooning. Mix beef chunks in a bowl with flour to coat all pieces. Melt a little butter in the bottom of a suitably large pot and brown the beef. Once the beef is browned, add in the broth, the water, the salt, and the barley. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 or 20 minutes to give the barley a good head start.
Add the vegetables. Simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour, or until the barley gets soft enough for you. (If you need to shorten the cooking time, use quick-cook barley, throw everything together at the beginning, and cook for only half an hour or forty minutes.) If you like pepper (we don’t, not that much) grind a little in.
Note that I prefer “hearty” soup, which means you can stand a spoon up in it. The recipe sounds like it calls for a lot of liquid, but barley is half-sponge, and when you’re done you’ll have something about 40% of the way from soup to stew. For thinner soup, add water or cut back a little on the barley. Nothing critical about the recipe; more meat would work, and you can leave out the onion if that’s an issue.
And there you have it. We ate simply but well when I was a kid. The evidence is in the pot.
Odd Lots
- We take digital clocks for granted, but this project may give you some perspective on just how difficult a challenge a digital clock really is. Absent integrated circuits, it takes over 1200 discrete electronic components to make a 6-digit digital clock. And you can get a kit.
- Maybe RCA’s engineers are having a little fun with us. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but I still don’t understand how this thing is not a hoax. I maybe know a little bit about both RF power physics (37 years in ham radio) and Wi-Fi. If there’s a place in the world with enough Wi-Fi hotspots to make that little box generate useful power, please tell me where, so I can be sure never to go anywhere near it.
- Several people have noticed that my author bio photo on Amazon has been replaced by someone else’s. Most oddly, the photo is of my old friend Jon Shemitz of Santa Cruz, who’s done some very good books on Kylix and .NET 2.0. I’ve been trying to get Amazon’s attention for a couple of weeks now, no luck yet.
- Classmates.com did it again: They sent me an email asking whether I’d like to reconnect with a girl from my high school class. As I’ve said before, Lane Tech High was all-male until several years after I graduated, so there was no Teresa Mazzerelli in my class–nor does she appear in the alumni directory. One I could call a database error. Two I call fraud. Don’t give these guys your money.
- Malt is my favorite ice cream flavor, but it’s very hard to come by. Several companies have offered it in the last ten or twelve years, including Meadow Gold and Boulder, but the flavor has always vanished after a few months. I guess I may just have to make my own.
- Sprint may be partnering with Wal-Mart to put WiMax nodes on top of every single Wal-Mart in the country. This is not the first time I’ve heard this, and have reported on it before, but having had some experience with something a little like WiMax, I think it could be a huge moneymaker for Wal-Mart if they don’t let the control freaks at Sprint ruin it.
- From the Words-I-Hadn’t-Heard-In-Thirty-Years-Until-Yesterday Department: bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel. Why, then, does it suggest erecting a shrine to the Emperor out of cow pies?
A Videophone Christmas
A day late, perhaps, but no less sincerely, let me wish everyone who reads this a good and blessed Christmas, from here on the snowy side of Cheyenne Mountain. We had a day so cold, clear, and crisp that I was walking around the house carefully, lest it shatter. This was our year to stay in Colorado for the holiday season. (Next year, as is our custom, we’ll be in Chicago.) Two thirds of the country had a white Christmas, which is great unless you happen to be traveling while the whitening is going on. Ducked that bullet, whew.
We’ve had our tree for a week or so now, and it may rank as the best Christmas tree we’ve ever scored. Tall by our historical standards at about 7′, it’s also a balsam, a breed of tree I don’t think we’ve ever had in 33 years of marriage. I’ve been a little leery of them since I was five or six and broke out in a rash on my hands when my mother allowed me to place some ornaments on the tree. Somewhere we have a photo of me hanging ornaments with my winter mittens on, and although history is silent on the point, I have to wonder if some of my poor mother’s ornaments didn’t survive the adventure.
No rash this time–I guess one can grow out of such things–and the tree is not so full as to make finding places for ornaments a challenge, nor so sparse as to look like Charley Brown’s poor twig from the Peanuts TV special. It’s taking water and is not yet losing needles. Dash pulled a stuffed Saguaro cactus ornament off the tree and tried to remove its stuffing, but we caught him before he got too far. Jack has been spotted licking the colored light bulbs when they’re off, but apart from that there’s been no tree mischief.
There was some stress on Tuesday night when Carol’s mom fell at her home outside Chicago and was taken to the hospital. She didn’t break anything, fortunately, but had to spend Christmas in a hospital bed. To cheer her up I put an SX270 system on the coffee table by the Christmas tree and set up a Skype video call with my nephew Brian. The hospital has Wi-Fi in the rooms, and Brian set his new laptop up on Delores’s bed tray. So by virtue of my Phillips ToUCam and Brian’s built-in Webcam, she could see us, the dogs, and the Christmas tree. Delores was delighted, and it’s a technique to keep in mind if you find yourself in such a situation. Skype is very good with detecting and autoconfiguring Webcams, and there was no fussing involved. I plugged in the ToUCam, made the call, and video happened. It’s not exactly a flying car, but it’s definitely one of those odd Sixties dreams fulfilled, mostly when nobody was looking.
We also called my sister and Bill on Bill’s laptop, and sang the ABCs song with Katie. Katie looked puzzled, but Julie just beamed. In another couple of years this sort of thing will be second nature to them.
