A blog that was supposed to be about writing, and has wandered off track.
Gratuitous Happy Baby Picture
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I realized the other day that Nova has looked uncharacteristically sad in all my recently-posted photos of her. Here's one where she looks more like her usual self:
When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that...
It's a quiet day under a grey sky. The seascape is dominated by rain and hail, lightened with occasional sunshine through the clouds. At the moment there are no large ships in port, and the lock is closed. Last night someone was welding on one of the smaller boats berthed along the near edge of the harbor. The pilot boat is parked by the lock. Stillness.
There are a lot of differences between the life of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer and the life of a modern, reasonably well-off human. We evolved and adapted in conditions that were simpler, rougher, and more physically demanding. Nowadays, we are more comfortable but that comfort has taken a toll in the form of chronic debilitating disease, which nobody wants. Looking back at our history – and especially our prehistory – can show how we’ve strayed from the way of life we were built for, but the past is a big place, people lived in many different natural environments, and we only have scattered clues about what actually went on. Anatomically modern humans emerged around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago in Africa, and we stayed there for most of our prehistory. Around 40 - 60,000 years ago, we started using complex language and moving around over long distances, exploring new continents. Recorded history covers less than 10% of the time since the first homo sapiens migrated to ...
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