Tolkien and Trees

...abashed partisan of trees. A couple of quotes from him regarding trees are making the rounds on the internet, but I’ve learned to distrust popular quotations. They are often misattributed or downright made up. So I searched his edited letters for references to trees. There are many–he always mentions trees when he describes places, has funny things to say about artists who can’t draw trees, and has many trees of significance in his books, which he...

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Saturday Tweets: Too Many Tweets!

...PG56m0hpdU — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) March 4, 2019 Alias: a smart-speaker "parasite" that blocks your speaker's sensors until you activate it https://t.co/uvSQXWz9kK — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 4, 2019 Goodbye Sidewalk Trees https://t.co/6MmMq42ay7 — Benjamin Vogt (@BRVogt) March 3, 2019 Haha. Our neighbours just accidentally connected the porn film they were watching to one of our Bluetooth speakers. — Jonathan Healey (@SocialHi...

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News From Nowhere

...or not. So that while (of course) they could not free themselves from the toil of making real necessities, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going.” “Yes...

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Baking Bread with Specialty Malts

...king and just use malted grains directly in your bread. The grains used in making beer are, mostly, barley that has been malted (sprouted) and then either caramelized or roasted. To make beer you soak the grains in warm water to extract the sugars that form in the malting process. Fermenting that sugary malt water creates alcohol. Most of the grain used to make beer is two or six-row malt. You add so-called “specialty” grains (that have been caram...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...e iris, half uprooting it. He turned, put the plant in place, pinched the soil up well around it and ran on as if it were nothing at all. In tilling the soil many a child “found himself.” In one school there was an Italian boy who just naturally could not help fighting. Though punished, he had a fight almost daily. All of a sudden he got interested in the work in agriculture and asked for a garden of his own. All the good land having been apportio...

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