Moon Flow

New post on Naima Dances

EmeFlow

Now that I’ve started teaching regularly… wait, let me back up. In the several moons since I last updated this page, I’ve gone from teaching belly dance to teaching yoga. I love belly dance but I think, for now at least, I’ll get more enjoyment from following a teacher than being one. Yoga has been something different.

With the encouragement (and subtle arm-twisting) of my YTT teacher, I auditioned for a group instructor position at my gym. I joined the sub list in March and have been teaching fairly regularly since then. Once I got past my initial nervousness, or perhaps to help me get past it, I generally accepted every teaching opportunity that came my way. I found that it was somewhat easy to ‘wing it’ when I was teaching only one or two classes a week. But when my ‘just say yes’ philosophy found me signed up for…

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Eat your heart out, dolphins

Eat your heart out, dolphins

palau’s jellyfish lake was once connected to the pacific ocean, but when the sea level dropped its population of jellyfish were left to thrive in the isolation of its algae rich waters. no longer needing to defend themselves from predators, the jellyfish lost their sting, allowing snorkelers to now swim with them. the golden jellyfish will spend the day migrating from one end of the lake to the other, a 400 meter swim, and then heading back.
photos by david kirkland, david doubilet, jody macdonald and chean chong lim

I’m not a meat-eater. Every now and again I re-consider this position. Meat is rather delicious; even after all this time, I do recall that. And I’m not usually bothered when reading about meat preparation methods. But then sometimes along comes a post like this one. This fascinating post about the preparation of a pig’s head terrine reminds me that i am too much wuss for snout to tail eating. And since I do believe that is the most respectful way to be, carnivorously speaking, well that’s a good reminder that I should probably stick to the vegetable side of the fence (with occasional forays to sweeter pastures).

Yummybooks's Blog

When I was very young–probably seven–the 1963 version of Lord of the Flies was being played on television one night. It was Christmastime and I was next to my mom and dad on the couch when my dad, flipping through the channels, stumbled across it and stopped. For the next three hours I sat still as stone, horrified, terrified by what I was watching, but too shy to tell my parents. Laying in bed that night trying to sleep, the image of the fly-covered pig’s head, a stake stuck right into its neck, kept going through my tiny stressed-out brain.

It’s not as though I had never seen a pig’s head before. My grandfather (and his father before him) owned and ran a butcher shop in Boston, and I grew up surrounded and un-phased by meat and offal and blood, but there was something about this pig’s head that really…

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An Esquire profile of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

Just came across this Esquire article on Roger Ebert and how his life is now, or how it was as of early last year. Watching Siskel & Ebert At The Movies back in the day, I must admit, Ebert was never my guy. Some of his thumbs-up choices mystified me and so I looked to Siskel as the voice of reason. After Gene Siskel died, I stopped watching the show; Richard Roeper seemed even less selective than Ebert so couldn’t fill the void. (Movie reviewers are my first line of defense against bad films, so I’m pretty picky about whose tastes I’ll trust uncritically. Alternately, when I’m determined to watch a movie I’m pretty sure will be bad, I’ll avoid reading reviews so I won’t be talked out of the idea.)

I’ve recently re-discovered Roger Ebert through his writing. I’m not sure whether I’ve mellowed or he’s changed, or perhaps it’s simply the difference between his spoken and written voices, but I kinda like the guy now. Knowing him only from television, I’d never read any of his reviews, didn’t investigate the resume that earned him a spot in that balcony. The article linked above is chock-full of stuff I didn’t know; in addition, it’s a vivid and humanizing portrait.

in which ESPN teaches me something about football

It’s football season here in the United States. Still. So my dad’s been watching a lot of it (and every other sport on the planet; it’s also basketball season and hockey season and the Australia Open just started up).

This morning, I woke up to find the TV still tuned to ESPN. First Take was on. Skip Bayless and Kordell Stewart (I think) were having a debate about whether it was time to repeal the Rudy rule. I had no idea what it was, but Kordell was for keeping it in place. And so was Skip, but his argument got to be a bit like nails on a blackboard when, speaking of Blake Griffin, he wondered why black people were allowed to be “proud” of biracial athletes for being black, but he couldn’t be just as proud of them for being white. And then Kordell had to explain that, no matter Blake Griffin’s actual racial makeup, he is seen as a black man in the eyes of the world in general. I’m not sure whether this was a pre-scripted conversation meant to illustrate a point about race relations or if Skip really hadn’t picked up on this fact, but the race conversation was a bit much for first thing in the morning, so I changed the channel and decided to do a little looking-up later.

What I learned:

It’s actually called the Rooney Rule. It requires NFL teams to interview candidates of color for senior leadership positions. (It started out applying only to black candidates and head coaching positions, but was recently updated.) No requirement to hire them, but just to make sure they’re included in the candidate pool.

I’d been wondering why there were suddenly so many black head coaches and I guess this is the reason why. I still remember the days when even a black quarterback was a novelty. Well, days are still like that, but a black head coach was pretty much unimaginable [to me] back in the days of Warren Moon.

This despite the fact that the NFL actually had its first black head coach back in 1921. His name was Fritz Pollard. He was one of the first two black players in the NFL in 1920. And, in 1926, he and the nine other black players in the league were booted. I wonder how long it was before another black player debuted in the league?

When dad came out of his room later, I asked him if he thought the Rooney Rule had lead to the sudden [to my eyes] upswing in the number of black head coaches in the NFL. He agreed that the Rooney Rule probably had something to do with it. He also credited Bill Walsh. (I should have expected that. With dad, all football roads lead back to Bill Walsh.) Bill Walsh apparently hired/mentored a good number of today’s successful coaches.

So there’s my football history lesson for the day. Now I’m all set for the Super Bowl.

New post at Beryl Bakes

My mom gave me a persimmon.  She told me to eat it as soon as possible–she always tells me to eat my fruits as soon as possible; to her, fruits are always on the brink of self-destruction–but, my habit of procrastination extends even to my eating (assuming we’re not talking about something like the chocolate cake I just snarfed down).  Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I decided I might want to eat this fruit before it got too much softer.  But I couldn’t just eat it, of course, I had to make it into a project.

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New post at Beryl Bakes

So it’s been a while, but I finally got around to baking something last week.

nude custard

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New Post at Na’ima Dances

The day ended on an up note.

An evening at Yoga Belly Studio

New Post at Beryl Bakes

I have a surplus of carrots lately. Dad’s been eating them raw and in stews and in salads and then finally asked if I could do anything with them.

When life hands you carrots…

New post at Beryl Bakes

Having decided I wanted to make a less dense cake than my usual, I spent some time looking into sponge cake recipes. But sponge cake/angel food cake has always been a little too light for my liking. So I decided to try out a Victoria Sponge cake instead, because at least it has butter in’t. And also because it’s the simplest formula imaginable: equal ratios (by weight) of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.

Then, having decided I wanted to try out an Aztec/Mayan/Spicy chocolate cake, I decided to make a spicy chocolate Victoria Sponge.

And then…