Just a Brief Post Today

I've been blogging now for almost three weeks. I've come to enjoy the opportunity to write every day even if my choice of topics have been trivial ones. More and more often the Easton Curiosity Shop takes more than it's allotted hour with research and rewriting and that too is an enjoyable feature. Every writer writes for an audience even a diarist writes to hear themselves, but a blogger is much more a part of a community than a typical writer due to the instant feedback of a blog. My community is a very, very small one mostly of people I see on a weekly or monthly basis with the blog serving as the conversations we never seem to have time to have.

Blogging has been a great experience and who knows where it will grow from here, but I note that Chet Raymo has been blogging daily since the middle of 2004! Chet's blogs, accessible by clicking to the right of this post, are humane, profound, and often witty. I was particularly impressed by one from the other day.

Changing the Subject

Have you heard about the cloud? That's where its happening these days. The cloud is the term for computer programs and data storage that don't live on your hard drive, but are accessible through your web browser. For example, this week Amazon decided to give away 5 gigabytes of storage on their servers accessible from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. They are doing this to promote downloading their music mp3s but note the space can be used to store and recall any kind of files.  I have about 50 gigabytes of music on my iPod and can imagine the day when someone will give me space to back it all up in the cloud. That means all my music will become available from any computer with access to the Internet anywhere in the world. What happens to radio then? What happens to musical copyright?

Even more interesting is prezi. This is a cloud based presentation program that aims to replace PowerPoint and Keynote. The program is based on zooming and rotating instead of the old slide show paradigm so it takes some getting used to-tutorials feature instructions on how to avoid giving your audience vertigo-but once you get used to using it results can be spectacular. If you go to the site click on the tab labelled "Explore" to see examples.

Chowder 2

 Clear broth chowder may be original, but I believe you have to have milk in order to qualify as a chowder today. Stuff made with tomato broth is soup. Or so I thought. While searching through an old Historical Society cookbook  I found this from Anna M. Sheehan:

Tomato Corn Chowder
1 can condensed tomato soup
2/3 cup water
1 1/4 cup Pet evaporated milk

Mix the above and then add:
1 1/2 cup creamed corn
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons grated onion
Pinch of pepper
Stir constantly while heating over low heat.

My mother and father were married on December 26, 1942, and the wedding reception was held at the Toll House in Whitman. Apparently my mother received a copy of Ruth Wakefield's Toll House Cookbook as a wedding present. Evidence that she used the book was her favorite recipe for blueberry cake (I'll share this at another time). By the time I came along it was HER recipe for blueberry cake, and I only learned its origin when the Historical Society began to sell a reprint of Wakefield's cookbook. For those that don't know Mrs. Wakefield was an OA graduate who invented the chocolate chip cookie, the state cookie of Massachusetts. I guessed that my mother's recipe for clam chowder might have come from the same cookbook so I searched it out and found this recipe in the "Advice for Bride's" section:

New England Clam Chowder
(Basic Recipe for New England Brides)
Try out a 1 1/2 inch cube salt pork cut fine
Fry in it
1 onion, sliced. Add:
4 cups diced raw potatoes
2 cups boiling water. Cook 5 minutes.
Add liquor of 1 peck clams, steamed and shucked.
Remove black necks. Add clams. Simmer until potatoes are done.
Add 4 cups of milk, scalded.
Season with salt and pepper

Prepare 1 hour ahead of serving to allow chowder to develop best flavor. Dot with butter and serve with Boston common crackers or water crackers. Serves 8.

An interesting and authentic recipe that doesn't use cream or half and half like modern recipes just milk probably unhomongenized. Sadly, this was not my mother's recipe! Hers involved frying the onion in butter or margarine. (Sorry Melanie, I couldn't convince her to use bacon in corn chowder either), and evaporated milk (usually with regular milk also), canned clams, potatoes, and bottled clam juice proportions currently unknown. Where did this mixture come from? One can easily see that the evaporated milk took the place of the task of scalding milk and my family wasn't going to waste fresh steamers on a chowder when they could be boiled up with lobster for a real feast. Still, my mother never worked without a recipe from somewhere even if she had memorized the ingredients long before, where did the original come from?
A clue came from the New England Chowder Compendium website mentioned yesterday:

This 1942 recipe for corn chowder is from a magazine ad pushing Armour products. My mother was an inveterate recipe clipper almost to the day she died so here was a lead. With all the Rosie the Riveters at work, convenience foods must have become popular during World War II. My mother was teaching elementary school at the time so she was certainly busy. The Chowder Compendium added another recipe from a 1944 Army Technical Manual-Chowder for 100 men that was also made from evaporated milk although it added celery, flour, and melted fat to the more basic recipes. I still haven't found the source of my mother's recipe or the proportions of ingredients, but I'm confident that her version tells a story about life on the home front during World War II, and it still tasted better than any version I've had in a restaurant.

Tomorrow: The joy of blogging, Chet Raymo, and Prezi.

Clam Chowder

It was a cold Monday and the talk at Little Peach turned to clam chowder. The authentic creamy stuff versus that red stuff they serve in Rhode Island. Or so we thought. What is the authentic clam chowder in a world with a thousand different versions? Hey, you're asking a historian so my answer would be to seek out the original recipe and on the way to find the recipe for chowder the way mother used to make it.

By the way this is worst kind of historical research. It's easier to know about Julius Caesar than discover when the first French cook made fish stew in a cauldron and forgot to write the recipe down for le chaudree. Fishermen probably made a stew of water, hard cracker, fish and sometimes butter and onions on shipboard from time immemorial. All the ingredients were readily available on long voyages. The sharks that followed ships to eat the garbage were prime targets for the stew. Potatoes were added after the discovery of the New World although apparently not in New England until the 18th century. Here is the first American recipe for a fish stew from the Boston Evening Post of 1751:
  

First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning
Because in Chouder there can be not turning;
Then lay some Pork in slices very thin,
Thus you in Chouder always must begin.
Next lay some Fish cut crossways very nice
Then season well with Pepper, Salt, and Spice;
Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory, and Thyme,
Then Biscuit next which must be soak'd some Time.
Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able
To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel;
For by repeating o'er the Same again,
You may make a Chouder for a thousand men.
Last a Bottle of Claret, with Water eno; to smother 'em,
You'll have a Mess which some call Omnium gather 'em.

The pork was probably salt pork. Layering the ingredients was an important part of all the early chowder recipes I saw and you can see a lot of them at The New England Chowder Compendium.

