Glass coffeemaker found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art

Chemex® Coffeemakers & Filters http://www.chemexcoffeemaker.com/Coffeemakers.htm Three Cup Handblown Series Glass Coffeemaker CM-1 The best coffee in the world only comes in one shape Coffeemakers Known as a pristine coffeemaker, Chemex® employs all of the chemically correct methods for brewing. It's hourglass shaped flask is made entirely of glass, a chemically inert material that does not absorb odors or chemical residues. The Chemex® has no moving parts and will work forever, unless it is dropped or in some other way demolished. Chemex® filters are made of the highest quality filter paper. With a wide selection of coffeemakers, filters, and accessories, we can assist you in all of your coffee needs. Please note: All of the coffeemakers are measured using 5 oz. as 1 cup. The Handblown Series, found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other fine museums. Produced by hand, the clarity of the glass and fine workmanship is unequalled. Three Cup Handblown Series Glass Coffeemaker Designed for those who appreciate the quality of old world glass blowers. The CM-1 will compliment any table setting with it's elegant shape. It brews the perfect cup of coffee. Includes a polished wood collar with leather tie. (One Pint) Uses FP-2 Filters ONLY. Height: 8 1⁄4" Diameter: 3" Item: CM-1 Price: $65.90 Handblown CM-1 A nice piece of functional art, but it can't compare with the $10 masterpiece below that makes my good strong coffee every morning:

Bialetti Moka Express Stovetop Espresso Maker

http://www.dancinggoats.com/Home_C277.cfm?CFID=2902954&CFTOKEN=16024615

DANCING GOATS® BLEND 16 OZ. Batdorf & Bronson's signature coffee is dark, smooth and sweet with a beautiful floral aroma, exceptionally clean acidity and a heavy, nutty body. Flavor nuances include fresh citrus fruits and fine chocolate. Caramelly and spicy, its complexity makes for both a flavorful espresso with rich, rusty reddish-brown crema as well an excellent drip coffee. The “perfect cup”.

Since 1990, Batdorf & Bronson Coffee Roasters® has grown to include a roastery in Atlanta, Georgia that opened in 1994, a new roasting facility in Olympia in 1998, and six retail and licensed locations. Hacienda La Minita is a 700 acre coffee farm located in the steep terrain of Costa Rica's Tarrazu Valley. The coffees from this estate are considered by many to be the finest produced in the world.

Dwile Flonking

Dwile Flonking

The pastime of Dwile Flonking involves two teams, each taking a turn to dance around the other while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked dwile (cloth) thrown by the non-dancing team.

'Flonk' is probably a corruption of flong, an old past tense of fling; and "dwile" is a knitted floor cloth, from the Dutch dweil, meaning mop.

Appropriate and seasonal dress is important.

Does dwile flonking really date back to the Suffolk harvests of 400 years ago?

Rules

According to The Friends Of The Lewes Arms, "The rules of the game are impenetrable and the result is always contested." However, less alcohol-centric authorities provide more clarity.

A 'dull witted person' is chosen as the referee or 'jobanowl' and the two teams decide who flonks first by tossing a sugar beet. The game begins when the jobanowl shouts "Here y'go t'gither!"

The non-flonking team joins hands and dances in a circle around a member of the flonking team, a practice known as 'girting'. The flonker dips his dwile-tipped 'driveller' (a pole 2–3 ft long and made from hazel or yew) into a bucket of beer, then spins around in the opposite direction to the girters and flonks his dwile at them.

If the dwile misses completely it is known as a 'swadger' or a 'swage'. When this happens the flonker must drink the contents of an ale-filled 'gazunder' (chamber pot ('goes-under' the bed)) before the wet dwile has passed from hand to hand along the line of now non-girting girters chanting the ancient ceremonial mantra of "pot pot pot".

A full game comprises four 'snurds', each snurd being one team taking a turn at girting. The jobanowl adds interest and difficulty to the game by randomly switching the direction of rotation, and will levy drinking penalties on any player found not taking the game seriously enough.

