These have been very trying times. When the UK voted to leave the European Union I was having a good time in two of Britain's former dominions. I was utterly shocked, surprised and depressed. I still am, in a way. I refused to discuss it with anyone over there unless they also allowed me to bring the US presidential campaign into the discussion, and mostly they saw my point.
Which was: if the Brits could vote to the leave the EU -- which all the experts, as opposed to talking heads, believe could be bad economically, culturally, everything -- it is entirely possible that come November, the Americans could vote for the presumptive Republican nominee, as he was at the time.
Only one thing was clear, although I could not articulate it: these voters and the people they followed were not simply stupid.
Down a microscope, a lichen looks like a loaf of ciabatta: it has a stiff, dense crust surrounding a spongy, loose interior.
Wonderful story of curiosity and a willingness to follow the evidence.
I have to believe that nobody at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science has actually looked at the site since 11 July. Either that, or this headline is a joke to which I am not privy.
Also interesting, the original on the BBC website, credited by the AACCS, has no such error, and is shorter.
So maybe it is a joke.
Back from almost 6 weeks away (and no inclination to write here) my first order of business was to coax my sourdough leaven back to life. In 36 hours I managed to go from the somewhat smelly jar above to the rather delicious bread below. And I wrote about it over on Fornacalia, which, like the leaven, has been a little bit neglected of late.
Really excellent guide to changes in cuisine through history, and the forces that drove them. A useful antidote to the rose-tinted myth that the cooking of times gone by was so much better than the food we have now. Some people have described the book as too dry; I disagree. It is scholarly and informative, rather than the once-over-lightly so common in so many "factual" works.
