3rd December 2005

State of the Blog

posted in Blogging Community News |

I left a comment at Halley’s Comment a while ago, a reflection on the following post -

Halley says,

I don’t eat sugar. I don’t put sugar in my hot tea, in my iced tea, in

coffee, in most anything. I eat sweet things, but just not granulated
sugar for the most part.

So I never had a sugar bowl on my table for a long, long, time.

And then, this fall, I bought a sugar bowl.

You’d
think I’d started serving magic potions to people — they LOVE my sugar
bowl. I find I’m refilling it all the time, which is annoying, but also
find that I have a lot more people sitting down to chat, waste an
afternoon and stir some sugar into their coffee or tea. And that, I
kinda like.

Reflecting on that, I noted that nobody seems to use our sugar bowls.  They always end up filled with a solid impenetrable white crystalline rock, a product of the geologic time between disturbance and the humidity, I guess.  By the time we have to refill the sugar bowl the container we fill it from has usually hardened beyond use as well.

Sometimes we have honey.

My sweet little comment vanished into the black hole of Halley’s moderation.  I think it had something to do with the tone.  Not saccharine enough perhaps.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2024 at 8:40 and is filed under Blogging Community News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 12 responses to “State of the Blog”

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  1. 1 On December 3rd, 2024, Peter (the other) said:

    All through my twenties, thirties and forties I drank my coffee black, no sugar, smoked Camel non-filters, ate the darkest breads, drank the strongest liqueurs-neat, and generally took a quiet pride in my fortitude. Somehow, now in my fifties, it started to feel all so self righteous, pompous and ungenerous. While spending a season working in Paris, and having some gnarly work schedules where meals might be missed, replaced by double cafés (espresso), I started plopping in a sugar cube here and there (I have always studiously avoided fake sweeteners, in some kind of tinfoil hat paranoia). Now I have a sugar bowl, stocked with those french, odd shaped cubes, and I use it.

    Life IS too short, my life lesson is to learn to err on the side of generosity (compared to my inate instinct for “prudence”).

  2. 2 On December 3rd, 2024, Mike Golby said:

    Nobody’d accuse you of being artificially sweet, Frank. I doubt you’d know how to be so. Besides, we prefer the “solid impenetrable white crystalline rock,” a “…product of the geologic time between disturbance and the humidity.” Chipped from source, the rough edges lend great depth and lasting value to the resulting taste.

    Peter, civilize us :).

  3. 3 On December 3rd, 2024, Ken Camp said:

    I’ve tried to leave Halley a couple of comments recently but, like I said in a post a week or two ago (http://ipadventures.com/?p=404″). Personally, I feel like I’ve tried saccharine. I feel like I’ve tried cloying honey sweet. I think the girl’s just stuck in old broadcast mode.

    As to sugar bowls, the one we own is empty in the china hutch because of that same hard lump problem. If people want sugar, we send them to the cooking canisters with a spoon. Oddly, it’s generally a big white rock in there too.

  4. 4 On December 3rd, 2024, Winston said:

    Preferences for coffee or tea:
    For Taste: Raw unrefined sugar
    For Convenience: Liquid Sweet n Low
    Everywhere else: Little pink, yellow or blue packets, whatever is handy.

    Still a kid at heart, I like sugar on my cereal, but have been using the little yellow packets lately without adverse effects. Other than the hair coming out by the roots, of course. Sugar bowl, yes. Empty, yes. Use it only when guests are present, more for show than anything, I think.

  5. 5 On December 3rd, 2024, fp said:

    (”Zippity-do-dah” from Disney’s “Song of the South” is heard emanating scratchily from an old Victrola set at stage right. Entering from stage left, and stopping center stage…)

    The Moderator: I’m thinking Halley messed up by moderating my comment into oblivion. This is exactly the conversation she was looking for with her post.

    Halley. You messed up, girl.

    (The Moderator looks out over the audience significantly. He looks left. He looks Right. He looks straight ahead. Then he pivots on the balls of his feet and exits as “A Spoonful of Sugar” from Mary Poppins winds up quickly from zero rpm to 78 on the old Victrola)

  6. 6 On December 3rd, 2024, Elayne Riggs said:

    My husband uses our sugar bowl all the time, at least thrice daily if not more. He works at home, and drinks a lot of tea or coffee during the day. On our kitchen hutch we have a whole coffee layout - the jar of whole beans, the grinder, the coffee press, the electric kettle to heat the water, and on the left the sugar spoon and sugar bowl, which is always filled with turbinado or demerara. (What can I say, life with an Englishman…)

  7. 7 On December 3rd, 2024, liz said:

    I am over run with ants. I’m over run with ants spring, summer and (most overrun) now, when the weather has changed to cold and wet.

