Randy | July 8, 2018
Title notwithstanding, today we started testing the Little Chief smoker by Smokehouse Products of Hood River, Oregon. For this first trial run, we’re doing a short flavour smoke on marinated pork chops and beef patties. Taste testing reports and a product review in a week or two as comprehensive testing proceeds.
Randy | July 1, 2018
You can keep your bit coin mining. It’s a well known fact that nickel mining is an important component of the Canadian economy. Less well known is that the one in Sudbury, Ontario, is the biggest we’ve ever found. This is Canada Day up here in the Great White North, on which all and sundry […]
Randy | June 21, 2018
As if the news hasn’t been serving up enough provocation for eyebrow raising, brow furrowing, and lip pursing to last us up to Yule, this Summer Solstice found us waking up to news out of Europe proclaiming CO2 shortage could leave beer drinkers flat — Supply in Europe runs thin just as World Cup boosts […]
Randy | June 16, 2018
I have just come out the other end, as it were, of a week of battle with an intestinal infection of surpassing vileness. Among other things, it spawned this. Critic’s Notes on Maestro Whynacht’s Symphony, “A Week in Thirty-six Movements” I attended the first performance of Maestro Whynacht’s daunting new symphony, “A Week in Thirty-six […]
Randy | April 22, 2018
The production of cheese predates recorded history. It originated through the transportation of milk in bladders made of ruminants’ stomachs due to their inherent supply of rennet. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheese-making originated. However, it may have originated either in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, or the Sahara. Cheese-making was known […]
Randy | January 14, 2018
Our title today paraphrases G. K. Chesterton’s observation that, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” The poem was inspired by a combination of current meteorological realities here in Nova Scotia, and some reading I’ve been doing on daily life of British and Commonwealth soldiers in […]
Randy | December 28, 2017
“As to Human kind, Winter will bring challenges at the end of which the result will lie on a spectrum ranging from the greatest of joys to the gravest of sorrows, and in this it stands as no different from any other aspect of life but for bearing a greater degree of urgency and inexorable […]
Randy | December 26, 2017
Culturally, the hospitality aspects of festivities prevailing at this time of year exist in a maelstrom of ill considered and contradictory drives. Year after year, many will attempt to answer seasonal motivations to visit people who sometimes live at a great remove and may be reached at no small peril to life and limb, even […]
Randy | October 28, 2017
Folklore comes from the same place as Human spirituality in that it springs from a need to understand the forces of the Universe by putting their obvious influences into some sort of context. On a human level, it is also crafted to convey time tested lessons of conduct to each succeeding generation. In this effort […]
Randy | October 13, 2017
“But darkness came on fast, and the paths of the wood seemed but imperfectly known to the marauders.” ~ Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott Sad to tell, most people with a taste for Dark Sentiments don’t always go looking for it in moonlit forests, ancient basements, forgotten burial grounds, remote moors, hoary caves, or sexual adventure. […]