My research uncovered two styles of white chowders and many styles of red. The Italians and Portuguese, unlike Americans, were quick to adopt tomatoes as an ingredient in cooking, and so they arrived in America with fish stews made with the red fruit. Exactly when is a mystery-there were Portuguese living in Massachusetts in the 18th century (one actually served  for Easton in the Revolution). The two major styles of red clam chowder are the Manhattan and the Rhode Island. The Rhode Island is red from tomato juice, paste, or ketshup, the Manhattan has chunks of tomato. The name Manhattan may have come from disgusted New Englanders who thought everything awful came from that big city on the Hudson. I also learned there were two styles of white chowder, the Cape Cod and the Maine. In Maine the chowder is plain and made with steamers while the Cape Cod is made from quahogs and is likely to have more seasoning and ingredients. These two varieties are served indiscriminately throughout Massachusetts.

Now for the bad news. The first recipe for a chowder with clams came in 1833 when Lydia Maria Child's cookbook notes that "a few clams are a pleasant addition" to her fish chowder recipe. She also recommended adding tomato ketshup. One could argue that this was not a true chowder, but a very poor version of bouillabaisse.

With all due respect to Miss Child, I don't think the first clam chowder made in Massachusetts had ketshup. Laying aside worthy Native American claims to having invented clam chowder, I would argue that the fishermen who made the first clam chowder probably made it in a similar fashion to the 1751 recipe above. As proof, I offer a recipe from the much maligned state of Rhode Island. It turns out there is a lesser known Rhode Island chowder that is made along the south coast. It contains neither dairy products nor tomatoes:

Serves 6

4	cups chopped sea clams
4	cups (32 ounces) bottled clam broth
2	cups water
1/4	onion, finely chopped
4	tablespoons unsalted butter
1	bay leaf
1	teaspoon coarse salt, or more to taste
1	teaspoon black pepper
4	russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch dice

1. In large flameproof casserole, combine the clams, clam broth, water, onion, butter, bay leaf, salt, and pepper. Set over high heat and bring to a boil.

2. Add the potatoes and let the liquid return to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer the chowder for 40 minutes or until the potatoes are tender but not falling apart.

3. With a slotted spoon, remove 1/2 cup of the potatoes. In a food processor, work the potatoes to form a puree. Stir them back into the chowder. Taste for seasoning and add more salt, if you like. Adapted from Evelyn's Drive-In, from the August 27, 2008 Boston Globe. 

For supporters of the white chowder's primacy, I'll add the following recipe from the Union Oyster House, the oldest continuously operated restaurant in America. It opened in 1826 and this recipe, may be the descendent of the original one that predates Ms. Child by a decade (I say may be because there is another Union Oyster House recipe floating around that contains celery).

10 cups clam juice
2 pounds baking potatoes, like russets, peeled and diced
4 pounds fresh or frozen clams, shelled and diced
1/4 pound salt pork, diced
2 small onions, diced
1 cup butter
1 cup flour
2 pints half-and-half
Salt and pepper
Dash hot pepper sauce
Dash Worcestershire sauce

Bring the potatoes and the clam juice to the boil. Cook until the potatoes are tender, about 10 to 15 minutes. Add the clams and any of their liquid. Cook about 5 minutes. Set aside.

Add the pork to a sauté pan and cook over low heat until rendered. Add the onions and cook until transparent. Add the butter and allow it to melt. Add the flour and cook until slightly colored. Add a bit more flour if necessary if the mixture is too soft. Bring the clams, juice and potatoes back to the boil. Gradually stir in the cooked roux. Bring to a rolling boil to thicken. Stir continuously while cooking. Beat the half-and-half and add to the soup. It may not be necessary to use all the half-and-half; the soup should be thick. Adjust the seasoning and add a dash of hot pepper sauce and Worcestershire sauce before serving.

Yield: 10 servings

 Be a little suspicious here since Worcestershire Sauce wasn't commercialized until 1837. However, fermented fish sauces were back in use (the Romans loved the stuff) by the 17th century in Europe so it is possible that the original recipe contained a Worcestershire precursor. The history of hot pepper sauce is too complicated to get into, but American versions are generally a hot pepper variety in vinegar and salt certainly nothing beyond an early 19th century chef.

Tomorrow: The search for my mother's recipe for clam chowder and blueberry cake!

Census Results

Amazing! One person read yesterday's blog about saving the tiger and today news arrives that the tiger population of India has gone up for the first time in a decade. Nice work reader!

The 2010 census was on WBZ radio this morning and the Curiosity Shop had a posting from Melanie Deware regarding the population of Fall River and train service. You can access Bristol Counties population figures here. Easton's population grew 3.65% to 23,112. Fall River lost 3.35% of its population one of the largest drops in the state. Raynham, Rehoboth, and Dighton all grew more than 14% as the buildout that passed through Easton and Mansfield in the 1980s and 1990s moved south. The comment on Fall River's loss of population related to its need for a passenger rail connection to Boston. The other cities that think they will benefit from passenger rail to Boston are Taunton (down .18%) and New Bedford (up 1.39%).  Of the fastest growing communities only Raynham and Berkeley (up 11.52%) will "benefit" directly from rail service. The other fast growing towns (Dartmouth, Dighton, Rehoboth) will have to drive some distance to a station in order to use the train although if you believe in the rail transport fairy tale that's better access then they had before. The 2010 census data probably can be used to build an argument for both sides in the train debate, but the Army Corps of Engineers report only uses population data up to 2006. From 1990 to 2006 Fall River had only lost 187 people (it's now down about 3,000) while New Bedford was down 5965. Federal census figures show that between 2000 and 2010 New Bedford gained 1304 people. In 1990 New Bedford had a population of 99,922, in 2000 it was 93,768 while in 2010 it was  95,072. Clearly, an argument of rail proponents is that New Bedford and Fall River need passenger rail to reverse negative growth. There are lots of reasons to question this hypothesis (if anyone on the other side was actually listening), but in New Bedford's case we are being asked to build a billion dollar railroad on a twenty year downward trend when the ten year trend is upward. The ultimate problem in  projects like this one is we will never have current enough information to reach a completely rational conclusion. So how much "by guess and by gorry" is acceptable in planning? One could argue that the bigger the project, the bigger the guessing simply because of the immense amount of data involved and the slowness of interpreting that data. Bet you could apply that same insight in building nuclear plants in Japan or sending men to the moon. No matter where you stand on the train, it's an interesting philosophical issue.

