I'm actually doing stuff! Social stuff, even!

After the last couple of weekends of nothing but work, this one is turning into a dizzying whirl of socialization. Last night, B and I drove out to Whitby to visit a couple of friends of mine from undergrad. It was our first visit since their wedding six months earlier, and my first opportunity to hear about their honeymoon and see their house of two years. Yeah, I apparently need to keep in better touch with them.

This afternoon, realizing that we still had time left on the Autoshare car and B still had gift certificates left from Christmas, we went shopping. Among our purchases: a dictionary, so that we can finally stop arguing over what constitutes a word in Scrabble. We could look it up online, of course, but it's dangerous for us to turn on a computer in the middle of a Scrabble game. We might never pry ourselves away.

Tomorrow evening it looks like we'll be joining some friends to watch the Oscars, which ought to be fun. I had wanted to see all of the Best Picture nominees so that I could make an informed guess about which might win, but I think the only one I ended up seeing in time was Brokeback Mountain. Maybe next year.

Fleeting questions

As I was reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, I was struck by the realization that his description of the ways and lives of cooks greatly resembled the ways and lives of the eighteenth century, French, journeymen printers as described in Darnton's "Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre": rough, frequently unreliable, and sometimes minorly criminal. I'm wondering about the thread of commonality that connects the two. What occupational conditions create a group (or attract a group) with these characteristics?

Canadian Cadbury Egg Recall

Creamy centres marred by small bits of plastic: http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/corpaffr/recarapp/2006/20060301e.shtml