Photos? What photos? November 7, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in Uncategorized, wit and wisdom.Tags: blogging, FoodPress, Freshly Pressed, Luddites, our friend Ben, Poor Richard's Almanac, WordPress
2 comments
It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, here today to talk about a query that’s been cropping up a lot on our blog lately and causing some confusion to your humble bloggers, yours truly, Silence Dogood, and our friend Ben. Our blog host is WordPress, which we love, and it has a great spam filter, Akismet. Akismet has been auto-dumping all these queries into our spam folder. Why?
The general query seems both harmless and relevant. In its many incarnations, it’s basically “Why don’t you ever change the design of your blog, and why don’t you have any photos?” We think these are perfectly legitimate questions that deserve honest answers. What confuses us is why we’re being swamped with bazillion versions of this query now, and why they’re all going straight to spam. We’ll answer the questions anyway.
We don’t change our blog’s design because we’re Poor Richard’s Almanac and we think the design looks, well, appropriately almanac-ish. We also think the typeface and clean presentation make our posts easy to read, and since our blog is all about reading and writing, that’s very important to us.
So much for the easy question. Why we don’t have photos is also easy to answer, but more complex in its implications. Basically, we don’t have photos because, as our friend Ben says upfront in the blog’s subhead, we’re Luddites. All three of us are so technologically inept that replacing a lightbulb constitutes a major technological achievement. Or try this recent technological breakthrough, as reported to me by Silence:
OFB: Silence, there’s something wrong with the coffee machine! I can’t get it to turn on!
Silence: Mmmmpfff. [Rolls over, pulls up blanket, ignores OFB.]
OFB: Please, Silence! I can’t figure out the problem. Please get up and see what’s wrong with it!
Silence: [Suppresses comments, staggers into kitchen, stares at coffeemaker.] Ben, I unplugged it last night to make popcorn and forgot to plug it back in. See? It’s unplugged. Now watch this! [Plugs in cord, turns on coffee machine.] Isn’t it amazing?!
OFB: It’s still not coming on.
[Silence and OFB stare at machine in horror. Silence turns on countertop oven and stove. Nothing. She presses the "test" and "reset" buttons on a light switch/outlet at the end of the counter. Nothing. After about five tries, she goes to the circuit-breaker box in the mudroom and begins flipping switches. Nothing. Depsondent, she returns to the kitchen.]
Silence: Ben, nothing’s working. I guess we’ll have to call the handyman and hope he can get down here today. We have to have a working stove!
OFB: Er. Remember when this happened before? I would swear you were able to get everything working again by pushing those buttons on the outlet.
Silence: But I did push the buttons, over and over, and nothing’s happened.
OFB: Maybe you should try again.
Silence: [Glares at OFB, furiously pushes buttons on outlet, finally sees that one says "test" and one says "reset" and pushes the test button first, then the reset, then stops pushing.] Try it now, Ben.
OFB: Hey, the light came on!
[curtain]
I’m no better. If I weren’t a teacher, I probably wouldn’t know anything about technology at all. So as you can imagine, our collective photographic skills are pretty much nil. I can at least manage to get the entire subject in the photo, unlike OFB, who always manages to cut off the top of someone’s head or the tips of his dog’s ears, or poor Silence, whose shots tend to be obliterated by her thumb inevitably placed over part of the lens. As for digital photography, splurging on a digital camera, downloading photos, manipulation of digital images, and the like: forget that.
It’s not that we don’t enjoy photos on other people’s blogs; of course we do. But we’re writers, and we use our blog as a showcase for our writing, whether we’re trying to be helpful (like Silence), informative (like me), or just ranting (as in the typical OFB post). We all believe that strong writing conveys images along with sounds, scents, and every other sensation. So the challenge for us is to make sure our writing is good enough. And we leave it to our readers to be the judges of that. So far, according to WordPress’s counter, we’ve had over 223,000 visits from people seeking information or entertainment, so somebody’s reading us, even without photos.
But even our beloved WordPress exacts a price for our photo-free posts. WordPress now has two features that showcase blogs it deems worthy of attention. One, called Freshly Pressed, prominently features its picked posts every time you go on the WordPress site to log on. The other, FoodPress, highlights posts about food and cooking. (I’ll bet you guessed that.) In both cases, showcased blogs have the opportunity to attract millions of new viewers. WordPress should be commended for helping its bloggers reach a wider audience.
