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Happy New Year.
2023 is brand spanking new. Now, what do you do with it?
As a person playing on the back nine of life, we’re reminded that 2022 and ’21 and ’20 and so on…sure went by quickly. And that each day is one more fleeting chance to live life fully.
Now you really don’t need to be reminded by your favorite home heating company to carve out a bit more time for – intimate discoveries – intellectual pursuits – grand adventures – making human connections and cherishing moments that will all to quickly slip from your grasp. Of course not.
Here’s a thought from Roman Philosopher Seneca on "Time"
“Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands… Certain moments are torn from us… some are gently removed… others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness.”
More: https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/04/17/seneca-letter-1-time/
So. look for the chance to giggle a bit more – starting today with…This Just In…And thank you for being a Daniels Energy customer.
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Oh, The Joys of Winter #1 | |
Lovely New York City. 1937 |
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January Something Different | |
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Freddie (Mercury) would have been impressed and appreciated this variation of his song.
He actually wrote an opera (Barcelona) which he performed with Montserrat Caballé, who was a Catalan Spanish operatic soprano.
Give a Listen
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A New Year's Truth
(sorry for the run on sentence)
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Your age is not defined by a number, but rather — passing asteroids, friends, enemies, births, deaths, meeting strangers in airports, frequent flyer miles, bad coffees, bad haircuts, kicking your toe, sneezes that make your head explode, lost loves, being car sick, pictures you take, songs you never forget, singing badly, taxi rides, reading a book cover to cover when you should be asleep, paying the groceries of the person behind you, falling down and skinning your knee, eye contact with a stranger, late night food stands, patting your friend's back while they vomit, (listening to them apologize profusely and telling you repeatedly that they love you), road trips alone, running through sunflower fields, sitting under a tropical waterfall, talking to locals in buses loaded with pigs, chickens and market goods, dancing in the street at fiestas, road trips with friends, road trips with family, fishing trips and not catching anything, the first kiss with a lover, movie dates, bad movies, escaping road bandits, escaping pirates, nursing an injured animal, swimming nude, swimming with crocs, swimming with dugongs, riding motorbikes on long, sandy beaches, helping baby turtles hatch, hot air ballooning at dawn, tearing around a race track, picking fresh oysters at low tide, de-husking coconuts, dancing hula to a ukelele band, threading clover flowers, cooking your favorite meal over coals, sunrises and memorable sunsets ... and sooo much more ...
Our life determines our age. How we live it, determines our youthfulness.
Go and enjoy!
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If you’ve added a new propane log set fireplace or propane space heaters (as we admittedly have suggested in the past) and you use it regularly – as we expect you will – please note you’ll no doubt be using a bit more propane this winter than in the past – so be sure to keep an eye on the tank. Should you need a fill-up just give us a ring and we’ll be there with fresh propane! | |
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White Mountain’s Empire Sassafras log set & burner
Beauty and Warmth all in one.
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Oh, The Joys of Winter #2 | |
The Trevi Fountain in magical Rome. | |
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Quiz #1
(The Wicked Easy One)
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Huge. They made a HUGE movie back in the day. Name either one and you may win a new 2023 Amazon gift card. Tell us here...
As is tradition at Christmas, David went bonkers win winners, especially since more than 175 people played. The most ever.
So, he pulled a whole lot of winners including: Jessie W, Kathleen E, Benedict B, Mary La, Paul B, Karen S, John T and Heather P. They identified (as did more than 100 of you) – Mr. Evel Kinevil. And the Ronettes.
The answer – we were looking for – for the word quiz -- was that they were all shortened versions of larger words. (plane, flu, phone – airplane, influenza and of course telephone).
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Daniels Positive Encouragement Mantra For 2023 | |
(Choice of Opera is yours, though we suggest Cosi Fan Tutte) | |
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We wondered as we stared at the keyboard for the 40th time this morning why in the heck the letters are placed as they are? We hope for some fantastic, magical rationale. Then we found what appears to be the answer.
According to various legends, the QWERTY layout had been created to slow typists down. It seems mechanical typewriters could jam if people hit the keys too quickly, so they had to put the common letters far apart from each other.
