aaaah.... isn't this sweet? My wife & my name together at last! 😉
Have you seen the sequel to the Da Vinci code? Well, in the movie the ‘bad guys’ use ambigrams as part of their sinister plot… but I won’t tell you more or I’ll spoil all the fun. What you see isone type of an ambigram. As i have come to learn there are many kinds and styles, but I have provided a link so you can read all about it yourself.
Call it the romantic in me but I thought I would see if Laura and my name could produce a pretty ambigram, so with a little help from a couple of sites, some work on Arcsoft then Giffy animation software … there it is above!
So this is what I did today… hope yours was as fun!
You could say that I have had three lives. I grew up in the ‘middle of the pack’ as a child always a bit wirey priding myself on my ability to sprint and jump. As I got older, I grew to be on the tall side (6-04) and found sports more in sync with my new body type. My third life was a struggle to stop growing out since I already stopped growing up…. this is a constant battle.
Recently, I ran into an old friend I haven’t seen since grad school and he commented typically on how much we had changed and that he jokingly always thought of me as his ‘fat friend.’ He moaned about how much bigger he was than me today. He then pried my secrets of weight reduction(Jenny Craig) but — I confess — I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I actually felt too heavy after the holidays and I was in the process of taking off the excess Christmas cheer.
So, the moral is that I don’t think everyone needs a fat friend to make them feel better, but slim friends ( or ex-fat friends) help make the transition back to normality easier. My guess that the next time I see him he will be as I remembered him… and without all his medication.
Karla loves the internet and drawing, it fits with her overall interest in the world around her. Naturally, when she noticed a young reporter using one of her illustrations for his story, you can imagine how excited and happy she became. The entire family received repeated emails about the event!
We gave Karla her own domain to post her drawings and she is catching on to the entire web design thing as well fairly quickly.
Congratulations Karla.
By the way, Karla’s big sister Karen (nick named by her ‘the poodle’) was an athlete at SC and previously Florida and drew lots of Trojans!
One of the many variety of Trojans Karla has drawn! ( Karen the fighting poodle?)
I love reading cookbooks because they don’t always tell the truth. Often they will omit key steps or ingredients and the picture of the culinary marvel in the book may not always match up with the disaster you prepared. For those of you who have blamed yourself, it may have not really been your fault.
There are some genuine reasons for the discrepancies. First, the pictured food product may not even be what it is purported to be! For example, an old photographer’s trick was to use flat Coca Cola to substitute for coffee in a layout. Why? Because, real coffee looks muddy with a matte finish in a photography while Coca Cola has the right glossy shine and deep black color.
However, another reason is that it might not even be the same product. This became apparent when I was asked recentl about WHY my ‘Meringue’ turned out so well. At first, I was going to tell the usual lies about how their Meringue didn’t work out because of the weather, phases of the moon or their marital happiness… but I opted for the ‘truth.’ Not everyone can handle the truth and the revelation that their cookbook had ‘lied’ to them came as a bit of a shock. There was a bit of reaction as they referred to my cornstarch addition as ‘goop’… but jealousy is an awful thing! 😉
So how do we avoid being ‘lied to’ in our cookbooks? Well, there are a couple of easy rules to follow:
1) Add some very old cookbooks to your collection that contain more steps and more ingredients… the pointers will be invaluable. Chef Escoffier , at the turn of the 1900’s, was saddened by the trend towards recipe simplification and ease of preparation which has continued to this day. 30 meals in 30 minutes has it’s place, but not when you want to make something special.
-- the I Ching or "Yì Jīng" of American Cooking --
2) Buy ‘nitch’ cookbooks. These are cookbooks that teach you everything about something specific. I just bought a cookbook produced by a Baking Powder company in 1908… invaluable!
-- no secrets are held back here! --
3) If a recipe doesn’t work out in your cookbook, set the book aside because the other recipes are probably going to be just as flawed.  Albert Einstein once said,”Insanity (is) doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Cookbooks are like people, they have personalities and you have to find those you like.
Abebooks.com is one of my favorite on-line sites for… yes… books! Recently I found two books that were amusing. The first book is a look into how and why alcoholic beverages developed around the world and the importance of various berries and grains as well as honey. The author, Patrick McGovern travels the world to see exactly how various civilizations produced beers and wines… “Uncorking the Past” is an excellent buy for those interested in how things all began.
My second book is a simple cookbook from 1908 the Rumford Complete Cookbook by Lily Maxworth Wallace who went on to write through the 1940’s on cookery and etiquette. Rumford — as many know — makes baking powder including the ‘Clabber Girl” brand familiar to those here in California. One can already see the trend towards recipe simplification, cost reduction and minimization of preparation time. However, the book is fun in that it covers a wide variety of subjects not addressed in many cookbooks today… for example, how to properly bone a fowl.