Tomorrow, an article of more import-Clam Chowder, Red or White?

Save the Tiger

The tiger is what biologists call a "charismatic megafauna." This is a somewhat pejorative term for big animals that everyone knows and wants to save sometimes at the expense of even more endangered but less sexy animals. Everyone knows a tiger when one sees one, and the animal is the mascot of innumerable schools including Oliver Ames because it epitomizes power and grace. Today the tiger is in trouble with only 1200 in the wild in India and 1000 more scattered from Siberia to Sumatra. Luckily, unlike the panda, tigers breed fairly often in captivity so its unlikely that we will lose the species completely in our lifetime.

The BBC has a four minute video today about ecotourism in one of India's best tiger parks. The park is host to many spectacular animals, but whenever a tiger is sighted convoys of land rovers converge on the poor beast. The intrepid reporter goes on to show us how to tour the park on the back of an elephant. Tigers and grown up elephants apparently have a rapprochement so the reporter got close to three tigers. The video also makes a point about charismatic megafauna. Everyone cares about saving tigers, but hardly anyone gives a damn about saving grey junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens.  However, in order to save the tiger we must also save large swaths of habitat and that helps save the junglefowl and many other species as well. Thus, tigers make good mascots for promoting biodiversity in their native lands.

At NRT we are often asked to put in more trails through our woods for wildlife viewing or to connect with outside properties. We avoid this as much as possible to give wildlife quiet places to live. Watch the BBC video, and you may understand why. The trails at Sheep Pasture are designed to let wildlife be seen if they want to be, but to remain unseen if that is their choice. By the way, horseback riding is forbidden at Sheep Pasture, but there is apparently no ban on riding your elephant.

Earliest Art with the Latest

German filmmaker Werner Herzog has just released a 3D documentary called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It is the story of Chauvet Cave in France where the earliest human paintings has been found. These date to about 32,000 years ago almost twice as old as the more famous paintings at Lascaux, also in France. You can view the trailer for the film on YouTube, but you'll see even more of this breath-taking art in an eight minute story from England's Guardian newspaper. While praising the film some critics have pointed out a few scientific errors in Herzog's script so a visit to the official website is well advised. The website has a virtual tour of every gallery within the cave with excellent still pictures as well as explanations of the history of the site.

You are unlikely to ever see these works of art in person since the Chauvet Cave is closed to the public and even most archaeologists in order to protect it from changes in humidity that might promote mold growth on the organic pigments. Thus world travelers have no advantage over a stay at home South Easton boy. I once did a presentation on American art for my students and threw in a picture of the first known photograph with the caption "this changes everything." Photography seemed to free painters from the need to be representational leading to the abstract works of the 20th century. While photography quickly asserted its own artistic side almost all photos still are about something. When a Lumiere brother' early film showed a train pulling into a station audience's ducked to avoid getting hit, but the advent of films didn't seem to push still photography into abstraction.

Viewing the Guardian video linked above gives you a real feel for the volume of the paintings and the mysteriousness of the cave itself. This effect must only be magnified in 3-D. The still pictures give you extensive coverage, panoramic views, and excellent close-ups, but something is missing that is present in the movie. Herzog actually speaks to this issue in the Guardian video because at the dawn of art, the first artists were thinking about this issue also! Live animals, the base of almost all prehistoric art, are full of motion. Herzog points to an eight legged bison as an early attempt at animation, and a rhino done in multiple outline almost seems to be shaking his horn. The use of the natural contours of the cave also seem to accentuate motion. It seems that motion pictures were the goal of representational art from the beginning. In an age of digital video cameras does the still photo have a future?

By the way, what you get with 15,000 years of technological advances is a much more colorful cave art at Lascaux. While the Chauvet drawings used charcoal and red ochre, the artists at Lascaux add browns and yellows to their animals. The Lascaux website, by the way, is one of the most spectacular I have ever seen. Using flash animation you descend into the claustrophobic cave and a helpful graphic pop-ups to tell you to stop and look at a painting as you pass by. The panoramic views make it seem as if you are inches away from the art. The link above may or may not take you to the English flash version of the website for which you need the latest version of flash player; it's worth it to view the site with flash. The site may also pop-up in French (Thank you Mr. Ialenti). If it does click on accessibilite and you'll soon find your way to Anglais.

Square Foot Raised Bed Gardens

For the past several years I have been practicing square foot gardening. Square foot gardening can be any garden that is planned out in sections one foot on a side, but my garden is in two wooden containers three feet wide, twenty feet long and raised off the ground about thirty inches. One is completely filled with soil while the other has a floor with drainage holes set a foot down from the surface. Both beds have an embedded leaky hose to provide water with the least evaporation. The pattern of the hose divides the bed into one foot sections. One bed has a string trellis attached for growing pole beans and other vines. The Wikipedia piece on square foot gardening is a good place to start if you want to try this organic gardening method.

Practiced correctly square foot gardening is intensive horticulture. For those who know me this might seem like the least likely form of gardening for me, but until last year, when I never seemed to be home to care for the garden, my beds provided a big supplement to for my summer table at very little cost once the beds were built.

Although I get a dozen or more seed catalogs, this year all my seeds are coming from Pinetree Garden Seeds in New Gloucester, ME.  Their focus is on the small home gardener, and they keep costs down by not selling you as big a packet of seeds as a place like Burpees. For $1.35 you can get 500 lettuce seeds or 20 cucumber seeds in varieties that tend to favor heirlooms. All outdoor seeds are tested in Maine so you know they’ll grow around here. Here’s a list of this year’s choices and why I chose them:

Masai Bush Beans (47 days to maturity)-The bushes only grow a foot tall and yield heavily with a couple dozen very tasty beans per plant. All this is perfect for a square foot raised bed gardener. I set aside six squares and plant at one week intervals in the spring. This year I plan a mid-August planting for a September crop.

Purple Trionfo Violetto Pole Bean (60 days) For the trellis, beautiful light purple flowers followed by flavorful purple beans (they cook up green) that remain edible until almost eight inches long. A ten week harvesting period helps make this a great choice as well.

Long Island Improved Brussels Sprouts (85 days)-My favorite vegetable, but I have had bad luck with members of the cabbage family due to a plethora of pretty white cabbage butterflies. Hopefully, I’ll have a better eye for the caterpillars this year. This is an heirloom variety, but, as you may imagine, a lot of horticultural work has not gone into creating hybrid Brussels sprouts. One plant is put into a square foot.

