Who Versus That and Whose Versus ... Thatses?

I noticed a couple instances in The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb where a who was needed instead of a that: 

• She said there were a few more people they still needed to reach, and a few THAT felt they had to decline, but that most of the eyewitnesses had agreed to assist them. (page 267)

• "The woman THAT sat across from me in the bakery on our first date." (page 315)

That latter sentence was spoken by someone who may be forgiven for not always speaking perfect English, but the character was an English teacher, so I expected more of him. 😄

Not long after I got a new boss at my previous full-time gig, she questioned the use of whose when modifying a thing, not a person, in a sentence I don't recall in full. It was a legitimate question, and the legitimate answer is, our language doesn't have an accepted alternative for the possessive pronominal adjective whose when dealing strictly with things. See this post by Bonnie Mills (or Bonnie Trenga?) over at Grammar Girl's blog that uses the following two examples: "The car whose windshield wipers weren't working was driving in the fast lane." and "The tree whose leaves were falling seems to be dying."

For whatever reason, a word like thatse or maybe thats or even thatses, which would clearly show we're dealing with a thing, not a person, never took off as the logical possessive to use in such instances: The car thatse windshield wipers weren't working was driving in the fast lane. The motel thats sign was spray-painted didn't look like a place I wanted to stay. The novel thatses plot was getting too depressing for me is now back at the library, half-read.

That last example pertains to me and The Hour I First Believed. I couldn't bring myself to continue reading it once the author foreshadowed an even greater tragedy the narrator's wife was going to have to deal with after having already survived the taken-from-real-life massacre at Jefferson County, Colorado's Columbine High School, where she was a nurse. I didn't want to go where it was clear Lamb was going—to a chapter thatses next plot twist was too emotionally devastating.

Pears, Prepositions, and Phrasal Verbs

I made some delicious, vegan Pear-Cardamom Oat Scones on Sunday using this recipe from Power Hungry.

These scones are a breakfast treat I've made regularly since Christmastime 2015. (That link goes to Hawleyblog, my personal blog. If you want the log-in and password, please let me know.) The flavor is wonderfully spicy, and I love the heartiness that comes from both oat flour and rolled oats.

I highly recommend making one addition to an otherwise totally awesome recipe: 1 teaspoon of xanthan gum whisked in with the rest of the dry ingredients will make the scones less crumbly. In that Hawleyblog post, I wrote that I must have underworked the dough because the scones didn't hold together. I had to make the scones a couple more times before I came to the conclusion the vegan egg needed some help in binding the ingredients together into a cohesive baked good.

I've found that 3/4 teaspoon of dried cardamom seeds ...

... yields almost exactly 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom, the amount called for in the recipe:

And grinding your own cardamom really is worth the extra effort. The smell of the freshly ground spice is amazing. 

For my flax egg, I used the 1 1/2 tablespoons of ground flax-seed meal (and 3 tablespoons of water) called for in the Power Hungry recipe, not the 1 tablespoon of meal used in the Bonzai Aphrodite recipe I linked to in this post from last summer. And the "egg" turned out nice and thick after the refrigeration recommended by BA.

You'll need 2 ever-so-slightly heaped teaspoons of whole flax seeds to make the 1 1/2 tablespoons of ground meal. My attempt using 2 1/8 teaspoon of whole seeds resulted in a little too much meal, so when I say "ever-so-slightly," I mean "less than 1/8 teaspoon altogether."

Here's my freshly ground flax-seed meal:

Two rather-modest-sized pears will yield at least 1 1/4 cups of chopped pear.

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Prepositions are one of the trickiest parts of speech to learn in any language, and there's sometimes disagreement regionally here in the U.S. about which preposition is correct in a given sentence.

I found two examples of what I would argue are "wrong" uses of prepositions in Amy Tan's terrific novel The Hundred Secret Senses, though I acknowledge you may feel differently, especially if you grew up in a place like, say, Appalachia or the Rocky Mountain states or anywhere else other than far-southwestern New Jersey, where you might have been taught something different.

The following sentence appears on page 199: "And then we're in the outskirts of town, both sides of the road lined with mile after mile of identical one-room restaurants."

I've only ever heard of being "on the outskirts," never "in." I like the second answer (to the question of on versus in) on this English Language & Usage page: The now-always-plural word outskirts comes from the singular word meaning outer border, and you would logically speak of being on, not in, a border. I'm also personally fond of giving the first answer on that page: It's the idiom. Which is to say, we say that series of words in that context because (almost) everyone says that series of words in that context.

Vocabulary.com takes no position as to which is more or less correct; it has separate examples that use on and in.

It's also entirely possible, of course, that this was a straight-up typo that never got fixed.

The following passage is on page 205: "Around the corner we'll stumble on reality: the fast-food market, the tire junkyard, the signs indicating this village is really a Chinese fantasyland for tourists: Buy your tickets here! See the China of your dreams! Unspoiled by progress, mired in the past!"

I would argue "stumble onto" is preferable to "stumble on," but a Google search isn't helping me make the case I'm correct. A contemporary-Christian song called "Arms of Jesus" contains the phrase "stumble on reality," so there are many hits for that iteration but precious few for "stumble onto reality."

This Cambridge Dictionary page suggests stumble across or stumble upon as alternatives to the also correct stumble on, and they both sound good to me. In fact, I'm going to change my mind and endorse stumble across as my favorite stumble option. And I'll belatedly recognize that, as Cambridge Dictionary states in that entry, these stumble combos are better identified as verb phrases (or phrasal verbs) followed by a noun (such as reality) rather than the verb stumble followed by a prepositional phrase.

Other classic examples of verb phrases that look like a verb and a preposition (and that are sometimes followed by a true prepositional phrase) are catch up (with an old friend), break up (with my boyfriend), turn off (the lights), fill out (this form), fill up (the gas tank), and hold on (for one more day).

A Case When a Duplicated Word Was Necessary

I just finished reading Skios, a farcical novel by Michael Frayn. There were some laugh-out-loud moments throughout, but I wasn't super jazzed to be reading the book until near the end, when it seemed like there was going to be a huge comedic payoff during which all the various plot threads would be sorted out and the characters would get their comeuppances or rewards. The conclusion wasn't awful, but it left me a bit unsatisfied.

Anyhow, the main reason I'm mentioning the novel is to point out the missing, necessary, second you in the first sentence in the photo above. Maybe the sentence had correctly said "told you you were" at some point, and a misguided copy editor or proofreader took out a you because the editing software had flagged the duplicated word.

The first you indicates whom the taxi driver told something to, and the second you is an essential part of that something: "you were Oliver Fox."

A Gorgeous Novel From David Leavitt and a New Sorbet That's a Riff on an Old Favorite

I finished reading The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt over Thanksgiving weekend and was blown away by the quality of the writing. I want to highlight these two sentences that reference the sun and the moon, two much-written-about entities it's difficult to say anything fresh about:

• All this came back to me as I sat outside the Suiça, and the sun resumed its posture of perennial bored sovereignty, like a lifeguard on his high chair, and the pigeons gathered, on the lookout for any new customers who, out of gratitude at finding themselves, after so many months, in a city with bread to spare, might give them some crumbs. (page 97)

• The moonlight, though dull, held intimations of sharpness, as if shards of the noonday sun were embedded in it. (page 189)

The novel is set in the summer of 1940 in Lisbon and revolves around two married couples who are planning to escape to New York from Nazi-occupied Paris. The narrator of the story is Pete Winters, a car salesman whose wife, Julia, doesn't want to return to the U.S. because of her troubled relationship with her American family. Pete has an affair with Edward, a writer who has a complex, codependent partnership with his wife, Iris. The plot takes unpredictable but always true-to-life turns, and the dialogue sparkles. You should read it, even though the adjective half-shod appears on page 210. ;-)

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Tony had been hinting he'd really like a batch of a frozen dessert I hadn't made for him in far too long: Blood Orange and Bittersweet Chocolate Sorbet. His friend Nancie, whom I referenced in my Comparing Billions to Billions post, sent him the recipe, from Sunset magazine, in February 2016 and said it was enough to inspire her to get an ice cream maker. As I wrote in this post¹ on my long-running personal blog, Hawleyblog (log-in and password required; email me if you'd like them), "this sorbet was fantastic, thanks in no small part to the Campari, which gave it an extra air of sophistication." If I'd come up with this flavor, I would have called it Blood Orange–Campari Sorbet With Bittersweet Chocolate because the Campari was more essential to its enjoyment than the chocolate and Tony and I discussed at the time whether the chocolate was even necessary or wanted. "My final decision is that it's a fine addition but I'm sure it would also be scrumptious without it," I wrote in my Hawleyblog post.

