Category: Newsletter Announcements

First, the announcement: I sent out a new installment of the newsletter the other day! This one was in remembrance of actor/director/playwright Tom Noonan, who died recently. Please check it out and subscribe! I try to send it twice a month, with usually a long piece or essay.

Now, for the weekly quiz-thing that I don’t always do weekly but this week I am because it’s prompt-based, which is interesting. Here’s the details:

This week we’re playing word association as suggested by a blogger named Dawn Camp. She said these words “tickled her fancy,” and let’s see if they inspire you. Feel free to answer with either a single word or a thought/memory. It’s up to you.

Word Association. Share what comes to mind when you hear the word …

OK, this sounds interesting! Here we go!

1. Biscuit

OK, where to go with this one? I love biscuits…here we’re talking about the American kind, the fluffy pastry-layered ones with wonderful buttery saltiness. But I learned quite a while back that this is not what British people mean by “biscuit”…but right now, I’m actually thinking of something I read many years ago in a book called The Musician’s World, which is a collection of excerpts from the correspondence of great composers. One of Richard Wagner’s letters, to poet Mathilde Wesendonck (with whom he was cheating on his first wife, Minna), thanks her for a gift of biscuits. Now, this is in translation, so I’m still fuzzy on what exactly Wagner is describing here, food-wise, but here’s an excerpt of the letter. I like this because it shows how weirdly capricious creative people can be about what enables them to get the work done:

Child, child! The biscuits did help; they suddenly jerked me out of a bad path where I had been stuck for a week, unable to go further. Yesterday my attempts to work were miserably unsuccessful. I was in a shocking humor, and gave it vent in a long letter to Liszt in which I informed him that I had come to the end of my composing days…

When the biscuits arrived, I realized what I had been lacking; the biscuits I had here were much too salty, so they could not give me any sensible ideas; but when I took the sweet ones I had always been accustomed to, and dipped them in milk, everything suddenly fell into place. And so I threw aside the revision and went back to composing, on the story of the woman physician from far away…Heavens, how much can be achieved by the right sort of biscuits! Biscuits! that is the proper remedy for composers when they get stuck–but they must be the right kind.

Richard Wagner was a really strange dude…but I’m lying if I didn’t admit that my own creative juices are not sometimes jump-started by some food or another.

2. Crayon

People my age may remember that the big box of Crayolas (the 64-pack, the one that came with the sharpener in the back of the box) would include a color called “Flesh”, so you could color the people in your pictures with the proper flesh color…making certain specific assumptions, obviously, as to what a “proper” flesh color is.

Well, more recently, this seems to be the way of things now:

Not everything is getting worse!

3. Warmth

It’s late February in Buffalo. Warmth is an envied commodity! My main need now, in terms of warmth, is a pair of gloves that (a) keeps my hands comfortably warm, and (b) allows for easy operation of the buttons and dials on my camera. I haven’t looked too deeply for this sort of thing yet, but I imagine I will sometime next year as the temps start falling again. I have a pair of warm gloves that have fingertips that allow for operation of touchscreens, but they’re not super reliable on that score, and I have another pair of gloves that is super reliable on that score, but they’re not particularly warm. I also have a pair of mitten-gloves: the mitten part is actually a flap that folds back, exposing your fingers if you need access. This is currently my best option. I have seen gloves optimized for photographers where the individual fingertips open up and fold back, allowing for operating camera controls, but I haven’t tried them. We’ll see.

4. Flip

Wilson?

Or the cocktail? A flip is apparently (I’ve never had one) a mixture of a spirit, egg, sugar, and spice. (Add cream and you have a nog.) I don’t know that these are made much these days; I’d have to look them up. But I remember reading about the original flip, in a history book I have that centers rum (God, I love history writers!). The original flip was a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, and you served it hot after heating it by sticking a red-hot iron in it! Yes, that sounds gross. Yes, I would taste it if offered, but I wouldn’t pay for the pleasure.

5. Slush

This will be the dominant landscape feature of my region starting sometime in the next three or four weeks, and likely remaining so until May. Stupid WNY spring, I hate it.

6. Wing

What else?

These are the wings (well, some of them, I fried up a 5-lb bag containing 40-some pieces of wingy goodness) I made on Super Bowl Sunday. And we don’t even watch the game! But being non-observant doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the same kind of yummy not-that-good-for-you food that that day brings to all. No, these aren’t Buffalo-style wings; I don’t make those at home. No particular reason, really, other than the fact that everybody around here makes good Buffalo wings, so why make here what I can get when I go out? Maybe I’ll write a post on how these got made sometime soon…or maybe it’ll end up in video form, I did make some footage. We’ll see. But these were very tasty. The wing is a wonderful part of the bird! (In terms of home wing making, I prefer grilling to deep-frying.)

7. Candle

OK, here’s a random Star Trek word association! There’s an episode from the seventh, and final, season of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Sub Rosa” in which Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost who was her grandmother’s lover, or some such thing. It’s a very strange episode that is sufficiently disliked by fandom to often be cited as a good example of the worst Trek stories. I’ve only seen the episode one time, when it originally aired, and I remember it being a really goofy episode indeed. And because this is Trek and there’s nothing truly supernatural in Trek, the ghost is an alien who lives inside a candle. In the first part of the episode, there’s a Scottish groundskeeper–I swear I am not making this up–who tells Dr. Crusher several times, in warning, and also in a really exaggerated Scottish brogue, “Dinna light that cahhhhn-dle!”

To this day I often think of that guy when I go to light a candle.

8. Cinnamon

Oooooh, I love cinnamon! I just love it. It’s probably my favorite spice after black pepper and maybe garlic, if we’re considering garlic a spice. (Technically garlic isn’t a spice, but in most culinary uses it functions as a spice.) I like to add it to the coffee grounds to add flavor to the brew, or also dose my applesauce (we buy the natural stuff with no added sugar) because apples and cinnamon were clearly invented to go together. One reason we love Pastitsio so much is that it contains cinnamon, and I exceed the recipe’s specified amount by a lot. More recently I’ve started taking cinnamon supplements because I’m told that cinnamon is good for blood sugar, and though I’m not generally a fan of black tea, I’ve recently discovered this stuff, following a recommendation by YouTuber Faith Connally:

I really really REALLY love this tea, and I have actually started drinking a mug of this on weekends after my initial cup of coffee, instead of having two cups of coffee.

Goodness, this one turned more extensive than I expected it to!

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