Minor Comments

A couple of minor things.

I just came back from a local farmers market where we had gone to buy cheese for our little wine and cheese outing tonight. This isn't the kind of thing that we normally do, but we stumbled into it through some folks at my wife's job who were aware that a local winery is offering a package deal of some kind of concert with their products. We're not at all big wine drinkers -- we may drink part of three different bottles of wine over the course of a year, and its rare for us to finish one -- but the idea of actually getting out together was attractive. My wife being more gregarious that I, she was ready to make this an Event, complete with picnic baskets, food and desserts, strolling minstrels -- okay,perhaps not them -- but it turns out that there will be less people there that we know, so we decided not to be that expansive -- we're simply bringing a couple of different kinds of cheese along with some crackers. My wife asked me what kind of cheeses I'd like, and I pointed out that to me there are three kinds of cheese; American, Swiss, and everything else. Do they call it American cheese in Canada, I wonder? Intellectually, I know that there's a wide variety of them, with broad variations in taste, and texture, but emotionally, thats the Big Three. Left up to me, we'd bring Ritz crackers and spray bottles of Cheeze-wiz, but fortunately, it wasn't left up to me. Hey, I'm a plebian kind of guy.

While we were there, we went to a used book store thats in the same building. They were having a hell of a sale -- 2/3s off their entire stock -- so I pored it over. Its a little disconcerting to realize how many different kinds of books, to say nothing of numbers of books, I have no interest in reading. I saw some books that I recall reading in high school -- one was Kon Tiki, for example -- which brought to mind what it was like to read books then, when I would frequently get a sense of adventure in what I read. Granted, much of this reading was due to the dreaded Summer Reading List that our school would foist upon us; three to five closely typed pages of books, where we'd have to read at least some number in each category, and you would scramble to find the smallest, shortest, most digestible of them. That's where I encountered A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Yankee from Olympus, and, of course, Kon-Tiki. I think that when I look at books now, I don't get that sense of wonder and adventure, normally. I see people recommending books that are almost always Great Books, or books that push the boundaries in new, exciting ways -- but those ways are only exciting to book critics, and people who are Really Into It. Very rarely do I find a book thats a Good Read, all by myself, and even less often through these official and officious recommendations.
So I did get some -- but you will not be surprised to learn that at least one was a Star Trek novel, and all four are fiction.

I feel like baking something.

An article in Jane Galt's blog on the availability of doctors in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain (one of these days I'm going to get it straight as to which is Britain, Great Britain, and England... at least now I know what is meant by the Commonwealth) is interesting, particularly the comments. I want to think it sparks thought in my mind, but as I'm feeling lazy at the moment -- my other two just went out for a couple of hours, and I'm thinking of taking a nap -- I'll just point it out.