September 26 to October 2 2021

Daily Entries for the week of
Sunday, September 26, 2021
through
Saturday, October 2, 2021

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It’s Saturday, October 2, 2021
Welcome to the 1,238th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
E Bike

Fat Tire Bike by Ensey Motorized Bikes
Nzmb - Own work
Ensey Motorized Bikes Fat Tire Bike

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Commentary

Can you believe it? My cousin hit the million-dollar lottery.
He’s a great guy and deserving of it.
Congratulations Michael.

Henry V, quote below, is one of my favorite plays.

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Reading and Writing
It’s always something. My new device, a Surface 4 laptop, arrived today and took a little bit to configure it to my personal likings.
The machine is terrific, but its arrival reduced the time I had to spend on my manuscript.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
“This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day”

~William Shakespeare
Henry V

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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts. 

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

This from Jim P:
Dom, 

I really liked the Chihuly image. I had never heard of him. Lovely art, he makes.  Thanks for enlightening me/us. 

Your friend, 

Jim 

Blog meister responds: Dale Chihuly’s exhibition at the MFA got my daughter Katherine hooked on art museums so he holds a special place for us.

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Wednesday night I had Goat Curry and Rice and Beans.
I bought the food from Flames but doctored it up a good deal.
I made a sauce of Yellow curry, Asian oil [sesame w garlic, scallions, and ginger, and coconut milk and heated the goat in that. Good call.
I sauteed scallions, serrano pepper, and red bell pepper in a teaspoon of Asian oil. Then I added a can of black beans with the water. In two minutes, I added the simple yellow rice from Flame.
Dinner was terrific.

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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Katherine and Swarthmore College President Valerie Smith

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Short Essay*

An electric bicycle, also known as an e-bike or ebike, is a bicycle with an integrated electric motor used to assist propulsion. Many kinds of e-bikes are available worldwide, but they generally fall into two broad categories: bikes that assist the rider's pedal-power (i.e. pedelecs) and bikes that add a throttle, integrating moped-style functionality. Both retain the ability to be pedaled by the rider and are therefore not electric motorcycles.

E-bikes use rechargeable batteries and typically travel up to 25 to 32 km/h (16 to 20 mph). High-powered varieties can often travel more than 45 km/h (28 mph). In some markets, such as Germany as of 2013, they are gaining in popularity and taking some market share away from conventional bicycles, while in others, such as China as of 2010, they are replacing fossil fuel-powered mopeds and small motorcycles.

Depending on local laws, many e-bikes (e.g., pedelecs) are legally classified as bicycles rather than mopeds or motorcycles. This exempts them from the more stringent laws regarding the certification and operation of more powerful two-wheelers which are often classed as electric motorcycles. E-bikes can also be defined separately and treated under distinct electric bicycle laws.

E-bikes are the electric motor-powered versions of motorized bicycles, which have been in use since the late 19th century. Some bicycle-sharing systems use them.

* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.

**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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It’s Friday, October 1, 2021
Welcome to the 1,237th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
Star Wars: Visions

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Commentary
I want people to succeed.
I’m a Pats fan but I want all five NFL rookie quarterbacks to do well.
Not as well as Mac Jones, but to submit performances to be proud of.
Want them all to do well.

And President Joe Biden’s dream of a new American infrastructure.
I want his bills to pass.
Want him to succeed.

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Reading and Writing
I’m in a good place on the manuscript: writing the new opening pages.
The past work is kept, just moved one chapter to the rear.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?”

~John Milton
The Complete Poetry

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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

This from Tucker J, our terrific movie critic:

Hey Dom,

I just finished another piece on a really lovely anthology Disney just did for Star Wars.

I hope it’s an interesting read!

Thank you for always giving these pieces your kindest attention.

Blog meister responds: Tucker’s writings are terrific. We are grateful to receive them.

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
I had Jamaican fried chicken with jalapeno peppers.
I bought the chicken from Flames, in Brigham’s Circle.
It was decent.
To energize it, I bought a baguette to stuff it into.
I fried some jalapeno peppers and tossed in the chicken
after breaking it up into pieces small enough to absorb
the flavors of the peppers and olive oil.
I let it cook over a low flame for several minutes.
It was delicious.