Points are awarded as follows:

• +3: a 'wanton'- a direct hit on a girter's head
• +2: a 'morther' or 'marther'- a body hit
• +1: a 'ripple' or 'ripper'- a leg hit
• -1 per sober person at the end of the game

At the end of the game, the team with the most number of points wins, and will be awarded a ceremonial pewter gazunder (def.: A chamber pot for the collection of faeces and urine, so called because it gazunder the bed).

Traditions Before a match the dwile flonkers sing an emotionally filled anthem "Here we 'em be together" penned by one Amos Thirkle, who was later adopted as the sport's patron saint.

History

The earliest definitely known game of Dwile Flonking was played at the Beccles Festival of Sport in 1966. According to BBC research, 'No one can remember the score, although team members recalled feeling "pretty fragile" the following morning.'

The organisers were Andrew Leverett and Robert Devereux, printing apprentices at Clay's of Bungay and Clowes of Beccles, respectively, who had apparently been shown the rules on the only decipherable portion of a parchment document entitled: 'Ye Olde Booke of Suffolk Harvest Rituels', which George High of Bungay claimed to have found the same year while clearing out his late grandfather's attic. The inaugural teams were formed by employees of Clay's and Clowes.

The Team at The Racehorse pub in 2002. The picture was taken on their Christmas Day, which was the Sunday before August Bank Holiday (explains the Christmas tree on the left of the photo)

Some suspicion was cast on the game in 1967 when the Eastern Daily Press ran an article which stated inter alia that the county archivist had failed to find any mention of the game amongst the county records. Dwile Flonking featured as a key element in legal hearings later that year assessing an application for a licence extension to cater for the dinner dance of the Waveney Valley Dwile Flonking Association. The Waveney Valley Dwile Flonking Association went on to make their television debut on The Eamonn Andrews television programme in 1967, which resulted in letters from Australia, Hong Kong and America asking for a Flonking rule book, although in the Australians' case this may have been a misprint.

Schott's apparently retcons the game claiming an historical evidence in a 16th century painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Children's games.

References

• Finn, Timothy: Pub Games of England (Oleander Press)

Notes

1. ^ Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports by Tony Collins, John Martin, Wray Vamplew
2. ^ dwile, Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.), Oxford University Press, 1989, http://dictionary.oed.com/, retrieved 2009-08-14.

External links

• "The art of Dwile Flonking" at BBC Suffolk, 11 September 2003.
• Dwyle Flunking at the Lewes Arms in Lewes, East Sussex
• Play Virtual Dwile Flonking online, courtesy of the BBC
• Video of Dwyle Flunking at the Lewes Arms from 2008
• World Wide Words
• http://TheNorfolkBroads.Org/Dwile%20Flonking.html World Dwile Flonking Championships

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwile_Flonking"

Categories: Pub games

Thanks in part to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

FEDORA

Wikipedia: A fedora (pronounced /fɨˈdɔrə/) is a felt hat that is creased lengthwise down the crown and pinched in the front on both sides.^[1] Similar hats with a C-crown (with an indentation for the head in the top of the crown) are occasionally called fedoras. The brim goes all the way around, and often there will be a hat band as well. A trilby hat is somewhat similar to a fedora, but typically has a narrower brim, and the back of the brim is distinctively more sharply upturned as a result.

The term fedora was in use as early as 1891. Originally a women's fashion into the 20th century, the fedora came into use in about 1919, as a men's middle-class clothing accessory. Its popularity soared, and eventually it eclipsed the similar-looking Homburg by the early 1920s. Fedoras can be found in nearly any color imaginable, but black, grey, tan, brown, and red are the most popular.

The term Fedora came from the title of a 1880’s drama by playwright Victorien Sardou, which had been written for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Premiered in 1889, it saw Bernhardt portray Princess Fedora, the heroine of the piece wearing a fedora hat. On this basis it became fashionable amongst women around the early twentieth century.

MOVIES & TV from boxwish http://boxwish.com/movies-men/2010-02-22- return-to-the-50s-with-fedora-hats-as-seen-on- leonardo-dicaprio-in-shutter-island

There's nothing old hat about these old school fedoras.

Fedora hats are due a cinematic comeback. Over the years, they’ve often been in the movie mix. Way back in the days of black and white (before anyone had even dreamed of HD), they were THE thing with gangsters, private investigators and tough guys, almost like a badge of honour for Hollywood heavies. Humphrey Bogart rocked one in Casablanca and Gene Kelly rarely took his off, yet since the heyday of the 40s and early 50s, they’ve become reduced from a key style staple to a quirky character clue.