Rainbow Carrots (57 days)-Up to five color varieties with slightly different tastes in each variety, if you don’t grow this, Adam at the NRT Farmer’s Market has them for sale.

Sea Foam Chard (53 days)-Boringly green compared to the more colorful red stemmed chard, this one is mild flavor and is good in salads or stir fried or steamed. Two plants per square, chard can be harvested all summer if you are careful not to cut too many leaves from one plant.

Miniature White Cucumbers (49 days)-A long vined variety like this is not really suited to the square foot unit so these delightful little picklers will probably end up on a trellis. Care must be taken in trellising a cucumber because the vine is much more tender than a pole bean.

Gourd Mixture-Another vining project. My uncle who worked for the New Enlgand Horticultural Society grew and dried gourds for crafts projects so I figured I’d try a mixture this year for fun.

Pinetree Lettuce Mix (40 days)-An all leaf, all sweet mix with a variety of colors and maturation dates, this mix works well in salads and sandwiches. Perfect for a square foot garden where you plant close together and “weed” as needed.

Summertime Lettuce (68 days)-The family has never had much luck with heading lettuce, but I tried this heat resistant type two years ago and got good results. Small heads make this ideal for the square foot plan and a small family.

Broccoli di Rapa-Novantina (30 days)- Broccoli rabe is pungent, but goes great with white beans, potato or pasta. The short growing time should help beat the cabbage moths. Good in early spring and again in fall, perfect for intensive gardens. The second planting will go in the squares from the first of the Masai beans.

Hailstone Radish (25 days) This heirloom variety from the 1800s is the fastest maturing radish around. The one inch round radishes can be planted close together. This is a new variety for me and supposedly has the tangy, pungent flavor that has been bred out of commercial varieties. Unlike unfragrant modern roses, I like modern sweeter radishes so this may be a disappointment. We'll see. Old-fashioned radishes are supposedly great with beer!

Tatsoi (45-50 days)-A Chinese green that can be picked leaf by leaf, this is a variety of a spinach mustard hardy down to 15 degrees so it can be planted when most other things are out of the garden.

Without a good window to start plants I’ll be buying my tender vegetable plants like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and basils from Gerry’s in Brockton although with eggplant and peppers its actually easier to buy the crop from Gerry’s. Peas never yield enough in a small garden (although I have had success with sugar snap pea pods) so I buy them as well. Squash and zucchini grow too well in a home garden so I buy them as needed.

Why You'll Get a Better Blog Tomorrow!

Switched to a new browser today and it has completely flummoxed posting the blog. Firefox 4 promises exciting improvements and greater speed. I use Firefox because it is hugely customizable, but, of course, in the upgrade a lot of that customization gets lost and has to be rebuilt. I was well on the way to getting things back to normal and starting a blog about my vegetable garden when I had to put things off and rush off to school. Rushing off is not something I'll be doing again because in the course of hurrying I ended up taking my dog's medication instead of my own. Maggie was smart enough to notice this-she gave me the "what the hell are you doing now look?" But it was down the hatch before I realized what I was doing. More delay ensued as the school nurse assured me that a milligram of prednisone and some pepsid was not going to kill me, but not getting enough sleep might! I was planning to post on ordering seeds for my garden, but an inadvertent tap on the wrong spot on the browser made it all disappear! Now I'm really out of time so here's my promise-a superior blog about seeds and a relatively new form of gardening and a good night's sleep for me.

Not Writing About the Train

Trying to be positive (and non-controversial) is getting more and more difficult. With news that the Army Corps of Engineers approved the politically motivated and scandalously expensive train through Easton our town is about to change dramatically and forever for the worse. Nice to see the Army Corps can do for little towns like Easton what their flood control plans did for New Orleans. The 2,500 page draft environmental report CD arrived in the mail yesterday, and we have until May to comment. It's so hard to justify this boondoogle on any rational basis (other than using passenger rail as a Trojan horse for freight and trash trains) that I can't yet jump on the mitigation bandwagon, but I promise not to write about it again. Starting to think about moving out of town though, but I'd miss the potholes.

By the way, because of our soil, Easton has always had problems with its roads. We were fined constantly by the state in the 18th century for not keeping Bay Road up to snuff and Turnpike Street disappeared into the Hockomock Swamp several times before it was finally pushed through to Raynham. I think the Highway Department should be commended for their seemingly around the clock efforts to fix potholes even as the normal winter clean-up is underway.

Happier stories to come.

The Cape Ann Earthquake of 1755

There was a reassuring article in the Globe Sunday about earthquake risk in Boston and as always there will be an Easton connection if one hits Boston. We have little, often missed quakes here in Massachusetts. The last one I remember was centered in Abington and sounded like the washing machine was working in the basement. Other tiny quakes have felt like heavy trucks rumbling by. The last quake to cause damage in the area was in 1940. My mother always told about the day when a display plate fell off the wall in our ancestral home in Braintree although I didn't hear that story quite as often as the one about my father putting out a hundred years worth of dishes for the trash when we moved to Easton. Heard that one whenever a similar plate appeared on Antiques Road Show.

OK, back to the earthquake. The little woodcut is from  religious tract of the time. Church steeples tumbled during the quake as they had in other large quake in 1663 and 1727. We apparently have no record of quake damage in Easton, and since we were embroiled in what Chaffin called "The Great Church Controversy" about the location of a new church, our old meeting house may not have had a steeple to fall off. The US Geological Survey website has a nice modern interpretation of the quake and a reference to a 19th source.

What's the Easton connection to a possible Boston quake? The Globe article mentions that filled land that remains wet is in danger of liquefaction, think shaking a bowl of jello. The buildings of the Back Bay are built on wooden pilings and fill that is still wet with ground and sea water. This 19th century project to fill the Back Bay had, as one of its primary investors, Frederick Lothrop Ames of Easton.

Time for Easton to Give Chaloos a Second Chance?

There are a number of fine restaurants in Easton, but the range of dining choices is small. Thus, when Chaloos Persian Restaurant opened in October I had high hopes for a different taste in town. As is often the case when a new restaurant opens I ate there a number of times to try the full menu. I ate lunch at El Mariachi’s every day last April vacation and was practically adopted into the family. The welcome at Chaloos wasn’t quite as warm, but the service was attentive and I recommended it to "everyone."