I'd been finding (and purchasing) blood oranges at our local supermarkets for several weeks, but, of course, once I'd decided to make a batch of BOCSWBC, they disappeared everywhere. I had a bag of clementines in the fridge that I had planned to use for our Thanksgiving turkey breast, in this preparation from Food & Wine. I'm sure the clementine-and-garlic combo would have been magical—I trust F&W's recipes not to suck—but I started to have my doubts and decided I'd rather serve a more-traditional, herb-infused turkey. So the clementines were available to make Clementine-Campari Sorbet on Sunday.

I needed 3 pounds of clementines to produce the 3 cups of juice. As I often do, I substituted brown rice syrup for the corn syrup. And I left out the chocolate because clementine and chocolate seemed like a less-winning combo than blood orange and chocolate.

The processed sorbet base was a pretty, apricot-like color ...

... that grew paler after it finished solidifying in our freezer:

It tasted pretty good, but I'm not craving this sorbet anywhere near as much as I did the BOCSWBC.

Tony and I tried this sorbet with a sprinkling of bittersweet chocolate chips. We both agreed it's better without the chocolate element. And by the way, for the blood orange version, I throw chocolate chips into my ice cream maker toward the end of churning rather than go through the timely process of melting bittersweet chocolate, pouring it onto a sheet pan, freezing it, and breaking it into fragments.

¹That post also included the announcement that Tony and I were getting married nine weeks later. The post about the wedding itself is here.

A Pre-Thanksgiving Hodgepodge Post

There were two issues that grabbed my attention in a single paragraph in this story about glamping¹ at a Japanese resort that appeared in the November issue of Food & Wine. I decided the best way to resolve the first issue was to remove the parenthetical sentence altogether. And I ultimately realized the other issue wasn't problematic after all. Here's the paragraph in question:

• Glamping, on the other hand, is the illusion of work and ruggedness. (Think of it as like transferring prepared foods into your best serving dishes and adding a sprinkling of cut chives on top before guests arrive.) Essentially you're playacting, with an emphasis on props. Sure, I'm wearing a headlamp, but it lights the wooden staircase back to my climate-controlled room, where a deeply compliant Japanese toilet with a heated seat awaits. I might chop wood or paddle a canoe or hike among the trees, but only under the gently watchful supervision of a "glamping master" who has just delivered a 20-minute safety lecture on the topic.

The first thing that took me aback was the as like in the second sentence. We're used to seeing either one of them being used to make a comparison, not both of them in a row. I considered whether adding being between them would be helpful or overkill. I leaned toward helpful, though the presence of three other -ing words in the sentence gave me pause. I finally concluded that if I'd been the editor or copy editor of this story, I would have made the case for taking out the entire sentence. This particular example makes sense as far as the illusion of work goes, but it has nothing to do with the illusion of ruggedness—unless, maybe, you harvested the chives with an axe. I think it's better to go right from the illusion bit to the part about playacting.

At first, second, and even third reads, I didn't like the use of the topic to refer back to the three things the writer might have been doing in the last sentence. But after further reflection, I decided that since she's considering doing only one of the three at a given time, the singular topic works just fine.

Once I started seriously analyzing the minutiae of this paragraph, I discovered one more, rather small, thing I'd have changed: I'd have made it "Essentially it's playacting," so as to avoid the shift from second person ("you're playacting") to first person ("I'm wearing").

By the way, the expression "deeply compliant Japanese toilet" is brilliant. 😄

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Speaking of two things you don't expect to see together, I was flummoxed by multiple instances of the consecutive use of a comma and a dash in the last novel I read, The Professor's House by Willa Cather. The combination came up pretty regularly, sometimes singly and sometimes in pairs within a sentence:

• To the new generations of country and village boys now pouring into the university in such large numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in manners,—what is called an "influence." (page 130²)

• Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her conronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories. (page 158)

I haven't found a compelling explanation online for why these punctuation marks would have been used consecutively. Tony suggested "the comma is grammatical, and the dash is rhetorical," meaning the latter indicates a greater pause. He also said to look at Wordsworth poetry for other examples of this phenomenon, and I found a bunch of them. This poem contains comma-dashes as well as period-dashes and colon-dashes. If any of you readers can offer further insight into these punctuation combos, I'd welcome it. For now, I'll conclude that I see no need for anything but a dash in my first example. The second sentence is so complex, it almost makes my head ache, but I would have gone with (only) commas after Bayeux and heroes as well as after action. I think the semicolon after themselves is justified by all the commas that preceded it and to remind us of the Just as that began this big ol' mess of a sentence.

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I'm generally mellow about diction, and so I don't have a long list of words I despise. If a word is used correctly, who am I to say it offends me? Two exceptions to this mellowness are shod and clad, when used to mean wearing shoes/shoed and wearing clothes/clothed respectively. Nobody ever uses the first word (or shoed) conversationally. Nobody! And if somebody is saying the second word, she's probably referring to metal, not clothes.

This bugaboo of mine came to mind because shod was used in the fourth paragraph of this Bloomberg story I read the other day about an estate sale at Grey Gardens, the former home of "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" Beale, the mother-daughter pair who were the subject of a Maysles brothers documentary of the same name and, later, a terrific Broadway musical and an outstanding HBO movie.

¹In case you don't want to bother reading the entire article, but obviously don't have a problem scrolling down the screen for footnotes 😆, I'll tell you the writer is dismissive of the term glamping—a combination of glamour and camping—even while having enjoyed her glamping experience.

²The page numbers refer to Willa Cather: Later Novels, which was published by Literary Classics of the United States in 1990 and which I checked out of my local library a few weeks ago. The Professor's House is the second novel in the six-book collection and Tony's favorite later work of fiction by Cather. I had never read anything by Cather. I really enjoyed TPH and wished for a longer third segment back in the world of the St. Peter family after the (also enjoyable) digression into "Tom Outland's Story" for the middle part of the novel.

Vanilla Fudge Coconut-Milk Ice Cream

For dessert last night, we ate what Tony called my best frozen dessert ever(!): Vanilla Fudge Coconut-Milk Ice Cream. I thought it was pretty great, too. 😄

I was inspired to make a vanilla fudge–flavored frozen dessert because my buddy Jack had sent me—via snail mail, because he's old-school that way—the paper version of this interview (subscription required) in The Wall Street Journal with Jeni Britton Bauer, one of my frozen dessert idols, that included Bauer's recipe for Hot Fudge. The sauce is quite simple—only four ingredients, including boiling water—and dairy-free. If you want me to email you the full recipe, please ask and I will do that.

I used Enjoy Life Semi-Sweet Chocolate Mini Chips in lieu of the finely chopped bittersweet chocolate listed in the recipe. I was hoping the chips would be small enough, unchopped, that they'd melt easily into the other ingredients—cocoa and sugar—after adding the boiling water. They didn't quite get softened enough, so I ended up heating the mixture on low for a couple minutes until everything could be incorporated into a smooth and luscious sauce. Next time I make this ice cream, I'll have to use bittersweet chocolate, so we can have an even darker and richer fudge experience.

For a change of pace, I was in the mood for a frozen dessert made from canned coconut milk. (As I wrote in my second post on this blog, I enjoy CM-based ice creams now and again but am not always in the mood for the pronounced note of coconut that's inevitably present in these desserts. I like, but don't 100% love, that coconut flavor.) I used this recipe from The Kitchn for my vanilla base. I'd never encountered a CMIC recipe that called for cooking the base, so I had to give this one a try.

The time on the stove—and the arrowroot thickener—resulted in a superior texture and mouthfeel compared with other CMICs I've made.

