culinary arts and other mysteries

Yesterday I roasted another chicken and I'm not boasting when I say that it was highly successful, spiced stuffing and all the trimmings. But I haven't mastered the culinary art of having everything ready at the same time: the roast potato, parsnips and sweet potato were ready for too long before the bird was properly cooked, so they disintegrated when I tried to get them out of the pan in one piece. The fragments tasted OK though, and there's enough left over for us to have cold chicken and salad for the rest of the week. I'd call that a success.

There's an oddity about these blogs that I can't explain or account for. The clock on the laptop that I use for them is set to the exact correct local time; but I've noticed that the time on all the blogs seems to be 4, or to be precise about it, 4 1/2 time zones away. Bermuda, perhaps? Or St Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic ocean? I'm too old and too busy with the other things I have to do each day to care about this. It's just another - yet another - of the odd eccentricities of computers or of cyberspace that make me realize that the world has passed me by, has adopted habits and customs that everyone else understands and I don't.

Today the parliament of Canada reassembled after a long break that happened because the prime minister prorogued parliament in order to evade - at least temporarily - some awkward questions that had arisen about honouring certain universal human rights obligations; we have an extreme right-wing government at present, and clearly it doesn't entirely approve of universal human rights, such as the right of women to control their own reproductive functions. Perhaps as a sop to those who believe in universal human rights, the speech from the throne included a promise to rewrite the words of the national anthem to make them gender neutral. I don't think this will satisfy advocates of human rights. The Canadian national anthem is quite a good one - not in the same class as the French or Russian anthems, but a notch or two better than the British, Australian or (when it comes to singing it) the American anthem; the American anthem has a rousing, even inspiring tune, but it spans too many octaves to be sung comfortably by anyone with an untrained voice. Actually, the words of most national anthems that I know anything about don't stand up well to close examination - God Save the Queen (or King, as the case may be) is a prime example. It would be a challenge to find a national anthem more chauvinistic. But I get nervous when I hear of politicians seeking to muck about with matters like this. I hope this particular item on the national agenda gets lost in the fog of battle among the warring factions on Parliament Hill.