Cat in a Basket

Sometimes people write on the back of their emails, so you have to turn your device around to read your message. This is inconsiderate.

Here's a recipe for chocolate caramel Valentine's cookies from Emily Richards, as posted in Metro News.

And here's a picture of a turnip from farm-basket.com. Turnips are known to be very good for you, with all kinds of health benefits, but you probably shouldn't give one of these to your special Valentine's day person; you might be in for a surprise if you do.

Speaking of Valentine's day, here are some very nice photographs of demolition excavators from Kocurek Excavators Ltd., featuring their line of bespoke front-end equipment for hydraulic excavators.  There are all sorts of interesting pieces of equipment here, including long-reach arms, teledippers, and modular joints.

It's Monday. No worries.

Never Look a Gift Alien in the Mouth

Re-gifting has become a traditional activity during various festivals, including birthdays, graduation, Spring riots, and sports riots.

It's come to my attention there aren't enough chocolate cookies in the world. Here, in a bid to ease this growing crisis, is a recipe from the Toronto Star for peanut-butter filled chocolate cookies. If you're allergic to peanut butter, close your eyes while reading the recipe.

And here, from Group Recipes, is a fine contribution to the well-being of humans everywhere--a recipe for the old-fashioned chocolate malted, as consumed during the fifties in such places as Walgreens, Woolworth, the Hudson's Bay Company, and other fine establishments. This is even better than a Burma Shave sign!

And here is the website of the North American Dismantling Corp., where you will find lots of interesting pictures of fine machines biting, crunching, shearing, smashing, digging and wrecking old buildings.

If you're interested in learning how to operate these beauties, or in a career in demolition, here's a site that can get you started.

Remember, anyone can build something--it takes an expert to destroy it.

Tie me stegosaurus down, sport!

St. George Likes Dragons that can Sing.

Modern civilization's dependency on oil and gas really began with the internal combustion engine, and developed over a period of several decades to the point that our entire civilization would collapse without this raw material.

Our dependency on computers began with the development of mainframe computers for business and science, and has developed over a period of several decades to the point that our entire civilization would collapse without them.

Civilization is very fragile. Barbarism and anarchy don't need much; just a bunch of fun guys with swords and spears, tearing up the neighborhood on fast horses.

Everything regresses to the statistical mean.

Here are some chocolate Christmas cookies that are said to be easy to make. When the barbarians come, offer them some of these cookies. They might spare your house. And they might ask for more.

Here's a picture of a Hitachi demolition machine taking care of business. True demolition experts, unlike barbarians, plan their campaigns thoroughly, only destroy what needs to be destroyed, take pains to avoid collateral damage, and recycle much of what they tear down. So let's hear it for the demolition guys!

And that's our show for today.....

Variety is the Spice of Life

Love is in the air.

Is there any point in pontificating on a Monday morning? A cold, dreary, dark, wintry, Monday morning?

Here is the answer to the Riddle of Life: chocolate cookies, with a recipe, from Joy of Baking. Walk into any room redolent of the aroma of chocolate cookies baking in an oven, and you will immediately feel like eating chocolate cookies.

That's all you need to know. Everything else is the province of philosophy, science, politics, or finance, and we all know where those lead. You can see the results of these branches of human endeavor right here, courtesy of Scrap Demolition.

Religion, of course, is in a separate category, which is above all of this unseemly eating and smashing.

The practitioners of various religions, however, are NOT in a separate category.

Peace, order and good government.

If you can't see it or touch it, don't fight over it.

The Easter Bunny is watching you....

Abandon Duck!

What can I say?
There's a reason cartoonists are not allowed to run the country.

Here are some orange and chocolate chip cookies from What's Cooking Mexico.

I think I may have linked to this one at some point in the distant past, but here it is again, a Varney model railroad dockside steam locomotive--one of the finest locomotives ever made.

That about sums up my philosophical system--cookies and steam locomotives. There's a precedent for this: Charlie Brown's Snoopy had cookies and WWI biplanes, and he did very well.

Here's a Leonidas chocolate shop in Belgium. There's one here in Toronto, on my way to wherever I'm going. If it moved, wherever I'm going would probably be somewhere else. It's important to understand the mysterious relationships that underpin our identities and help to make of us what we are.

Here is a site devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre.  He had no influence on me when I was a kid, because I couldn't make any sense out of his books at all. So I went back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and this book: 

I'll be back....