Community Picture
2000 year old Egyptian gods gown

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Short Essay*
Star Wars: Visions (Hepburn: Sutā Wōzu: Bijonzu) is an anime anthology series created for the American streaming service Disney+. Produced by Lucasfilm Animation, the series consists of nine short films produced by seven Japanese animation studios, Kamikaze Douga, Studio Colorido, Geno Studio, Trigger, Kinema Citrus, Production I.G, and Science SARU, each telling their own original stories based on the Star Wars universe. The anthology was released on September 22, 2021. It received largely positive reviews with a spin-off novel continuation of "The Duel", Star Wars Visions: Ronin, set for release on October 12, 2021.

* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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It’s Thursday, September 30, 2021
Welcome to the 1,236th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
Shakespeare’s Sonnet #93

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,

Like a deceived husband; so love’s face

May still seem love to me, though alter’d new;

Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place:

For there can live no hatred in thine eye,

Therefore in that I cannot know thy change.

In many’s looks the false heart’s history

Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,

But heaven in thy creation did decree

That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;

Whate’er thy thoughts or thy heart’s workings be,

Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.

How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,

If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!




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Commentary
I intended to beat the rain and walk to Tatte’s for a baguette and then to Whole Foods for some food shopping. At 9.30am I stepped out of my building and saw the flash of lightning and heard the crash of thunder. I changed direction and headed for the subway instead and made it before the first raindrops hit.

Without my taking a step outside, the train takes me to the Prudential Center, to the Blue Bottle café where I do my writing, and Eataly, where I get a baguette and tomato, all I needed for today’s dinner. The two destinations are fortuitously beside each other, and both indoors. When I’m done shopping and writing I’ll train back to the waterfront and will have a short five-minute walk back to my apartment. One of the joys of city living.

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Reading and Writing
Once in a while a person, perhaps a friend, rises to fill your needs. Howard Dinin, a friend for sixty years, has, by his insightful and intelligible direction, provided me with the tools to develop my manuscript in a cohesive and logical way.

Tucker Johnson, with his knowledge and love of people, has, almost daily through these eighteen months of the pandemic, helped me navigate the mine-laden world of technology so I can seamlessly post to my blog and develop my manuscript using my laptop and desktop computers,  and slowly expand my understanding of the power of my Duo cell phone.

Life would be much more difficult without the help of these two friends. Thank you.
May each of us always have such angels to pick us up.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
Today’s entry is in the Lead Picture printed above and the Short Essay printed below.

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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

Today’s mail is a combination of emails sent over the course of the last years by Howard D and Tucker J, which I summarize and respond to above, in the Read and Writing section.

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Monday night I wanted a dinner without a sauce. At Whole Foods I lucked into a dry-aged rib eye which I slow-roasted before I seared/broiled it. I served it with Jamaican rice which I bought at Flames, a Caribbean restaurant with several locations in Boston.
The meal was simple and delicious.
Whole Foods meat prices continue as the best food value in the city; at least when you factor in their commitment to animal welfare.

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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Greenway fountain at night


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Short Essay*
Sonnet 93 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.

Continuing the alarmed discovery at the end of Sonnet 92, the poet here explores what it would be like to be living a life in which the young man's deceiving of him is simply unknown to the poet. Instead of dying at the moment of discovery of falsity, the poet now lives 'like a deceived husband'.

The vocabulary of this sonnet repeats terms that appear throughout the sequence, and gives readers a sense of the sequence feeding off itself, finding source in its own prior utterances.

Sonnet 93 features 'face' twice (15 times in the whole sequence), 'looks' twice (12 times in the whole sequence), and 'love' also twice ('love', unsurprisingly appears frequently, 172 times, throughout the Q1609 sequence).

Remarkably, the poet imagines himself as being like a 'deceived husband': directly relating his friendship with the young man to marriage. The sonnet ends with the allusion to 'Eve's apple', making the 'deceived husband', the poet in line 2, into a version of Adam, and the betrayal into a version of the Fall. Otherwise, religious references in the poem seem facile or inflated: 'heaven in thy creation did decree' etc. Readers are confronted again to the exaggerated sense of betrayal expressed in these sonnets - what kind of claim could the poet have thought he had over the young man?

