You can tell it‘s a quiet day in whatever personal blogosphere you explore when people start talking about the comments they‘ve had or, better yet, the search terms people used to find them. I should know; I‘m guilty. Next in importance, an irrelevance to most readers, is the “I get email” gambit. W...

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Some time ago in an American airport a man came up to the man in front of me in a line. He had a packet of white powder in his hand. He showed the man in front of me a very official looking badge (although he wasn’t in uniform or anything) and asked the man to put the bag of white powder in his bac...

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A lot of my loaves are raised with natural leavens, rather than store-bought yeast.

There’s a lot one could say about natural yeasts, wild yeasts, sourdough starters, levain, leaven, what have you. I'm not going to say much. You can read elsewhere about how a good natural leaven is a symbiotic m...

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I may regret this, but having learned to spread little goodies to followers through Google Reader, I thought I would send them back here to The Mother Ship. Over there, below the Random Photograph. To do that, however, I have to make them available to all and sundry, rather than just to my friends a...

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Here's a nice, sprightly, startling lede from the review of a new book about pandas.

It is one of the more startling revelations in Henry Nicholls’s sprightly history that we still have no idea how many giant pandas there are currently living in the wild. Fewer than 2,000? More than 4,000? Perh...

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