I layered the semisolid ice cream in a container with drizzles of almost completely cooled hot sauce late yesterday morning, ... 

... and our dessert was completely frozen by dinnertime. Tony and I both went back for a second serving.

A Friend Suggested I Edit The New York Times' Review of Stranger Things 2. So I Did

An UPDATE on Nov. 5: We watched episode 7 of Stranger Things 2 tonight, so I now get the "apocalpyse-chic street-punk gang" reference. It was an unusual episode in that it focused strictly on only one of the regular characters, who got caught up in the gang in question. If you recall the very begining of the first episode of this season but haven't yet gotten to episode 7, you'll probably have a good guess which character I mean. But that's all I'll say.

We also watched the first episode of The Big Family Cooking Showdown on Netflix. I enjoyed it. The competition between the two families held my interest, and it was fun seeing Nadiya Hussain, one of my favorite Great British Baking Show contestants, as the co-host. Tony thought the show(down) was only OK but held out hope it would get better.

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My friend Stacy texted me a link to this, in her words, "sloppily written" New York Times review of the second season of Stranger Things on Saturday and suggested I use it as the basis for a post on this blog.

I concur that the piece, written by James Poniewozik, has some issues. I emailed Stacy a list of what I'd found that bugged me and asked her what she'd seen that had gotten her riled.

We both found some annoying repetition: I pointed out that season was used three times in two sentences in the sixth paragraph, and two of those times, it's preceded by the word first. "That's a mite too repetitious for me," I wrote. Stacy was worn out by all the uses of it, which appears 32 times in the story, including in its possessive form. (See what I did there? Do bloggers still ask "See what I did there?"¹) The third and final paragraphs are especially it-heavy, with five apiece.

In the sixth paragraph, Stacy thought this sentence was poorly constructed: "Will is back in our world, but tormented by visions of the Upside Down, which, as the first-season epilogue suggested, still has a hold on him." (I don't think we need the comma after world.)

We both called out the seventh paragraph: "Eleven, who went missing at the end of Season 1, is still in hiding. So Will's D&D buddies—Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo)—find a new cool girl to be group-infatuated with, Max (Sadie Sink), and a new creepy-crawly menace to battle. As a new extradimensional threat arises, Mr. Modine's conspiracist scientist is replaced by Dr. Owens (a credibly straight-faced Paul Reiser)." (Actor Matthew Modine's full name had been given earlier in the story.) Stacy called the first two sentences of that passage "messy." I wrote in my email:

• I would have connected the second sentence with the first and made a new sentence about the creepy-crawly menace (and lowercased the first s in Season 1): "Eleven, who went missing at the end of season 1, is still in hiding, so Will's D&D buddies—Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo)—find a new cool girl to be group-infatuated with, Max (Sadie Sink). Given that Eleven defeated the Demogorgon in the final episode of the first season, it shouldn't exactly be a spoiler to mention there's a new creepy-crawly menace to battle. And Mr. Modine's conspiracist scientist has also been replaced, by a doctor played by a credibly straight-faced Paul Reiser."

Since I wrote that email, Tony and I have started watching the show, so I now realize Reiser's character is also a scientist, with a Ph.D., and not a medical doctor, as my wording would tend to imply.

In the fifth paragraph from the end, I would have added the 2 in the show's name, like we see again in the penultimate paragraph. Earlier in the review, Poniewozik had made a point of noting the correct name of the show is now Stranger Things 2—"like a movie rather than a season of TV." And I would have put an an in front of apocalpyse-chic in "complete with apocalypse-chic street-punk gang." That phrase comes up in a reference to the classic 1980s film The Outsiders, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starred a bunch of young men who went on to great success as actors: C. Thomas Howell,² Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. The writer mentioned that film in the context of providing a list of movies ST2 cribs from, including two childhood favorites of mine: Gremlins and E.T., which, to be hypercorrect for a moment, should officially be called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at first reference. (And the NYT piece gives that full name at its first reference to the film, in the first paragraph, in an interesting tidbit about a horrific-sounding potential E.T. sequel that, thankfully, never saw the light of day.)

In my email, I added:

• I don't quite understand what's meant by "an apocalypse-chic street-punk gang." Maybe I will after I watch the episode in which it appears.

In the penultimate paragraph, I would once again lowercase the first s in Season 1. And I would put a comma after and for several episodes in this sentence: "I'm not sure 'Stranger Things'³ creatively needed a second season, and for several episodes it seems like 'Stranger Things 2' isn't convinced of it either."⁴

Stacy was annoyed by what she saw as an overuse of parentheses and specifically called out this sentence, in the penultimate paragraph, as one that shouldn't have been made parenthetical: "(The ingenious device of having Will speak from the Upside Down via Christmas lights is replaced by—well, you'll see.)"⁵ (That particular use of parentheses doesn't bother me, though I would note I tend to use them a lot. Like right now.)

My final catch, in the last paragraph, was:

• There's one two many a's in "But it's a still a good time."

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Tony and I are very much enjoying ST2, but we were both disappointed in episode 4, the one we watched last night. Tony felt that several of the characters' actions weren't realistic or keeping in line with their motivations (even while, of course, acknowledging we're talking about a show with supernatural elements). I won't give any more details for fear of providing spoilers, but I'll say that I agree with his assessment. I didn't like that there wasn't much in the way of comedic or uplifting moments to offset the tension in this rather heavy episode (even while acknowledging ST2 is first and foremost a horror/suspense show that was bound to get really heavy eventually).

¹At one point, I added a second question mark here, after the end quote mark:

• Do bloggers still ask "See what I did there?"?

But I ultimately stuck with my initial inclination that that would have been excessive.

²I left Howell off that list at first because he doesn't have the name recognition the rest of that crew has, but I see from his IMDB page that he's worked steadily ever since that film.

³Newspapers understandably tend to use quote marks in lieu of italics for TV and movie names because italics are harder to pull off on a printing press than on the web. I don't think I can use italics in headlines in the theme I'm using in Squarespace, so The New York Times and Stranger Things 2 are in roman in this post's headline. (There were five in's in that last sentence, but they're all totally justifiable. 😛)

⁴At one point, I added a second period here, after the end quote mark, like so:

• And I would put a comma after and for several episodes in this sentence: "I'm not sure 'Stranger Things'³ creatively needed a second season, and for several episodes it seems like 'Stranger Things 2' isn't convinced of it either.".

But I decided it was pretty obviously excessive. And that decision led me to delete the second question mark referenced above, in note 1.

⁵Here's another place a second period could maybe, possibly, be justified, especially given the closing parenthesis:

• Stacy was annoyed by what she saw as an overuse of parentheses and specifically called out this sentence, in the penultimate paragraph, as one that shouldn't have been made parenthetical: "(The ingenious device of having Will speak from the Upside Down via Christmas lights is replaced by—well, you'll see.)."

But I think it looks ridiculous before the quote mark and like a mistake after it:

• is replaced by—well, you'll see.)".

So I'm leaving it alone.

Comparing Billions to Billions

A dear friend of Tony's lives in Santa Rosa, one of the communities in Northern California that were devastated by wildfires earlier this month. Thankfully, Nancie; her husband, Frank; their beloved standard poodle, Cosmo; and their home are all safe and sound.

Yesterday, I read a good story at all-things-alcoholic website Punch about the effects of the fires on California's wine industry. This sentence stood out for me because of the monetary figures in it:

• It’s not simply that economic losses are projected at anywhere from $3 to $6 billion, but also that the fires came during Napa and Sonoma’s busiest time of year, when the small restaurants and shops that rely on tourists finally start to turn a profit.

Another billion is absolutely needed after $3. Otherwise, that sentence is literally saying the economic losses could be as low as $3. Sure, readers could logically assume once they get to the billion that the word applies to both $3 and $6, but it's much better to use the word twice and not require readers to make that assumption.

Editing Talking to Animals and an SFGN Headline Flub

My current nonfiction read is Jon Katz's Talking to Animals: How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You. I like what I've read so far, but I haven't gotten too far into it. That's mostly because I'm more in fiction mode right now and so am spending more time with Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, a book recommended by my husband, Tony.