Freddy Krueger wore one (with a slasher knife glove? What was he thinking?) as he terrorised dreamers in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and Jake and Elwood Blues paired theirs with Wayfarer shades and classic suits in The Blues Brothers, but by far the most famous fedora fan is Indiana Jones. With his bullwhip and leather jacket, it made up the holy trinity essential to nailing Indy’s explorer look, and while this is always being copied and admired like Freddy and the Blues brothers’ styles, it’s a bit more fancy dress than everyday cool.

So how to give the fedora a more cool currency in modern fashions? Get a screen star known for being well-dressed and stylish to wear one. Enter Leonardo DiCaprio – job done. Yes, Leo is working the fedora look in Shutter Island, his latest collaboration with iconic director, Martin Scorsese. Working with Marty has taken Leo back to the mid-1800s with Gangs of New York, to the crime-filled streets of Boston for The Departed and to Hollywood’s glittering golden age in The Aviator and now they’re heading to 1954 for this adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s 2003 bestseller.

el Ecuadorian Sombreros de paja toquilla

Six-thousand years worth of way cool Some little-known facts about my favorite headgear, el Ecuadorian Sombreros de paja toquilla, commonly referred to as the "Panama" hat, which is experiencing a huge resurgence of popularity among young fashion mavens today: The sombreros de paja toquilla, or “hats of toquilla straw.”

Beginning in the early to mid-1600’s hat weaving evolved as a cottage industry all along the Ecuadorian coast. Hat weaving and wearing grew steadily in Ecuador through the 17th and 18th centuries. Even then, the best quality hats were being made in what is now the province of Manabí (mahn-ah-bee). Ceramic figures dating back to 4000 B.C. appear to be wearing a similar style of headwear.

The Manabí towns of Montecristi and Jipijapa (hee-pee-ha-pa) gained pre-eminence as the leading centers of the emerging hat industry. Hats woven there gained a reputation for being better quality, finer, than hats woven elsewhere. By 1850, the U.S. had developed quite an appetite for woven straw hats from Ecuador, buying two hundred twenty thousand of them per year.

Napoleon’s Montecristi

In 1845, Don Bartolome Serrano dramatically speeded up the development of the Cuenca hat industry by taking a more comprehensive approach to the task at hand. He went to the coast and set up straw supply lines from the largest toquilla-growing areas. He bought thousands of wooden hat forms, all the tools of the trade, bleaching powder, even weavers. He hired master weavers from Manabí and brought them to Cuenca.

Sorting hats at the old Ortega factory in Cuenca Serrano and others in the Cuenca hat industry exercised their considerable political influence, and soon apprenticeship in hat making was compulsory throughout Azuay Province. Adults as well as children were required to learn the trade. Failure to do so could result in prison time. Some well known aficionados of el Sombreros de paja toquilla Edward G. Robinson, actor Sidney Greenstreet, actor U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt Nikita Kruschev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Paul Newman, actor Panama hat made for President Harry Truman

The former Bond star was photographed on a jetty close to his home in the Bahamas Photo: ANNIE LIEBOWITZ

Among my personal favorite straws is a grand folder from Brent Black. His website is the main source from which I stole the above information. http://www.brentblack.com/

Beware of Wolves in Sheep's Clothing - SHAME!

The Lord Jesus Christ warned His followers, "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves" (Matt. 7:15).

• 

• APRIL 16, 2010, 6:19 P.M. ET

How to Save the Catholic Church

The Vatican badly needs new blood—and a woman's touch.

• By PEGGY NOONAN

The great second wave of church scandals appears this week to be settling down. In the Vatican they're likely thinking "the worst is over" and "we've weathered the storm." Is that good? Not to this Catholic. The more relaxed the institution, the less likely it will reform.

