DeepLeap

Heard about this addictive time-waster? A word game that's a cross between scrabble and tetris - you make words out of disappearing tiles. I just played for the first time. Beat my score of 738!

Leaky DSL

James Thurber wrote of his elderly mother's fear and suspicion that electricity might leak into the house through unused wall sockets.

Strange as it seems, it appears that if you have DSL (internet service that arrives through your telephone line) something similar could be happening. The DSL things (waves? molecules? particles?) don't understand that their only job is to travel efficiently and directly through the wire from the phone jack to the DSL modem. Having DSL means having it ready and available through every phone jack in the house.

I had blamed my lousy phone reception and haphazard, unreliable internet service on a long-ago lightning bolt. Cursed the phone company for not being able to fix it. It was my nephew in Oklahoma who casually asked whether I had a DSL filter.

A what? How is it possible that a little plastic gizmo attached to the end of a phone cord at the OTHER END OF THE HOUSE has made such a dramatic difference? It can only be that the DSL is no longer "leaking" out of that other jack. I'm sure of it.

Julia and eggs

Surprise! I am back! Not that it's likely anyone's around to notice. I won't make excuses for the long absence except to say that part of the problem has had to do with iffy computer behavior which (too soon to say for sure) MAY now be a thing of the past.

Anyhow. Went to see the wonderful movie Julie and Julia the other day and it has sent me to revisit the old cookbooks, including the original 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking that I learned to cook from in those newlywed days of 1964 and 65 in Brooklyn (not so different from Julie in the movie, except that I certainly never attempted to make EVERYTHING!).

More importantly, I now see that many of the original French Chef TV programs are to be found on-line. Oh, the memories! Take a look at this one, the Egg Show, from 1964 and you who may NOT have seen any of these programs will understand what even today sets Julia apart from all her followers and imitators.