The second chapter of Talking discusses using visualization techniques to develop a closer relationship with a companion animal. Here are some fixes I would have made if I'd been tasked with editing that chapter:

On page 41: "I had never had a dog like that or really heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog beyond Lucky, but I was very young, and she had not lived long." Katz is referring to the relationship between Caroline, an artist and poet who lives in the same town as him, and her yellow Labrador retriever, whose name is Jade. We learned about Lucky in the previous chapter. He was a puppy the author adopted from his school's janitor when he was a young boy. Katz told the bittersweet story of wanting this dog so much, struggling (with a bully and a somewhat reluctant parent) to make the adoption happen, taking him home, and ultimately not having him in his life for very long. I don't know what the antecedent of she in that sentence would be other than Lucky, and since Lucky was male, that should be "he had not lived long." I'm thinking the she may have mistakenly ended up there because of the multiple references in the previous paragraphs to Jade, who's female.

And because I think less isn't always more, I also believe that passage would read better with a few more words and split into a couple of sentences: "I had never heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog, and I had yet to have my own such relationship. Lucky didn't count because I'd been so young and he hadn't lived for very long."

On pages 42 to 43: "During [walks with my Lab, Julius] I would often speak aloud of new characters, story ideas, and plots twists." That should be plot, singular.

On page 45: "At the time, I knew little about dogs, I avoided the growing shelves of dog books in the bookstore, I thought the dog love I saw often seemed excessive, overly emotional." That's a doozy of a run-on sentence. I would put a yet before I avoided and a period after bookstore.

On page 47: "In our world, a good dog is a dog who abandons most of the natural behaviors of a dog—having sex a lot, digging holes in yards, running off after strange smells, eating revolting things, fighting with other dogs, chewing up garbage, pillows, and table legs, stealing food off counters." Because of the multiple chewable things that are separated by commas, some semicolons are in order throughout the part of the sentence that follows the dash: "having sex a lot; digging holes in yards; running off after strange smells; eating revolting things; fighting with other dogs; chewing up garbage, pillows, and table legs; and stealing food off counters." And because I'm generally not a fan of asyndeton—and particularly not in a sentence like this one that's already got so much going on—I added the and before stealing.

On page 48: I have no problem, however, with the asyndeton in this sentence: "Most important, I said, you need to begin imagining how you want this dog to be with you—calm, quiet, responsive." Later in that paragraph: "He'd always had big, easygoing dogs, never a dog quite like this." A dash would do a better job than the comma after dogs of setting off the final thought.

On page 52: "Red watched closely." That sentence shows up in the seventh paragraph of a story about the difficult labor of Katz's rescue sheep, Ma. Up to that point, Katz had given us no indication that any other animal besides Ma was in the barn with him. And he hadn't mentioned Red at all since the list of animals he'd been able to have a "wondrous dialogue" with over the years that appeared in the book's introduction, on page 5. I would have found a way to bring up the dog's presence before this point in the narrative.

On page 53: "Two years after Julius came into my life, I went back to the breeder in Ramsay and brought Stanley home. He was a Lab from the same place I got Julius." Even if I hadn't read the account earlier in this chapter of how Katz came to purchase a yellow Labrador retriever named Julius from a breeder in Ramsay, New Jersey, I think that second sentence would still seem overly repetitious.

And, finally, on page 54: "These might have been difficult things for city dogs to adjust to, but they were not farm dogs." Earlier in this chapter, Katz established he had been living in the "beautiful suburban town of Montclair," New Jersey, when he'd bought both Julius and Stanley. Then, five paragraphs before the one in which the above sentence appears, he wrote about packing up the dogs and moving for a year to "a cabin on the top of a hill in the Upstate New York town of Jackson." It was a wilderness-type experience, with deep woods to explore and howling coyotes to be wary of. So, given that he moved from the suburbs to a cabin in the woods, what is the purpose of that sentence? Julius and Stanley were neither city dogs nor farm dogs. I don't know what Katz is trying to say there.

I would also lowercase the U in Upstate because that adjective isn't capitalized in my dictionary of choice and I think it's too broad of an area (everything in the state of New York except New York City and its suburbs) to be considered a proper region.

***

This is the cover of the Oct. 4 edition of the South Florida Gay News, a tabloid newspaper that (as you no doubt would have guessed, even if you're not in the publication's prime demographic) covers LGBT issues and is distributed in the south(east)ern part of Florida:

There's one big problem and, I would argue, one lesser issue in the main headline. Do you see the same things I'm seeing? (I also would make it "PAGES 7, 13" instead of PAGE.)

First, the lesser issue: I think LGBTs should be used when speaking of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. LGBT, to me, is, first and foremost, an adjective describing these people, who are my people. Adding the s transforms that adjective into a plural noun.

The bigger problem is that my people have banded, not banned, together to help the (U.S.) citizens of Puerto Rico in their time of need, so the verb should be BAND.

My First Freelance Job in Florida, a New LLC, Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet, and the Finest Chocolate Chips Available at Grocery Stores

I'm happy to report that I recently landed my first freelance editorial job since we moved to Florida, and it promises to be an ongoing, many-months-long gig. I'm still in the onboarding¹ and training stage, but I'm very excited to be working with this first corporate client.

With my husband Tony's help, I've created a Florida limited liability company that will be the entity through which I'll offer my editorial services to this and future clients. Its name isn't terribly clever: Bill Hawley Editorial Services LLC. I had considered some more-interesting names but ultimately went with one that included my own name because I already owned this domain with billhawley in it. I plan to add a landing page here that describes my business in the next day or so.

I considered calling my company either Big Hyphen or Huge Hyphen or Golden Hypen Editorial Services because I always used to joke at my previous full-time gig that what I mostly did was insert and—only occasionally—remove hyphens. That was far from the truth, but I would nonetheless make that joke because, well, I was actually quite proud of my ability to hyphenate and I'm a self-deprecating kind of guy. The first two options would also have been homages to Huge Hound Frozen Desserts LLC, the sweet-frozen-treat company I successfully started up in New Jersey last year, before we decided to give subtropical living a whirl.

I also pondered calling my business Punctual Punctuation LLC, because I love alliteration, but Tony said it could seem like all I was capable of doing was correctly—and quickly—punctuating copy. "I'm sorry. I can't find misspellings or subject-verb disagreement. But I moved that comma from there to here." Much like the names with Hyphen in them, it also seemed too self-parodying. And I really should be serious about my editorial skills, because they're seriously good. And so, Bill Hawley Editorial Services it is.

---

I made my first batch of Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet (which I previously wrote on this blog may be my favorite frozen dessert ever) in a little over a year last week. The previous occasion was the production week for Huge Hound in which I made both that sorbet and Beet-Nutmeg Ice Cream.

This batch turned out nicely, though it wasn't as high in quality as other iterations of this sorbet I've made. The biggest issue was that I used mostly frozen blackberries supplemented with a couple ounces of nonfrozen ones that had been shipped to Florida from California, and neither of those sources of berries was going to compare with fresh-picked fruit from a local farm like I could easily get in Hunterdon County and New York City.

For part of the chocolate component, I used dark chocolate morsels from Enjoy Life, the allergen-free-food producer I mentioned in my blondie recipe post. I utilized Enjoy Life chocolates in my Huge Hound desserts because they never contain even a trace of the most common allergens, including dairy, and that's terribly important to people who have severe health reactions to cows' milk or who avoid all animal-derived food products on moral grounds.

Although Tony can't eat dairy in any significant quantity, his body is able to handle the trace amounts that might have been left behind as a contaminant when a production line was switched from milk chocolate to a dark or semisweet chocolate. That means I can buy brands whose labels indicate they were made on equipment that also produces milk chocolate but not items containing gluten.

Which brings me to Guittard, maker of the finest brand of chocolate chips that's pretty widely available in grocery stores and that Tony and I generally eat straight from the bag, though I do occasionally bake them into cookies. We hadn't been able to find Guittard chips locally since we moved here, and we were leery of having them shipped to us given the Florida-summer heat we're still experiencing.

On Thursday, I was thrilled to find two kinds of Guittard chocolate chips at the new Lucky's Market in Oakland Park that's a short drive from our apartment complex. I texted Tony a photo of the chips with the exclamation "Squee!" Lucky's didn't have our two absolute favorite kinds of Guittard chips—the Akoma Semisweet Chocolate Chips in the pink bag or the Super Cookie Chips in the bright-yellow bag—but I will cajole the grocery manager to please start offering them.