But Jimmy Stamp over at Smithsonian suggests that, in fact, the story is bunk. The QWERTY keyboard did not spring fully formed from Christopher Sholes, the first person to file a typewriter patent with the layout.
Rather, it formed over time as telegraph operators used the machines to transcribe Morse code. The layout changed often from the early alphabetical arrangement, before the final configuration came into being.
The researchers tracked the keyboard’s evolution and concluded that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Rather, the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used.
Telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. So the keyboard evolved via input from telegraph operators.
Perhaps QWERTY will always be good enough.
But if not, how might a new design develop?
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Oh, The Further Joys of Winter #3 | |
Making commuting easy in Chicago | |
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. | |
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Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
Get Book Here
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Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel.
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The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
Get Book Here
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The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, J.Kenji Lopez-Alt.
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J. Kenji López-Alt’s debut cookbook, The Food Lab, revolutionized home cooking, selling more than half a million copies with its science-based approach to everyday foods. And for fast, fresh cooking for his family, there’s one pan López-Alt reaches for more than any other: the wok.
Whether stir-frying, deep frying, steaming, simmering, or braising, the wok is the most versatile pan in the kitchen. Once you master the basics — the mechanics of a stir-fry, and how to get smoky wok hei at home — you’re ready to cook home-style and restaurant-style dishes from across Asia and the United States, including Kung Pao Chicken, Pad Thai, and San Francisco-Style Garlic Noodles.
López-Alt also breaks down the science behind beloved Beef Chow Fun, fried rice, dumplings, tempura vegetables or seafood, and dashi-simmered dishes.
Get Book Here
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The Candy House, Jennifer Egan. | |
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The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.”
Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory.
Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious” — which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others — has seduced multitudes.
Get Book Here
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The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li.
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A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past.
The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.
Get Book Here
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The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman. | |
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It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn’t know who it was.
By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand.
Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.
Get Book Here
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In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us.
We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats.
We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.
We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
Get Book Here
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In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies.
Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.
Get Book Here
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The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddharta Mukherjee. | |
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In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.
He seduces you with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling.
Told in six parts, laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate — a masterpiece
Get Book Here
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Eric Orner’s graphic biography of former Congressman Barney Frank is just as smart and determined as its subject, but way more polished.
From aspiring academic to essential aide to powerful committee chair, Frank’s journey to political acumen and personal acceptance is so heartening that it’s easy to lose sight of the skill with which Eric Orner retells it.
If this happens to you, then I suggest you immediately read it again.
Get Book Here
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Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, Laura Stanfill | |
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The writing is whimsical but transcends whimsy. The story is magical but transcends magic.
Laura Stanfill's Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary is deceptively delightful, exploring real-world themes of connection, loss, feminism, death, and identity, all wrapped up in lyrical language, bountiful cleverness, and endless wit. Resplendent and transcendent.
This lovely, whimsical, humorous, smart, and fantastical book brightened up my winter reading (lucky enough to read an advanced copy). Take yourself out of this wearisome world and into Laura Stanfill's magic.
Get Book Here
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2 A.M. in Little America, Ken Kalfus | |
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Ken Kalfus has spent his decades-long career mostly out of the mainstream — a writer’s writer with a blurb from David Foster Wallace to prove it — but 2 A.M. in Little America belongs among the year’s biggest hits.
The speculative novel finds Ron Patterson, a humble security technician, in a world post–America’s fall. Avoiding specifics about what exactly happened to destroy the U.S. and how the rest of the world is responding, Kalfus follows Patterson as he moves from country to country, searching for asylum in a place that hasn’t closed its borders to U.S. citizens.
Throughout, a sense of paranoia pervades, growing as Patterson is thrust unwillingly into the center of a conflict between factions that refuse to take advantage of their new ad hoc homes on the margins of a country that barely tolerates them.
It’s bewildering and alarming and often darkly funny at the hapless Patterson’s expense, a scarily believable future. But it’s also a humbling glimpse of the circumstances millions of refugees are actually facing — a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God experience that shouldn’t be necessary to evoke empathy but certainly maximizes it.
Get Book Here
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Or Our Favorite:
Genius of Place: The Life of Fredrick Law Olmsted,
Justin Martin.