For us, there’s just one little problem: To be featured, your blog must have photos. We find this a bit ironic for a blog host called WORDPress, but there it is. As a teacher by vocation and a historian, coin collector, backyard birdwatcher, and hot-pepper enthusiast by avocation, this doesn’t bother me; my topics are probably too obscure to rate showcasing even if they did have photos. But I know it kills our friend Ben, since a showcased post might finally attract the attention of a MacArthur award nominator, and distresses Silence, who is quite passionate about her cooking posts. (“Imagine if Julia Child or MFK Fisher or, say, Escoffier had been forced to include photos with their writing!” Silence sniffs. And the FoodPress guidelines were especially merciless, saying in effect “Nobody wants to read your stupid recipe if it doesn’t show photos of the food!!!”)
Well, we beg to differ. Silence rightly points out that food photography is the hardest of all. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of unappetizing photos of food that make you wish you’d never eaten before in your life; we certainly have. Better to have no photos than to show bad photos, and that applies to every post, whatever its topic, but especially to something that’s supposed to be enticing. Kudos to those bloggers—and we know several—who are both good writers and good photographers!
Of course, we’re aware that you don’t have to be a good photographer to add visual interest to your posts. One of our blogging friends is a genius at finding photos and illustrations that provide an ironic visual commentary on his posts. What we can’t figure out is where he finds them, how long it takes him to find them, and how it could possibly be legal to simply put them up on one’s own blog without even crediting their originators, much less paying them.
The three of us here at Poor Richard’s Almanac aren’t in agreement about all things, to say the least. But we are in agreement about this: Tempus fugit. Time is fleeting. There’s only so much sand in the hourglass, and we have plenty to do in our real lives to use it up. We blog for pleasure, not profit or celebrity. We love thinking, writing, kicking it up in our posts and having fun doing it. As Sherlock Holmes famously noted, there’s only so much room in the brain-attic, so you’d better focus on storing the things that matter to you and clean out the rest. Please don’t ask us to waste time becoming competent photographers; the blogosphere is flooded with them. Let us put our focus on something else: On becoming such good thinkers and writers that you want to read our posts, even if there’s nary a photo to be seen. We may have a way to go, but trust us, we’re working on it.
Your friend,
Richard Saunders
Up in arms. November 6, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: anguished English, headline bloopers, awful headlines, bad writing
1 comment so far
Our friend Ben was shocked and appalled when I turned on my computer this morning and was confronted by the following AP headline: “Arms mounted onto giant Jesus statue in Poland.” Talk about blasphemy! Our friend Ben was certain that the Prince of Peace would never approve, and besides, I’d always thought of Poland as a deeply religious country. What the bleep?!
Clicking the link, I discovered that the headline actually referred to an enormous statue of Jesus that was being erected in the little town of Swiebodzin, Poland. The statue is so huge that it has to be constructed in parts, and today, the section containing Jesus’ arms and chest was hoisted into place, leaving only the head awaiting placement.
But oh, please. Shouldn’t a reporter be capable of an unambiguous headline? “World’s largest Jesus statue nears completion” or, if you must have a pun, “Construction of giant Jesus statue moves ahead”? “Arms mounted onto giant Jesus statue in Poland,” with its Cold War overtones, sounds more like one of the bloopers written by sixth-graders in our friend Ben’s favorite language book, Richard Lederer’s Anguished English. (“Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years.” “[Benjamin Franklin] invented electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, ‘A horse divided against itself cannot stand.’”) Shame on the reporter who wrote that headline, and the publisher who let it see the light of print!
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they write.
Thanksgiving sides. November 4, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in recipes, wit and wisdom.Tags: braised escarole, butternut-spinach saute, easy cold-weather side dishes, fall and winter side dishes, roasted sweet potatoes with mushrooms and sweet onions, Thanksgiving side dishes, Three Notch'd Grill
1 comment so far
Silence Dogood here. Okay, it’s only November 4th, but the Harvest Home season is in full swing—our friend Ben and I consider Harvest Home to last from Labor Day through Thanksgiving—and besides, admit it: You’re already thinking about Thanksgiving dinner, right?
Some Thanksgiving sides are simply iconic. Here at Hawk’s Haven, these include mashed potatoes, dressing, dried corn pudding, and cranberries (both homemade and that childhood favorite from a can, jellied cranberries). We always have a big, fresh tossed salad, and we usually serve green beans or sauteed spinach to counterbalance all that starch. And we do love our sweet potatoes, baked to the point of caramelizing and served up with butter, salt, and cracked black pepper. Yum!!!!
