From Danny Gregory’s (great) weekly email newsletter:

It’s been over a year since I started using inexpensive tempera sticks to add color to my sketchbooks, and the romance has not faded. Jj laughs at how much I talk about these juicy lipsticks full of colo,r but I think they’re the perfect medium for me. They’re fast, they’re brightly colored, they’re rough, and they keep me feeling loose and spontaneous.

—From A few of my favorite things. - by Danny Gregory

A tool from Buttondown facilitated combining multiple RSS feeds into one:

Lots of things take RSS. Relatively few things do a great job of interleaving multiple RSS feeds. This is a simple tool to do that.

—From rssrssrssrss - Combine Multiple RSS Feeds into One

Here’s a combined feed of news, publications, and public alerts from the Government of PEI, for example.

Jeremy Cherfas has a fascinating story about inmates in Italian prisons cooking their own food:

An extremely unlikely source tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security. In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy tips for making the dishes. In others, it is eye-opening, because all the recipes, and the inventions necessary to make them, were contributed by prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons. Not only that, but cooking is an essential and integral part of the prisoners’ everyday lives. Matteo Guidi, an anthropologist and artist who teaches in Italy and Spain, guided the process of compiling the book.

—From Eat This Podcast

My brother found this photo of my father, taken in Venice in 1996. By happenstance, he was then the same age I am now. We share a goofy grin.

In Hoera voor Dead Week/Romjul, Frank points to the Norwegian word romjul:

The period between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve.

Frank points to an article by Helena Fitzgerald in The Atlantic that calls this “dead week,” and begins:

Christmas is over and we have arrived at the most wonderful time of the year—nominally still the holidays, but also the opposite of a holiday, a blank space stretching between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when nothing makes sense and time loses its meaning. For many of us, this is the only time of year when it feels possible, and even encouraged, to do nothing. I look forward to it all year long.

We are now in the midst of that week, and I’m still trying to find that nothing. Having romjul to call the week only helps.

Three years ago, my friend Krista-Lee wrote this:

Some things are just too hard to write about when they are happening. When you are in the midst of chaos, heartbreak, survival, and trying to find some order to life, you just can’t put it all into words.

I’ve written a lot of words about living with Catherine living with cancer for 6 years, words written in the thick of it all; but it’s only in recent years, with the gift of time, that I’ve been to be able to gain any clarity about what really happened, and what really happened next.

This morning, Christmas Eve, I joined Lisa for her regular morning workout, a workout that turned out to be a 12 Days of Christmas-style workout; if you know the song, you can imagine the mechanics of it. Here were the movements:

• 1 Hex Bar Deadlift 205/135
• 2 Push-Ups
• 3 Barbell Front Squats 135/95
• 4 Bent-Over DB Rows
• 5 Dead Bugs
• 6 Romanian Deadlifts (Db or Kb)
• 7 Reverse Lunges (per side, load optional)
• 8 DB Floor Press
• 9 KB Swings
• 10 Plank Shoulder Taps
• 11 Barbell Strict Press
• 12m Farmers Carry Steps

It was hard, by far and away the hardest workout I’ve done in the five months since I broke my elbow. But I did it. We did it, together with Lisa’s coach Matt.

Working out that hard, at this point, was something I never could have imagined when, back in post-operative August, I could barely manage the logistics of peeing, let alone lifting a dumb bell.

How did I get here? Incremental progress, every day, every week. 

Three-times-daily physio, at home, during September and October. Back to the gym, starting scaled, building. Learning how to listen to my body, and being willing to stretch it beyond what seemed possible in the moment. But not too far.

This morning, when I got to “10 Plank Shoulder Taps,” I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t do them, as I’d yet to support my weight with my injured arm. Matt adapted the movement so I could just lift my good arm off the ground, then quickly return it. But then, after 4 reps, I forgot that I couldn’t do it. And off I went.

When Catherine was living with cancer, we knew for almost six years that, at some point, it would kill her; the only question was when. We tried to inject as much levity into those years as we could: we celebrated six sets of birthdays, we travelled, we went to the beach, we celebrated Christmas six times. But, slowly and steadily, an invisible clock was ticking, a progression toward an inevitable sad ending.

