Of course one creates just for the pleasure of it, with no audience other than oneself in mind.¹ And yet, having an actual audience of living, breathing people interested enough in what one has created to give it some of their precious currency is a wonderful reward and a spur to action. When the...

One of the nicest things about a couple of days of break is the opportunity to get lost in a little project. Not entirely lost; after all, there are meals to be cooked and eaten, walks to be taken, relaxation to be enjoyed. Lost enough, though, to start and finish something, that something being the...

Feeding Our Reading Habits, a long and fascinating article by Alex Kessinger, whom I know as @voidfiles on app.net, set me thinking, as it was surely intended to do. Ostensibly about RSS readers, one of the least understood and most useful tools of the internet, the article is also about how and why an RSS reader can be a good thing, and in the course of settting out a draft manifesto for a new kind of RSS reader, Alex discusses some of the things readers ought to be able to do, and some of the things you ought to be able to do with them.

I'm not going to attempt to summarise those points; if you've come this far, you owe it to yourself to go and read the article in full. Instead, here are the thoughts it provoked in me.

Cooking, they say, is a matter of transformation, and of all the transformations perhaps the most magical is that of quince. A hard, off-white, barely edible hunk of mouth-puckeringness turns deep blush, fragrant and flavoursome. Absolute magic. Take it a step further -- by straining off the juice and boiling briefly with some sugar, and the transformation is complete. I defy anyone who doesn't already know to connect quince jelly with the fruit from which it comes.

Hot on the heels of the Dallas Morning News, mighty NPR has a story about pecan prices and the insatiable Chinese. What can I say? I'm flattered, of course. And also smart enough to realise that my podcast with James McWilliams, author of The Pecan: a history of America's native nut, probably had nothing to do with it.