Archive for the ‘My life’ Category

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Triplefruit trail mix, the musical score

April 13, 2026

A couple days ago, with my helper Isaac, I was preparing triplefruit trail mix: a large pouch of commercial trail mix — of almonds, cashews, and (dried) cranberries — with added packs of (dried) blueberries and cherries. (A couple handfuls of this trail mix is then added to some granola — rolled oats with almonds, raisins, cranberries, and pecans — to make a bowl of my breakfast cereal, which is, finally, moistened with yogurt and milk. Fiber, fruits, nuts, probiotics, and yumminess.

Assembling the trail mix involves dumping the pouch of commercial mix and the packets of dried fruits into a large plastic container, fixing the top firmly on the container, and then getting its contents thoroughly mixed, by turning and shaking the container briskly, over and over.

Trail mixing is noisy, energetic, and surprisingly entertaining. You are moved to treat the stuff in its container as a percussion instrument, to sway your hips a bit, and to contemplate breaking into song. This time, Isaac and I had the very same inspiration:

Shake it up, baby … Twist and shout … Come on and work it on out

Oh yeah! There’s a musical score for trail mixing, and it’s glorious.

(more…)

Posted in Language and food, Language and medicine, Music, My life | 2 Comments »

The coconut-oil temperature gauge

April 12, 2026

The background. In two postings on this blog.

— on 8/9/23, in “The states of matter: coconut X”: the spreadable coconut fat (a semi-solid cream I use for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77F) to to a free-flowing liquid; when cooled in the refrigerator, it’s transformed into a firm solid that you have to deal with in hard chunks.

— on 3/20/26, in “Coconut X revisited”:

Today is March 20th, the first day of spring — the vernal equinox — here in the northern hemisphere. But also another day of record-breaking heat in the southern SF bay, set to soar once again to over 90F. When I went to oil my legs and feet at 6:30 am, it had already melted to a messy liquid.

(more…)

Posted in My life, Weather | Leave a Comment »

Living tubes, no sex

April 4, 2026

Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house).  I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans).  Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.

An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:


The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees

(more…)

Posted in Language and plants, My life, Names, Palo Alto, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

Maximus

April 3, 2026

(alcoholic drinks and lots of condoms, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

I put in a grocery order for delivery from Safeway (a bag of mandarins, 2 containers of yogurt, 2 cartons of milk, 4 boxes of Kleenex, and some Dijon mustard), and Safeway suggested a pile of additions to my order, the first of which came as the word MAXIMUS, which my highly penis-invested imagination took as a reference to condoms, huge ones (no doubt as a compliment to the power of my body; for the purposes of sales, every man is admirably horse-hung, whatever his actual equipment is like). As it happens, I am happily snug — salestalk for small / slim — rather that max / thick, congenial rather than showy, but I’m entertained by the gesture.

But it turned out that MAXIMUS was an allusion to max taste, not max size — specifically to the powerful taste of an ale, Lagunitas Maximus Colossal IPA. Safeway was encouraging me to order some. Or Mad Dog Bling Blue Razz blend raspberry wine. Or Absolut Tabasco — chili pepper flavored vodka. (I swear I am not making these up.) There were probably further remarkable alcoholic drinks on succeeding pages, but I did not venture further into this astounding catalog. In fact, I was falling back on visions of snug but silky condoms. (more…)

Posted in Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Taste | 1 Comment »

Occasions

March 31, 2026

This is ultimate March: 🐅 tiger 🐅 tiger 🐅 tiger, as the inaugural rabbits of April mass for April Fool’s Day, Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday, and this year at sundown tomorrow, the first day of Passover, as Good Friday and Easter Sunday are soon upon us; today is the Transgender Day of Visibility, fitting most uncomfortably with what has been, for some years now, Cesar Chavez Day — which I now choose to celebrate as Dolores Huerta Day (you might have an alternative proposal).

So the calendar brings us a contended landscape of some of the best and the worst in humankind, along with the landscape of the daily news, which supplies some of the most appalling reports alongside some of the most heartening.  Meanwhile, the mechanics of daily life have not gone well for me; most notably, my internet access vanished for most of yesterday; and dips into very low barometric pressure have made my joints scream with pain.  But I endure. And tomorrow is another month.

 

Posted in Events and occasions, My life | Leave a Comment »

Stained by poppies

March 30, 2026

Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).

Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/)  as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:

My morning coffee
By a field of poppies

(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)

(more…)

Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Language play, Mishearings, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »

A fortuitous cold soup

March 26, 2026

Doing a regular grocery order yesterday,* the Safeway page for their excellent house-brand tomato bisque happened to show, among other things I’d ordered previously, small cans of chopped clams (which I used to use for pasta with white clam sauce, when I still actually cooked), and it occurred to me that I could combine the soup and the clams, with some sriracha sauce added for a bit of heat, mix it up, heat it in the microwave, and get myself some nice tomato-clam soup. (I don’t cook, but I microwave up a treat.)  [*If you kvetch about this example as a glaring dangling modifier, I will throw discourse-organizational stones at you, and try to educate you in the ways of non-default SPARs (subjectless predicational adjuncts requiring a referent for the subject — non-default when they don’t obey the Subject Rule, that is, when they don’t pick up this referent from the subject of the main clause; see the Page on this blog about my dangler postings here).]

I gave the spoon a lick to check the spiciness level. And found that it tasted wonderful, just as it was. It didn’t actually need heating. So I had it half of it for lunch, as a nice cold soup, and put the rest in the refrigerator, to produce a truly wonderful chilled soup for my lunch today. It might be nice with a bit of dill, maybe a dollop of sour cream, but I don’t have those in stock, so I was content with what I had.

And I got a nice, botanically oriented, walk around the block with Isaac, answered mail reconnecting with my old friend the philosopher Bill Lycan (see my 3/12 posting “The Vishnu of philosophy”), and then (for dinner) scored some bibimbap from a Korean restaurant, just because I was seized with a desire for it. An excellent day.

 

Posted in Danglers, Discourse organization, Friendship, Language and food, Modification, My life | Leave a Comment »

Coconut X revisited

March 20, 2026

Briefly noted. From my 8/9/23 posting “The states of matter: coconut X”:

I discovered the melting point of coconut X several summers ago. My air-conditioning aims to cool things to 80 F, so when it gets hot outside, inside my condo the spreadable coconut fat ([a semi-solid cream] used for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77 F) to to a free-flowing liquid that’s very hard to cope with.

So this morning I put the jar in the refrigerator (where it’s probably between 35 and 40 F) — and discovered another state of the substance, a very firm solid that is also almost impossible to deal with; I have to chip away chunks of the stuff with a pointed implement, chunks that alas, do not spread (though I can get small amounts of the liquid state by using the (roughly 97 F) body heat in my hands to melt a chunk).

That was on an early August day, in the dog days of summer. Today is March 20th, the first day of spring — the vernal equinox — here in the northern hemisphere. But also another day of record-breaking heat in the southern SF bay, set to soar once again to over 90F. When I went to oil my legs and feet at 6:30 am, it had already melted to a messy liquid. (I got up at 3:30 am to enjoy the cool and quiet of the night, and did in fact finish a posting then. After which I turned into a reptile stunned by the heat.) Tomorrow the temperature will drop by 20 degrees, and I’ll be able to walk in the neighborhood again. May it be so.

Posted in Chemistry, My life, Weather | 2 Comments »

The breakfast walk

March 16, 2026

From 722 Ramona St., between Forest and Homer (my house) to 566 Emerson St., at the northwest corner at Hamilton (the Palo Alto Creamery, a standard place for Saturday breakfast with my daughter Elizabeth in the old days), along a route fixed in its details (there will be a map, with commentary). Now notable in that the Creamery is the only business or office on that route that has been there all the time since Jacques and I came to Ramona St. in 1986. This is urban life, with everything in flux.

(more…)

Posted in Architecture, Language and food, My life, Palo Alto | 1 Comment »

March 15th

March 15, 2026

Today: a significant day in my personal life for many years, and also a significant day in world history.

— March 15th was spring Removal Day — Higashi (East) removal — when (for about 10 years) Jacques and I left Palo Alto (after winter quarter at Stanford) to drive the 2650 miles east to Columbus OH (for spring quarter at Ohio State); the winter Removal Day — Nishi (West)  removal — in the opposite direction was December 15th

— March 15th is also the Ides of March, the day of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.E.

(more…)

Posted in Holidays, Language and food, Movies and tv, My life | 1 Comment »

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