It’s PSC Awareness Day, Frank reminds us. 

From his blog marking today (in translation):

What is PSC?

PSC is a rare disease. There are just over 1,000 cases known in the Netherlands and around 100,000 worldwide. It is a progressive and chronic disease. This means that over time the symptoms become more severe and that there is no medicine for it yet. The treatment of PSC mainly focuses on preventing the symptoms of the disease. Since the beginning of the diagnosis, I have been taking ursodeoxycholic acid (Ursochol) and fortunately it visibly slows down the disease process. My liver functions are improving slowly but surely, as we see in the blood values every few months. But I’m not the old Frank anymore. PSC is a part of my life and will not go away. That’s why every year with Global PSC Awareness Day, an update on how I’m doing now.

PSC Partners has a good overview of the disease.

I am a voracious highlighter of RSS feeds and email newsletters in Readwise Reader, an accumulator of songs in my Spotify “Liked Songs,” and a saver of “Watch Later” videos in YouTube, often with the thought that I should, one day, blog about whatever I’m noting. These piles of interesting things have now risen to the point where I need to disgorge them all at once. Here goes.

Music

• Night Vision, by JJ Heller and and Sandra McCracken. I am not constitutionally programmed to love Christian folk, but this song’s got me by the tail.
• Little Blue, by Jacob Collier. If you need an introduction to Collier, David Weinberger has you covered.
• Different When It Comes to You, by Bruce Cockburn.
• We Surrender, by The East Pointers. My favourite of a crop of their recent great tunes.

Videos

• Bruce Guthro Last Song, with Jodi & Dylan. Guts me every time.
• Steve Knightley - Romeo and Juliet.
• Bruce Sterling, Reboot 11 Closing Talk.
• The Raconteurs feat. Ricky Skaggs and Ashley Monroe - Old Enough.
• SCTV: Gerry Todd, and Michael McDonald (and McDonald’s memories of it).
• Casual by Chappell Roan but Make It Indie (Winnetka Bowling League).
• George Carlin, Stuff. I used to play this on my community radio show, from vinyl; I think about it every time I pack to travel.
• How One Building Changed Filmmaking (368 Broadway).

Blog Posts

• My approach to GTD and PKM, by Justin Duke (“It’s easy for me to overfocus on short-term urgent work to the detriment of longer-term, more important but less time-sensitive work.⁠”)
• Just do the thing, by Annie Mueller (“I start doing something I care about. I’m enjoying the rhythm. The feeling. The action.”).
• Creel Flies to Paree, by Thelma Phillips.
• Better conversations, also by Annie Mueller (“If things get really uncomfortable/you get bored, consider a spontaneous interpretive dance. It’s amazing how quickly people can exit a conversation when they really want to.”)
• Night Drive, by James Reeves.
• P&B: Alison Wilder, because who doesn’t like being referred to as a “wonderful person” by a stranger!
• Safari URL Bar, by Jamie Zawinski (a helpful hint for making the URL field longer).
• Parable of the Sofa, by Tim Bray.
• Note to Peter, by Elmine Wijnia. I love this reply.
• Silk Screen Printed T-Shirt, by Ton Zijlstra. Would but for the world work like this in general.
• Why accessibility is good for business (according to my mechanic), by Nic Steenhout (“Why should I?” he shrugged. “You’re the only disabled customer I have.”).
• Green Bay Packers 2023-24: Game Sketchnotes, by Mike Rohde. I took Mike’s Sketchnote Lettering Workshop, and use the lessons I learned every day.
• Earle’s Paintings, by Rob MacDonald.
• Release Notes: How to make self-hosted maps that work everywhere and cost next to nothing, by Chris Amico.

Pressing Matters magazine first came to my attention last year, through Frab’s Magazines, the wonderful Italian magazine shop. I’d first come across Frab’s last spring, and fell into a deep (and expensive) rabbit hole of magazine ordering; I’m still reading my way through the backlog. (We made a pilgrimage to Frab’s this spring, when we realized we’d be driving by their shop in  in Forlì, Italy).

One of the magazines that came in that expensive shipment from Frab’s last year was Pressing Matters, and although I’d purchased it with the thought it might inspire my letterpress work, it quickly became something of a look book for our emerging practice as printmakers.