"Everyone" soon came back to me with gripes and grumbles. Most were about price and portion size, some were about stale pita or not liking the flavors. One person told me  "I give it six months.” What I didn't hear, but what is certainly an issue for some is that Chaloos doesn't have a liquor license. Maybe I was wrong about the place, I thought, so I stopped going in. It seems that after a first burst of enthusiasm most of Easton did the same. I hardly see anyone in Chaloo’s these days. At least now I don’t have to wear my hoodie and a guilty look as I sneak into the Thailand Restaurant because that Easton institution has closed after 22 years.

Today, the Globe’s South Weekly section reviewed Chaloo’s and reminded me of all the reasons I liked the restaurant in the first place.You can find the review here. (Don't be terrified by the movie ad that jumps off the screen. The full menu is also available on line. A healthy vegetarian lunch plate of falafel and a Persian salad can be had for $8.95. Wraps are also a good lunch choice in the $6.45 (hommus and veggies) to 9.95 (falafel and lamb) range. Soups are $5 or $6 and are deliciously different. The top price on the menu is $23.95 for a three skewer kabob combo. Admittedly the amount of food you get seems a little less than you get at Maguire's or El Mariachi's, but doesn't seem that far out of line to me. For locals used to Greek food, Chaloos offers a different taste profile on the typical Middle Eastern fare.

Maybe we should all give Chaloos a second chance. If we don't our restaurant choices will get even narrower.

Pot Pourri

From Yesterday's Blog: There is no Revolutionary War Memorial or is there? There is a marker at Militia Park at Friend's Crossing off Lincoln Street that reads: "Dedicated to the several militia companies of Easton who were ready for their country's call." The militia was the colonial military organization that included all men between the ages of 16 and 60 except the town minister and severely handicapped men. The militia met once or twice a year to train-ours at the now militia park, and Training Day became something of a holiday. In many towns there was more drinking than training on that day. In one nearby town, the men kept firing at the feet of their officers to make them dance until someone aimed too high and severed a femoral artery killing the captain of the company. With this level of training when crunch time came, the colonial legislature decided to form the Minutemen. Created in 1774, the Minutemen were younger militia members who promised to drill weekly and be ready to respond to a call-out on a moment's notice. On April 19th when the call did come, however, all of the East and West militia marched up Bay Road to Boston not just the Minutemen. However, the militia was the National Guard of its time, and a number of Easton men enlisted in the regular army so there is no official memorial to all who served to found this country. There is also a bronze marker at the Old Bay Road Cemetery that mentions the Revolutionary War, but I'll save the story of that mysterious cemetery for another day.

With Spring officially here. We'll all be working in our gardens soon. The ASPCA has a garden guide available for making your garden safe for pets. I was surprised to learn that cocoa mulch which many people are starting to use because of its rich brown color and sweet, chocolaty odor can be fatal to dogs and cats because it contains the same chemical that makes chocolate candy potentially danger for pets. The ASPCA website also has a list of poisonous plants. The list is long and detailed-the best I've seen with many surprises; it also includes non-toxic plants to help you plan your garden.

Thanks to Uma Hiremath and Madeline Miele Holt at the library who will soon be adding a link to this blog on the library's website. This is another exciting year at the library with many programs celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Italian Gardens. For those of us who like historical novels Madeline recommends All Other Nights by Dara Horn. It's a story of northern and southern Jews during the Civil War.

Bob and Carole Misiewicz visited the Kate's Butter website and found the following recipe there:

Thanks to all for following this blog!

 

Memorialization

Visit the Mall in Washington, D. C. and you can see the variety by which Americans memorialize events in our history. Oldest is the Lincoln Memorial with its colossal statue of the Great Emancipator and the carved words from his greatest speeches. Then there is the Vietnam Memorial, a black gabbro slash in the ground with its 50,000 plus names that reflects the tragedy and controversy of that war. Remember that traditionalists forced the addition of an old-fashioned (and moving) statue to the site. On Lincoln's right is the Korean War Memorial, my favorite. I first saw this at night and the stark figures crossing the center of the memorial reveal the tensions and fear of the moments before battle. The wall with its anonymous reliefs of the units that served in the war and the equally anonymous and very small relief of General MacArthur (pointed out by a helpful ranger) form an interesting historical study. The reflecting pool with the names of the nations that supported our efforts adds a traditional element to a perfect memorial. A brief walk down the mall brings you to the fascinatingly modern FDR memorial and the very traditional World War II Memorial. All big multimillion dollar efforts, but we in Easton do our best to memorialize as well.

Visit OA and one can see plaques commemorating students and teachers. Visit the town hall and you can see dedications to politicians, historic preservationists, and the current oldest citizen. ECAT just had a segment on the street signs that memorialize neighborhood soldiers who gave their lives in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The biggest outdoor memorials recognize those who put their lives on the line in the Civil War through Vietnam. Some of these reflect our bifurcated history. When the Ames family created Oakes Ames Memorial Hall for a new town hall and the Rockery as our Civil War memorial, the good people of Easton said thanks; and then kept the old town hall at Easton Center where they erected their own memorial to the Civil War dead. See the Rockery as Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial and the monument  at the end of Center Street as the traditionalist's addition. However the statue has a little modernist ambiguity-it faces south on guard lest the south should rise again, but it seems to turn a cold shoulder towards North Easton. At the Church Street Cemetery we have a memorial to those who lost their lives in service in modern wars while in North Easton we have the beautiful new memorial to all those who have served in those same wars. Luckily we have two days a year to honor veterans, and our two parades visit all the memorials!

Can anyone tell me where our Revolutionary War memorial is located?

Catbirds in Trouble

A birder’s favorite bird is usually the last one they’ve happened to see, but I have a particular fondness for the catbird, a dapper little figure in gray with a little black top hat for both males and females. He’s a relative of the mockingbird whose pitch perfect imitation of other birds is legendary. Catbird’s imitate too, but there’s a little bit of the rusty gate in its songs as well as the characteristic cat-like meowing. This doesn’t stop the catbird from singing from the highest perch he can find in the thickets and shrubs that are his home, and the term “sitting in the catbird’s seat” comes from this habit. At all times catbirds are pert, inquisitive and peppy, and today this happy little bird is in trouble.