However, we’re always open to new ideas, and this year, I have three to offer. (I’ll give you my unspeakably good dressing and dried corn pudding recipes, not to mention my Dogood Family Cranberry Recipe and fabulous Thanksgiving salad as the holiday draws nearer, so stay tuned.) One great thing about all three of these dishes is that they’re so easy to make, you could serve them every week through the cold season, yet they’re so delicious, they’ll set off a holiday feast. Let’s take a look at them:
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Mushrooms and Sweet Onion
This is a dish of my own devising, and boy, is it delicious. Nothing could be easier to make, and served over rice or with a side of creamy pasta (and baked or roasted chicken for you carnivores out there) and a salad, it’s a perfect cold-weather meal. Healthy and luscious—how often do you see that combination? It’s OFB’s favorite, so we serve it often. And it really is this easy:
Wash 1 1/2 sweet potatoes per person, skins on. Cut off ends and compost, then slice sweet potatoes in 1/2-inch-thick rounds. (We prefer organic sweet potatoes, since we leave the skins on, but whether you opt for organic or not, we can assure you that the resulting rounds are uniformly tender and delicious, skins and all.) Peel 2 large sweet onions (Vidalia’s our favorite for this), cut off and compost the ends (our compost bucket is always present when we’re making supper), and cut each onion into eighths (wedges). Wash a pound (16 ounces) of button mushrooms and twist out the stems, adding the stems to the compost bucket.
Place the sweet potato rounds on an aluminum-foil-lined cookie sheet. Drizzle extra-virgin olive oil over them, smoothing the oil evenly over each round with a silicone brush or the back of a spoon. I like to use a wild mushroom and sage-infused olive oil for this, but you could always use plain e-v olive oil and mince fresh sage leaves, available at most groceries in the produce section, adding them over the slices. Then I finish the slices with salt (we like RealSalt) or Trocamare, lemon pepper, and a sprinkling of Italian herbs (dried basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary) and slide the sheet into the oven at 350 degrees F.
While the sweet potato slices are cooking, arrange the onion wedges and the mushrooms, underside up, on a second aluminum-foil-lined sheet. Drizzle olive oil over them and finish with salt, pepper, and/or Italian herbs. Once the oil is bubbling on the sweet potato tray, turn the heat down to 300 degrees and slide in the onion/mushroom tray. Cook until the onions, mushrooms, and sweet potato slices are easily pierced with a fork, then mix and serve.
Braised Escarole
While we were visiting our friends Cole, Bruce, and Edith last weekend in scenic Charlottesville, Virginia, Cole served up such a simple and delicious side dish that we ignored the elaborate main dish and wolfed down the side as though veggies were going out of style. I’ll need to work with this to recreate the full deliciousness, but basically, Cole braised escarole in a pan with just a touch of water, then sauteed it in olive oil once the water had evaporated and served it up with salt and fresh-ground pepper.
What’s escarole, you ask? It’s a broad-leaved endive that’s paler and less bitter than classic endive. You can find it with the other fresh greens in the produce section of your grocery, and it’s definitely worth looking for. This dish may not sound too exciting, but I tell you, our friend Ben and I just couldn’t stop eating it. We’d have happily consumed the entire pan with rice and called it a meal. It was so delicious!!! The olive oil and the body of the escarole give the dish a richness that makes it perfect for fall meals. I plan to make it and experiment with adding thinly sliced sweet onion and garlic, toasted sesame oil, perhaps just a teensy splash of shoyu or tamari (both types of soy sauce).
Butternut-Spinach Saute
While OFB and I were visiting with our friends Cole, Bruce, and Edith, we joined one of our favorite couples, Jim and Trudi, for supper at the Three Notch’d Grill in nearby Crozet, VA. (Virginians, if you haven’t gone there, you should definitely make it a destination. See the menu and setting for yourselves at www.threenotchedgrill.com/.)
As noted, we often serve sauteed spinach as a Thanksgiving side, sauteeing the fresh baby spinach with minced garlic in e-v olive oil. But the Three Notch’d side dish, combining diced Butternut squash with spinach in olive oil, powdered cumin, salt, and fresh-ground pepper, was delicious beyond belief. Fortunately, Bruce, on one side of me at the table, had also ordered it, so I only had to share it with Edith, on the other side, and OFB, who mercifully wasn’t sitting close enough to hijack the rest of it.
Admittedly, I didn’t ask for the recipe, but assume that the diced squash is added to the olive oil-cumin-salt-pepper and sauteed until tender, then the spinach is added and cooked until just wilted. Oh, yum. Maybe we’ll serve this for Thanksgiving dinner this year and do the escarole or green beans as the second “green” side.
Anyway, there you have it: Three easy, delicious dishes to serve all fall and winter, and to give special sparkle to this year’s Thanksgiving feast.
