Month: December 2018

The joy of midnight pasta

If you are busy, or don’t feel like cooking much, or don’t have much in your fridge, then this pasta recipe is for you. It’s hard to believe something this simple could be so good, but it is. Lots of flavour with very few ingredients, ingredients you can have in your pantry.

Give it a try, especially when you are short of time, money, or food.

The photo is of the dish I whipped up one night.

Some contrarian ideas on happiness and being happy

Can be found here:

  1. BBC – Future – Why the quickest route to happiness may be to do nothing
  2. Daniel Kahneman explains why most people don’t want to be happy — Quartz

Basically, happiness is an elusive and not well defined idea and we are better off seeking things other than happiness. It is great to be happy, but it may not be great to try and be happy. Feel free to read and disagree.

10 Spectacular Roast Recipes That Aren’t Turkey

Many people

  1. want to make a roast turkey for Christmas
  2. do not want roast turkey

If that’s you, Chatelaine has your back with this:  10 Spectacular Roast Recipes That Aren’t Turkey | Chatelaine.

They truly are spectacular recipes, perfect not just for Christmas but any time of the year (ahem, winter) when a good roast is just what you need.

On cities and digital technology and loneliness

This is a good piece: How to redesign cities to fight loneliness.

It talks about how cities and services can be changed to fight loneliness. This is good. The flipside of it, though, is that cities are designed and have evolved to promote loneliness. One of the reasons people come to cities is to get away from things. The cost of that is often loneliness.

Cities are not the only contributor. Digital technology also can contribute to loneliness. But like cities, digital technology can also help to assist those struggling with being alone.

The bigger problem is loneliness in general. Cities and digital technologies can help there. But there are bigger social and cultural issues in the mix, and those need to be addressed as well.

 

Cook90: a goal for the new year

Can you cook 90 meals in a month? For many it sounds daunting. I like to cook and even I am not sure that I could do it.

If you like a challenge and the idea of it, there is a book you should consider: Cook90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier by David Tamarkin from Epicurious, at Amazon. (Also available in Canada at Indigo).

I heard of it from Mark Bittman and his newsletter (which I recommend also).  One good quote from the newsletter was this:

“Entire industries want us to believe that cooking is so much harder and more time consuming than it really is.”

It’s true that you can make complex meals, but a simple green salad, a fried egg with toast, or those two things combined can make up a home prepared meal.

 

On exhibit: the Slave Bible

A fascinating exhibit in Washington, DC on the Slave Bible. What is the Slave Bible? It was a heavily reacted book with anything removed  that could have supported slaves seeking their freedom. It’s a sad but also interesting story, and more of the details are here: Slave Bible From The 1800s Omitted Key Passages That Could Incite Rebellion : NPR.

On “River”, the sad Joni Mitchell song that became a Christmas classic

A fine and detailed study on Mitchell’s great song from her masterpiece album, “Blue”: www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/12/07/how-thoroughly-depressing-joni-mitchell-song-became-blue-christmas-classic/

My impression reading it was that there were no sad or melancholy Christmas songs before it, but “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Blue Christmas” are two that immediately come to mind. And later on songs like “Last Christmas” have shown that the holidays can be sometimes difficult.

Read the piece though. Lots of good commentary by great singers who have covered it, as well as what it really means.

New York City and the future of retail in cities


I’ve read a number of articles talking about the demise of New York due to rising rents and gentrification. After reading them, tt’s easy to feel hopeless about New York and cities in general. Which is why I was glad to read this: New York City Reveals the Future of American Retail – The Atlantic. It’s true, there are big changes in New York, just like there are big changes in other cities. And it’s true that many beloved retail stores are disappearing in cities everywhere. But it’s untrue that vacancy rates are shooting up and it’s untrue that it’s only big chains taking over. While retail stores threatened by Amazon are closing, places like restaurants and fitness locations are filling the gap.

You can argue that a city needs more than this new world of cafes and restaurants and gyms. The article points out to ways cities can encourage that. Specifically:

According to Jeremiah Moss, specific policies caused the disappearance of old New York—like tax breaks for big businesses, which have been a hallmark of city governance since the Ed Koch days (and up through HQ2). Moss says that several new policies could fix the problem. First, he is an advocate of the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which would make it easier for small retailers to extend their lease in neighborhoods with rising rents. Second, he favors zoning laws that would limit the density of chain stores. He and others have also called for “vacancy taxes” that punish landlords who sit on empty storefronts for months at a time. All of these policies could help small businesses push back against the blandification of New York and the broader country.

Cities thrive when there is a mix of establishments servicing the wants and needs of its occupants. After reading this article, I think cities, New York and elswhere, are doing well and have a viable path to get better.

44 short books to help you overcome your reading difficulties

This is brilliant: 44 Short Books to Help You Reach Your Reading Challenge Goal – Goodreads News & Interviews.

It’s a great list of books, for starters. Second, they tell you how long they long they are and a number of them are under 100 or 200 pages.

If you are trying to reach a reading challenge goal, or if you are stuck trying to get started reading, or if you find you never finish books due to their length, then you should check out that list.

Some thoughts on Philip Pullman, free speech and de-platforming

I think often of this speech Philip Pullman gave regarding the rights and limits associated with free speech. I like what he says, and I like how he says it.

I’d like to see a similar one for de-platforming. No one has a right to be popular on social media. No one has a right to access and use a specific platform. No one has a right to stay on the platform if they don’t abide by the rules. If they get kicked off, they can complain on other platforms. They can complain to the owners of the platform. They can build a platform of their own and make their own rules and say what they want in a law abiding way.

But wait, isn’t that a violation of someone’s free speech? I don’t think it is. It gives too much power to existing platforms to treat them like utilities. They are not utilities. If they are utilities, then they should be heavily regulated. Better that they are not regulated, that they do not gain too much power, and that people that want to exercise their free speech build their own platforms.

Free speech should be defined within the context of a citizen and their government. People should be able to say what they want within the law. People should also be willing to accept the social consequences if they say something that offends others. That is what Pullman is saying in some ways. If his book shocks and offends you, you can take action that may harm him by reducing the number of books he might sell. That is the consequence he is willing to take in order to write the book he wanted to write. He understands that free speech has consequences. The one consequence he is not willing to accept is to be prevented from speaking. (I would add that the other consequence he is unwilling to accept is to be physically threatened, an all too common threat that hangs over discussions of free speech on the Internet.)

People who are deplatformed are not prevented from speaking either. They are being prevented from speaking the way they prefer, and that is a different matter. They want to speak their way without the consequence of being deplatformed.