Let's look at the first wave. Eight years ago, on April 19, 2002, I wrote in these pages of the American church scandal, calling it calamitous, a threat to the standing and reputation of the entire church. Sexual abuse by priests "was the heart of the scandal, but at the same time only the start of the scandal": the rest was what might be called the racketeering dimension. Lawsuits had been brought charging that the church as an institution acted to cover up criminal behavior by misleading, lying and withholding facts. The most celebrated cases in 2002 were in Boston, where a judge had forced the release of 11,000 pages of church documents showing the abusive actions of priests and detailing then-Archbishop Bernard F. Law's attempts to hide the crimes. The Boston scandal generated hundreds of lawsuits, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and judgments, and included famous and blood-chilling cases—the repeat sexual abuser Father John Geoghan, who molested scores of boys and girls and was repeatedly transferred, was assigned to a parish in Waltham where he became too familiar with children in a public pool; Cardinal Law claimed he was probably "proselytizing."

Ravenous Wolves Dressed As Sheep Associated Press

In the piece I criticized Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, who had suggested to the Washington Post that the scandal was media-driven, that journalists are having "a heyday." Then came the it-wasn't-so-bad defense: The bishop of Joliet, Ill., Joseph Imesch, said that while priests who sexually abuse children should lose their jobs, priests who sexually abuse adolescents and teenagers have a "quirk" and can be treated and continue as priests.

Really, he called it a quirk.

Does any of this, the finger-pointing and blame-gaming, sound familiar? Isn't it what we've been hearing the past few weeks?

At the end of the piece I called on the pope, John Paul II, to begin to show the seriousness of the church's efforts to admit, heal and repair by taking the miter from Cardinal Law's head and the ring from his finger and retiring him: "Send a message to those in the church who need to hear it, that covering up, going along, and paying off victims is over. That careerism is over, and Christianity is back."

The piece didn't go over well in the American church, or the Vatican. One interesting response came from Cardinal Law himself, whom I ran into a year later in Rome. "We don't need friends of the church turning on the church at such a difficult time," he said. "We need loyalty when the church is going through a tough time."

I'd suggested in the piece that the rarefied lives cardinals led had contributed to an inability to understand the struggles of others and the pain of those abused, and soon Cardinal Law and I were talking about his mansion outside Boston. He asked me how it would look if he'd refused to live there. I told him it would look good, but more to the point, the church was going to lose the cardinal's mansion to trial lawyers, and it should sell it first and put the money in schools.

Soon enough the mansion was gone, sold to pay the plaintiffs. Cardinal Law's successor, Archbishop Sean O'Malley, lives in an apartment in Boston's South End.

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter once called Cardinal Law "the poster boy" of the American scandal. He has also became the poster boy for the church's problems in handling the scandal. And that has to do with its old-boy network, with the continued dominance of those who grew up in the old way.

In December 2002, Cardinal Law left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with subpoenas seeking his grand jury testimony in what the state's attorney general, Thomas Reilly, called a massive coverup of child abuse. The cardinal made his way to Rome, where he resigned, and where he stayed with Archbishop James Harvey, a close friend and, as head of the pontifical household, the most powerful American in the Vatican. Within a year Archbishop Harvey, too, was implicated in the scandal: The Dallas Morning News reported the Vatican had promoted a priest through its diplomatic corps even though it had received persistent, high-level warnings that he had sexually abused a young girl. The warnings had gone to Archbishop Harvey.

Cardinal Law received one of the best sinecures in Rome, as head of the Basilica of Saint Maria Maggiore and a member of the Vatican office tasked with appointing new bishops and correcting misconduct.

These stories are common in the church. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, was a primary protector of the now disgraced Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, described by a heroic uncoverer of the scandals, Jason Berry, in the National Catholic Reporter, as "a morphine addict who sexually abused at least twenty . . . seminarians."

I know this from having seen it: Many—not all, but many—of the men who staff the highest levels of the Vatican have been part of the very scandal they are now charged with repairing. They are defensive and they are angry, and they will not turn the church around on their own.

In a way, the Vatican lives outside time and space. The verities it speaks of and stands for are timeless and transcendent. For those who work there, bishops and cardinals, it can become its own reality. And when those inside fight for what they think is the life of the institution, they feel fully justified in fighting any way they please. They can do this because, as they rationalize it, they are not fighting only for themselves—it's not selfish, their fight—but to protect the greatest institution in the history of the world.

But in the past few decades, they not only fought persons—"If you were loyal you'd be silent"—they fought information.

