Harsh. Brutal. Ugly. Cold, hard.
All these adjectives precede the same word. Whatever can it be? What horrible, depressing thing is being described by all these words?
Oh. Truth.
Category: Quick
I look again at the food-site’s designator for Everything Bagel Salmon, but it doesn’t get any better the second time around. Quick? Quick? What kind of recipe category is “Quick”?
What part of the meal does a Quick recipe supply? What ingredients does a Quick recipe require? What craving does a Quick recipe satisfy? What cooking skills does a Quick recipe assume?
I’ll leave the weird lyrics to Ol’ Blue Eyes. (I mean, seriously, check them out.) Me, I thought you might enjoy a virtual walk or two somewhere where it’s warm.
These first views are from the neighbourhood and are just fun.
Do you remember this?
Technically, you don’t. You can’t. Because this is a photo I took late last year and am just now posting. But if you rook my question to mean, “Do you remember these social-distancing decals?” then I expect you could honestly answer, “Yes.” My favourite was the Timbits one.
en•tro•py
lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
I do not think much about thermodynamic quantities; the thermal energy of systems (whether available or unavailable for conversion into mechanical work) is not where I live, at least not consciously. But I admit to being bothered by lack of order/predictability, and by any decline (gradual or otherwise) into disorder wherever I observe it.
Last year I indulged myself by sorting, folding, and neatly stacking the towels in our Tempe rental, thereby rolling back the disorder that had accumulated across a succession of renters. Hey, everyone needs a hobby. I documented the result.
2025 Mar – How it started
I am *so* done with Christmas.
Oh, sorry – wrong pronoun. WE are so done with Christmas: you, me, everyone. That’s it; it’s over. How do I know? Here’s my go-to grocery store in Tempe AZ on Dec 30.
This display was relatively modest: Walmart had an aisle (or maybe two) of Valentine’s Day paraphernalia. Standing at one end, I peered cautiously into the modern analogue of a formal Victorian garden, an arch of hearts above me standing in for the wrought-iron trellis supporting trailing wisteria.
I’m Jewish.
There, now, I wasn’t going to blurt it out like that. I’m not sure what I was going to do.
Maybe I was going to tell you my convert-cute story, where I started going to synagogue services right after the 2023 Oct 07 attacks to show solidarity with the community, and just never stopped going.
At this time [~60 million years ago], the Earth was a much warmer place and most of the Arctic was in fact a gigantic freshwater lake. Azolla bloomed in the Arctic mega-lake, covering an astonishing area of 1.5 million square miles (4 million sq km), which is roughly half the size of the United States. It is a truly staggering thought. If you were to visit this Azolla-filled lake 60 million years ago, you could fly in an airplane for about three hours overhead and continue to see this one species covering the top of the water like a green blanket. –
“Ferns: Lessons in survival from Earth’s most adaptable plants” (Ch 6)
That one paragraph might fill your “fern stuff” quota for today; indeed, it might be more fern stuff than you ever wanted in all your days. But I’m going to take a chance here and provide some important context: an individual Azolla-fern plant would fit on the fingernail of your little finger. Yet some Azolla plants, working together in a truly impressive collective effort, managed to cover 1.5 million square miles of lake. But hey, it wasn’t for long, right? If you’d blinked, you’d have missed it, right?
Psst, Isabel . . .
I look up in irritation: an email is trying to get my attention. Dagnab it. What do They want now?
. . . do you need a last-minute gift?
Aw. Embarrassment-at-being-caught-being-impatient-with-another’s-good-intention (I think German has a word for that) disarms my irritation. Embarrassment and something deeper. I can’t say that I need a last-minute gift, exactly — after all, I have a houseful of extra stuff I’m trying to get rid of — but against all reason I’d love to have a gift, last-minute or otherwise. I wonder how it knew?
Belfast's Big Fish
Posted: 2026 Jan 24 (re-upped from Jan 16)