Jump ahead to this summer: we sent a This Box is for Good to publisher John Coe, and John reached back to us with a generous offer to feature our April box, a collaboration with Dutch printer Roy Scholten, in their October issue. This issue hit the newsstands this week; here’s the piece:

This lovely development is the continuation of a set of dominos that Ton set in motion in 2018, when he first pointed me to Roy’s work. That led us, 6 years later, to contact Roy about doing a residency with him in Hilversum, which led to the box featured in the magazine, and also led us to a visit with Ton and Elmine, who generously adopted some of the boxes. 

A kind of perpetual motion machine of inspiration, activity, inspiration, activity.

Pressing Matters is available on better newsstands everywhere, or you can order a print or digital copy online directly.

The latest of the tests in our strength cycle at Kinetic took place during today’s workout; this time it was the back squat. Where a dead lift — which we tested earlier in the month — is picking up a barbell off the floor, a back squat is holding the barbell on your shoulders, squatting down, and then standing up. I finished with a single rep of 175 pounds, which was a new personal best for me. 

This is what 175 pounds looks like (the barbell itself weights 45 lbs., and then there are 2 x 25 lbs., 1 x 10 lbs., and 1 x 5 lbs. on  each end):

I was wearing my “everything’s hossible” T-shirt this morning — one of the lot we produced as a birthday gift for Lisa’s father, who’s long been known as Hoss — and I like to think that the spirit of the shirt, and the spirit of Hoss, helped me with the last 5% I needed to get there.

Until this weekend anchovies were a mythical beast, never encountered, but often referred to in popular culture, frequently preceded by “hold the…”, and certainly something I’d avoid if offered.

But then, Thanksgiving.

There was a decision to have a Rukavina family lasagna meal on Saturday. Mike would make the lasagna, from Mom’s recipe, and we would be responsible for the Cæsar salad, the drinks, and the dessert.

“Will you make the salad dressing from scratch?”, Lisa asked, with a tone that suggested that a real adult would, definitely, be making the salad dressing from scratch.

“Of course,” I said, as though that had always been the plan.

The Internet is preloaded to assume anchovy aversion in its presentation of Cæsar salad recipes, often leaving them out entirely, or listing them as “optional.” 

There was also the issue of the heart of the vrai dressing being a raw egg, something that, in the Rukavina culinary universe, was anathema. To say nothing, for some parts of the family at least, of the vehement anti-garlic stance.

Which is to say that my first go at the dressing was a stripped-down version that omitted anchovies, garlic, and eggs altogether. 

This might have you asking “why bother,” and the result was a sort of “watery tasteless mayonnaise” that never fully emulsified. We made the decision to just go with it, put the mason jar of it in the fridge, and went on with the day.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t serve that dressing, or at least only that dressing; I felt called to put aside my preconceived notions, and dive all-in.

I found another recipe, this one with no hesitations. I bought the last tin of anchovies at Kent Street Market, and reassembled the other ingredients, this time with garlic and egg. I followed the “immersion blender” version of the instructions. Made a paste of the anchovies and garlic, drizzled in the olive oil. The result was, relatively speaking, divine.

Mindful of my larger family’s preferences, I prepared another version, anchovy and garlic-free. It lacked the kapow of the full version, but was nice and creamy at least.

In our various ways, we enjoyed a lovely Cæsar salad for Thanksgiving, went through three heads of Romaine lettuce, plus some aftermarket leaf lettuce additions when the bowl ran dry.

I feel like I have a new salty fishy kapow-offering friend in my culinary reportoire.

Once you’ve embraced anchovies, they pop up everywhere, it seems.

The very next day’s episode of Jeremy Cherfas’ Eat This Podcast was a deep dive into anchovies and their role in Basque cuisine:

Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.

At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.

It’s worth a listen to the entire episode, as Marcela is engaging and very anchovy-aware. You may emerge, as I did, wanting to book a flight to Bilbao.

And then, again, today.

Patrick Rhone pointed to a book recently published by his tax accountant, A Season for That, that details a 6-month sojourn to the south of France the that author, Steve Hoffman, a food writer and Francophile in addition to accounting for taxes, undertook with his family.

This naturally led me to Hoffman’s blog, where I found a post art and anchovies on the vermillion coast that described an anchovy transition similar to my own. He writes, in part:

But shortly after the turn of the century, I fell in love with Alice Waters. (You might know her as, oh, the chef/owner of Chez Panisse and inventor of the farm-to-table movement, for starters.) It was a long-distance affair, which, if you asked her, she might not remember well. But in its first full bloom, there wasn’t anything she suggested that I wouldn’t try, anchovies included.

Hoffman is a delightful writer. To the point where I’d hire him to be my tax person should I need a tax person in Minnesota.

All of this has me planning a future for my next tin of anchovies.