‘Til next time,
Silence
What about that pizza crust? November 3, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in Uncategorized, wit and wisdom.Tags: Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations, pizza, pizza crust, Tony Bourdain
3 comments
Silence Dogood here. The other night, our friend Ben and I watched Anthony Bourdain’s Pacific Northwest episode from his series “No Reservations.” (Thanks, Netflix!) We thought it was one of the better episodes, showcasing both the unique foodie/artisanal approach of Oregon and Washington State and Tony Bourdain’s entertaining persona and unending flow of bon mots.
But while OFB and I were enjoying the show, something struck me: There’s room for improvement in pizza crust creation. Say what? OFB and I are serious pizza fans. We like to go out for pizza and order it for takeout. We love homemade pizza. (OFB consistently praises my own-made pizza as “the best ever,” forgetting that our friends Delilah and Mary both make much better pizzas on their grills.) I love to improvise by spreading olive oil and/or pesto on the crust before adding tomato sauce, cheese, herbs, and toppings. But it never before occurred to me to consider adding things to the crust itself.
All this changed when I saw Tony Bourdain heading to a pizza parlor, something that, even loving pizza as I do, I’d never have expected, on-air at any rate. But this wasn’t just any pizza parlor. It was a restaurant owned by a chef who was determined to make the perfect pizza. He makes his dough by hand so the crust will be light, crispy, and crackly. (“Nobody does that!” said Tony about professional pizzerias and handmade, from-scratch pizza crusts.) He allows no more than three toppings on his pizzas. And he closes the restaurant once the dough for that day runs out. (“Don’t you care about making money?” “No! I care about making pizza.”)
Watching all this made me think. Why doesn’t anyone add ingredients, enhancements to the pizza crust? Olive oil and Italian herbs (rosemary, basil, oregano, thyme); Parmesan cheese; kalamata olives; sauteed onion and/or roasted garlic; roasted peppers or sundried tomatoes. Maybe a crust with lavender or minced truffles, pepitas or cumin seeds. The possibilities are endless. I can imagine a luscious crust with a simple assortment of toppings, all working together for the ultimate goodness. Yum!!!
But I’ve never heard of anyone doing this. Do you? If so, what do you do? If not, what do you think of the idea? Please let me know!
‘Til next time,
Silence
Elementary, my dear Sherlock. November 2, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: Benedict Cumberbatch, Holmes and Watson, PBS Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2 comments
Is anybody/is everybody watching the new PBS series, “Sherlock”? The first two episodes have aired (at 9 p.m. Sundays here on our local PBS station as part of their “Masterpiece” program), and of course, our friend Ben and Silence Dogood just had to watch them, rabid Holmes fans that we are. The premise is that Holmes and Watson live in contemporary London. The first episode was about how they met and became flatmates, as well as how Watson becomes sucked into the world of private detection; the second was a more conventional mystery.
Our friend Ben assumes that we all have our own picture of how Sherlock Holmes should look and act. Some might match him to an actor who’s played him: Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, even Christopher Lee or Robert Downey Jr. Some might match Holmes to an actor we wish would play him. (Silence and I are still hoping for Johnny Depp.) But our friend Ben and Silence would never have matched Holmes to the actor who plays him in “Sherlock,” a man with the marvelously Dickensian name of Benedict Cumberbatch.
Mind you, this isn’t because we found Mr. Cumberbatch bad or offputting. He’s quite a good actor, and it’s not his fault if he looks exactly like a young Mr. Spock rather than Sherlock Holmes. (Our friend Ben was unable to resist Googling him to see if he’d ever portrayed Spock. Alas, no.) But Silence and I both thought he’d make a better James Bond than Sherlock Holmes. His portrayal was more that of the nerveless agent, the man of action who gives nothing away, than of the high-strung Holmes who delights in his own cleverness and is both visibly excited and happy when announcing “The game is afoot!” Mr. Cumberbatch’s marble face was, to us, the antithesis of Holmes’s own highly expressive, mobile features.
Silence and I wish with all our hearts that the idiots who cast Daniel Craig as the latest James Bond would come to their senses and hire Benedict Cumberbatch instead. And future Star Trek films could certainly use his appearance and talent to advantage. Meanwhile, we’ll keep watching him in “Sherlock.”
