Jack Manassas and Company

While looking for something else entirely, I found a box of  'Appleford's Cooking Parchment' that appears to have been made in 1935.  It is a real eye-opener!  The directions all over the box (and in the brochure that miraculously stayed inside the box for the past 82 years) are completely different from anything you read about parchment paper today-- You probably think it just prevents cookies from sticking to a cookie sheet. In fact, Parchment Paper was never meant to be used with cookie sheets.  I'll bet you didn't know that you must wet the sheet before you use it.  You can wrap several types of veggies in parchment paper bundles and boil them in the same water without transferring flavours between them.  You can-- and should-- wash your parchment sheet after use, and use it over and over again. Of course, maybe the sheets inside the box are made of different stuff than today's parchment paper.  The box originally contained ten sheets, neatly...

The thing that struck me first about Joyce was the laugh. We had an open house for our small group at church—I don’t remember the exact details—but Joyce was there, and at one point she let loose with an enormous belly laugh. It was a laugh that someone laughs when they haven’t laughed for years. A hungry laugh, a laugh of desperate starvation. A laugh that told the world, “Maybe I don’t have to be alone anymore.” She started coming to our small group each week. All the adults in Joyce’s family tended to die of heart attacks when they hit 50, so Joyce worked out at the gym. She was one of the fittest people I knew. Her husband had run off with the secretary and left her to raise their children alone. She did a good job, and by the time I got to know her, they were grown, had moved out of the house, and were living on their own. Joyce was witty as well as very smart, a good friend, and a marvelous cook. She was also lonely. Small group ...

In 1969, it probably seemed like a good logo for Cream Soda-- But with the advent of a certain emoji, maybe not such a good choice.  At least they didn't color the soda brown... On the other hand, I bought a bottle just to take this photo.  Maybe not such a bad marketing move after all, eh?

And Now for Something Completely The Same... Against my better judgement, I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on Netflix.  Halfway through, I got a great idea! What this world really needs is a NEW movie– “Planet of the Apes King Kong!” It starts in Planet-of-the-Apes 1936.  A group of ape explorers finds a mysterious island with ape natives that try to convince the ape explorers to turn back from the enormous bamboo gate.  Naturally they go through the gate anyway–and they find a Giant Human! One thing leads to another, and the Giant Human finds his way to the top of the Ape-Empire State Building, carrying a lady-ape. Apes in biplanes attack, and the giant human falls to the pavement. “T’was Beauty killed the Beast.” That’s the basic outline.  Remember–You read about it here first...

July 28-31, 2017 - Mini Vacation in Revelstoke Anne noticed that I had 4 days off in a row over the weekend, culminating in her birthday (she is 29, of course!). She has completed the six-month ordeal of the CP3, that was the final hurdle to getting her pharmacist license here in BC. She will soon be heading down to Maryland to visit with family and help take care of her mother. Our Honored Son (HS) will soon be heading to California to seek his fortune in Silicon Valley. Really, it is our last likely time for a family vacation. So naturally we headed for Revelstoke. We stopped at the Dutchmen Dairy for ice cream. The camel and llama are both gone now, but many farm animals are still on display.  I was working in Sicamous a couple of weeks ago, and got two one-liter tubs of their ice cream after work. It was actually a bit disappointing. We remember how rich it tasted in previous years, but these two tubs were not much better ...

A lot of people are very upset about global financial conditions these days.   Almost everyone I know is struggling to make ends meet, and failing at it.  Debt levels are high, wages are not keeping up with inflation, our standards of living are going down year by year.  The most likely endpoint of this process, for most of us, seems to be bankruptcy--But bankruptcy is increasingly being prohibited by law.  The only people who seem to be prospering in the current environment are the Very Rich, Government Employees, and Organized Criminals. In the banking crisis in 2008, we bailed out the banks.  It has gotten us nowhere.  The banking industry has continued the same bad practices that got it into trouble in the first place.  We are heading for another crisis of the same kind, but orders of magnitude larger.   The usual endpoint for all this is a giant financial crisis, mass bankruptcy, hyperinflation, chaos, war, bankers and politicians ha...

July 2017-- British Columbia is on fire. Well a lot of it is, anyway. We went driving around to see what we could see-- and what we couldn’t see. Smoke from the wildfires hundreds of kilometres away have obscured the sun for days on end. Here are some pictures:  This is Blind Bay Road, heading towards the lake.  The trees are not really covered with ashes-- That's an artifact of the dirty windshield, which IS covered with ashes...  Here's one of the giant mini-mansions near the waterfront.  The reddish ball in the sky is the Sun.  It looked a lot redder in real life...  Here's the Marina, mountains in the background barely visible through the smoke.  The sign in the middle says "Thank you." By contrast, only a couple of days later, the wind shifted and we had blue skies again.  This is what watering the flower baskets is SUPPOSED to be like!