The final line of the sonnet expresses the poet's uneasy bafflement: the young man's beautiful 'show' is completely opaque, he will only ever seem beautiful to the poet, his heart's duplicitous inner 'workings' will never betray themselves in 'moods and frowns and wrinkles strange'. That triad of terms, redundant in expression again suggests that Shakespeare in not writing at high pressure in this sonnet. 'Workings' is a rare word in Shakespeare, only here and in the no doubt near contemporary Henry IV Part 2. The unreadable, always beautiful face of the young man looks forward in the Q1609 sequence to the face of the 'woman colored ill' in the final group of so-called 'Dark Lady' sonnets, where face and deeds match blackness, rather than the young man's mismatch of lovely appearance and morally ugly behaviour.

This sonnet perhaps struggles to get the attention of experienced readers of the sequence, as it is followed by a far more striking sonnet, 94, and such readers might always be tempted to turn to the utterly unformulaic sonnet that follows.

* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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It’s Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Welcome to the 1,235th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
Mad Men 5th Season

This is a promotional poster for the fifth season of AMC's 'Mad Men'.
http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2012/02/season-5-poster.php[dead link]
Fair use
File:Mad Men Season 5, Promotional Poster.jpg
Uploaded: 16 March 2012
About this interface | Discussion | Help

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Commentary
I thought I had six appointment-free days. I discover I’d forgotten my annual physical, Friday, and the new Surface I ordered arrives Oct 2 and must be synchronized with my One Drive and personal preferences. That constitutes another appointment. So, four free days and one of those is at this moment slipping away: Tick Tock.

I am bingeing Mad Men. It’s a great TV series. Perhaps amazing. The problem is that binge is defined as overindulgence. So accurate. Define it also as a muscular blocking out of all other activities, like going to work, spending time with friends, reading, and on and on. Bingeing Mad Men is killing me.

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Reading and Writing
Not only did my diet suffer during this swirl of reunions, but so did my writing and reading.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
“As Shakespeare says,
if you're going to do a thing you might as well
pop right at it and get it over.”
~P.G. Wodehouse
Very Good, Jeeves!

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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

This from Tucker J, responding to my request for a summary of the different iterations of the MS Surface laptop family:

Happily!

Your needs aren’t many. I honestly don’t think anything they announced is any better for you than anything else. 
The laptop studio is the most powerful but it’s power most users would never know they had.
The Laptop 4 is a simple and capable Surface. Standard laptop shape and feel with with much or little power as you want to spend. Lots of options for power exist in the Laptop 4.

The Surface Pro 8 is our bread-and-butter device. A laptop that is also a tablet. Various power levels like the laptop 4 but the tablet feature is a great option for some users.

The final option would be a surface pro x. It has the same tablet option as Surface Pro 8 but this is the only surface that comes with LTE built in. That is to say if you have a data plan with your cell phone provider, the device can connect to the internet like a smart phone, and you don't need to rely on other's Wi-Fi when using it out and about.

How is that?

Tucker Johnson  |  Customer Success Manager, Surface

tujohn@microsoft.com  |  1 857-299-7749 

Blog meister responds: That is terrific! I’ll let you know which I get.

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Sunday night I had a slice of Lasagna from my son Dom that was in my freezer.
I made a bucket of Marinara Sauce and used a ladle or two to wet the pasta.
I also had the last piece of Chicken Fricassee, leftover from a meal I ate a couple of nights ago.

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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Espresso bello
Espresso bello maker

A beautiful cup of espresso

Made by a beautiful barista.

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Short Essay*
Mad Men is an American period drama television series created by Matthew Weiner and produced by Lionsgate Television. The series ran on the cable network AMC from July 19, 2007, to May 17, 2015, lasting for seven seasons and 92 episodes. Its fictional time frame runs from March 1960 to November 1970.

Mad Men begins at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, New York City and later at the newly created firm of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (later named Sterling Cooper & Partners), located near the Time-Life Building at Sixth Avenue. According to the pilot episode, the phrase "Mad men" was a slang term coined in the 1950s by advertisers working on Madison Avenue to refer to themselves, "Mad" being short for "Madison". (In reality, the only documented use of the phrase from that time may have been in the late-1950s writings of James Kelly, an advertising executive and writer.)