    La Princessa de Todo said last night, “Oh, mom, the ice has protein in it again”.

    The cats stare accusingly at the moving, black-dotted cat food.

    So no sugar bowls for us. Even the freezer isn’t safe from the ants.

    Blogs that don’t accept comments, or require you to have some kind of membership, or my personal least-favorite, blogs where you can’t email the owner with a private comment, are really just online newspapers.

  8. 8 On December 3rd, 2024, fp said:

    I have to share my favorite anti-ant recipe. It’s quite simple and it has always worked for us. It has the disadvantage of being slightly messy, but it’s not poisonous so I would suggest it is worth a try…

    powdered cinnamon

    sprinkle liberally in cupboards, across ant trails, on door jambs, and everywhere you might be tempted to spray bug killer.

    a few days later, when the ants are gone, you can vacuum up the mess, although it doesn’t hurt to leave it in the cupboards… smells nice and discourages the bugs from returning.

    I’ve heard that the reason it works is that it clogs up the bugs’ respiratory system.

  9. 9 On December 4th, 2024, madame l. said:

    – they LOVE my sugar bowl. I find I’m refilling it all the time, which is annoying
    and stoopid me, i thought she was talking about her pu$$y. you know, in that money bin, jellyroll, junk in the trunk sort of bluesy way.

  10. 10 On December 4th, 2024, Dean Landsman said:

    We Diabetics generally have no sugar around the house. And thus no bowl. Last time I saw a sugar bowl was when the ex wrapped one in newpaper just before it went into one of the twelve zillion boxes of stuff she felt was rightfully hers when community property became “sole property of the ex.”

    She would be more needful of something to contain sweetness, that’s for sure. And no doubt, in her case, it would turn into a rock, an object of difficulty, a hardened, unpleasant thing to deal with . . . .

    I keep some packets of sugar on hand just in case someone wants it (coffee, tea, whatever). Splenda is the sweetener of choice around here. A house without Splenda (or a restaurant, for that matter) is a house making poor decisions on alternatives to sugar.

    Back before the diagnosis of Diabetes there was a lot of honey around here. That came to an immediate halt!

    My parents have not only a sugar bowl (never used) but also an old-timey sugar shaker that pours out exactly a teaspoonful with each upending of the glass and metal enclosure. This is an artifact from the luncheonette my maternal grandfather ran, back in the 1920s and 1930s. A very cool item!

  11. 11 On December 4th, 2024, Mike Golby said:

    “I wanna live | with a cinnamon girl | I could be happy | the rest of my life | With a cinnamon girl.”

    So, Leslie, I take it *you’re* talking about *your* sugar bowl, eh?

    Perhaps Elayne, your husband’s foul habits might be attributable to something other than his being English. A South African, I find myself getting through 15-20 cups of tea daily (Ceylon, I’m afraid–not one the ridiculous range of herbal poseurs so popular these days), several cups of ghastly powdered coffee (at work), and only occasionally, a cup of decent coffee brewed at home.

    “Ten silver saxes, | a bass with a bow | The drummer relaxes | and waits between shows | For his cinnamon girl.”

    While the kids use lashings of unrefined sugar (we have ants, but we shoot them–they’re big), I must admit to using a single sweetener. The sugar bowl (and I mean the sugar bowl) is an earthen clay pottery type thing–I’ve just checked–with a most remarkable design on the side. I’d take a snap of it and post it to Flickr had I the means to do so.

    I mean that; it really is good and I would not have noticed it but for Halley’s immoderation.

    “Pa sent me money now | I’m gonna make it somehow | I need another chance | You see your baby loves to dance | Yeah…yeah…yeah.”

    Neil Young | Cinnamon Girl

    Note: I wonder if Neil Young has a problem with ants in his sugar bowl?

  12. 12 On December 5th, 2024, Dean Landsman said:

    No, Mike — Steven Stills was the antsy one. It all goes back to that Blonde In The Bleachers. And perhaps those ten silver saxes were veiled reference to Phil Spector’s famed Wall Of Sound. And there was Sugar Magnolia, but that was from some band in the Bay Area.
    Jimmy Gilmore warbled about the Sugar Shack, many years prior to all this.

    Neil Young was interested in a different, more earthy sugar thing, to wit: musical questions about whether or not one had been to Sugar Mountain. His countrymen the Guess Who had the definitive tune on the matter: No Sugar Tonight.

    The Archies harmonized over “Sugar, Sugar.” And who can forget Chakha Khan’s Sweet Thing? (or, to those hopelessly stuck on the vernacular, her Sweet Thang)

    Er, Frank — I woulda linked to all those tuneful references, but apparently your Typepad setup prevents commenters such as I (XP user, FWIW) from doing so.

    It would be mighty Splenda of you to enable such a thing.

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