It is extremely galling that as soon as one has committed to learning something new, one is immediately flooded with unavoidable paid work that prevents one from putting the new stuff into practice. As a result, one may as well not have bothered.
The wait is over. After soaking in weak tea for seven days, my one remaining Phalaenopsis orchid is looking a little less ropy. In fact I was exceedingly pleased this morning that the one particularly daggy leaf came away in my hands. I had feared that I might have to cut if off, risking disease and death. Now I’m thinking that maybe the tea treatment gave the plant the strength to withdraw what it could from the leaf and seal it off with a nice corky abscission scar.
Like the bourgeois gentleman I aspire to be, today I learned that asparagus topped with a fried egg, which I eat at every opportunity during the season, has an actual name. It is, apparently, Asparagus Bismarck.
I learned this from Elizabeth Minchilli, doyenne of people who write about La Dolce...
A friend recently asked me what to call the ancient wheat known as farro. The word derives from the Latin far and she knew, as she explained, that “it is not spelt — as all of the classicists want to translate it.” And indeed it isn’t. Alas, the only correct answer to this fascinating question can only be, “It depends”.
Whitewood under Siege is a cracking good article in Cabinet Magazine on, as the subhead would have it, “the front lines of the pallet wars”. Pallets are one of those things most people seldom think about, except perhaps when they are on the lookout for cheap, hip-ish raw materials. And yet,
[M]any experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.