This was a very good year for Lionel trains: I finally bought a modern steam locomotive to run around the tree, and boggled a little to find myself searching underneath the brand-new 4-6-0 MTH Camelback loco (above) for its volume control. It has a built-in electronic sound effects system that plays real steam locomotive sounds, a bell, water-pump thumps, and other racket at deafening volume. Jack backed around the tree as I slowly ran it along the 
tracks, yapping furiously at it until he got bored. Pete Albrecht unexpectedly sent me a rare artifact indeed: An original Lionel 275W ZW dual-control transformer (right) that was probably made in the midlate 1950s. It works great, and can control two independent track sections and two independent sets of accessories.
Christmas for us really isn’t about gifts (and I confess to being a little tired of Santa Claus supersaturation this year) but once again, my spouse knows me well, and bought me an electric blue summer robe to replace my old terrycloth robe that’s been falling to pieces for the last ten years. She also presented me with my recent books wantlist: The Long Summer and Fish On Friday, both histories by Brian Fagan, and two popular treatments of decision psychology: Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Fagan is the author of The Little Ice Age, and The Long Summer is his followup about the warm period that followed the end of the last ice age.
I bought Carol her fondest wish: A universal TV system remote that allows you to program whatever sequence of steps is required to turn everything on and then pop the drawer for a DVD, all with a single button press. (She’s justifiably weary of having a fruit-bowl full of diverse, incompatible, button-riddled remotes on the coffee table.) It’s a Logitech Harmony One, and I guess now I have to figure out how to program it. Hey, I know assembly; how hard can it be?
Our friends Jim and Marcia came by for Christmas dinner at 2. We had a spiral ham, Yukon Gold mashed potatoes, spinach salad, home-made apple-pecan bread from Jimi Henton, steamed asparagus, and Carol’s signature spiced squash soup with cranraisins floating in it. I opened a Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel 2007, and we had hot spiced cider as well as some Colorado honey mead that Jim brought. We stayed at the table for almost six hours, solving the world’s problems and designing the odd universe, and overall considered it an excellent Christmas Day indeed.
Nor is it over. Carol and I celebrate Christmas for at least a week, so for us it’s really only beginning. If this is your season (whatever you may call it) to celebrate all that is good in the world, hold that thought–there’s no reason at all to stay there for one day only and call it done!
Whiskey Handed ‘Round in Tumblers
We’ve just gotten back Midnight Mass…for small values of “Midnight.” Very small values. Ok, ok, I know…I’m not a night person. For me and for today, midnight comes at 4:00 PM. I like to be awake when I worship; inflicting my dreams on God would be cruelty to deity: A few nights ago I dreamed of three life-size crowns of thorns, each of which had three little legs, and the whole group was chasing some poor guy up a steep hill. God’s been there and done that; no need to put Him through it again.
And on the CD player is Golden Bough doing a very English sort of Christmas Carol that also mentions Midnight Mass: “Christmas Comes But Once a Year.” (The link is to the Clancy Brothers cover, but it has the lyrics.) The song describes the sort of feasting I can barely imagine, especially the line describing “Whiskey handed round in tumblers…”
Wow.
Maybe “tumbler” means something different these days, or to us Yanks. When I was a kid a “tumbler” was what I also called a “jelly glass”: a tall, fairly narrow glass that we had because we bought jelly in it at Certified, and after we cleaned out the jelly (which was a week or so’s worth of PBJ school lunches) we had a glass. These probably held a pint or maybe a little less; perhaps 12 ounces at very least. They were our everyday drinking glasses, and we used them until we got a little jittery and broke them, one by one.
Jelly no longer comes in useful glasses, but there was a time about twenty-five years ago when peanut butter did. I don’t remember the brand, but we bought our peanut butter in glass jars that held about 14 fluid ounces, and after we finished the peanut butter, we washed out the jars and kept them for everyday drinking glasses. We went through a lot of peanut butter in those days, and before we decided that enough was enough, we had twelve glasses in the cabinet.
Then either the peanut butter went away, or we did. (That may have been when we moved to Arizona.) And over the years, I have downed an enormous amount of Diet Mountain Dew in those glasses. One by one, I’ve gotten jittery and dropped them, and there are now only six. (The half-life of a dozen peanut butter jars used as Mountain Dew glasses is evidently twenty-five years.)
Regardless of what was originally in the glass, 12 or 14 ounces seems like an astonishing amount of whiskey to put away at one meal. I have a bottle of Evan Williams Bourbon Whiskey Egg Nog in the fridge, and typically drink about 50 ml in an evening, which is plenty. Given that it’s a 15% cordial, my limit (for 86-proof whiskey, at least) is about .15 X 2.3 X 50, or 17 ml. A hard drinker I am evidently not. (And clearly, not English.)
Or maybe “handed ’round in tumblers” means what my friends used to do with a joint back in the 70s: Pass it from person to person, with each person taking a draw and then passing it on. Or maybe people really do drink 14 ounces of whiskey at one sitting. Again, I boggle.
Doesn’t matter. We’re about to sit down to a feast of smoked turkey slices, cranberry sauce, and a loaf of home-made apple-pecan bread that Jimi Henton gave us for Christmas. I opened a bottle of Whitewater Hill Sweetheart Red, and poured each of us a glass that might be a full 100 ml. We may go a little nuts later on and have some of the Evan Williams, handed around in (one) peanut-butter jar. I may eat my two allotted slices of Jimi’s bread and then cut a third. Hey, Christmas comes but once a year!