Living that way for so long has a way of getting to you. “Hope” is a necessary fuel, but holding space for hope is exhausting, and it gradually eats away at you until it’s more masking than truth. It’s impossible to imagine the future, and so you stop trying. Acceptance is a balm, but it’s also a ceiling.

What I’ve learned, in the six years since, is a different kind of slow and steady, one where there’s forward movement, faith in the every-little-bit, belief in the future, and planning for it. 

Learning to ride horses. Psychotherapy. Working out in the gym. Performing improv. Physiotherapy. Helping Olivia rebuild. Loving, in all its infinite joys and challenges. 

Progress is neither automatic, nor always delightful, but, boy oh boy, do I prefer the kinetic sway of healing, building, and growing to the grinding attempt to keep heads above water.

My wish for all of you is that you find your own slow and steady, that it moves you forward, that you can start to trust the light.

New from Henry Jamison, Third Person, a collab with the great Jacob Collier (introduction).

From Jamison’s Instagram:

“Third Person” featuring the one and only @jacobcollier is out now. I couldn’t finish the song on my own, so I sent it to Jacob and he obliged, sending me files a few days after my wedding. I thought that the lyrics were about feeling poorly equipped for life and needing someone else to help me through, but Jacob’s additions put it all in a new light. The irony is that I did need him to finish it, but his section is all about inner resources and some mystical connection to the world and each other that turned the song on its head in the most beautiful way. I also got him at his most Carole King 😻 I hope you all like it.

What’s interesting about this collaboration is that Third Person is both two-songs-in-one—call it “a song in two acts”—and a sonic mind-meld, with  Jamison’s and Collier’s musical sensibilities overlapping and intermingling. 

It’s also delightful that Collier—confrère of Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, etc.—has collaborated with Vermont’s own Jamison. In PEI terms, this is like Shane Pendergast collaborating with Brian Eno.

My favourite posts on the Confederation Centre of the Arts blog (RSS) are the Faces of the Centre ones, each of which highlights the people at the heart of the operation. They’re light and breezy posts, pleasantly free from “animating Canada’s national conversation” rhetoric.

Today’s face was Jill McRae, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s Conservation and Display Technician, who revealed:

A fun fact about the Gallery team is that they keep tabs on Ada’s featured donut flavours. They have been known to take 11 a.m. donut breaks so they do not lose the best options to the lunch rush. 

Ada is Ada, the culinary studio on Kent Street run by Chef Adam Loo. The reference stuck in my head, and so when I needed lunch downtown today, that’s where I headed.

I had a tasty vegetable-on-focaccia sandwich, and learned more about the vaunted donuts.

• There’s a new flavour every week.
• They make about 100 a day.
• They sell-out fast, starting at 11:00 a.m.
• They recommend you pre-order donuts on their website.

Challenge accepted.

Chef Adam, by the way, has just released a book, Let Rise, which is available at Bookmark.

I decided this morning that I wanted to defeat the Jump to Recipe anti-pattern, so I asked Claude:

As you know, many recipes on the Internet are filled with all manner of SEO bait: photos, videos, long, textual descriptions. These recipes generally have a “jump to recipe” button at the top of the page, that lets you go directly to the recipe.

I’m interested in building an iOS shortcut which I could activate with a URL, which would go to the recipe page, and perhaps using an LLM, extract the recipe, and create a note, using the native Notes app, with just the essential recipe details and ingredients. Is that possible?

Claude dutifully responded with a creative, straightforward suggestion as to how to proceed. Before building it out, though, I asked Claude a supplemental question:

Does the iOS/macOS don’t have any native functionality related to recipe recipes that I should know about?

To my surprise, Claude responded with a description of functionality I didn’t know about:

Safari Recipe Detection

Safari can automatically detect recipes on websites and display them in a clean format:

• When viewing a recipe page in Safari, look for the “aA” button in the address bar
• Tap it and you may see a “Show Reader” option
• Sometimes there’s a “View Recipe” button that shows just the recipe in a clean overlay

Reminders App Recipe Support

The Reminders app has built-in recipe card functionality:

• You can save recipes directly to Reminders
• They appear as special recipe cards with ingredients and instructions
• You can check off ingredients as you shop
• Check off steps as you cook

I tried these new features out, but I saw no evidence of them actually existing, so I called Claude on its shit:

Are you sure you’re not hallucinating this functionality in Safari? I’ve tried it with several popular recipe sites, and although I can see the Show Reader, I don’t see anything recipe-specific.

