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| Windows of the People’s Food Co-op. |
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| Ann Cleeves: another Inspector Ramsay novel. Not a very good book! Too many hints make it seem contrived. |
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| Marina Chang: Tastes of the Pyrenees Appealing recipes — I may try some of them. |
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| A cup of coffee at Argus |
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| … we told them to find another way to trim the trees away from the power lines! |
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| In the Salish Sea near Seattle — AP photo: A little seal escapes a pod of orcas that wanted to have it for dinner. |
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| Story of the seal in the Guardian. (This is only a screen shot of the video). |
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| We saw seals furiously barking at a pod of orcas when we took a National Geographic cruise there: my photo (© 2018). |
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| A mural on a street in Shanghai. More of Miriam’s photos will be posted here. |
“She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by color, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities . . . In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.” (p. 215)
What’s next? — From The Contrarian:
After gleefully inflicting pain on the American people, MAGA Republicans are stuck defending their Epstein coverup and a politically wounded president, a rotten economy, a self-inflicted affordability crisis, their determination to jack up healthcare premiums, a reverse Robin Hood scheme that takes from working people to enrich the mega-wealthy, and defense of a money grubbing, corrupt, low-functioning president.
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| The White House: symbol of America and its leadership. |
“The government shutdown is already the longest in American history. But it’s also perhaps the most punishing, in part because President Trump has taken actions no previous administration ever took during a shutdown.
“Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration cut food stamps for millions of low-income Americans. It tried to fire thousands of government workers and withhold back pay from others, while freezing or canceling money for projects in Democratic-led states.” (New York Times, November 10, 2025)
I am fortunate to have a secure life at the moment. However, I’m concerned about people throughout the country whose access to food is in jeopardy or is actually diminished by the cruel games being played by our president and his cronies in Congress. Here in Michigan, the state government has acted to continue food benefits (SNAP — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
If you live in a different part of the USA, benefits for SNAP recipients may be disrupted, with congressional action perhaps about to provide some help. At the same time as food aid is disrupted, medical programs run by the federal government are almost certain to be decreased, with many people cut off from benefits that they depend on. It’s a horrendous situation, part of the autocratic takeover of our former democracy.
I’ve collected some headlines about the Michigan food situation — and I’m making a contribution to the main food bank in our town, but I feel totally helpless watching the destruction of what we thought was the American way.
From an article in the Guardian by a SNAP recipient in Oregon:
“But it still seems to me that we, America’s low-income people, have been treated like lab animals in a sick political experiment. Oh good, they’re giving us food! Oh wait, they’re not.
“When I say ‘giving us food,’ it makes it sound like we do not work or do for ourselves. That is simply not true. Even with a regular allotment of Snap benefits and a handout from the food bank, it takes true ingenuity to get through the month. And while we are cooking beans from scratch, we are also working or hustling to find work.” …
“I quit being choosy at the food bank, and started picking up stuff I would not normally eat – AKA stockpiling food. Off-brand mac and cheese, a can of peaches. The thing about food insecurity is that you are always worrying. You are always doing mental math, figuring out how to substitute key ingredients or spruce up the pot of lentils you have been eating all week.”