The series' main character is the charismatic advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), who is initially the talented creative director at Sterling Cooper. He is erratic and mysterious, but is widely regarded throughout the advertising world as a genius; some of the most iconic advertisement campaigns in history are shown to be his creation. Later, Don becomes a founding partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, but begins a struggle as his highly calculated identity falls into a period of decline. The plot of the show tracks the people in his personal and professional lives. As the series progresses, it depicts the changing moods and social mores of the United States throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

Mad Men received widespread critical acclaim for its writing, acting, directing, visual style, and historical authenticity; it won many awards, including 16 Emmys and 5 Golden Globes. The show was also the first basic cable series to receive the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, winning the award each year of its first four seasons (2008–2011). It is widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time, and as part of the early 21st century Golden Age of Television.

* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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It’s Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Welcome to the 1,234th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
Atomic Blast

The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, which led J. Robert Oppenheimer to recall verses from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one "... "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".
United States Department of Energy - Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie
Mushroom cloud of 'Gadget' over Trinity, seconds after detonation

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Commentary
So finishes my current visiting with my children. Two weeks ago all four of them together for two days in Philly. Then, individually, came four visits, one with each of them, three were meals only, and one was a thirty-six-hour event.  Taken as a whole, it’s been a sweet month for me.

This weather is spectacular. Please appreciate it: winter is looming in the background.

So much social time means a routine disrupted.  Diet and work rhythms are the first to go. But then you find six days running with no social engagements and you catch up on everything. Just make sure you take advantage of the quiet time to get back.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
“Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.”
~Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare

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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

This weekend was ‘fill-in’ weekend brought by my children.
“What are you up to?”
“How are the families?”
“Are you well?”

Blog meister responds: Nothing like family and good friends. And when they are combined, life is good.

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Saturday night son Mino and I had dinner at Waypoint restaurant in Cambridge.
It was terrific, starting with a serving of ossetra caviar that was wonderfully presented including blini made with plankton. We followed that with fried smelts, and that with fried brussel sprouts and bucatini with uni and bottarga.
We passed on dessert, opting for a visit to Toscanini’s, now located in Central Square. Mino had my favorite, the chocolate pudding; I had vanilla. We both got the micro size.

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Pictures with Captions from our community**
egyptian head on lid + same (2)

The head of an Egyptian marking the lid of a sarcophagus.
Photo taken at the MFA.

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Short Essay*
On 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, was the officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow which housed the command center of the Soviet early warning satellites, code-named Oko. Petrov's responsibilities included observing the satellite early warning network and notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union. If notification was received from the early warning systems that inbound missiles had been detected, the Soviet Union's strategy was an immediate and compulsory nuclear counter-attack against the United States (launch on warning), specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

Shortly after midnight, the bunker's computers reported that one intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the United States. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a first-strike nuclear attack by the United States was likely to involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches in order to disable any Soviet means of a counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system's reliability had been questioned in the past. Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors or not after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile had been launched. Petrov's suspicion that the warning system was malfunctioning was confirmed when no missile in fact arrived. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning again, despite having no direct means to confirm this. The Soviet Union's land radar was incapable of detecting missiles beyond the horizon.

It was subsequently determined that the false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite.

In explaining the factors leading to his decision, Petrov cited his belief and training that any U.S. first strike would be massive, so five missiles seemed an illogical start. In addition, the launch detection system was new and in his view not yet wholly trustworthy, while ground radar had failed to pick up corroborative evidence even after several minutes of the false alarm.

* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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It’s Monday, September 27, 2021
Welcome to the 1,233rd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
Sandra Day O'Connor

1st Female Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

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Commentary
Another fine day in Boston. Except that the Yankees beat them in the first game of an important three-game series. Love their yellow uniforms.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd:
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd;
By thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
~William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Friday night I made a chicken fricassee with two chicken legs.
One would have sufficed. I ate one and the drumstick of the other.
The chicken fried in 3 different fats for complexity. I used a teaspoon of each.
I reserved the chicken and the loose fat, the pan surface retaining a thin layer.
I used that fat plus 2 TB each of chicken stock and white wine to soften shallots and mushroom.

