cary head nuts bursting into flame
In the oven, on a stove, on a street, in a barrel, in a highrise, in a fireplace, under the hood: Fire interests humans keenly.
So it's after the Thanksgiving meal and we're drowsing about the table, stuffed, blissfully indifferent, when a few pecans in the oven burst into flame.
Earlier, pecans had gotten spilled. We don't need to go into exactly how they were spilled by my wife. They just were. By my wife. Many dishes coming and going out of the oven. Pecans got spilled. Down in there in a crack somewhere out of sight. Then the next pie goes in, the oven heats up and those little sleeper pecans come to life.
That was the best part of the whole thing. Nuts bursting into flame. Smoke filling the room.
It didn't matter, of course, and that was the best part of all. Nothing matters when you've just eaten turkey. Yet that little nut fire galvanized us all in a peculiar fashion.
We're just that way about fire, I guess. Plus we got on to the flash point of parchment paper. It's apparently higher than Fahrenheit 451. There was some parchment paper in the oven over the pie that was baking and amid the consternation about the flaming pecans the question arose whether the parchment might also catch. Consensus was no, that parchment flashes at around 500 F or maybe 550. Naturally one looks up such things on the Web. Naturally to no avail. These sites that say they have the answers to things? They don't have the answer to what's the flashpoint of parchment paper.
Nuts bursting into flame
I can think of some nuts I'd like to see burst into flame.
cary head but enough about nuts

I wonder who's coming to the Cafe la Boheme tomorrow. I'll be there.

So I looked into the writers we'll be reading with in the Sunday 11/28 Portuguese Artists Colony reading at Five Points Arthouse, 5 p.m.
I'm familiar with Tamim Ansary's work from my days as an editor at Salon. Three tense, shaken days after 9/11 he wrote a piece for us from the viewpoint of an Afghan trying to explain to Americans how the Taliban did not represent the Afghan people and how it would be a tragic mistake to heed the vengeful calls of those at the time who wanted to "bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age."
"But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan," he wrote in Salon. "They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think 'the people of Afghanistan' think 'the Jews in the concentration camps.'"
It will be good to meet him. A lot of great copy came across our desks in those first days after the World Trade Center attack. A few days later, the late great John Leonard took up the subject and talked a little about Ansary's piece. Like I say, I'll just be pleased to meet him in person. Working on the Web, you can go years without seeing a face.
Also special guest on the bill is Clint Talbert, who I'm looking forward to hearing, and musician Dawn Oberg, who mentions on her Facebook page recording with Lemon DeGeorge, which rang a bell with me that has not stopped ringing, though I still can't remember exactly when and how I ran across Lemon DeGeorge, but I know I did and I'm probably a better person for it.
And then some of us regulars will be doing the live writing thing, to prompts yelled at us from the audience, or something, I'm still not entirely clear on the concept but I'll be writing at the table, and then some others of the regulars will be reading, as usual from the lectern.

So now I'm going to have some assam tea and some apple crisp! It's in the oven! and no nuts are bursting into flame.

cary head plus: workshop note

To repeat from yesterday:

Saturday 11/27 regular writing workshop 3-6 p.m. Participants please note: This Saturday is not the last one in the series. I am extending this series for one more week, so the last one will actually be Saturday, Dec. 4, 3-6 p.m. We will have a nice potluck and party on Sat., Dec. 4 after the workshop. So put that on your calendar. And then the workshops are going to take a winter break and come back Sat., Jan. 8.

cary head more from yesterday: new holiday book

That Special Time of Year holiday column collection with exclusive "Cary's Crappiest Christmas Ever" essay about being booted out of the hospital on Xmas Day 2009 arrived from the printer Monday and is ready for you now. What a year. All of a sudden it was October and we wanted to put out a holiday book so we gathered 22 of my best holiday columns  and I wrote the essay about my Christmas Day return from surgery in 2009 and so we'll sell it out of the house for $11 plus $6 shipping. Or buy it from me when you see me.
I showed it to my sister-in-law who knows the circumstances of my ignominious return from the hospital on Xmas Day 2009 and she laughed at the title of the essay "Cary's Crappiest Christmas Ever."
I think that was good. It's kind of embarrassing to be revealing medical details in the way I have in that essay, but I figured I ought to just say what happened.
I like it. It's a nice book. I read the first column at the Why are There Words reading last week and it read well. The first column is like, Why you should go visit your family anyway, basically. There are 22 columns in it plus my essay on being booted out of the hospital on Xmas day.

$11 plus shipping. Let us know if you want to buy a few. We'll figure out the shipping. And Norma's been working to convert it into epub and mobi formats for the Kindle (buy the Kindle e-book here) and the iPad/iPhone should be live by tomorrow.