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| My Margaret Atwood shelves and a couple of my early editions of her novels. |
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| A first US edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, which became very famous later. |
We had school uniforms to combat the usual teenage girls’ urge to have the latest outfit so as not to appear ridiculous, but in me the sewing impulse was also constructivist: I wanted to see what I could make. I pored through pattern books in fabric stores and haunted remnants counters, and was eager to snap up bargains. Some of the lusher scraps—velvets, taffetas, silks, lace—I turned into sumptuous ballgowns for my sister’s proto-Barbie doll. I made my own formal dance dresses. One was pink chiffon, which ended up as cleaning cloths, says my sister. The next was an elegant Audrey Hepburn spaghetti-strap white brocade. Skirts could be very full, with crinolines underneath, or they could be pencil skirts, worn with cinch belts and sweaters with bat-wing sleeves. The cinch belts were not my friends: I was short-waisted, and with a cinch belt, looked like two tomatoes, one on top of the other. I also made a pleated plaid skirt—this must have been a school project, as I recall no love for it—and my father said, “You shouldn’t wear plaid. It makes you look broad in the beam.” How withering. (p 92)
Our Home Economics teacher, Miss Ricker, was a humourless person for whom dinner was a green thing, a white thing, a yellow thing, and a brown thing on every plate, no matter what they tasted like. Clothes were inner seam finishes and linings, not style. (p. 103)
One of the men who worked in the kitchen, at the potato-peeling level, had a number tattooed on his arm. We counsellors all knew what it meant, but we didn’t talk about it, which you might find peculiar at a Jewish camp. Strange as it may seem today, the Holocaust was not much discussed publicly in the 1950s. (p. 103)
The Bohemian Embassy was a coffee house of the early 1960s kind pioneered by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. You climbed a set of worn stairs to find yourself in a large former storage room, with exposed brick walls and small tables and the first espresso machine any of us had ever seen. There were jazz nights and folk nights, and a poetry night, which was on Thursdays. A genial fellow named Don Cullen ran the whole shebang. I was invited to read poetry there, on the strength of my college publications, by John Robert Colombo, who curated—as they would now say—the poetry nights. (p. 149)
Phoebe borrowed a strapless, wired formal dress from one of her other roomies. It was a little too big for her, but because of the wiring the dress could stand up by itself. She put it into a dress bag and took the train to the boys’ school, as was the custom. Her date turned out to be the school’s champion rock ’n’ roll dancer. The floor cleared so everyone could watch his fancy steps. He gyrated around Phoebe and her dress, showing off. Then he put his hand on her waist and twirled her. “He twirled me right around inside the dress. The zipper was at the front, and at the back were the two wired…” “Phoebe! How devastating! What did you do?” “He twirled me back again.” (p. 302)
Margaret Atwood’s memoir, “Book of Lives,” is long, nearly 600 pages, and it doesn’t sit lightly on the lap. It’s a largely shapeless narrative spanning the entire life of Canada’s pre-eminent novelist, … It frequently reads like a Politburo speech, in the sense that it takes its audience for granted.
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| A herd of Buffalo at Domino’s Farms, a hybrid office center and (sort of) zoo in Ann Arbor. |
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| Another animal: a Magnificent Quetzel from a friend who went to Guatemala. One more magnet for my refrigerator collection. |
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| Cabbage was our vegetable alongside lamb chops with roasted red pepper. |
“To safeguard jewels that the ruling Hapsburgs had owned for centuries, [Emperor Charles I] had them transported to Switzerland. One gem in the collection was a particular prize, a 137-carat diamond admired not only for its pear shape and yellow hue but also for its illustrious history. Before the Hapsburgs … , it had been owned by the Medici family, the rulers of Florence.
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| Competing. (These and all images in this post are screen shots I made during the show.) |
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| One of many very richly decorated and filled cakes. |
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| Judging |
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| With all the friends, family, and other contestants — about to announce the winner. |
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| An edible pumpkin about to be cooked in my kitchen a few years ago. |
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| Canned pumpkin or pie filling can legally be either actual pumpkin or one of a few kinds of orange squash. Details here: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/whats-in-canned-pumpkin/ |
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| The pumpkin wall on Halloween night. It goes on much longer than this. (Alice’s photo) |
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| The pumpkin wall on Sunday. Some pumpkins remain, others are gone. |
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| A pumpkin pie web image search. |
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| An old spice container with pumpkin pie spice that my mother always used. |
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| Making soup in my kitchen this week: a squash that’s equivalent to pumpkin. |
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| Stereotyped Thanksgiving image with pumpkins. |
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| Presidential banquet, starving masses. (Image from the Guardian) Thinking about Thanksgiving forces me to consider how some Americans are being abused, deprived of ways to buy food, and kicked around by our leaders. |
