Jeremi was home on the weekend from sea so we were able to celebrate his birthday a bit. We went out for a very nice supper on Saturday night at Paprika Bistro, but opted to stay in on Friday night for homemade cabbage rolls, roasted onion and garlic soup, and some tasty birthday carrot cake. The cake is very nice, from a recipe from one of the girls in my knitting group. It's really carroty - 3 cups of grated carrots (about 6 carrots) in the cake shown. Quite tasty too.
On Saturday I (Julia) was out much of the day at a meeting of my book club held over brunch, which lasted most of the afternoon. We were reading a Michael Crichton book - State of Fear - which sets out to convince people that anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is not a real problem, but rather a conspiracy cooked up by self-interested scientists and environmental organizations. Right. Since most of the book club members are atmospheric scientists and oceanographers working in climate science, this was not a popular view point. What makes it worse than just a silly novel is the fact that Michael Crichton puts references to scientific (and not-so-scientific) articles and books throughout the book which he claims support his claims. While he does include some reputable peer-reviewed articles in his bibliography, in each case he grossly misrepresents the finding, essentially choosing a single quote out of context to support his argument. And people do take him seriously, despite the fact that he's a novelist. He actually testified as an "expert witness" last September in front of a US senate committee regarding climate change. I kid you not. This is the guy who wrote Jurassic Park and he was called to give the US government advice regarding their environmental policy.
Sorry, I just got a little carried away in my rant there. I need to calm down if I'm going to be able to handle a whole evening of election coverage...
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