As they were softening I added salt and freshly ground black pepper, chervil and tarragon, one anchovy, 1TB tomato paste.
Then I added ¾ cup each of stock and white wine and returned the chicken and the fat to the pan, actively simmering the pan for 30 minutes, reducing the liquid to less than half of its original volume.
Then I added 1 ½ TB of crème fraiche, 1 ½ TB parmigiana, and ½ cup fresh parsley and simmered it for 2 minutes.
Finally, I tossed in 2oz of al dentissimo bucatini and let it cook for a minute or so.
A delicious meal. 

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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Dave Chihuly

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Short Essay*
Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is an American retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was the first woman nominated and, subsequently, the first woman confirmed. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she was considered the swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the first few months of the Roberts Court.

Prior to O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was a judge and an elected official in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. On July 1, 2005, she announced her intention to retire effective upon the confirmation of a successor. Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005 and joined the Court on January 31, 2006.

O'Connor most frequently sided with the Court's conservative bloc. She often wrote concurring opinions that limited the reach of the majority holding. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. She also wrote in part the per curiam majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, and was one of three co-authors of the lead opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

During her time on the court, some publications ranked O'Connor among the most powerful women in the world. On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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It’s Sunday, September 26, 2021
Welcome to the 1,232nd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com

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Lead Picture*
a perched multi-colored parrot

Edward Lear - originally posted to Flickr as Platycercus pileatus. Red-capped parrakeet
A painting of male Red-capped Parrot, also called the Pileated Parakeet, (originally captioned "Platycercus pileatus. Red-capped Parrakeet.") by Edward Lear 1812-1888.

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Commentary
I love days in the mid-seventies. My kind of day.

We are coming into the colder parts of the year when storms can put us into dangerous and terrible situations. Ever think of preparing for a moment when you are forced to evacuate yor home or apartment?
Here are pertinent links:

There are various governmental and organizational websites where you can find more information and get detailed lists for what you may want to include in your To Go kit, such as:

https://www.mass.gov/emergency-preparedness-month

https://www.newportoregon.gov/emergency/documents/GoBagChecklist.pdf

https://www.thespruce.com/emergency-go-bag-4165380

https://www.ready.gov/kit

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Reading and Writing
I am reading the Goldfinch but will take a pause and do some reading of a manuscript submitted to me by a dear friend. I’ll read a chunk and pen some initial comments so he won’t be waiting forever for any critiques from me.

I’ve started rewriting the section of the manuscript into the third person. I note that most of the manuscript is indeed in the third person but I changed the first 65 pages into the first person to see how that would work. I will say this: every time I rework the manuscript it improves so the effort isn’t wasted.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
“The composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend in the air,
interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and
sometimes giving shelting to myrtles and to roses;
filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.”
~Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare

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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192

My daughter called with a conundrum. Should she give up half of a four meeting ceramics’ class to attend an hour’s presentation by Hilary Clinton?

Blog meister responds: We all would like problems like that.

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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Thursday afternoon I had dinner at the Palm with friend LouLou. Although there were no surprises Despite nothing extraordinary, the lunch was excellent and a good value.

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Community Photos**
dusk at public garden

Walking through at any time of day is lovely.

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Short Essay*
Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots is an 1832 book containing 42 hand-colored lithographs by Edward Lear. He produced 175 copies for sale to subscribers as a part-publication, which were later bound as a book. Lear started painting parrots in 1830 when he was 18 years old, and to get material for his book he studied live birds at the London Zoo and in private collections. The latter included those of Edward Smith Stanley, later 13th Earl of Derby, who had a large menagerie at Knowsley Hall, and Benjamin Leadbeater, a taxidermist and trader in specimens. Lear drew onto lithographic plates for printing by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, who was known for the quality of his reproductions of fine art.

Although the book was a financial failure, Lear's paintings of parrots established his reputation as one of the best natural history artists of his time. It found him work with John Gould, Stanley and other leading contemporary naturalists, and the young Queen Victoria engaged him to help her with her painting technique. Parrots was a forerunner to the major volumes of bird paintings by Gould, and Lear's work has influenced children's illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak as well as bird specialists like William Y Cooper, Elizabeth Butterworth and Walton Ford.

Lear continued with his nature painting for some years, but from about 1835 he became concerned about his failing eyesight, and increasingly concentrated on his nonsense works and landscape painting, although he may have contributed to the illustrations for Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.

*The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.

**Community Pictures with Captions are sent in by our followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com

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