 The Smithsonian's Migratory Bird Center published a summary of a study of Catbirds in suburban Maryland. The study took place in three parks in towns with two population densities a little larger and one a little smaller than Easton. While studies have often looked at nest success (something we do with our bluebirds at Sheep Pasture), the catbird study followed the juvenile birds into the post fledgling period. A fledgling is a young bird who can fly a little and who has left the nest. Mom and Dad typically feed the fledglings for a few days outside the nest while they learn the ropes of being a bird. With catbirds the fledgling/post fledgling stage is rather spectacular as the juvenile birds hide in bushes and make plenty of noise to attract the parents with a free lunch.

The baby birds had been fitted with radio transmitters so that they could be tracked after they left the nest. About half the fledglings made it to adulthood in one park while only 10% did so in another. Predators accounted for 79% of the fledgling mortality overall with the highest rate of predation in the first week after leaving the nest. Now lots of things eat fledglings including other birds especially blue jays and crows and native mammals like squirrels and chipmunks. However, in two parks more than half  the fledglings were killed by cats. One can conclude that native birds have not adapted well to this introduced predator. The study notes that high quality habitat helps reduce predation.

What are the lessons for Easton? Stricter laws regarding cats would help. Why do these damaging predators roam free? Given that coyotes seem to find domestic cats delicious, why do owners let their cats out alone anyway? At places like Sheep Pasture feral and semi-feral cats should be removed and sent to a no-kill shelter. Attention should also be given to providing quality habitat so that a property  does not become a reproductive sink where birds find it easy to nest, but hard to raise babies to adulthood. Studies by professional forester Phil Benjamin and wildlife expert Diane Boretos tell us that Sheep Pasture has a exceptional variety of habitats that can be managed to balance the needs of wildlife with the needs of visitors, but, for me, the needs of wildlife should have more weight in the scales.

The Solar Panel Vision

I went to the Community Visioning presentation last night and was generally very pleased. As noted in an earlier blog, the Community Visioning Report of 2007 has actually driven policy decisions in a positive direction for three years. One thing mentioned was the small solar array at the Clock Farm. A citizen mentioned that the payback in electricity for the cost of the program was about 43 years which exceeds the life expectancy of the panels. He was told that it was OK since town money wasn't spent because we had gotten federal money to pay for it. Wrong answer!

Several people including the citizen that raised the question noted that federal money was our tax money just as much as town funds so we are paying for a project with no real payback.

A few years ago kids on OA's Envirothon Team studied the possibility of putting solar panels on the roof of the school and reached the same conclusion. Without a subsidy from our taxes, the cost of the project couldn't be justified from the payback in electricity within the life expectancy of the panels. That's not the point, however. Government subsidies for cutting edge (but not speculative) technology helps build the demand needed to bring the costs down for everyone and reduce the need to continue investing in older polluting technologies like coal fired electric generating plants, both public goods. Already subsidies for solar have made it attractive for homeowners to invest.  The NRT will again be hosting a solar workshop this year to show homeowners how easy it is to use solar to make their electrical meters run backwards. Taxpayer support for solar today will pay dividends tomorrow in jobs and energy independence. Hopefully we won't be buying all the solar panels from China where the government is funding extensive research and development!

Thus, it was good to subsidize railroads in the period from 1830 to 1870 since it was a better transportation option than canals and stagecoaches. The freight railroads created a national economy that benefited everyone. Unfortunately, passenger transportation on railroads never achieved economic viability without subsidies so now we are stuck with projects like the MBTA's South Coast Rail. With  an entrenched MBTA bureaucracy and politicians like Taunton Senator Mark Pacheco pushing it, I have no confidence in the Army Corps of Engineers to do the right thing and pull the plug on both rail alternatives. So expect to subsidize the old and inflexible technology of rail transportation over a cutting edge technology like computer scheduled hybrid  buses. Remember that every dollar down the rat hole of South Coast Rail is a dollar that can't be spent on projects with real upside like solar power or flex transportation.

The Browning Club Cookbook 1923

Pat Baker, the Easton's favorite music teacher, loaned me a copy of The Browning Club Cookbook of 1923. I don't have my History of Easton, Volume 2 in front of me this morning to check out the Browning Club, but it was one of many woman's clubs around town in the decades around the turn of the century. From the contributors to the cookbook, the club had a decidedly South Easton clientele.


Today, we have become used to exact measurements and detailed cooking instructions in our recipes, but in 1923 recipe writing was in transition. You were much more likely to get exact measurements than you were several decades before when instructions like add "butter the size of a hen's egg" were common. On the other hand you darned well had to know how to cook because information about cooking time and temperature was scant at best. This was probably due to the fact that wood stoves and early gas and electric stoves were not very standardized and each cook had to get to know her appliances.

The Browning Club Cookbook is strong on desserts like Caramel Cake, Snicker Doodles, and Clove Drop Cookies all with precise measured ingredients and no instructions on baking. The Caramel Cake doesn't explain where the caramel in the name comes from since the only flavoring is chocolate. There are also a few recipes that we would consider "oddball" today although they were popular back then. See for instance this recipe for "Condensed Milk Salad Dressing."

Condensed Milk Salad Dressing

Mix in the order given
1 can condensed milk (small)
1tablespoon mustard
1tablespoon salt
1/4 cup melted shortening
1 or 2 eggs
1 to 1 1/2 cups vinegar

Do not cook


Much more "today" is the "Carrot Salad" submitted by Mrs. W. P. Howard, the editor of the cookbook.

Carrot Salad

6 carrots
2 onion
3 hard boiled eggs
6 stalks celery

Grate the carrots and dice the other ingredients.
Season to taste. Mix with lemon dressing.
Set aside to cool.
Serve with lettuce

The "set aside to cool" throws me a little. Was the lemon dressing heated? No recipe is provided so assume it was a simple mix of olive oil and lemon juice and the set aside instruction was just to provide time for the dressing to mix with the ingredients. This sounds like a refreshing lunch entree for a summer day.

One final recipe for "Corn Oysters" is my favorite.

Corn Oysters
Place a can of corn on the stove and let simmer 20 minutes. Season with 1 teaspoon of salt, a little pepper, a teaspoon of butter, and 2 tablespoons of milk. Let cool and then add 2 well beaten eggs and 1 cup fresh, crisp cracker crumbs.

Fry sliced bacon and drop corn mixture by tablespoonfuls in the hot bacon fat and fry until brown on both sides.

