As a kid, I found the kitchen a rather mysterious place, filled with exotic implements like the bizarre “colander,” the ominous “deep-fat fryers,” and the straight-out-of-the-mad-scientist’s-laboratory “pressure cooker,” as well as bizarre ingredients like “bouillon,” “baker’s chocolate” (real chocolate’s evil twin), “paprika,” “cloves,” and something called “pectin.” Both the pressure cooker and pectin mostly came …
Category: Blog
The voice
With the season about to tilt from summer to autumn, Canada geese are once more filling the air with their melodious sounds as they prepare to fly south for the winter. To us, of course, the sound of a flock of geese “talking” to each other is more or less the same as the sound …
Future phones
When I was a kid (and though young whippersnappers may beg to differ, I’m not all that old now) pretty well all telephones were black and had rotary dials: no digital readouts, no push-buttons, no “recent callers” buttons or “redial” buttons or “recall” buttons or any of the other buttons that my current phone boasts. …
Ants
I spent the Labour Day weekend at the home of some friends at Crooked Lake. The weather was beautiful and so was their yard, and so we ate lunch outdoors, observing and being observed by cats, humming birds, bees, butterflies, hawks–and ants. Of all of them, it was the ants who were most interested in …
Dry cleaning
Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve wondered something. Somewhere in between the first time I asked myself, “Why is the sky blue?” and the first time I asked myself, “What is the meaning of life?”, I first asked myself, “What the heck is dry cleaning?” The cleaning I knew mostly involved water–lots of …
Teeth
Here’s a question that has bugged me since childhood. Why does the tooth fairy collect teeth? Why does she want them so much she’s willing to give a quarter or even a loonie for every one she finds under a pillow? Teeth, at first glance, don’t seem very valuable. As any encyclopedia will tell you, …
Mirages
There’s a scene that’s appeared in so many movies and TV shows that it’s become a cliché. You know the one: it’s where this guy is staggering, eventually crawling, through the desert. Cut to a shot of the sun glaring down at him. Cut to a close-up of his parched lips. Cut to a wide …
Radar
With the end of the Cold War, a lot of previously classified military technology is making its way into civilian hands. Spy satellites whose very existence was top secret, for instance, are now being used to survey crops. This post-war transfer of technology from military to civilian use is not new: it happened after the …
Insect repellants
An anthropologist who knew nothing about our culture might well be fascinated by our traditional summer folk dance. You know the one: it’s where we jump about from foot to foot, waving our hands in the air and occasionally slapping parts of our body. It’s called the “Mosquito Mazurka.” Our hypothetical anthropologist might also note …
Special effects
Motion pictures have always been largely illusion: artificial realities convincingly created by assorted designers, craftspeople, cinematographers and actors. But these days, what you see on screen is less “real” than ever. Today special effects rule the movies, thanks primarily to computers. That’s not to say there were no special effects before computers came along. …
Amplification
Summer is the time for outdoor concerts, but even when 20,000 people gather in a muddy field, they take it for granted that they’ll be able to clearly hear the music…and complain if they don’t. We’re so used to electronically amplified sound the only time we give it any thought is when it doesn’t work …
Nails
It’s summer, and the weekend air is full of the sound of sawing, hammering and (occasionally) cursing. Yes, it’s time to break out the tools and build that deck, fix that roof, install that new door–and whatever your renovation plans, you’ll probably use either nails or screws in abundance. The nail is the simplest and …
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