What they don't fully understand right now—what they can't fully wrap their heads around—is that the information won.

The information came in through the cracks, it came in waves, in newspaper front pages, in books, in news beamed to every satellite dish in Europe and America. The information could not be controlled or stopped. The information was that something very sick was going on in the heart of the church.

Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting and changing will save the church.

The old Vatican needs new blood.

They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: "Hey, wait a minute!"

If the media and the victims don't keep the pressure on, the old ways will continue. As for Cardinal Law, he should not be where he is, nor mitred nor ringed.

Voltaire

While twits humorlessly tweet, are ideas requiring an excess of 164 characters relegated to Esperanto* on the Sesame Street?

Has curious died? What is Esperanto* anyway? Who cares....?

Skribsimbolo de Twitter

Twitter estas socia-reta kaj blogadeta servo aŭ blogetilo, kiu ebligas al uzantoj sendi ĝisdatigojn (aŭ tweets – "pepaĵoj" – tekst-mesaĝoj, kiuj enhavas 140 signojn maksimume) al la Twitter-retejo, per servo de mallongaj mesaĝoj (ekz. per poŝtelefono), tujmesaĝilo aŭ alia programo kiaj Twitterrific aŭ Facebook.

Hasta la vista Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire. Hello Twitter.

"... and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

A final word from Sesame Street:

http://tinyurl.com/y2xjybd

Ĝis revido.

Silly Swiss Spaghetti Harvest and San Serriffe, an island nation

Happy All Fools Day: SECOND HAND HOAXES ON "MEMORY LANE" EMAILS. This April 1st I decided to perpetrate some used* hoaxes for a change and sent them out under two "Memory Lane" email guises. I chose them for their high degree of silliness and historic success in deception. My previous April 1st best effort involved an inter-office memo which was taken as gospel by many, asking employees to, as an economy measure, restrict toilet paper usage to two sheets per sitting.

OK, Sports Fans, early email results from "Memory Lane" absurd hoaxes are in from two persons thus far. One may have believed my '57 Ford was pretty "cool", or perhaps it was the photo of Elvis or Lawrence Welk with his shovel that was "cool". He may have "overlooked" the main point: The Great Swiss Spaghetti Harvest video. So much for speed-reading with comprehension. The other reply had my asinine "Memory Lane" return heading but didn't even mention my very fabulous, beautiful Ford, much less any early April Swiss spaghetti harvests. On April 1, 1957 the British news TV show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The segment was linked in the first "Memory Lane" email and posting here. April 1, 1977: The British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. This hoax was also distributed, in the second "Memory Lane" email. I'll update the results by email and here before Easter. I'm interested to see if either of the two fatuous emails were read by anyone, or if anyone managed a stretched of attention spans or interest, much less outwitted the gullibility thing. FINAL UPDATE. Well, it is official. Only one person that I'm aware of could be bothered to read a short passage in order to grasp that an April Fool hoax was being played. A couple of well intentioned people responded, in their narrow awareness they believed that I was actually lost in a dementia induced reverie about Lawrence Welk and his shovel and about Elvis and an old car. No wonder April fools are such easy prey. One just has to allow for very short attention spans and lack of interest. I forgot to make those allowances. The Sesame Street generation is upon us! (this simple "Sesame Street" comment may be waaay to big a stretch for some - so don't worry about it) Being of a dry wit and old, and clearly VERY boring (if one isn't listening well enough to comprehend a simple message, of course nonsensical understanding is boring), I should not have expected anyone to be listening with more than one ear, if at all.. Perhaps at the Senior Center there are a few sentient creatures of wit who have learned well to listen and speak thoughtfully? Have a nice life.

April 1, 2001 photo, in Denmark, regarding Copenhagen's new metro. April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is a day celebrated in various countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbors, or sending them on a fool's errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible. Traditionally, in some countries, such as the UK, Canada, Australia, and South Africa the jokes only last until noon, and someone who plays a trick after noon is called an "April Fool".^[1] Elsewhere, such as in France, Ireland, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Russia, The Netherlands, Brazil, and the U.S., the jokes last all day. The earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392). *Used Hoaxes. See stolen, appropriated, plagiarised, misappropriated foolish intellectual properties.