The mud has dried and there are snowdrops on the bank
“Is this a hard choice for you?’ he demanded.
Yes! I cried. “Oh,” he said, springing back up cheerfully. “In that case, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a hard decision, then there’s always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.”
From the New Yorker 28th Jan, 2013 “Music to Your Ears” by Adam Gopnik
Snowdrops in the woods
As I sat by the bedside of my mother in law yesterday, as I have many times in the last year, I was catching up on the magazine I subscribe to – the New Yorker. I confess I didn’t quite understand the physics part of this great piece about how we listen to music and how the way we have listened has changed over time – but I was interested enough to read on as the cognitive sciences and the insights generated from them are really what fascinate me most intellectually and articles like these give one some sort of access to the world of science which otherwise passes one by. Music, emotional maps, time, culture, fooling the brain – always ready and willing to be fooled – who could not be curious at least to read this?
(The New Yorker article is reproduced here in full apparently with permission, so I will put a link in) Continue reading →
I fed them for a while and experimented with making rudimentary soft cheese with it, but found that the grains grew bigger and bigger and fermented the milk faster and faster and I couldn’t keep up. So I followed instructions on Dom’s Kefir! and froze them. I defrosted them about a week ago and have been giving them lots of love and so far they seem to have survived freezing fine. Continue reading 
Zeb Bakes 