In the olden days, one of my main forms of purposive exercise was Nordic walking, or as I call it, walking with sticks. After I had ramped up my high intensity interval training, though, it seemed like a bit of overkill. Sure, I could have walked with sticks on Tuesdays and Thursdays (Mon, Wed and Fri being HIIT) but I could also just go for a walk, which was altogether too attractive in comparison.
The idea of BookCrossing appeals to me. You give a book away, directly to someone or left where someone might find it, and by registering it with BookCrossing there's a chance you'll find out who gets it next. Reuse, community, all that stuff. So much so that I joined up pretty quickly (2010-06-07...
Like the bourgeois gentleman I aspire to be, today I learned that asparagus topped with a fried egg, which I eat at every opportunity during the season, has an actual name. It is, apparently, Asparagus Bismarck.
I learned this from Elizabeth Minchilli, doyenne of people who write about La Dolce...
A friend recently asked me what to call the ancient wheat known as farro. The word derives from the Latin far and she knew, as she explained, that “it is not spelt — as all of the classicists want to translate it.” And indeed it isn’t. Alas, the only correct answer to this fascinating question can only be, “It depends”.
Whitewood under Siege is a cracking good article in Cabinet Magazine on, as the subhead would have it, “the front lines of the pallet wars”. Pallets are one of those things most people seldom think about, except perhaps when they are on the lookout for cheap, hip-ish raw materials. And yet,
[M]any experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.