Anyhow, back to the sorbet, the majority of whose chocolate flavor actually comes from cocoa powder. I used Guittard-brand cocoa Tony had bought a while ago from Atlantic Spice Co., and I nearly plotzed just now when I saw the gluten warning on that linked page. Tony assures me he spoke with someone at Atlantic, a company that takes allergen issues very seriously, before making this purchase and was convinced the cocoa is perfectly safe for him. 👍

You might say the secret ingredient in this sorbet is water ...

... because the first step in making the chocolate component is to boil cocoa and sugar in water.

Tony said he liked the hint of earthiness the brown rice syrup I'd used as an additional sweetener lent to the sorbet.

I adapted my recipe from two that appeared in my trusty copy of Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library: Ice Creams & Sorbets: Crimson Plum–Raspberry Sorbet and Rich Chocolate-Orange Sorbet. I basically made a fruit sorbet base and a chocolate sorbet base, combined them in a single pot, chilled the resulting purplish-brown mixture, and processed it in my ice cream maker. Because the fruit sorbet recipe produces a little more than a quart of finished product and the chocolate sorbet a little more than half a quart, I ended up with more than 1 1/2 times the volume of a typical sorbet base and so had to churn it in two batches. I considered trying to combine the two recipes into one by, say, adding the blackberries to the boiled cocoa mixture, but I didn't. Maybe next time.

Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet

Makes almost 2 quarts.

1 3/4 cup sugar, divided

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa (preferably Guittard)

1 1/2 cups + 2/3 cup water

3 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips (preferably Guittard) or coarsely chopped pieces from a bittersweet chocolate bar

4 tablespoons brown rice syrup, divided

2 pounds blackberries, fresh or thawed frozen

In a medium saucepan, combine 3/4 cup sugar and the cocoa. Gradually whisk in 1 1/2 cups water. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, whisking constantly, about 4 minutes. Remove from the heat, add the chocolate and 2 tablespoons brown rice syrup, and whisk until combined. Pour into a large pot and set aside.

In a clean medium saucepan, combine 1 cup sugar, 2/3 cup water, and 2 tablespoons brown rice syrup. Cook on high, stirring constantly until the sugar and syrup are dissolved into the water. Bring to a boil and then remove from the heat.

In a blender or food processor, purée the blackberries until smooth. Strain into the saucepan, pressing firmly on the solids with a rubber spatula. Discard the remaining solids. Stir the berries and syrup together. Then transfer the berry sorbet base to the large pot. Stir to thoroughly combine the chocolate and berry bases. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, at least 1 hour.

Process the base in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions, working in two batches if necessary. Transfer the sorbet to a container and freeze for at least 4 hours before serving.

¹I usually am turned off by business-speak like onboarding. But for some reason, I like that word.

A Few More Brief Items, Including a Tricky Sentence About Eating Avocado Toast as an After-School Snack

Before I present my latest collection of nit-pickings (picked nits?)—including some less-than-ideal punctuation on our bottle of safflower oil—I want to begin with a statement similar to the one I wrote for my third post: I don't claim to be perfect, and the points I'm making here are given in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness.

***

The August issue of Bon Appétit—whose overall theme was simplicity, because BA was launching a new basic-cooking-skills website called basically—included a feature story that serves as a cultural study of avocado toast, the much-loved-but-much-mocked dish that's still a big hit in restaurants on both coasts. Writer John Birdsall gives the credit/blame for the somewhat-recent resurgence of avocado toast here in the States to Australian chefs, but he shows that Californians have been spreading mashed avocado on toasted bread since at least the 1930s.

Birdsall hangs out—and eats avocado toast—with Richard Parks III, "a 35-year-old food writer and filmmaker." RPIII is the son of Van Dyke Parks, a composer and music producer who was born in 1943. The younger Parks reminisces with Birdsall about being tasked with collecting the avocados that had fallen from the 100-year-old tree in his family's backyard "before the squirrels got to them." VDP would make "avocado toast on English muffins as a snack for Richard and his siblings." He would toast the muffins, spread on the avocado, sprinkle on some Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning, and retoast the muffins under the broiler.

A couple more references to the younger Parks follow, and it's clear we're talking about him (and not his father) even though he's called only Parks because it had been established earlier in the story that Birdsall was hanging out with him at a restaurant in Los Angeles's Beverly Grove neighborhood called Goldie's and the writer is still there.

Birdsall later moves on to Sqirl in Silver Lake. "I'm meeting a couple of food people: the writer and producer Gillian Ferguson and Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW's Good Food radio show," he writes. "Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as the default after-school snack in the 1950s and '60s, not far from here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar."

Birdsall told us the younger Parks ate avocado toast as an after-school snack. But he was born in 1982, so he certainly didn't know it as his default snack during those two previously mentioned decades. Either the writer is now talking about Van Dyke Parks or, more likely, the writer and his editors have erred in lumping together Richard Parks and Kleiman not only in terms of what they did but also when they did it. I would have proposed the following simple fix: "Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as her default after-school snack. She ate it regularly in the 1950s and '60s, not from far here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar." (Yes, Kleiman is a woman with a traditionally male name.)

***

I think the first line of this recipe found in that same issue of BA and also here online ...

... would be better as "strawberries, hulled and halved (or quartered if large), and ...." None of the berries in the photo is whole. At minimum, they should be halved, so let's make it clear to the reader she should cut them at least once. Then, parenthetically, tell her to cut them again if they were really big to start with. By the way, the online version is even less pleasing to me because the "or" has been eliminated.

***

I'm not loving this headline in the August/September issue of The Advocate:

I'm fairly certain the editors' motivation for plainly stating you're about to read old news is the "JANUARY 2017" that's clearly visible in the photo above the headline. But I still think the head, which practically shrugs at the reader, does the short piece that follows it ...  

... a disservice. The lede hangs on a new, or at least newer, angle than a months-old magazine, though the supporting evidence for its timeliness is presented only parenthetically: This documentary about gender you might be interested in is now broadly available for viewing.

I would have proposed something like "NAT GEO TACKLES GENDER," even though I realize GENDER looms large in the photo as well. I don't think there's a suitable synonym.

***

There's a SPOILER about, well, an almost-two-decades-old work of fiction in the lines below.

I just finished reading John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and I mostly wish I hadn't bothered. I thought the ending was a major cop-out. Marion, the woman who had abandoned her daughter 37 years earlier, when Ruth was only four, gets to have the last line. And she's telling Ruth not to cry! I want to know what Ruth—the novel's main protagonist—has to say back to her mother after all these years. *creates my own conclusion in my own head, which I reckon is what Irving would tell me to do*

I have only two more things to say about this book: Irving is clearly wayyyy into boobs. And on p. 165, it should say "And the Gomezes' granddaughter," not "the Gomez's granddaughter," because the passage is referring to a husband and wife with the last name of Gomez, which would be made plural by adding es and made possessive by adding only an apostrophe.

***

This label on our bottle of safflower oil presents an opportunity to riff on hyphenation—and I really love riffing on hyphenation. Almost as much as John Irving loves writing about boobs!

Is this oil a fat food that isn't hydrogenated? Or is it a food that consists of fat that isn't hydrogenated? The latter makes more sense, right? Because of that—and because all of the reference works I'm likely to consult when checking spelling say that words beginning with the prefix non are hyphenated only in rare cases¹—I would have changed that phrase to "A NONHYDROGENATED-FAT FOOD." Some might say that "NON-HYDROGENATED-FAT FOOD" is more aesthetically pleasing. And I wouldn't argue they're wrong.

¹Those cases are: when preceding a proper noun—for example, "non-American"—and, per the Associated Press Stylebook, when "awkward combinations, such as non-nuclear," occur. I don't think nonnuclear looks all that awkward, so I would be inclined to make that word hyphenless.