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Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War.
This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here. Most of all, he was a social reformer. He didn't simply create places that were beautiful in the abstract.
An awesome and timeless intent stands behind Olmsted's designs, allowing his work to survive to the present day. With our urgent need to revitalize cities and a widespread yearning for green space, his work is more relevant now than it was during his lifetime. Justin Martin restores Olmsted to his rightful place in the pantheon of great Americans.
Get Book Here
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Or….pick 12 on your own from maybe this list of lists
Here are some of the lists used to assemble this collection:
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Yet Another Joy of Winter #4 | |
Snowmaggedon silences Washington, D.C. | |
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I read a piece that was in either Harpers or some online blog or on the back of a bazooka bubble gum comic. 52 things to know.
So…here are four for January:
- A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent energy price rises, it’s only worth about .11c though some sources suggest bigger lightning bolts could be worth more as much as $11
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In the UK and Australia, people tend to turn left when entering a building. In the US, they turn right. It’s important to remember if you’re booking a trade show booth
- In 1739, there were three times more coffee shops per person in London than there are today.
- Applicants are 1.5% more likely to be granted asylum by a US judge the day after their city’s NFL team won.
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If you’re planning to attack January with a vigorous diet may we throw a small wrench in the works with this:
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Braised Onion Sauce
By Kenzi Wilbur from Food 52
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This recipe is lightly adapted from James Beard's "Beard on Pasta." He originally calls for two sticks of butter -- which you are welcome to do -- it works just as well with less. Use pappardelle, but feel free to switch that up. https://food52.com/recipes/32815-braised-onion-sauce
• 10 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 pound yellow onions, halved and sliced 1/4-inch thick
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• Salt
• 1/4 cup Madeira
• 3/4 pounds hot cooked pasta (I used pappardelle)
• Flaky salt, for serving (if needed)
• Grated Parmesan, for serving
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In a large (12-inch) skillet, warm the butter over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and translucent.
- Stir in the sugar and a pinch of salt, and reduce the heat to low. Cook the onions slowly for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Patience is key! When they're done, they should be dark, caramelized, and borderline jammy
- Stir in Maderia, cook for a few more minutes, and then add the cooked pasta to the pan. Shower on a generous dusting of Parmesan, and using two large spoons, toss the pasta well with the sauce.
Serve with additional grated Parmesan, and flaky salt if necessary.
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Tina Fey; Assisted Poirot; Founding Editor of Punch; Yankee Ace.
What one thing do they all have in common?
Tell us here if you know and perhaps…win an Amazon gift card to our astonishing delight and everlasting amazement!
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Oh, Absolute Joy of Winter - #5 | |
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Undine
by Renée Vivien
translation/interpretation by Kim Cherub
Your laughter startles, your caresses rake.
Your cold kisses love the evil they do.
Your eyes—blue lotuses drifting on a lake.
Lilies are less pallid than your face.
You move like water parting.
Your hair falls in rootlike tangles.
Your words like treacherous rapids rise.
Your arms, flexible as reeds, strangle,
Choking me like tubular river reeds.
I shiver in their enlacing embrace.
Drowning without an illuminating moon,
I vanish without a trace,
lost in a nightly swoon.
Occasionally I think about Renée Vivien laughing.
In fact, laughing so hard she had to leave a lecture. Why was she driven to such mirth? The speaker was talking about how a book of anonymously published love poetry was the pinnacle depiction of a young man’s desire towards women.
But…it was her book. She wrote it. About her girlfriend Natalie Clifford Barney. Worth a giggle, no?
Renée Vivien (born Pauline Mary Tarn; 11 June 1877 – 18 November 1909) was a British poet who wrote in French. In the Paris of the Belle Époque she was notable for her work, which has received more attention following a revival of interest in Sapphic verse. Many of her poems are autobiographical, pertaining mostly to Baudelarian themes of extreme romanticism and frequent despair. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renée_Vivien
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(This is particularly funny from the position of an oil company, no?)
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danielsenergy.com
Daniels Energy: CT License S1-385517 HOD#19 /
Daniels Propane. LLC: #846 CT License S1-302857
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