The idea of BookCrossing appeals to me. You give a book away, directly to someone or left where someone might find it, and by registering it with BookCrossing there's a chance you'll find out who gets it next. Reuse, community, all that stuff. So much so that I joined up pretty quickly (2010-06-07...

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.

Part of my recent physical, office-adjacent spring clean was to look at the various spinning hard drives lying around the place. One represented an aborted attempt to add big-time file storage to my Raspberry Pi, abandoned because I just don’t need that.¹ A big USB stick is all I really need for f...