Radical Face

The song of the day is The Crooked Kind from the 2013 album The Family Tree: The Branches by Radical Face (Ben Cooper).

Tom Odell

The song of the day is 2014's Heal by English singer-songwriter Tom Odell (Thomas Peter Odell). The song is in the 2014 film If I Stay.

Motörhead

I’m not a fan of heavy metal rock music – not since the days of Iron Butterfly and the original Steppenwolf: two bands that, while not heavy metal, paved the way for it. But when I read that Lemmy Kilmister (Ian Fraser Kilmister), founder and frontman of English heavy metal band Motörhead, had died on December 28, 2015, from an “extremely aggressive cancer” that had been diagnosed only two days earlier, I thought I should post a song of the day that features him performing.

The song of the day is Overkill, an extended version of the song from Motörhead’s 1979 album Overkill. The song has been covered by several bands including Overkill, a band who took their name from the Overkill album by Motörhead.

December

It’s been a messy, messy day. Rain and gloom all day long. Here in central Virginia, the day before Christmas Eve, the temperature is a balmy 72°F. The average high here in December is 50°F. The forecast calls for rain and thunderstorms through Christmas Day, then overcast for the weekend, then rain and thunderstorms next week. Wonderful.

Ever wonder why December is the 12th month, even though its Latin root decem- means 10? In fact, the same situation exists for the months of September, October, and November, which mean 7, 8, and 9, although they are our 9th, 10th, and 11th months.

It’s because the ancient Roman calendar had 10 months. The year started on March 1 and ended in December. At some point, January and February were added to the end of the calendar and became the last two months of the year. The calendar continued to evolve and by the time the Julian calendar was instituted by Julius Caesar in 46 AD, the starting date for a new year had become January 1. The original 10 months were pushed toward the end of the year by the two new months (January and February) but they kept their names. So December, originally the 10th month, is now the 12th month.

We no longer use the Julian calendar – we use the Gregorian calendar, named after the man who introduced it in 1582: Pope Gregory XIII. The Gregorian calendar kept the same months in the same order as the Julian calendar. Primarily, the Gregorian calendar changed the way leap years are calculated in order to make the length of a year more accurate.

Now you know. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Chairlift

The song of the day is 2011's Amanaemonesia by synthpop duo Chairlift (Caroline Polacheck and Patrick Wimberly). The song is on their album Something released in 2012.

M.I.A.

The song of the day is Borders by English singer, songwriter, director, and rapper M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam).

Maya was born in London but was raised in Sri Lanka during a fierce civil war that lasted 25 years. Tens of thousands of Sri Lankans left the country to escape the violence. Maya’s English birth certificate enabled her and her mother to return to England as refugees. Maya learned English quickly, completed primary and high school, and eventually earned a degree in fine art, film, and video in June 2000 from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Maya points out that the West’s film and music industries have long promoted a vision of life in the West that is very attractive to people trapped in difficult places around the world. Many of those people have decided, “Okay, yeah, I want the dream.” In a recent interview, Maya asked, “If the West is so deliberate in promoting its brands and is using art and culture to inspire people’s dreams, how can the West then turn people away?”

JoJo

The song of the day is When Love Hurts from the 2015 EP III (pronounced Tringle, a triple single EP) by singer, songwriter, and actress JoJo (Joanna Noëlle Blagden Levesque). JoJo’s debut album, JoJo, was released in 2004 when she was 13. Her debut single, Leave (Get Out) , reached number one on the Billboard pop songs chart, making her, at 13, the youngest solo artist to have a number-one single in the United States. Between 2006 and 2014, problems at her record label prevented her music from being released. In 2013 she took legal action against the label and was released from her contract in 2014. She is now signed with another label. More on the return of JoJo here.

Scott Weiland

I happened by chance to read in the news that Scott Weiland died this month, on December 3, from an accidental drug overdose. During his career he had been frontman for both Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver as well as a successful solo artist.
 
The song of the day is Sour Girl from the 1999 album № 4 (sometimes referred to as No. 4) by Stone Temple Pilots. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who appears in this video, posted a tribute to Weiland on her Instagram, saying “Your music will always be remembered.”

Melanie Martinez

The song of the day is Carousel from the 2015 album Cry Baby by singer and songwriter Melanie Martinez (Melanie Adele Martinez).

Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello

The song of the day is I Know What You Did Last Summer by Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes (Shawn Peter Raul Mendes) and Fifth Harmony’s Cuban-born vocalist Camila Cabello (Karla Camila Cabello Estrabao).

Lauren Alaina

The song of the day is Girl Crush by country artist Lauren Alaina. This song was a #1 hit for country vocal group Little Big Town and was released as a single from their album Pain Killer.

Beyond Mars

I read a review of Louis Friedman’s new book, Human Spaceflight From Mars to the Stars. (Friedman is the executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society, which he co-founded with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray in 1980.)

Friedman is optimistic about human space exploration, but he is quite certain that humans will not travel beyond the orbit of Mars in any significant way.

He says that human space travel beyond Mars is too expensive and is unnecessary; we can send machines to gather data, and virtual reality can give us the illusion that we have made the trip. He also says that space colonies – cities in space orbiting the sun – are impractical and unnecessary, a science-fiction idea that is not in our future.

I was at once reminded of Arthur Clarke’s First Law of Prediction: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I don’t know what time scale Friedman has in mind. If it’s the next 20 years, then he’s very probably correct. If it’s the next 1000 years, then he’s very probably wrong.