Now anything fried in bacon fat is fine by me, but I'd suggest opening the can of corn and placing the contents in a pan as an important first step. Bet the lady who wrote the recipe did that too!


I don't really fry things in bacon fat preferring olive oil or better yet grapeseed oil purchased at the NRT Farmer's Market, but I do enjoy one pat of butter on my breakfast egg sandwich (made with Sheep Pasture eggs, available at 3 dollars a dozen at the Carriage House). Recently, Stephanie Danielson of Easton's Planning Department told we about Kate's Butter from Maine. Its old fashioned fresh cream only butter from cows that were fed hormone free feed. Available at Roche Brothers, you can learn more at Kate's Butter.

Citizen Kane

The New York Times posted a nice 4 minute retrospective of the film that many consider to be the best American film of all time, Citizen Kane. This little appreciation highlights the dazzling technical achievements of the film and the acting prowess of its star and director Orson Welles. Is it the greatest American film of all time? Hard to say, Charles Foster Kane is a compelling character, I suppose, but the film makes it difficult to empathize with him until the last moment. This is a film that as the cliche says "repays repeated viewing" not only for its brilliant technical tricks, but for its meditation on what is ultimately knowable about even the most famous person. Rosebud! If we're paying attention, we'll know what Kane's last word means, but the inquiring newsreel reporter never learns. Like a historian he's followed all the sources, looked at his subject from multiple perspectives, and misses the whole point. Yet he gives us a great story.

At least at the end of Citizen Kane, we know the whole story. A little more than a decade later Kurosawa's Rashomon doesn't allow even the viewer to know what really happened.  Told from multiple perspectives this great film often confounds viewers who are used to a linear narrative structure, but like Kane it's true to the historian's quest for "truth." It just concludes that the quest is hopeless.

A. S. Byatt's wonderful novel Possession was brought to the screen in a much less wonderful movie than the two just mentioned. It manages to be one of my favorite films however once I got past the fact that the two stars Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow don't really click. It's a great story, told in flashback,  of two researchers digging into events of a century before, the best film about historical research ever. The two historians (English lit people actually) seem to succeed spectacularly until once again, we the viewers get to see the whole truth.

Not happy thoughts for someone getting back into writing history.



 

Seals and Whales and Community Visioning

Geology.com has provided this link to a you tube video of seal and whale sounds. Great pictures too. This reminds me that the whale watching season is about to begin. For me nothing is more fun than going to sea with a camera or binoculars and looking for great whales. I've had great tours from Boston Harbor and Plymouth, but prefer the Captain John's boats out of Plymouth because of the traffic free drive to the docks and the spectacular whaling luck I've had on the last two trips there. Here are three photos from the last trip.

 Humpback whales are known for their spectacular acrobatics. I had been on four watches before I saw this breaching behavior and it took me another trip to time the photo right. No one knows why a whale will jump out of the water and splash down dozens of times. Some believe it's to knock off barnacles. Since juvenile males tend to jump the most, some have suggested it might just be showing off or boredom due to a lack of video games.

I saw a lot of this behavior on the last trip also. The whale would roll on its side then smash its six to eight foot long flipper on the water. It's believed that this sends shock waves through the water to stun the small sand lances the whales love to feed on.

There's a better shot of this behavior on the video, but you can see inside the whale's mouth pretty well. These two had swum under a school of fish and blown bubbles in a ring to trap them. Then they opened their mouths and surfaced inside the bubble ring.

This Wednesday at 6:30 at Oakes Ames Memorial Hall town officials will update the community on the visioning plan that was initiated in 2007. You can find the 19 page plan here. It's interesting to see how well the town has done in already implementing many of the visions despite our challenging financial situation.

I Can't Believe the Easton Curiosity Shop is One Week Old

I hardly thought I'd make it through the first week of blogging, but here I am finding it fun and relaxing. I want to thank the person who makes it all possible-my dog Maggie. She has to take a pill an hour before her breakfast and heaven help anyone who makes a move towards the kitchen before she can eat. Thus, an hour of sitting quietly to write a blog.

Today, I'd like to share a grab bag of stories and sites with you.

Diabetes Self-Management posted an article by Diane Fennell on a meta study proving again the benefits of a Mediterranean style diet. It includes a link to an interesting recipe for Greek Shrimp.

An interactive map posted by the New York Times organizes photos of earthquake devastation in Japan. Interactive maps, pioneered by Google, are becoming more common in a much more serious way than showing you a picture of the latest pub in town.

If your thinking of donating for relief work in Japan (or New Zealand), you might want to use one of the several charity rating services available on the net. Here is the link to Charity Navigator.

Here's a link to Coriander Bistro in Sharon, the closest Indian (Nepalese actually) restaurant to Easton. Excellent daily lunch buffet. Just looking at the website makes me hungry.

Finally, a scary true story from the Chronicles of Higher Education from teacher Ellen Laird about having a murder suspect in her classroom.

The Era of Ten Pound Field Guides

For someone who doesn't have the time to enjoy birding, I have more field guides than almost anyone I know. I still rely on my 50 year old 2nd edition Peterson's Guide, and I'm likely to carry my favorite Kenn Kaufman's Field Guide to the Birds of North America or one of a number of smaller guides to New England birds into the field on those rare occasions when I go birding.

So what to make of the arrival of the new Stokes Field Guide to the Birds last October? One reviewer states that while it is large and heavy, he could carry it in the pocket of his cargo pants. He must be a belt and suspender kind of guy because I'd consider hiring a book bearer to carry it into the field with me.

Still, it's a wonderful book. Each of the 854 species (about 700 more than you're likely to see in Easton) covered has at least two photographs and many common birds have 6-10 spectacular color shots. The book also includes a CD with sounds from 150 common birds. For you non-bird watchers out there, Roger Tory Peterson revolutionized birding early in the 20th century with a system of bird identification based on certain features of a bird. See a spot on the chest of a sparrow and you probably had a song sparrow. The Stokes Guide introduces to average birders something good birders have been using for a while now. The Stokes call it "quantitative shape identification" and it's based on looking at the whole bird and checking out the proportions of the key parts and how they relate to each other. It's a good system and better than trying to see a streak over the eye of a bird off in a tree.

Even better may be the new Crossley ID Guide to Eastern Birds. Richard Crossley basically believes the best way to identify birds is to look at a lot of them. His guide is designed to be too big to carry into the field, but just open it to any page, and you can experience the thrill of birding from your favorite arm chair.

