Monkey Puzzle II

One side:



Other side:



It probably won't let go of the seed shell until late summer.

Previous Episode

Medium: Pencils B and 2H

Oh Bother

Medium: Pencil B and others I can't remember

Medium: 2B Pencil

Those aren't books

INTERVIEWER:

What do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?

BRADBURY:

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

From a Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury

From Grains

What, a new nine-year study just out (which will be in the June Archives of Internal Medicine) that shows something interesting about grains?

Men who ate a high amount of fiber had a 24 to 56 percent reduced risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, and infectious diseases, while women who were high-fiber consumers had a 34 to 59 percent reduced risk in these disease categories.

A significantly reduced risk of total, cardiovascular, cancer, and respiratory disease deaths in both sexes was associated with dietary fiber from grains but not from other foods, however. Fiber from beans and vegetables was weakly associated with a lower risk of total death in both women and men, but fiber from fruits did not show benefits except for a slight reduction in respiratory disease deaths in both sexes.

Go here to read more.

Studies are just that of course - studies. (Don't go on a grain binge.) But it just goes to show that one should be careful reading something that poses to have so conclusively scoured the bottoms of things.

Medium: Pencils B and H

Honey Cookies

I couldn't find the recipe I used the last time I made honey cookies. I searched a little on the internet and found this one. It's similar to the ones I made last time - a cake-like cookie. But these ones are too sweet for me. The last ones I made were almost like a biscotti, sweetness-wise (though of course not texture-wise).

This recipe calls for 1 cup of honey and 1 cup of sugar. I did 1 1/2 cups of honey and 1/4 cup of sugar. I could have cut out the sugar entirely. I also lowered the baking temperature to 325 F, as honey has a lower cooking point than sugar.

I also should not have used shortening as the recipe calls for, but butter. You cannot beat real butter. I used the shortening because we happened to have some in the house. It also doesn't help that the recipe calls for it - though I'm not sure "old German" honey cookies would have been made with shortening.

I did not know that St. Valentine is a patron saint of beekeepers. I discovered it at Fr. Z's. It's fitting I guess that I decided to make honey cookies then.

For some reason the camera makes the lighting a sort of yellowy sickly hue in some of the photos. I figured I would just put the pictures up in no particular order.






Found the organic flour on sale. I know, time to phone Poison Control.


It just has absolutely nothing on butter.


I bought a tub of the stuff some time ago that I've been working through. I use it often in coffee. I like the fact that it has pieces of bees wings in it. You can see pollen on the lid:

Testing, testing...

Embedding at a certain time-stamp. See if this works...









It works!

Medium: Pencils B and 2H

Medium: Pencils 2B, H and 2H

Medium: HB Pencil on two-ply bristol

Paradise

If people with Down Syndrome ruled the world.

I especially like:

Work would be revered, no matter what kind, from doing dishes to rocket science.

And:

Art and music appreciation would be BIG. There would be fewer movies, but they would be replayed over and over.

Medium: Charcoal Pencil and Pencils B and 3H on two-ply bristol

Not to Complain

This winter refuses hard freezes,
but with an easy median teases
the bulbs into early unsheathings.

The poking quills, soon to be shears,
seem to come earlier every year:
to make spring less powerfully appear

than if winter gave some cold-kill, more sustained.
For cold-kill's killed: the blossom suns her mane.
But the wintering rite that lingers lame,

is one that waits to tear down the blossom's claim.

Medium: Pencils HB, F and 2H