Our friend Cole, who’d recorded the first episode so we could watch it, said we’d either love the series or hate it. (He loved it.) But, having watched two episodes at this point, we neither love it nor hate it. We enjoy some parts and regret others, but find it perfectly watchable overall. We’d recommend it to any Holmes fan. Here’s our analysis of strengths and weaknesses based on what we’ve seen so far:
Strengths:
* Holmes and Watson are portrayed as (relatively) young men, as their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, intended. Benedict Cumberbatch is in his 30s, not early 20s as Conan Doyle depicted Holmes when the stories began, but it’s still a lot closer than pretty much every other depiction we’ve seen, where Holmes is middle-aged or worse.
* Mr. Cumberbatch fires off some truly wonderful one-liners as Holmes, either intentionally or through Holmes’s oblivion to the motives and feelings of others. They’re great and in character.
* The longsuffering Watson is given some great moments as he endeavors to come to grips with Holmes’s lack of normal human emotions. The second episode, in which Watson attempts to go on a date with a luscious female doctor, only to be thwarted at every turn by the oblivious Holmes and/or a cadre of Chinese mafia, is richly humorous. And Watson has the best line in the episode when he tells the kidnapped and terrorised woman, after Holmes manages a last-minute rescue, “Our next date won’t be like this.”
* Conan Doyle intended Holmes to be a sexless logic machine and Watson to be a normal redblooded man, but because Holmes’s charisma transcended his author’s intentions and because it’s rather difficult for us moderns to imagine a pair of men living together for financial convenience, people have long assumed that there was more going on between Holmes and Watson than the author conveyed. The series remains true to Conan Doyle’s intentions while squarely confronting other people’s assumptions about Holmes and Watson’s actual relationship, beginning with their landlady, Mrs. Hudson, who assumes they’re a couple.
Weaknesses:
* Our friend Ben can’t bear logical flaws in anything, and far less when a supposed master of logic like Sherlock Holmes is concerned. There are plenty to be found in “Sherlock.”
* Maybe it’s just us, but Silence and I can’t get used to everybody and his brother calling Holmes “Sherlock.” Maybe, just maybe, a 21st-century Watson would call him Sherlock rather than Holmes. But surely to God someone like Inspector Lestrade would call him Holmes or Mr. Holmes rather than the too-familiar “Sherlock,” especially since Holmes in the series always refers to him as Lestrade.
* And speaking of Inspector Lestrade. This is a minor quibble, but in “Sherlock,” the good inspector’s name is pronounced “LeSTRAHD.” This is good French, and many previous versions of Holmes have pronounced it the same way. Unfortunately, however, the Briton’s compulsion to maul all French names, to the extent of calling the French kings “Lewis” rather than “Louis,” applies here as well. The inspector would have pronounced his name—as would Holmes, Watson, and all the folks at Scotland Yard—”LeSTRADE.” A few versions have in fact pronounced it, ahem, “correctly,” at least as far as its owner and his contemporaries were concerned. Too bad this version didn’t follow suit.
As you can see, strengths outweigh weaknesses in “Sherlock” as far as we’re concerned. Please let us know if you’re watching the series and what you think. And if you’ve missed it so far, tune in next Sunday and tell us what you think! We’d love to hear.
Those glorious autumn leaves. November 1, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: autumn leaves, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: To a Young Child, why leaves turn colors in fall
3 comments
As an October baby, our friend Ben loves the beauty of fall more than any other season. Not that I needed a reminder, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of this last week when Silence Dogood and I traveled from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge to visit our friends Cole, Bruce and Edith in scenic Charlottesville, VA. The clear blue air, the colorful foliage, and the blues of the mountain ranges were simply breathtaking the entire way.
The colorful brilliance of the foliage made our friend Ben think about perception and perceived reality. So often, humankind’s interpretation of reality has been more marvelous, more mysterious, more majestic than the reality itself.
So many times, science has destroyed beauty and mystery by explaining it. Who wants to know the reason for rainbows, or that stars are simply distant suns, or the reason for consistent near-death visions or deja vu? As a species, we crave a mystery, and we crave the glorious, and we crave a tidy, happy ending: Give us the pot of gold and the wishing star and the hope of heaven and the far-seeing.
That’s why our friend Ben loves that the explanation for fall foliage color is even more mysterious and magical than our assumptions about it: The true explanation is better and more marvelous than anything we could imagine. We say that leaves turn color in fall. But science tells us that the colors leaves “turn,” the yellows and oranges, were really there all along, simply disguised by the green chlorophyll that fed the waking plant.
Surely this is a greater mystery—the glorious colors waiting to be uncloaked by the retreating chlorophyll—than any our imaginations could devise. It is the ultimate antidote to the lines of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his wonderful poem, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”: ”Margaret, are you grieving/Over goldengrove unleaving?” How can we grieve over colors concealed, then revealed? Surely this is cause for rejoicing.
