Music Monday on National Cookie Day

It's National Cookie Day in the USA - who knew? Not me, not until I read it on Wikipedia's page for 4 December. See also here for more detail. It's Music Monday too - I was doubtful about being able to find a song about cookies, but lovely George Strait has one:

Saturday & Sundries

At Free Will Astrology this week Rob Brezsny told Aquarian types that:

In 1938, a chef named Ruth Wakefield dreamed up a brilliant invention: chocolate chip cookies. She sold her recipe to the Nestlé company in return for one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate. Maybe she was happy with that arrangement, but I think she cheated herself........(etc.)

Ms Wakefield did the world a favour! In my opinion, though, choc chip cookies do not beat wonderful British Chocolate Digestives by McVitie. From the Wikipedia page on Digestive Biscuits in general - sc roll down:

Chocolate digestive biscuits also are available, coated on one side with milk, dark or white chocolate. Originally produced by McVitie's in 1925 in the UK as the Chocolate Homewheat Digestive....American travel writer Bill Bryson described the chocolate digestive as "a British masterpiece". The McVitie's chocolate digestive is the most popular biscuit in the UK to dunk into tea.

The Sartorialist website one day this week (a daily stop for me) inadvertently introduced me to another artist I'd not heard of: Ai Weiwei, when The Sartorialist's photographer and the artist decided to take photographs of one another at the same time.

Ai Weiwei, I discovered, once created a set of bronze sculptures representing the Chinese Zodiac
See Zodiac Heads
and The Meaning of Ai Weiwei's 12 Zodiac Heads

An interesting topic upon which to exercise imagination:

The Amazing Cloud Cities we Could Build on Venus by Adam Becker

Space scientists are pouring much time and effort into colonising Mars. But could we also live in the atmosphere of Venus? BBC Future investigates.

Snips:

It’s hot enough to melt lead, the acid rain will scorch the flesh from your bones – and it’s the perfect place to raise a family. Venus, not Mars, might be the off-world destination of choice for future space colonists..........

So how could we ever possibly hope to live there? The key is to avoid the surface. “The problem with Venus is that the surface is too far below the one-Earth-atmosphere [of air pressure] level,” says Geoffrey Landis, the Nasa scientist and science fiction writer who was among the first to propose the idea. “The atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like environment in the Solar System (other than the Earth).” Some 50 kilometres (30 miles) above the surface, Venus is surprisingly hospitable........

To live on Venus, then, just fill a balloon with nitrogen and oxygen, and live inside the balloon. A big enough balloon will have enough lifting power to support you and your supplies – and a really big balloon could do even more. “A one-kilometre diameter spherical [balloon] will lift 700,000 tons – two Empire State Buildings. A two-kilometre diameter [balloon] would lift six million tons,” says Landis. “The result would be an environment as spacious as a typical city.”.........

All of which brought to mind this ditty:

Hat-tip to Avedon's Sideshow (link in sidebar) for this -

Watching This Rare Color Film Of London In 1927 Makes You Feel Like You're There, by Emily Davis.

This wonderful short film was shot by early film pioneer Claude Friese-Greene in 1927, and is some of the first-ever color film footage of London.

Which, in turn, brought to mind that we've been watching a new TV series on NBC "Timeless" (mainly because it follows "The Voice", so we're already on TV rather than partaking of Netflix offerings).

We've seen 4 weekly episodes so far. The series is not awful, but it isn't great time travel fare either. The episodes need to be longer, dialogue needs more depth. To date the time travellers have tried: to stop a rogue time traveller from preventing the Hindenberg disaster; from preventing the assassination of Abe Lincoln, from something we hadn't quite worked out, and this week from preventing the Nazis using an atomic weapon on Belgium, and preventing Werner Von Braun from going to work in the USA. What the plot's characters are doing isn't travelling back to change stuff themselves, but to prevent a rogue traveller from changing stuff, and in the process causing numerous potentially catastrophic "butterfly effects".

As we told one another on Monday evening, "This theme, done this way, could get old quite quickly now!"

Cookies & Biscuits ~ Oreos & Digestives

I tell myself to stand in a corner before drafting a post with instructions to repeat 100 times: "I will not write about politics, I will not write about politics, I will not write about politics.................

So...

Husband's son-in-law, in his weekly column in the newspaper he edits made mention, some weekends past, of Oreo cookies (biscuits to any passing British readers). I quote:

....A century ago a chocolate sandwich cookie was created that’s been a staple in my diet since childhood.
In 1912 in Manhattan, New York, the National Biscuit Co. made the first Oreo, and cookie monsters all over the planet are now snorking down about 25 billion of the habit-forming lil’ beggars a year.

There are two really cool things about Oreos:
1. They are addictive, but subtly so. Really. Think about how many times you’ve sat down with a package of Oreos and a glass of milk to watch a TV show or read the paper or play a video game. It’s almost a mystical moment when you look down and suddenly realize: Oh, I just ate a whole row!

2. Oreo eating is ritualistic and individualistic; there are a dozen methods of devouring the combo of chocolate wafer and white goop inside........ Of course, dunking an Oreo into whatever liquid is at hand is extremely popular.

I have my own, similar, longtime attachment to a biscuit (cookie to any passing US readers) - McVitie's Digestives and the de luxe version: Chocolate Digestives. McVitie Price, Scottish biscuit makers established in 1830, were originators of the Digestive, created by one Alexander Grant in 1892, and so named because it was thought that its high baking soda content served as an aid to food digestion. The biscuits are grainy, coarse textured, semi-sweet and crisp.

The choccy version, created in 1925, has one side of the biscuit coated with milk or plain chocolate. Wikipedia reports that "Over 71 million packets of McVitie's Chocolate Homewheat Digestives are eaten in the United Kingdom each year, giving an average of 52 biscuits per second."

The loss of Digestives was almost as devastating as the loss of Marks and Spencer incurred by my emigration across the pond. There are thousands of cookie varieties here, surely I could've found a substitute? No. I find American cookies far too sweet. But...last Christmas-time I spied some familiar red cartons on the cookie shelves of (sorry!) Walmart.....McVities' Digestives, both plain and chocolate!! I stocked up! We make a point of shopping mainly at the other supermarket in town, but I will enter Walmart's doors to re-stock Digestives occasionally, and in each town we visit when away from home, if we happen to wander into a Walmart to use the loos, I'll make a detour to check the cookie aisle for stray Digestives.

There aren't as many ways of eating Digestives as the son-in-law finds for devouring his Oreos. They can be eaten plain or spread with butter and/or cheese. Dunking (in a proper cup of tea, with milk, not lemon) has to be carried out very carefully, and preferably in stereo: two biscuits, undersides together, even then it's an art to retrieve them without losing a piece in the tea and having to fish it out, all very inelegant!

I will not write about politics....I will not write about politices....I will not write about politics...