If a human of 300 years ago had been asked about the feasibility of going to the Moon, or of building a city full of skyscrapers, or even of building a network of paved roads like America's interstate highway system, he would surely have thought all of the ideas were far-fetched and unlikely to ever become reality.

Sending humans to the Moon? Not only impossible but completely unnecessary – until the invention of rocket technology and computers made it possible and a space-race made it necessary. A city of skyscrapers? Impossible – until inventions like structural steel, elevators, and electric lighting made it possible. A continent-wide system of paved highways? Impractical and unnecessary (for horses) until mass-production of motor vehicles made paved highways essential.

It’s impossible to predict future technologies and what they may enable humanity to do. It’s impossible to predict what our descendants may want to do or what they may need to do. However, we do know one aspect of the future: some of the things our descendants will do will be, to our eyes, indistinguishable from magic.

Zara Larsson

The song of the day is 2015's Lush Life by Swedish singer-songwriter Zara Larsson.

Barbarossa

The song of the day is Bloodline from the 2013 album Bloodlines by London musician Barbarossa (James Mathé).

Lisa Hannigan

The song of the day is Home from the 2011 album Passenger by Irish singer, songwriter, and musician Lisa Hannigan.

Buffalo Salmon Wings

After reading one of my recent blog posts in which I joked about salmon wings with Buffalo sauce, my friend and fellow blogger CyberDave pointed out that Buffalo salmon and Buffalo salmon wings are real things.

At Epicurious there is a recipe for Buffalo salmon. The recipe uses a salmon fillet that is breaded with panko (Japanese bread crumbs) and baked.

Food Network also has a recipe for Buffalo-style salmon that uses a salmon fillet.

A company called Seabear offers a kit containing a pouch of bite-size nuggets of wild Alaskan salmon in a light panko and flour coating and a separate pouch of Buffalo sauce. The kit is called Wild Salmon Buffalo Wings. Their recipe calls for the salmon nuggets to be cooked on the stovetop. I’ve never tried Buffalo salmon wings but they sure look tasty.

The only thing missing from the picture are the celery sticks.

The Old Skillet

When I was a kid, I usually prepared my own breakfast. Sometimes breakfast was bacon and eggs cooked in a cast iron skillet. There was a grease keeper on the countertop beside the stove. It had a filter to trap cracklings and particles of bacon. With the advent of microwave ovens and Teflon cookware, the cast iron skillet was almost rendered obsolete. It was down but not out. 

Many people have taken to using cast iron skillets again. I recently decided to use my old skillet to cook bacon and eggs again. The bacon doesn’t taste a lot different, but cooking the eggs in bacon grease opens up a whole new world of taste. Actually, it’s an old world of taste. Now my eggs taste the same way they tasted to young me, and to my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. The iron skillet is an antique, but it cooks as well as it did when it was new.

I’ve relearned how to season an iron skillet and what screws up the seasoning. I’ve learned how to clean a pan with salt and when it’s best to just wipe out the inside of the pan.

Teflon and ceramic pans aren’t supposed to be heated past medium heat, but cast iron skillets can be used on high heat (don’t immediately rinse them with cold water – the skillet could warp). Cast iron skillets are extremely durable. At most, you might mess up the seasoning and have to re-season the pan. Not a big deal.

You can fry, bake, and sear in an iron skillet. You can go from the stovetop to the oven to the grill with the same pan. There are many recipes for cast iron skillet meals. For starters, there are 27 recipes at Southern Living, 17 recipes at Rachael Ray, and 10 recipes at Food Network.

And if you’re wondering what you can do with the bacon drippings (assuming you cook bacon), Christy Jordan at Southern Plate has some ideas.

For me, there is something satisfying about cooking in a cast iron skillet. It’s organic, elemental – the opposite of unnatural, artificial. You can use metal utensils when cooking; if you scratch the seasoning, continue cooking and the seasoning will heal by itself. Teflon gives off fumes that are highly toxic to birds. Cast iron does not. Try serving food from a thin Teflon or ceramic pan; the food will be cold before the meal is finished. A cast iron pan stays hot a long time and keeps food warm.

There is one caveat: a cast iron skillet is heavy and its handle will get hot. Use a potholder or oven mitt. If you grab the pan off the stove with a bare hand, only to realize it’s burning you, you could get a burned hand and a broken foot at the same time.

The Month of Meh

I’ve not been very active in the blogosphere lately. The days between Thanksgiving and the New Year are, for me, the Sargasso Sea of the Soul, the Doldrums of the Spirit, the Zone of Apathy in which all of my get-up-and-go has done exactly that: it got-up-and-went. I don’t know where it went, but it left a hole in my psyche – a hole that can only be filled by inserting the proper amount of junk food and excess calories into my diet. And I’ve done that successfully, according to my bathroom scale.

One of the things I do with this extra time is read a lot of news. Some of it is eyebrow-raising. For example, I read that the Food and Drug Administration has approved the sale of genetically modified salmon. Yes, mad scientists have tinkered with salmon DNA and created something unnatural – unnatural in the sense that the fish now have, uh, “features” not found in nature. I think they’ve taken these genetic modifications too far, but no one asked me. These unnatural Franken-fish are not necessarily a bad thing. I hear those same mad scientists are now working on a new Buffalo sauce to go with the new salmon wings.

“Waitress, an order of wings, please.”
“Chicken or salmon?”

Just kidding. I’m pretty sure the new Franken-salmon will not have wings. Nor will they glow in the dark.

Yet.

Anderson East

The song of the day is Only You from the 2015 album Delilah by rhythm and blues/pop musician Anderson East (Michael Cameron Anderson).