Pass the Olives

Against Signs

Pass the Olives

The origin and purpose of most signs: someone is irked so they post a sign to irk someone else. Give an irked person a wall, or any surface actually, and they will slap up a sign with sticky tape or nails, usually big, and irk everyone else. But the only people who read signs are [...]

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Steve Jobs Has Died

Pass the Olives

I turned on CNN expecting back to back coverage of Steve Jobs but there was nothing. I was shocked. That’s how much a part of my life he has been since 1982 when I purchased an Apple IIe. In 1997, it was still working. Though I had moved on to a Macintosh, one of my [...]

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Oprah Winfrey

Quotations

I do not mean any disrespect to Oprah. A friend of mine once meant disrespect to Oprah, and all his window treatments turned on him. Alexandra Petri, Compost, Washington Post, 2011

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Food & Diabetes Type 2

Pass the Olives

I’ve given the following information to dozens of people carefully typing it out each time. It finally occurred to me that I could post it here and both share it more widely and save myself some typing. I’m not a doctor, lawyer, baker, or Indian chief so take it for what it is worth to [...]

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Kate Dies, NonSexist Language More Often Lives On

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Kate Swift died 7 May 2011. As the alphabetically second author of the first popular guide to nonsexist writing, she and her partner changed the world of writing. No more could the male pronoun be universal or taken for granted or justified. In 1970, she and Casey Miller formed a partnership as editing consultants and [...]

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My Life in a Harem

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Just when you thought you knew everything, I’ve come up with my life in a harem. No, it’s another book. The title, Some Girls, is not as interesting as the subtitle, My Life in a Harem. If all I had seen was the title, I wouldn’t have picked it up and you wouldn’t be reading [...]

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Multi-Tasking & Solitude

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A link from my daughter to an article on multi-tasking in the American Scholar prompts this post — or rather congealed it. I’ve been struggling with a life that has become so complex I wake up thinking about taking long road trips in a small car with impersonal motel rooms, or moving to a Tumbleweed [...]

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NYTimes Reports: Women Do Not Die

Pass the Olives

In August of 2008 I began saving the obituary email alerts from the New York Times when I noticed that almost none were about women. Since the NYTimes is infallible and comprehensive to a fault, the only conclusion I could draw from this was that women do not die, at least, rarely. This file now [...]

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Sharing the Microwave

Cohousing

We are having the wood floors in our dining room and the cork floors in the corridors connecting the rooms on the first floor refinished. When the workers arrived yesterday morning, I showed them where the restrooms were and took them to the kitchen to locate the microwave and refrigerator. They looked at me quizzically. [...]

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Fail-Safe Turkey and Turkey Soup

Pass the Olives

By Popular Demand. I’ve cooked turkey this way since I was in graduate school — and had an oven. A long time — remember Adelle Davis? This is her recipe for slow cooking. It works. One reason I remember how long I’ve been cooking the turkey is that Thanksgiving is my birthday and for most [...]

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