A Few Brief Items, Including Two That Involve Martha Stewart

An UPDATE on Sept. 9: I heard back from Rahul Mehta yesterday regarding the second item below. He gave me permission to reproduce his email here on my website:

Dear Bill,

Thank you so much for these very kind words about my novel NO OTHER WORLD. It means so much to me to know that you were moved by it. I'm also grateful to you for pointing out the error on page 207. The book is getting ready for reprint as a paperback, so perhaps it is not too late to make this correction.

Thanks again for getting in touch. All best wishes to you.

Sincerely,

Rahul

***

This sentence appears in the September issue of Bon Appétit, in an article titled "Tools of the Trade," which tells you the very low-tech things (including slotted spoons, ice, and a food mill) you need in your kitchen to enable you to cook like "a restaurant pro":

• That doesn't mean that in order to make decent food at home you need a fully outfitted showroom (like what I imagine Daniel Boulud or Martha Stewart have at their houses) or a state-of-the-art professional setup (like the basement of the big fancy restaurant in Manhattan where I toiled away subterraneanly until not so long ago).

I kept going back and forth as to whether a comma or two was needed to set off "in order to make decent food at home." My final judgment is that the sentence would read better if it were recast to start with "That doesn't mean you need" and end with "to make decent food at home," with the "in order" discarded.

I would have said "like what I imagine Daniel Boulud and Martha Stewart have at their houses" because 1) both of them no doubt have sweet kitchens and 2) the or needed a singular possessive pronominal adjective, not the plural one we were given. I realize the writer/editors may have been purposefully going for a singular, gender-neutral use of their here, but it's so much easier and, I would argue, more accurate to use and ... their than or ... their.

Subterraneanly looked odd to me at first, but both Merriam-Webster's and Webster's New World give it preference over subterraneously.

***

No Other World, by first-time novelist Rahul Mehta, is the most emotionally compelling novel I've ever experienced. The characters, especially main protagonist Kiran Shah, whom we see age from a socially awkward child to an ill-adjusted, young gay man, were amazingly vividly drawn.

Enjoying the book tremendously didn't stop this *ahem* sharp-eyed editor from noticing what I believe is a mistaken character name. I just sent the following email to Mehta through his website:

• I want to first tell you how very much I enjoyed No Other World. It packed more of an emotional punch than any other work of fiction I've read. Because I'm an anal-retentive copy editor, I also feel a need to point out what I think is a mistake on p. 207.  "Shanti's mother found occasional work—when they needed her—carrying rocks from one part of the site to another, and Prakash found work fetching tea during breaks." Shouldn't that be "Prakash's mother"?

Shanti is Kiran's mother and had no direct connection to Prakash/Pooja, a transgender girl whom Kiran befriends while visiting relatives in India.

I'll update this post if/when I hear back.

***

Here's a corner of the cover of the September issue of Martha Stewart Living:

I think some lines, or rules, are wanted between the three headlines at the top so they don't read like one continuous bit of text, given that the three blurbs are all in the same-size type and the same font, with no color variation.

I'm also not loving the em dash in the teaser copy, but I realize I would be in the minority among editorial professionals in that opinion. Ever since I wrote my first post here at BillHawley.net, because I've been on the lookout for them, I've been seeing what I consider to be em-dash faults every-freaking-where.

I also, at first, thought it would be better to have four periods after COVERED, but since periods aren't used at the end of any blurb on the page, it wouldn't make sense to use one to end the sentence there and lead into the ellipsis, even though it clearly is a complete sentence.

***

While I'm critiquing magazine covers, here's the latest one for Game Informer:

The space between the first E and the I ought to be bigger than the space between any other two letters.

A Poorly Written Recipe For Blondies That Fell Flat But Tasted Delicious and Some Notes on Vegan Flax Eggs

I made a batch of gluten-free and vegan blondies on Sunday using the recipe above, which I'd cut from the back of a bag of Enjoy Life–brand chocolate chunks. How old-school of me.

This recipe breaks two cardinal rules of recipe writing: One of the items in the list of ingredients, the xanthan gum, is never mentioned in the directions. And the ingredients aren't utilized in the same order in which they appear in the list: The first ingredient mentioned in the directions (the flax gel) is the last one in the list, the second ingredient (the vanilla extract) is eighth in the list, and the third ingredient (the oil) is sixth. No one with a clue about editing recipes read this puppy before it was printed.

Those problems have thankfully been corrected in the version of the recipe found on the Enjoy Life website.

My blondies didn't puff up that much and were too moist for me to consider them to be an overall success. But they tasted yummy.

At first, I thought the volume of flax gel, which is a vegan replacement for the eggs you'd typically find in blondies, seemed big compared with what I often see in similar recipes. But when I just now searched for "flax egg" online, I found many sources calling for 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed mixed into 2, 2 1/2, or 3 tablespoons of warm water. And since 1/3 cup = 5.333 tablespoons, the recipe is really calling for an amount of flax gel equivalent to about two flax eggs, which is certainly reasonable.

I should point out that I used not particularly finely ground flaxseed meal from Bob's Red Mill; further grinding the meal would probably have helped the texture. Actually, after reading this post at Bonzai Aphrodite, I've convinced myself I should be grinding whole flaxseeds instead of buying the meal—to ensure freshness—and refrigerating the flax egg (with a 1:3 ratio of ground seeds to water) for about an hour to ensure it has the right consistency. My flax eggs have never gotten all that sticky even when I've made them 15 minutes or more prior to incorporating them into a batter.

Two more notes on vegan eggs before I go:

This Food.com recipe calls for simmering(!) the ground flaxseeds in water.

The vegan baker whose recipes I make the most, Erin McKenna, skips the "egg"-making process altogether; in her three books, all of which I own, she has you simply mixing the flaxseed meal in with your other dry ingredients and letting the heat of the oven magically transform the batter into a cohesive product. Today, I'm going to make a double batch of her Chips Ahoy!–like chocolate chip cookies, the recipe for which appears in BabyCakes Covers the Classics, and mail them off tomorrow to my nephews, who are beginning their second year of college this month and whose birthday is this Saturday.

An UPDATE that night:

I made a batch and a half of the chocolate chip cookies this afternoon and will get them (minus a reasonable amount for Uncle Tony and me to enjoy 😄) in the mail to Matt and Mike in the morning from the closest post office to me, which, by the way, is in a mall. Specifically, Coral Ridge Mall, "where shopping is a breeze."

Here are the finished cookies, nestled in parchment paper:

The cookies contain Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Oat Flour, which lends them a pleasingly earthy, one might almost—almost—say healthy, texture. The recipe also calls for a slightly lesser amount of Bob's Red Mill All-Purpose Gluten-Free Baking Flour, but I substitute, at Erin McKenna's suggestion, a mix of brown rice flour, potato starch, and arrowroot, because BRMAPGFBF consists mostly of garbanzo bean flour (and also includes a bit of fava bean flour) and Tony's digestive system is better off when he avoids legumes, in addition to gluten and dairy.

A Fascinating Article About Lichens That Would Have Benefited From My Editing

Before I tell you about that very interesting article about lichens from The Atlantic and what I would have done to improve it, I first want to acknowledge that everything I write or edit could also benefit from someone else's editing and/or copy-editing.

At my previous full-time-with-benefits gig, pre–Huge Hound, my main job was overseeing a group of copy editors, but I also edited (as opposed to copy-edited) pieces by wine and spirits expert Elin McCoy. Whenever I'd route my edit of one of Elin's stories to a copy-editing colleague for her/his review, I always hoped it would come back with nothing corrected or questioned, but, of course, there were always at least a couple things that needed improving or fixing. Producing stories that are worth reading takes a lot of effort, and the more brains and pairs of eyes that are being utilized, the better the stories usually are.

I clicked on "How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology" because it was one of the suggested stories at the bottom of Christopher Orr's review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Tony and I had watched that movie on Netflix Saturday night, and I went in search of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes on Sunday morning. I agreed with a good deal of what MTV's Amy Nicholson wrote in this review, which took the movie to task for emphasizing fan service at the expense of new ideas.