It's a "Where's Waldo?" guide to birds. The idea is to put the bird into its environment just as you might see it. There are at least nine examples of this little bird, a Black and White Warbler, in the picture. This bird is a summer resident here, and I bet most of you have never seen it. This guide should help, and it's great fun on a rainy day.

Just time for a brief word on Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion, another heavyweight. This one has no pictures relying instead on excellent descriptions of a bird and its activities to supplement what you see in a field guide. Sounds like a strange way to id birds, but the description of a Wilson's Warbler helped me nail down an observation I made more than five years ago.

Patti's Cold Cream

Anna C. Ames, the Governor Oliver Ames' wife kept a domestic diary during the 1890s. A few pages have come down to us, and in them is this recipe for a beauty cream.

Patti's Cold Cream

1 pound mutton fat

1 cup glycerine

A few drops of perfume

Try out the mutton fat upon a small alcohol stove allowing the grease

to slowly liquify out until there is a swimming cup full of fat;

Run it through a fine silver wire sieve.

Stir into it an equal quantity of glycerine. Into this put a few drops of perfume.

Stirring all gently until it begins to harden. Then put it into small stone fancy jars.

The above is the finest cold cream.

Every night Patti massages with that cream and if there are wrinkles her maid rubs it in mornings.

She rubs it off. Cold cream has driven every line from Patti's face.

Was this Patti a friend, or a local farmer's wife with lots of mutton fat to get rid of? The answer is no, it was Adelina Patti perhaps the most famous operatic soprano of the 19th century. Patti was born in Madrid, Spain to two Italian opera singers. The family soon moved to New York and and Patti was raised in the Bronx. She made her professional debut in 1859 at age 16. She was a brilliant singer (Verdi considered her the best ever) and went from success to success through a long career. She was also a good businesswoman who commanded $5,000 a performance at the height of her career. According to legend she trained her pet parrot to cry out "Cash, Cash" whenever a certain opera promoter appeared in her room. She was less lucky in love. Her first marriage, to the inevitable penniless Italian count, ended in a divorce that cost her half her fortune. Her second marriage ended with her husband's death, a possibility she reduced with her third marrage by marrying a man twenty-seven years her junior. Thus, Miss Patti may qualify as the first cougar.

Did the magic skin cream work? Here's a painting of her in 1863 a year after her command performance for Abraham Lincoln at the White House.

In 1893 Miss Patti commissioned the writing of an opera called "Gabriella" by Emilio Pizzi. She, of course, played the title role, and the world premiere was in Boston. Its fun to imagine Mrs Ames meeting the famous diva at that time and sharing beauty secrets, but I haven't been able to nail down the meeting. Here's a photo of the singer just a few years later, 34 years after the picture above.

  Looks like the mutton fat worked pretty well! Sadly while the face remained beautiful the voice began to deteriorate. Her last concert tour in America in 1903 was "a critical, financial, and personal failure" and from then on she seldom sang in public spending more and more time in her mansion in Wales. She last sang in public for a Red Cross benefit in London at the Royal Albert Hall in October 1914. She died in 1919 two years after Mrs. Ames.

Miss Patti was almost certainly the only person to sing at the White House for Lincoln during the Civil War who sang at a benefit concert for World War I. The White House performance occurred in 1862 when the Lincolns were mourning the loss of their son Willie. Miss Patti's singing of "Home, Sweet, Home" moved the Lincolns to tears. The song became a regular part of the diva's concert repetoire. In 1905 she and her husband installed a primitive recording studio in her retirement home and recorded about thirty songs. Through the scratches and the decay of a great voice you too can hear the song that moved the Lincolns. As far as I know this is the only voice heard by Lincoln that you can hear today, and it still has the power to move to tears.

A Bug and My Billion Dollar Art Heist

Some people have dogs follow them home; I have bugs. Tuesday I went for a walk at Sheep Pasture and came home with a bug that looked like the one below.

 It was perhaps a half inch long and looked similar to something lurking among the dozens of lures in my fly boxes. A quick check of the boxes lead me to the stonefly section, a little used part of my fly collection because I generally fish ponds, and stoneflies like streams. A little research led me to the family Leuctridae-the rolled winged stoneflies. For those of us that aren't going to rush to the nearest stream with a fishing pole, finding this little creature is still important.

North Easton has had septic system issues for years. One of the pluses of the upcoming Shovel Shop project is the building of a sewage treatment plant that should help clean up the Queset. As we start that clean up, it would be good to know just how polluted the Queset really is. This little bug helps us answer that question. Stoneflies in general and this family of stoneflies in particular are highly pollution sensitive. The bug in the picture is an adult who only lives for 1 to 4 weeks. They are poor fliers and only move a few hundred yards or less from their natal stream looking for mates. Stoneflies like to lay their eggs in streams that have stony bottoms. The larva burrow between the rocks and stay there from 1 to 3 years. At Sheep Pasture this means that they live between the Main Street dam and where the stream widens into a muddy bottomed pool near the Sheep Pasture bridge. The long life span in the water is one factor that makes it such a good pollution indicator. Now just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, one pollution sensitive stonefly doesn't make a perfectly clean river, yet one stonefly is reason to hope that as our stream gets cleaner there will be more and perhaps the fish that eat them.

Easton resident Pat Basler is the director of the Stoughton Public Library. She has been a strong proponent of the idea of selecting one book a year for a town reads together program. This year she has chosen Ulrich Boser's The Gardener Heist, the story of the incredible art theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. You can buy the book at the library for $10,  a five dollar savings off the list price. While you are there you can pick up a listing of the programs Pat has put together related to the book including art theft experts and a trip to the museum. Hurry, because the programs have already started.

The most valuable of the stolen paintings is Vermeer's "The Concert." Vermeer is the guy who did "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" and there are only 36 Vermeer's in the whole world. I have a half dozen tucked away in the back of the curiosity shop along with my Rembrandts and Botticellis. Well, not quite, but the Google Art Project lets me "steal" and from 17 museums around the world and create my own museum where I can get so close to the art that I can see the brushstrokes. Now there are some shortcomings-not enough modern art, not enough American, but about a 1000 paintings are available. If you like art, just Google "googleartproject." Along with creating your own art gallery, you can use a unique virtual reality system to actually walk the galleries of some of the most famous museums in the world.

Tomorrow a posting about Governor Oliver Ames' wife's beauty secrets and its connection to Abraham Lincoln's ears.