Sylvia’s diaries, meticulously kept for almost every day from 1944 to 1949, reflect her early realization that you could broadcast your own life, as Jack Benny did on his radio show (another of her favorites). The show dispensed a running commentary on his funny failings, his desire to get ahead, and his preening, and had a cast—including Rochester, the faithful, if not uncritical African American factotum—that became Benny’s retinue, commenting on his every mercenary move.
Some years back, Talavera and his team realized they might be able to track the butterflies indirectly, by studying the pollen that accumulates on their bodies. Every time a butterfly visits a flower for a sip of nectar, it also picks up grains of pollen. If the researchers could identify plants from their pollen, confirm where and when the plants were blooming, and keep tracing them as the butterflies reached different geographic regions, perhaps they could trace the butterflies’ overall journey. “The method is like we put a GPS on them,” Talavera says. “Because we cannot do that, this is the closest we can go.”
In a world where you can make an icebox cake instead of an ornate French Christmas cake, why would you choose to make the Bûche de Noël?
For one thing, it felt luxurious, spending a day on this one task. I pulled my kids back in the mix to decorate the cake, quoting Julia when she made this Yule log in an episode of The French Chef in 1964: “Scuttle it up a little bit so it looks as barky as you can make it.”
Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead connects the people of today with the women of the past. What appears to be mere nonsense on the surface is, in reality, nonsense with a purpose.
An ode to fish and chips, corn dollies and driving Ringtons tea vans, Wendy Pratt’s seventh poetry collection is a greasy but glorious celebration of the coastal working class. Her deliciously joyful outlook on life oozes gratitude and a sparkling sense of humour, hitting as sharply as the salty ocean breeze.