By the way, I didn't see any of the original-trilogy movies in theaters. My parents didn't make it a habit to take my older sister and me to science-fiction movies because sci-fi wasn't their bag, though I do remember catching E.T. in the theater with my mother when I was in 8th grade. If I remember correctly, I actually saw The Empire Strikes Back before I saw Star Wars, at my Aunt Lorene's house in Bridgeton on a Sunday evening. Unlike the Hawleys, my aunt sprang for HBO. I also saw only the first film in the second trilogy because I thought The Phantom Menace was so poorly directed. I couldn't get over how awful such usually terrific actors as Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor came across in that movie, and I had to conclude it was George Lucas's fault.

Now back to our lichen story:

• He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love.

I see no need for a comma after either "park" or "science." There's no change in subject and no obvious reason to pause there. *shrugs*

• His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook.

There's a bit of a pause after "problem," so I can kinda sorta see a comma there, but I probably wouldn't have bothered with one. That's the end of my comma quibbles. And I swear all of the remaining points I'm going to bring up will be more interesting. 😄

• You’ve seen lichens before, but unlike Spribille, you may have ignored them. They grow on logs, cling to bark, smother stones. At first glance, they look messy and undeserving of attention. On closer inspection, they are astonishingly beautiful. They can look like flecks of peeling paint, or coralline branches, or dustings of powder, or lettuce-like fronds, or wriggling worms, or cups that a pixie might drink from. They’re also extremely tough. They grow in the most inhospitable parts of the planet, where no plant or animal can survive.

That paragraph is a beautiful, imaginative collection of sentences, so kudos to the writer, Ed Yong, and his editor(s). And extra props for using the new-to-me word coralline.

The first time I read this passage, I didn't have a problem with the multiple ors, but they bother me more now, on closer inspection. And I take exception to the last two sentences because: 1) I think of lichens, not inaccurately, as fragile organisms that are susceptible to air pollution, so I believe the "extremely tough" description needs to be qualified. And 2) I'm really curious to learn what's meant by these inhospitable places "where no plant or animal can survive." I immediately thought of lichens' ability to grow on bare rocks, but that's not a "part of the planet." I next thought of the Arctic tundra. Although it's not terribly hospitable, with a growing season of two months or less, some plants and animals do live there. A couple concrete examples of these harsh parts of the globe would be helpful.

• The backlash only collapsed when Schwendener and others, with good microscopes and careful hands, managed to tease the two partners apart.

I prefer "collapsed only when" to "only collapsed when," and I would have made that change if I'd been the editor or copy editor. The altered wording recognizes the more-correct placement of the adverb only—modifying when rather than collapsed—and it still reads fine. Sometimes moving an only (or a just) to its more-correct location causes a sentence to seem stilted and not like how people really talk/write. For instance, I wouldn't change "I'm only going to tell you this once" to "I'm going to tell you this only once," even though the latter is really what's meant. The former sentence is basically an idiom, and I've got better things to do with my time than fight for the second sentence's superiority.

• Schwendener wrongly thought that the fungus had “enslaved” the alga, but others showed that the two cooperate.

My previous employer discouraged its writers and editors from using the word but. I use but regularly in my own writing, but I take issue with its inclusion in the sentence above. The wrongly already told us the idea of the fungus enslaving the alga is inaccurate, so the supposedly alternative (as signaled by the but) idea that follows (it's really a cooperative arrangement) in no way contradicts the first part of the sentence. I would either 1) delete wrongly or 2) put a semicolon after alga and lose the but.

• Two Germans, Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, provided the perfect one—symbiosis, from the Greek for ‘together’ and ‘living’.

Why is it so important to note that those two dudes were German, so much so that it's the only characteristic used to describe them? And why is that stubby description more important (based on its placement first in the sentence) than these distinguished scientists' names? I would have started the sentence "Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, two German scientists who studied both plants and fungi, provided... ," and I would have turned the single quote marks into double quote marks and put the final double quote mark after the period, where it belongs. Actually, scratch that part about the quote marks. I would have put together and living in italics, as I've been doing throughout this post when I've used words as words. My go-to example of using a word as a word—that also uses a letter as a letter—is "Banana has three a's."

• When we think about the microbes that influence the health of humans and other animals, the algae that provide coral reefs with energy, the mitochondria that power our cells, the gut bacteria that allow cows to digest their food, or the probiotic products that line supermarket shelves—all of that can be traced to the birth of the symbiosis as a concept.

The the before symbiosis isn't wanted.

• Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures.

I'm a fan of hyphenating the word that means to create again to distinguish it from the word we associate with exercise or playing a game out on the blacktop behind the elementary school after lunch.

• He has shown that largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed.

A the is needed before largest. And I would have made it "has shown that the lichens in the largest and most species-rich group are... ." Otherwise it definitely reads like subject-verb disagreement to me, with the group calling for an is, not an are.

• To find out, Spribille analyzed which genes the two lichens were activating. ... But when Spribille removed all the basidiomycete genes from his data, everything that related to the presence of vulpinic acid also disappeared.

How does one determine which genes the lichens were activating? And what does the writer mean by activating? And how does our friendly scientist remove genes from his data? I don't follow. Maybe you do.

• Throughout his career, Spribille had collected some 45,000 samples of lichens.

Holy shit! That's a lot of lichens.

• Unless you know what you’re looking for, there’s no reason why you’d think there are two fungi there, rather than one—which is why no one realised for 150 years.

Where did that British spelling of realized materialize from? The American spelling is used six paragraphs earlier.

•  Lichens are alluring targets for ‘bioprospectors’, who scour nature for substances that might be medically useful to us. And new basidiomycetes are part of an entirely new group, separated from their closest known relatives by 200 million years ago.

There's another unwanted set of single quotes. And the last sentence should have either the by or the ago, not both. My assumption is that "an entirely new group that separated from its closest known relatives 200 million years ago" is the way to go, but I would have conferred with the writer before making that change.

• That’s a theme that resonates throughout the history of symbiosis research—it takes an alliance of researchers to uncover nature’s most intimate partnerships.

And my last nitpick: I would replace the em dash with a colon because this is a textbook example of what a colon is used for: indicating an explanation or an expansion of what precedes that punctuation mark. And since it appears the style of this publication is to not capitalize the first letter in the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon, I would retain the lowercase i in it.

Chocolate-Mint Vegan Frozen Dessert

The other day, I made my first frozen dessert in South Florida: a vegan one that incorporated the essence of fresh mint ...

... from our apartment complex's community herb garden:

The mint, of unknown variety or varieties, completely fills the middle bed. Several other types of herbs, including rosemary, dill, parsley, and basil, reside in the other beds.

When my husband, Tony, and I lived in Hunterdon County, New Jersey—for about a year and eight months, after having left Manhattan in August 2015—I started up a company called Huge Hound Frozen Desserts LLC. (The website, which I put together myself, is here.) By that time, I'd been whipping up dairy ice creams for more than 15 years, first using the kind of ice cream maker that utilizes a chemical-filled metal canister you have to store in the freezer and then using the more-advanced, self-contained kind that needs only to be plugged in.

My friend Dan once referred to me as an "ice cream maven." I'm using a variation of that description above in the tag line for this website.

I began making dairy-free FDs after I met Tony, because he can't eat milk or cream (or gluten or legumes). The first year we dated, I focused on sorbets. My favorite was Concord grape, but I also remember making (two) very good ones from mint and watermelon. Later, I whipped up some delicious FDs using coconut milk as the base, including one flavored with lime basil.¹ (Like I wrote in my first post and will no doubt write in many more posts here, if you want the password to my other, long-running, personal blog, which would allow you to read the two linked posts above, just shoot me an email at bill@billhawley.net.)

I've never been the hugest fan of coconut (though I'm not a hater), and I didn't necessarily want that flavor mixed in with the chocolate or lemon verbena or whatever I intended to be my primary flavoring ingredient(s), so when I started Huge Hound, one of my main goals was to create a vegan-frozen-dessert base that was as neutral tasting as possible.

And I did it. My ingredients were hemp and flax milks; refined coconut oil, which had had its coconut flavor removed during processing; agave syrup; and small amounts of lecithin, xanthan gum, and arrowroot, which thickened and emulsified the fatty-and-sweet mixture. Plus a pinch of salt. On principle, I would have preferred to avoid using the much-trifled-with RCO, but I found I really needed the boost of fat it provided; the nondairy milks on their own weren't rich enough to produce a creamy-textured product.

