Monthly Archives: December 2013

Christmas Light Failures

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Cold, as predicted. Well below freezing, but no snow or ice.

Seasonal decorations came out of storage today. Eleven-twelfths of the year, they’re packed away. We plan to buy a tree tomorrow. I tested our light strings, both indoor and out, and found that most of them to be non- or partly functional. But at least the eight-function string still works.

Just another thing to buy. Are light stings of the present shoddy compared to those made when I was young, or am I romanticizing the light strings of old?

Old but not too old. After all, I remember one goes out, all go out. That kind of string was considered old-fashioned when I decorated Christmas trees as a lad, but they were still around. Some of the strings I tested today showed a different kind of failure: half or a third of the string was dark, but the rest glowed. Go figure.

Eddies in the Data Stream

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Gray, misty day. But not that cold. Not yet. But it will be soon.

And when is the age of individually tailored on line advertising going to arrive? I hear about that, but haven’t seen it much on my computer yet. Over the last few days, for instance, banner ads have been appearing on one of my email accounts to persuade me to attend — well, let’s just say a Vegas concert by a has-been singer I never liked or followed or cared about in any way. I’ve never been to any concert of hers, bought any of her records, or watched her on TV.

This is the best data mining can do? Maybe it’s just an old-fashioned, everybody-gets-to-see-it ad.

On the other hand, I’ve occasionally done comparison shopping for motel rooms, and later seen ads appear on unrelated web sites for those very brands. The thing to do, then, is searches involving sites you have no real interest in, and see what happens. Mix it up some. Guns & Ammo one day, the Socialist Worker the next, and maybe High Times thrown in for grins.

Man Bites Shark

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Today was of the foggiest days I’ve seen in years. Not enough to make driving impossible, but enough to erase detail in the mid-distance and everything further away. At least it wasn’t cold. They say cold air is massing in the Dakotas and Minnesota for an assault on us soon.

On the menu tonight: shark steak and fruitcake, among other things. Some months ago, I bought the shark at Valli, a fine store I trust not to sell me too much extra mercury with my shark, and it’s been frozen since then. Recently I decided it was about time to eat it, so I thawed it and faced the task of cooking it. But how?

I could have looked it up. In the Joy of Cooking, maybe. Or on YouTube, where a half-dozen Cook Your Shark videos probably await. But no. I wanted to go without expert advice. So I salted the meat a little, heated a bit of olive oil, and cooked it slowly in that. Simple, but effective. It was good.

No one else wanted any. We had other fish on the table, and everyone else ate that. I finally persuaded Lilly to take a bite and she said she liked it, but didn’t eat any more. Maybe I shouldn’t have used that loaded word “shark.” But it isn’t loaded for me. I remember buying shark at a grocery store in California more than 30 years ago, and I’ve eaten it sporadically ever since.

As for the fruitcake, which was my dessert, our Collin Street Bakery fruitcake had arrived over the long weekend. Sometimes around Christmas we buy one, sometimes not.

Not sure why people joke about fruitcakes, but maybe we can blame that on the otherwise admirable Johnny Carson. A bad fruitcake is a bad thing – like anything else – but a good fruitcake is really good. Collin Street fruitcakes, made in Corsicana, Texas, and shipped all over the world, are really good.

Front-Yard Biomass

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December got off to a mild start. Warm enough to spend time outside yesterday raking leaves without complaining about the cold. But I did think about the suburban leaf-removal custom with increasing skepticism.

“When we remove the leaves from our yards, we’re actually interrupting the natural process that allows the return of beneficial nutrients to the soil,” writes one Matt Higgs in the Peterborough Examiner, which is published in Ontario. “When the process is continues on its own, worms, bacteria and a host of other tiny organisms feast on the leaf matter, outputting rich organic material lawns thrive on.”

Ah, my sentiment exactly. But then he goes on to recommend mulching the damn things. Or worse (in terms of effort), composting. The goal here is to rationalize doing nothing, and those suggestions don’t help.

In the end, we compromised. “We” because I had Lilly help me. “Compromise,” because we did a crummy job. The front lawn clearly isn’t carpeted with leaves any more, but there’s a sizable residue.

Canterbury, 1994

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I took lousy notes during our four weeks in London in December 1994, so I can’t remember exactly when it was we took a day trip to Canterbury. It wasn’t December 1, because that day I saw a revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie somewhere in the West End, and after the show the lead actress made an appeal for donations to fund AIDS research, since it was World AIDS Day.

We went to Canterbury sometime early in the month, and we had a pleasant walk around the town and a long look at the cathedral, which is off in the distance in this picture — one of the few I took there.

I think the closer ruins are what’s left of St. Augustine’s Abbey, which Henry VIII put on the road to ruin. The grass looks strangely green for December, but I remember that December in southern England wasn’t very cold at all, to the wonder of people who lived there year-round.

Better pictures of the cathedral and the ruins and other places nearby can be found at the fine Saints and Stones web site.