Freshly Baked Gingersnaps: November 2008

Lesson here: When things gets really bad, you need to understand that treatment may require repeat applications for several more months before you see signs of improvement.

Chris Matthews sums it up - your moment of Zen

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

George Carlin awarded Mark Twain Prize last night

I had a great time at the Kennedy Center last night. There were some great guests! Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Joan Rivers, Lewis Black, Lily Tomlin, and others. The show will be aired on PBS on April 1, 2009.

One of my favorite clips they played in honor George was him singing Cherry Pie on the Arsenio Hall Show, November 30, 1989. First 5 minutes is Carlin talking about Rhythm and Blues in the early 50's ... then his performance starts at about 5 minutes in.

Another tribute that will have you in tears is Stephen's Colbert's Tonight's Word "Bleep" - where his does a skit about the 7 dirty words....

Monday, November 10, 2008

Food Science - Splendid Table links

Shirley Corriher
Several good features about cooking vegetables, Starch, Potatoes and more.

Susan Hassler, editor-in-chief of the science and technology online magazine IEEE Spectrum, decided to reach out to science and techno geeks who cook. Find out what happened.

Lynne talks with Harold McGee, the man who took food science from the laboratory into home kitchens. He recently updated his classic tome from twenty years ago: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. He fills us in on the discoveries contained in the 21st century edition. Listen

March 11: Molecular Gastronomy | Listen
This week we take a look at the new kitchen science that has haute restaurant chefs rethinking everything, taking foods apart and putting them back together in ways we can't imagine. The instigator is our guest, chemist Hervé This, author of Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History.)

March 25: Umami | Listen
If you've always suspected that taste goes beyond science's big four of sweet, sour, salt and bitter your instincts are right. This week we're looking at umami. It's what food types call the "fifth taste." Our guest, David Kasabian, tells us how to use this wunderkind to make everything we eat taste better. Coq au Vin Nouveau, from The Fifth Taste: Cooking with Umami by David and Anna Kasabian, demonstrates the principle.

For the Homeschooling Mom -
Wine critic Matt Kramer, author of Matt Kramer's New California Wine answers the controversial question: can you actually get cheap good wines?

Picks from Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)

Faith and Science
Science and Hope
Our guest straddles the worlds of cosmology and social activism. During a live audience interview in Philadelphia, he tells us
how he unites his convictions about faith, ethics, and cosmology.

Quarks and Creation
Science and religion are often pitted against one another; but how do they complement, rather than contradict, one another? We learn how one man applies the deepest insights of modern physics to think about how the world fundamentally works, and how the universe might make space for prayer.

Reimagining Environmentalism
Environmentalism and climate change are hot topics; yet they're still often imagined as the territory of scientists, expert activists, and those who can afford to be environmentally conscious. We discover two people who are transforming the ecology of their immediate worlds in Dunn, Wisconsin and New York's South Bronx.

Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth
As a theoretical physicist, Janna Levin probes whether the universe is finite or infinite. As a novelist, she explored the separate but parallel lives of two influential 20th-century scientists: Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Their work laid the foundations for computer intelligence while challenging fundamental notions about how we can know what is true.

Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin
We'll take a fresh and thought-provoking look at Darwin's life and ideas. He did not argue against God but against a simple understanding of the world — its beauty, its brutality, and its unfolding creation.

Food
Ethics of Eating
Kingsolver describes an adventure her family undertook to spend one year eating primarily what they could grow or raise themselves. As a citizen and mother more than an expert, she turned her life towards questions many of us are asking. Food, she says, is a "rare moral arena" in which the ethical choice is often the pleasurable choice.

Faith and Politics & Founding Fathers
The Religious Roots of American Democracy
Philosopher Jacob Needleman speaks on the spiritual and moral ideals of the American founders — and how these ideals resonate in our culture today. Democracy, Needleman says, is inner work, not just a set of outward structures.

Liberating the Founders
Americans remain divided about how much religion they want in their political life. As we elect a new president, we return to an evocative, relevant conversation from earlier this year with journalist Steven Waldman. From his unusual study of the American founders, he understands why 21st-century struggles over religion in the public square spur passionate disagreement and entanglement with politics at its most impure.

Religious Liberty in America: The Legacy of Church and State
At the center of our history of church and state is a troublesome irony. What began as an attempt to guarantee religious tolerance in the new world has at various times been commandeered by the most chauvinistic movements America has known. In spite of this, religious liberty has survived as an American ideal—one which we continue to test.

We live in a world of increasing religious pluralism—diversity beyond the imagining of our nation's founders—which suggests fresh nuance to the meaning of religious liberty. This much is clear: our modern conversation has few connections to the social, political, and religious impulses that led to the First Amendment.

Host Krista Tippett and her guests revisit the history and meaning of separation in thought-provoking and, at times, unsettling ways. Charles Haynes talks about his work in the American public school system—the arena in which our modern debates often center. Philip Hamburger describes his research into the surprising, and largely forgotten, origins of separation of church and state. And, Cheryl Crazy Bull speaks about the loss and reemergence of religious expression in tribal public life.

Evangelical Politics
A passionate discussion is unfolding in public and in private among Evangelical leaders and communities. Should Christians be involved in politics and if so, how? What has gone wrong, and what has been learned from the Moral Majority up until now. In this live public conversation, Krista probes these ideas with three formative Evangelicals.

Topics for Bible Study
Jewish Roost of the Christian Story
New Testament writings about Jews may sound inflammatory in modern ears. A New Testament scholar with ties to both Judaism and Christianity helps us put these writings in context and look for meaning in the Passion that Hollywood and popular culture can't convey.

Beyond the Atheism-religion Divide
In 1965, a young Harvard professor became the best-selling voice of secularism in America with his book The Secular City. He sees the old thinking in the "new atheism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The either/or debates between religion and atheism, he says, obscure the truly interesting interplay between faith and other forms of knowledge that is unfolding today.