After I'd been selling my VFDs and ice creams for a while, I began thinking about ways to cut costs, so the last time I made a Huge Hound VFD, which was flavored with chocolate and ginger, I used only flax milk, because hemp milk is significantly more expensive. Hemp milk is also more strongly flavored than flax milk, so eliminating it as an ingredient improved the neutrality of my base.

I was somewhat sorry to ditch the hemp milk, though, because I think hemp is an amazing plant that we should be using in many different ways, including in foods, paper, and plastics. But I just learned when I was buying my ingredients to make my Chocolate-Mint VFD that I have another good reason for giving it up: One of the two major makers of hemp milks, Pacific Foods, is now putting a warning on its labels telling its customers that its hemp-based nondairy beverages shouldn't be considered gluten-free:

I had been using Living Harvest's Tempt-brand hemp milk for my Huge Hound VFDs, and its packaging contains no such warning. Maybe Living Harvest is confident in its ability to prevent cross-contamination with wheat, but I didn't want to take that chance, so when I made this latest VFD a couple weeks ago, I again used only flax milk.

I applaud Pacific Foods for erring on the side of caution at the risk of losing customers. People like Tony who have serious dietary issues need and appreciate candor from manufacturers and restaurants so they can make informed decisions.

Once at the Union Square outpost of Whole Foods, a woman standing near me complained that the package of dried fruit she was holding was labeled as being gluten-free. "How stupid do they think we are?" she asked. I just wanted to get in and out of the store and wasn't really in the mood for a teachable moment, so I didn't explain to her that manufactured foods can be contaminated with things like tree nuts, peanuts, dairy, and gluten based on how they're processed, not only by the ingredients they obviously contain.

A case in point: Tony and I just got back from our local supermarket, and we had to go with the third brand of walnuts we picked up because the first two said they could contain traces of gluten. (He's making Chicken With Walnut Sauce for dinner tonight.)

The other day, at the same store, I put a bag of pine nuts back on its hook because the packaging said the PNs were "produced on shared equipment with peanuts, tree nuts, milk, wheat, soy & egg." The only things missing from the list of the big eight food allergens were fish and shellfish.

OK, let me reel myself back in *sound of fishing line being respooled* and post a photo of my finished VFD:

Our dinner guests three nights later—Tony's longtime friend Marchéta and her wife, Uli, who live in the next county north of here—went back for seconds or thirds. I hadn't lost my touch. 

¹In that same linked post, you can see I still made dairy ice creams for my own enjoyment, including the Gooseberry With Gooseberry Swirl that was one of my favorites of all time. And I kept experimenting with sorbets, culminating in the Chocolate-Blackberry that may be my favorite FD ever.

An UPDATE the next day:

That's the out-of-this-world dinner Tony made last night, with the chicken-and-walnut stew served over GF pasta with additional, chopped walnuts. The herb on top is cilantro—from the grocery store, because there's none growing in the community garden.

An UPDATE two days later: My friend Desirée sent me a link to this New York Times story about vegan frozen desserts, which has a sidebar on a VFD base that uses hemp (or cashew) milk, coconut cream or milk, and agave (or corn) syrup.

Introducing a New Blog With a Discussion of Dashes

I'm starting this new blog so I have an outward-facing space to highlight my writing, editing, and frozen dessert–making skills.

Since September 2005, I've been regularly writing Hawleyblog, which, depending on the individual post, has maybe been about food, current events, theater, music, and/or other topics that interest me but has also always been a diary of the events in my life. And I've enjoyed having that record to look back on. For instance, if I want to relive the time I took my then-13-year-old identical-twin nephews to the New York Hall of Science museum in Queens, I can reread one of my favorite Hawleyblog posts, from December 2011. (And you can read it, too, if you request the password I've recently protected that blog behind. Just send an email to bill@billhawley.net.) 

That's me pretending to pet a (much-magnified) water flea at the Hall of Science.

The main purpose of this new blog is, frankly, to sell myself to potential employers and clients. I'll use it to demonstrate I can write and self-edit and to tout some of my accomplishments as a copy editor, line editor, and small-business owner. And I'll no doubt also run the occasional photo of my cute dog and my cuter husband.

I also plan to discuss matters of English-language grammar, diction, and punctuation. And now *cracks knuckles* I'm going to write about how I like to use the hyphen's longer and less-well-known punctuation-mark friends: the en dash and the em dash.

I used an en dash in the first sentence of this post, in a compound, attributive adjective in which one of the components of the compound ("frozen dessert") consisted of two words. Some editors would prefer two hyphens ("frozen-dessert-making") to the en dash, and I don't necessarily think that's wrong. It's just not my preferred punctuation method.

Just about everyone agrees on using an en dash rather than multiple hyphens when a proper noun is involved. "National Book Award–winning author" looks so much better than "National-Book-Award-winning author"; the former construction respects the integrity of the multiword proper noun.

As for em dashes, I prefer using them to set off a fragment of a sentence that reads like an important but ultimately omittable¹ aside. Here's an example from the November 2009 issue—the final issue²—of Gourmet magazine that also features a classic, proper noun–incorporating en dash:

• Our Pennsylvania Dutch–inspired Thanksgiving menu brings together all those things—savory and sweet, new and nostalgic—that make any Thanksgiving an occasion to remember. (p. 24)

(By the way, I would have deleted the first Thanksgiving in that sentence.)

I don't like using em dashes in a situation where a semicolon is the obvious choice. At my last full-time-with-benefits job, as a senior editor who oversaw a team of copy editors at a business-and-finance magazine, I coined the term em-dash fault³ for the joining of two complete sentences by an em dash. Here are two examples from copy that was routed to us back in the day:

• It comes apart easily no matter how cold the metal gets—even a novice won't spill a drop.

• "I think there's still a measure of skepticism that exists toward Wall Street—that's not going to change."

In both cases, we replaced the em dash with a semicolon, whose main job is to separate two sentences that are deemed worthy of a closer connection than a period provides.

And the other night, in my bedside reading, The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee,⁴ I came across these two examples of an em-dash fault in rapid succession:

• All that would be required was for her to find something I'd forgotten about, some incontrovertible proof—much as I knew her kind, I was sure she knew mine. (p. 305)

• Each day I was to begin at the piano, and to begin with my posture at the piano—I was to sit erect, head slightly lifted. (p. 315)

In between, I found this dash-filled mess of a sentence:

• He was quite small in stature by comparison to Turgenev, who kissed him on both cheeks—Louis looked a bit like an old fox in evening dress, his whiskers and sharp eyes quizzical as he took me in—all of his weight was in his eyes, his gaze—all of his body raised up so he might see. (p. 311)

If I'd been this novel's copy editor—and I wish I had been, because it seems like it would have been a great project to have been involved with—I would have put periods after cheeks and took me in. And I would have worded and punctuated the last part this way: "All of his weight was in his eyes, his gaze. And all of his body raised up so he might see."

Though it might be seen as inconsistent, I take no issue with a complete sentence being plunked down in the middle of another complete sentence and being set off by em dashes. Here's an example of what I mean from that same Gourmet magazine:

• Here are six sweet, seasonal breaks from the norm—fig crostata, anyone?—engineered to add a little variety to your dessert offerings. (p. 42)

I could also easily see those three words inside parentheses, another fine option when you're inserting a sentence inside another one.

Thanks for reading this first post of mine.

¹Some believe the old-school omissible is preferable to omittable.

²I'm reading that old magazine now because I had stowed it away, still sealed in its plastic bag, back then, because I thought it would be fun to treat it like a mint-condition comic book. I opened it up to start reading it just prior to our move to Florida, when I was going through a lot of old crap I wished I'd recycled or thrown out years ago.

³The only reference to an em-dash fault I found online when I searched just now was on the last page of this pdf that includes the postscript and a list of corrections for a book called Bad Medicine. I'm curious to know whether the person who compiled this list has the same definition for an em-dash fault as I do.

⁴I got a little carried away with footnotes in this post, but it gave me some practice at creating superscripts in Squarespace's markdown mode. I finished The Queen of the Night last night. It was a great read, with oodles of period details and a captivating main character.