Monthly Archives: September 2015

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Left-handedness isn’t evil but some people are

My jaw dropped on reading this story today. The same thing happened to me in grade school, I think in 1st grade, but that was some decades ago. I figured perhaps we had advanced a bit. Silly me.

I was shocked enough by the teacher grabbing the pencil out of my left hand and forcing it angrily into my right hand that I told my mother about it that afternoon. The next day she was in school to have a little chat with the teacher, who never tried that again. I found Mrs. Douglas in the 2nd grade much pleasanter – and funnier, particularly when she would loudly sigh and lament, “Oh, what’s the point?“ at least once a day.

Had that left-is-wrong idiocy continued, would I have ever in my life attempted artwork like this – or any artwork at all, for that matter? Seems questionable.

Thanks, Mom.

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Click any of these images for a larger version

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Inspired by the 401st Bomb Group jacket below (click for a larger version). My research turned up the George Petty painting that jacket was based on, and I found an original Life magazine where it appeared in a full-page ad and used that as the basis for my version.

   

Rita Hayworth and the 452nd Bomb Group B-17G “Mon Tete Rouge”

Ginger Rogers and a 1942 model Daffy Duck

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Chips Ahoy

Parislights, in the My Inspiration post, asked:

my god daughter has started at Tufts and she is hopping to start a little cchip cookie business for her fellow students. She has had access to really delicious chocolate chips thanks to a local chocolatier in Normandy ( yeah…I know! France! He makes his own ! )

Hershey just doesn’t cut it for her. What do you suggest? Feel like making a cchip post ? – p’lights

Hershey’s or Baker’s or the more ubiquitous Nestle chips definitely don’t cut it. For delicious but still affordable chips, I switched years ago to Ghirardelli’s 60% bittersweet chips, which are about halfway between a chip and a disc. This photo of mine from 2010, one of about 600 rotating desktop backgrounds I have, shows the wider spread of chocolate you get from that shape:

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Click for HD size

The Ghirardelli site’s price seems rather high. I think Market Basket sells them for US$3.49, maybe even as low as $2.99, but as you know, they have the lowest prices around. In the Northeast US, these are in maybe one out of three supermarket chains.

You may recall that I switched allegiance to the salted chocolate chip cookie recipe published in the New York Times some years ago. It’s definitely the best I’ve tried, but you may also remember that I found through my own blind taste testing that their 24-36 hour “curing” step is unnecessary. Any perceived difference is imaginary – or perhaps the result of people unconsciously baking for a minute or two longer to produce a darker, more caramelised cookie, thereby fulfilling the aged dough fantasy.

Other than dropping their waiting period, which seems like cruel and unusual punishment given my testing, my only change to their recipe is to add a boatload of pecans that have been toasted for ten minutes in a 300F oven – an overflowing cup worth for this recipe. After toasting, I break each half into four pieces so they’re on the chunky side and let them cool so they don’t melt the dough.

I was recently delighted to find that Costco sells two pounds of unsalted pecans for US$9.99, much cheaper than any other place I’ve found; others charge about double that. If you buy in that quantity but don’t use them at a fast clip, it’s best to freeze them to stop them going rancid. They thaw quickly.

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“Gas…Market Basket…veg…Dingleface. Wait, what?”

See if you can spot the fraudulent transactions on my debit card:

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On submitting the dispute just now, I said:

I’m not a member of Facebook or any of the other ultimately antisocial media sites (case in point).

I’ll stop by the credit union tomorrow for a replacement card – for the third time in a little over a year.

I thought it unusual when a friend told me recently that she routinely cancels her debit card and gets a new one every six months. I no longer think that unusual.