Maybe you might want to become an anchovy-loving person too? 

One of the casualties of Hurricane Fiona, in 2022, was a plum tree that Catherine and her father planted many years ago. The tree had been a prolific producer of plums for years—I made a tasty apple-plum sauce from its fruit and that of its neighbouring apples back in 2020—but Fiona threw it to the ground.

As the tree wasn’t snapped, we sought guidance as to possibly saving it, and a month after Fiona we ratcheted it to vertical, hopeful that this would take. Late last year we removed the strapping, on the perhaps-spurious advice that the tree would seek its own salvation. It didn’t. Or rather it did, but at 45º to the ground.

Despite this, and despite a bad case of black knot that afflicted the tree this year, it produced a (very) small crop of plums this season, which I harvested in the rain yesterday:

“If I could wave a magic wand, and change one thing about your life, what would it be?”

These are the types of questions uncles ask, I suppose. At least curious uncles like me.

The younger nephew’s response was to be allowed more time for video games, and to not have to go to school (because he would learn everything “directly”).

His older brother’s response eventually settled on having the ability to teleport (although not mandatorily; he’d still have the choice to walk).

And then he turned the question back on me.

After taking some time to think about it, my answer was “the power to not care what other people think.”

“I can give you that power right now,” he replied.

And so now I have it. 

William Denton wrote yesterday, in a postscript to a blogpost:

No library in Canada had this book, and I got it through interlibrary loan from Rice University in Texas. Resource sharing departments are wonderful.

Being the son of a librarian taught me a lot about libraries (and a lot about librarians!), including the superpower of being able to request any book—even, and especially, ones not held by my local library—by interlibrary loan. Here’s the form for doing this from the PEI Public Library Service, and here’s the form for the University of Prince Edward Island (a reminder that all Islanders have borrowing privileges at UPEI).

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading How to Wash the Dishes, by Seattle bookseller Peter Miller. I was prompted to seek it out after reading his Shopkeeping, which I loved. I was also primed by last year reading An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler, the first chapter of which is titled “How to Boil Water”: I realized then that I’m well-suited to learning from lyrical prose on simple topics.

The book arrived in only a few weeks, courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library:

The book delivered: it is, indeed, lyrical prose on the simple topic of washing the dishes, and has had, as my housemates will attest, a palpable effect on my kitchen hygiene. Here’s how Miller introduces the topic:

Almost everyone, at some point in their life, washes the dishes. Not many will do it well and even fewer will look forward to it.

It is a curious task, washing the dishes. Some people save it for themselves, some do it as a sacrifice, and some dread it or avoid doing it entirely.

Washing the dishes in a sink, with clean, warm water, is a luxury. If you have ever lived without clean running water or warm water, or even if you have ever camped in the wilderness, you already know this. It is also a task of order and of health and hygiene. The kitchen is an operating room, and although you may not always be the one operating, you are the one cleaning up after a kind of surgery. You have all the surfaces and all the equipment to scrub and make ready for the next use. You may be lucky enough to have a dishwasher. There will be a mention of dishwashers here and there, but this is a book about washing the dishes, not about machines that wash dishes. This is a book about enjoying your time and using it well. The dishwasher is the express train; your kitchen sink is the local.

This is a primer for the task, with rules and regulations, safety and sense, and a start and a finish. When the kitchen lights are dimmed, there should be a dish towel and a bowl drying. You have finished the meal and closed up shop.

Other than learning how to make a good omelette—there’s a recipe in the book, around which a dishwashing parable is wrapped—the primary change the book has inspired in me is the calling forth to leave the kitchen, after preparing a meal, as though I was never there. This has changed my attitude toward cleaning-as-I-go (I do it more often), and the bar I consider “done” before shutting the light and “closing up shop” (which I’ve set much higher).

There are a few other books in the Peter Miller canon I might seek out: Five Ways to Cook Asparagus, and Lunch at the Shop: The Art and Practice of the Midday Meal  both out of print, seem prime candidates for interlibrary loan next.

We’re in a six week cycle of strength conditioning at Kinetic, and today’s workout was a build to a single “RPE 10” deadlift (“lift as much as you can while maintaining technique”).

I lifted 245 pounds. While not impressive by Olympic standards, nor even by Kinetic standards, by personal standards it’s a mind-boggling personal best.

I got my haircut yesterday. When Hillary asked “How short do you want it?”, I replied, uncharacteristically, “pretty short,” and then let chips fall where they may.  

This is as short a haircut as I’ve ever had. I kinda like it.