Season's turning toward blackcap time ...

Walk in the local cemetary ...

Nice batch of daisies ... no joke ... lovely creatures.

Why Chris will want an iPad someday ...

and me too. When you purchase a show/movie on iTunes, you can play it at home or take it with you on the iPad. Nice. And Rome is great: BBC on steroids. As usual, the leaders of the filmic Roman Empire have the accents of the British Empire.

Gone East ...

Friday we gathered with friends of Barbara and Jim Allaire to wish them farewell. The Allaires are moving to Boston to spend more time with their kids, old and young. (Great idea!) Their leaving creates an absence. And an appreciation for all the great work they did in Winona with the Catholic Worker, Saint Mary’s Press, and the other contributions folks at the gathering mentioned that were news to me.

The World Cup predicted ... Brazil ... what a shock ...

A book has been written on how to predict the winner. I just like the pretty picture. And even I would have said Brazil.

Every nation is first in something ...

And here’s the graphic to prove it.

I love a great gadget ...

Here’s one someone should produce. A bank of speaker balls you can take with you.

And what is Hufpo? ...

I’m not a frequent reader of the online Huffington Post, but look who it’s passing up. Everybody.

Bloom watching ...

I threw the best of my flower shots into a slideshow for a quick overview. Check out the bigger version on the Vimeo hosting site.

Offering a free Twitter tips service ...

As a free service allied to my American Business Writing services, I have begun positing to MailTip, a daily Twitter feed. The tips focus on using email as a career building tool. The posts are also available at ABW as a journal, organized by tags, including accountability, appreciation, audience, brevity, caution, integrity, lead, learn, performance, procedure, promotion, results, voice.

Taking "printed" out of print publishing ...

Or "Honey, I shrunk the bookcase!" This morning Don and Jack and I got to talking about a local music publisher and I trotted out my latest take on print publishing. (Credit to blogger Mike Cane. Be warned: Mike writes “explicitly.”) When I read his comment that publishers are ignoring technology, the idea sunk in. Unnerving in its implications. Really.

My rendering: Book publishers giving their content to the Amazons, Apples, and other hardware vendors of the world because they don’t know how to produce hardware is comparable to their handing over their content (and revenue) to book printers because they don’t know how to print books. The tablet is the new print delivery vehicle. So just as publishers go to China to print their books, they need to partner with Chinese hardware companies to produce their own inhouse tablets.

Of course scale will matter, and publishers like Hal Leonard, the largest music print publisher in the world with institutional buyers, get to be first. The Kindle will be just one of three or four tablets per household. One for music, one for Bibles, one for other books, one for cookbooks, and so on. Each tablet will have its own focus, features, and store.

And they will be free with a subscription to the publisher's wares.

[Mike Cane linked to this post. My apologies on edits to the quote he excerpted. Didn't change the substance of the thought, just the styling.]

Last gasp of spring flowers ...

Blue eyed grass and drooping trilium. And here's some others.

Friday night at the boathouse ...

Dishing the dishes ...

So I think I will include posts about dishes I cook. I like cooking. I like messing around with recipes. I never record them. Honestly, why would anybody want to make a dish the same way twice?

I won’t post each day; we eat a lot off leftovers. And I won’t repeat a dish unless it’s improved vastly. Maybe I will add photos.

Here goes.

Asparagus pesto pizza
Look here for the original pesto recipe. My changes are in brackets. Use the extra on pasta at another meal.

Pesto recipe:
1 pound asparagus
1/4 cup pine nuts
2 or 3 medium garlic cloves [2 teaspoons bottled spanish garlic]
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 ounces freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (about 2/3 cup) [4 oz. Asiago]

Added ingredients:
Put down a bed of caramelized chopped onions on the pizza crust.
Next lather on the pesto.
Chop 1 tomato and toss it on top of the pesto.
Put a sprinkling of cheese for looks.

Pizza crust:
Use a biscuit recipe using 2 cups of flour and 1/4 cup of sesame seeds.

Next time:
I will use diced smoked salmon on the pizza. It’s yummy as is but it can use a bit of bite.

Wow. Here’s a sidebar on the recipe sent by my brother Jim: A condition known as pine mouth caused by pine nuts.

Its feats show it, they're iPads ...

Dunno what that means. Just to say, the iPad is a cool tool reading machine.

Making the connections with Campbells, Canada, and cod ...

Winona’s Marine Art Museum has a great exhibit including a new acquisition, Winding Line, by Winsow Homer dated 1874. Nice: I could tell my grandkids that the artist was living in and around Gloucester during the period that their great grandfather was fishing cod there.

Reporting a spoofed purchase ...

For my future reference. And yours. Here's a response from Amazon on what looks like a fraudulent purchase. Or something.

Thank you for writing to Amazon.com to bring this to our attention. Your message has been forwarded to our security department, and we will investigate the situation.  Please note that you may not receive a personal response.

In all likelihood, the message you received was not sent to you by Amazon.com.  We strongly advise that you *not* send any information about yourself back to this individual (especially your credit card number or any personal information). If you have already submitted any personal information to this person via e-mail or on a potentially fraudulent web site, you may wish to contact Customer Service for assistance.  To send an e-mail to Customer Service, please visit www.amazon.com/contact-us/

In the future, if you are ever uncertain of the validity of an e-mail, even from us, don't click on any supplied links--instead, type our web site address "www.amazon.com" directly into your browser and follow the regular links to Your Account.  Many unscrupulous spoofers mislead consumers by displaying one URL while taking the visitor to another. By typing in a well-known address you can avoid this trick.

Where's my waldo-pod? ...

Cool feature. Find a computer’s location and wipe the memory if it’s been lost or ‘napped.

Up the Amazon without a paddle ...

Google does have a way of dismantling entire market sectors, in this case Amazon’s ebook business. Emphasis added to this item:

“Google says its new service--called Google Editions--will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book search service. It will also allow book retailers to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue.”

On a light, blight note ...

Heard some nice clips by Tom Lehrer on MPR last night. A great lyricist. His song “Pollution” is an ode to add to the dipstick cultural note below.

. . .

See the halibuts and the sturgeons Being wiped out by detergents. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, But they don't last long if they try. Pollution, pollution, You can use the latest toothpaste, And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste. . . .

A day we will not soon forget ...

Another sorry chapter in our national faith in progress through petrol.