Maybe not the best way to start off a conversation with your seat partner on a plane.  But I could hardly help myself.  (If you have been following my musings for a while you will know that I tend to get into some interesting conversational situations on planes!)

I was on my way back from a week of meetings in Plainview, Texas.  Now, I realize that bringing an environmental seminar to the high plains of east Texas is not the normal thing to do.  People there are warm, friendly – but pretty convinced that “environment” means “liberal” and “government” and that sort of thing, and they’re not interested.  But things are changing.  For one thing, these folks are running out of water, and they know it.  Read more »

In my hometown lives a baker.  The very ordinary name of his business (“Madison Sourdough”) hides the fact that he’s a European trained master pastry chef.  Croissants, danish, brioche – the stuff is, if not worth dying for, certainly worth driving several extra miles across town early in the day to grab the last items before someone else gets them.

Still-life with Brioche by Chardin (Wikipedia Commons)

Now, I’ve been a fan of most of what he makes for quite a while, but his brioche are some of the best pastry I’ve ever eaten.  Which has led to a couple of very interesting conversations:

About a month ago my faithful readers may recall I was in Washington DC during the time of the Inauguration.  One of the mornings there I found myself, with Daughter #1, in a very authentic french patisserie in Bethesda Maryland.  Guess what was in the pastry case?  Brioche!  But these looked a bit different from those I’ve become accustomed to  in Madison.  A long conversation with the woman who ran the shop followed.  She had baked everything in the shop herself.  She had serious doubts as to whether the so-called brioche from Madison was the real thing, and in what would have to be described as a passionate defense of her craft, grabbed a brioche, sliced it in half, and stood there while we sampled it, with the following (please imagine a strong French accent):  “If this is not the best brioche you’ve ever had, I want to know it…”

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[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term 'neem hakeem' - means a doctor who isn't quite up to par.  Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area:  A 'neem hakeem' is a danger to your life...]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend.  People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe?  Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation?  No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.

There’s more than one lesson here:

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