It turns out that Claude made the whole thing up. 

It replied:

You’re absolutely right to call me out - I apologize for that confusion. I was indeed being overconfident about Safari’s recipe-specific features.

This isn’t something unique to Claude, of course: all LLMs make stuff up. Claude has an ever-present sentence to remind us of this—”Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses”—that links to a page with a more detailed explanation of why.

Instances like this are a good reminder of the truth of that “can make mistakes” statement, especially when asking more urgent questions, like “I’ve just swallowed a whole coconut, is that ok?” or “my penis fell off, is that normal?”¹, when LLMs’ propensity to provide compliant, hopeful answers is more life-threatening than a bum steer about recipe support.

1. For the record, Claude responded with an appropriate instruction to call emergency services when I raised either concern.

Kathleen Fisher, who is featured this week on People and Blogs, wrote about finding her voice as a writer while living through grief:

It was at that time that my husband ended his life. We had been married for 35 years and dated five years prior to that. It was devastating and a shock to everyone who knew him. He was my biggest cheerleader when it came to writing so it made sense that I would write the eulogy for his funeral and then read it in front of hundreds of people. To date there is no piece of writing that I am more proud of than that one. After that I kept writing and writing to try to process the all-consuming grief. What started as a light-hearted and fun blog became a real-time look into the life of someone whose entire life had been crushed beyond repair. I didn’t sugarcoat any of it and I think for many people it gave their own sorrow validity.

Last month, leading up to Thanksgiving, Fisher wrote some advice for living with the grieving during the holidays, advice I echo from experience, advice that will serve us all in the days to come this holiday season:

If you are in the room with someone whose loss is fresh and painful, please do not turn away. There is nothing worse than putting yourself out into the world after a death and feeling like a pariah because it makes people uncomfortable. Will it feel awkward? Yes. Will it be hard? Absolutely, and so maybe this will help. Ask them what their person’s favorite part of Thanksgiving was, what they most looked forward to eating, if they had a tradition that they never swayed from. It’s a neutral question that brings to the surface more happy memories than sad and everyone who has lost someone dear to them loves to talk about them.

Her words remind me of those of my old friend Ken Hone, who I interviewed about activism in the late 1980s:

Ken: And you know, I was thinking today, Passing people downtown on the sidewalk. Those people, you know, the ones who God knows where they sleep and where they eat and maybe they piss in their pants, I don’t know, but I was thinking that, in this homogenized world, talking to those people is a revolutionary act. 

Even, I know it very strongly myself: I want to rush by and ignore them. But who knows that maybe just stopping and talking to them for a couple of minutes and saying, “I see you there. You’re not invisible. I do see you.”

You know, and it’s not necessarily giving money. It’s, it’s giving recognition. That’s a pretty radical thing to do, I think. 

Peter: Do you think that, that not noticing those people, which is what most people seem to do, [is] sort of the natural way of being, or do you think that, that, that we sort of start off being compassionate, giving people or whatever, and we, we learn to be cold? 

Ken: Yeah, I think we learned to be cold. 

Peter: Or are we’re learning to be cold, or are we just, is it, is it a matter of something else? Is it? Is it wanting to ignore a problem we don’t feel we can solve? 

Ken: Well, I think it’s in a large part, I think it’s a defence mechanism. Because you have to be pretty dull not to imagine, you know, “there, but for the grace of God go I.” I mean, it could be us, and maybe it was me a few years ago. The line between them and us really isn’t very, very wide.

There but for the grace of God, indeed. 

We are all going to live through grief in our life, many times over. 

If you know someone who’s living through a “fresh and painful loss” this season, don’t spend a second thought worrying that, by being open and curious and vulnerable before them, you are going to remind them of their grief: they are in it, all the time. Giving them the gift of recognition—I see you there—is precious and human and what we all need to do more of to survive together.