An original cocktail: Montmartre

Montmartre is a hill (the butte Montmartre) which is 130 meters high, giving its name to the surrounding district, in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank. [Wikipedia] A few years ago I was staring at the lovely bottle creme de cassis in our liquor cabinet I’d hand-carried […]

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Nano-opera: Carmen

This nano-opera comes to us from my Twitter friend, SAS expert Michael Tuchman (http://bit.ly/cnY8m8): Carmen: Soldier doesn’t want to marry nice girl. He chases bad one. He gets cold feet. She dates hot celeb, so he kills her.

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Expiration Date Soup

Many of my family and friends have gifts for foraging–recognizing all the funky greens, vegetables, mushrooms, and so forth in their habitats, and knowing when and how to harvest. I don’t have the gift–or rather, my repertoire is rather limited. I know cress, dandelions, and other basics, and most of the Rocky Mountain region edible […]

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Weather announcements and youthful indiscretions

Something I’ve found wonderfully amusing is that ever since Dad got on the email bandwagon in the mid 1990s, we Vangs (and in-laws) have received email nearly every weekday and often on the weekends that opens, invariably, with a weather report. Dad’s a farmer’s son, which probably has something to do with the obsession, and […]

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Wagnertuben available for rentals, with or without players

Fellow San Francisco Bay Area freelance hornist Alicia Telford and I own a matched set of four historic Wagnertuben that are available for rental, with or without players.  Our tuben are a matched set of Alexanders picked out by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1952, during the Fritz Reiner era. We have a pair of […]

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Smørgåsbord Step 14: Make meatballs

Two years ago, we started blogging about how to throw a smørgåsbord in several thousand easy lessons, and recently a loyal smørgåsbord attendee, our good friend Katja, asked me where to find the meatball recipe on the blog. Well, the sad truth is that we never quite got that far in our smørgåsbord blog. Meatballs […]

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I need help

It was starting to feel this way around here yesterday. I’d finally had it with my AppleTV STILL trying to finish syncing less than 20gb from the night several months ago that my friend Noel helped me mess with channels, realized that 2 of my 3 Expresses were not 802.11n (or whatever that number is) […]

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Leadpipes and statues and boats, oh my!

Dag to i Oslo began with the promised better strategy at breakfast. I started on the hot side but unfortunately found that the pølser weren’t as good as the day before and the weird thick pancake things were definitely some kind of fiskekake–not bad, though. The potatoes were hot and yummy, but the egg-sausage scramble […]

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