Author: Monique (Page 55 of 130)

From Farm to Table: A six-part Food and Culture series on sustainable food systems hosted by Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks and Farmfed

I’m helping Anthony Nicalo and Natalie Jensen of Farmfed, a non-profit organization dedicated to building transparent, sustainable food systems, promote their six-part food and culture series entitled Provenance: You are what you eat.

If you want to help, grab the widget in the sidebar or pull some info from below. Or just come to the events! Hope to see you there.

From Farm to Table. Provenance: meaning source or origin. You Are What You Eat

Over the course of the series, experts will join host Anthony Nicalo for classes directed at understanding the origins and sources of the meat, seafood, wine, and produce that appear on our kitchen tables and restaurant tables.

Location
* Part 1-5: Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks in Vancouver at 1740 West 2nd Ave.
* Part 6: UBC Farm at UBC

Tickets
$65 for individual tickets or $360 for all 6.
Call Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks at 604.688.6755.

Net proceeds from the series will benefit programs supporting transparent, sustainable food systems.
http://www.farmfed.com/programs/provenance/

Tuesday, April 21
Join Anthony Nicalo for the official book launch of Provenance: a blueprint for the modern eater. Guests will learn to assess the sources for food they eat and will learn practical tips for buying clean, healthy food.

Monday, April 27
Special guests include Mike McDermid, Program Manager of Ocean Wise, and Chef Robert Clark of [C] Restaurant discussing the importance of understanding seafood’s impacts on our oceans. Guests will enjoy sustainable seafood hors d’oeuvres prepared by Chef Robert Clark and fish-friendly wines.

Tuesday May 5
Jason Pleym, founder of Two Rivers Specialty Meats will shed light on what is really going on in grocers and butcher shops, while guests taste naturally raised meats.

Wednesday May 20
Mark Bomford, the Program Coordinator for the Centre of Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm will share tips for buying and growing sustainable produce.

Tuesday May 26
Farmstead Wines founder Anthony Nicalo lifts the veil on wine marketing and connects guests to authentic wine and artisan farmers.

Saturday June 6 at UBC Farm
This special fundraiser features international food expert and author of In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan. Pollan will share his manifesto for eating. Guests who participate in the full series will receive a gourmet picnic lunch at UBC Farm.

“Having these experts share their knowledge with us is very empowering”, remarked Anthony Nicalo. “Because the food we eat has clear implications for everything from clean water and climate change to hunger and obesity, the power to change the world is right in front of us, on our plates.”

If you can’t join us in Vancouver, the series will be broadcast live online via Ustream. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/farmfed

Freaky. Yes it works. I printed out the page.
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

Today is World Autism Awareness Day.

In celebration, I want to highlight a book I reviewed many moons ago: Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach. This is a novel full of funny and educational moments (and sad moments) in raising a child with autism. In this review I’ve also posted links to a couple of other books by writers with autism or books with characters who have autism.

Celebrate difference.

Hey, Hatshepsut is my favourite Egyptian king. He was a she and she rocked! Hatshepsut is kind of pronounced like “hot chep soup”, like hot chicken soup.

This is a 3,500-year-old perfume bottle that a German research team discovered in March 2009 and there is still some ancient oil in the bottle.

So exciting! More on National Geographic…

Saturday the Butchers of Gastown got together to take care of Wanda.

* Anthony
* Ben
* Boris
* Evan
* James
* Mark

Karen and I documented. Andrea and Rachael stopped by for a visit. And it was all good.

Highlights

Full set is here.

Breakfast

Wanda arrives.

Butchering. Wanda’s cuts are done and then she’s put in the fridge.

Hours of meat cutting and grinding in order to make sausage.

Ribs with Ben’s Rub

Breakfast Wine for Monique.

Ribs and sausage. Both are delicious.

Up close and personal with the sausage.

Close examination of the rub.

Skin sausage blow-out.

Boris makes bacon.

Anthony’s grub. I’d eat it any day.

Anthony makes salami.

Leah makes sausage.

I was there.

Mark receives.

Anthony inspects the work.

The kitchen clean up.

Presentation example.

Ada Lovelace Day is when we celebrate women in technology who inspire us. I am in awe that I made Kate’s list because Kate is truly inspirational to me.

My shout out, since I’ve been negative about the publishing industry, needs to go to Julie Wilson of SeenReading.com who continues to come up with phenomenal ways to capture the attention of book readers.

She’s promoting poets for Poetry Month:
30 in 30 video

She also has a kick-ass google mashup of bookstores across Canada and about a million great ideas for promoting books online.

I love you Julie. Thank you for rocking my world!

Bruce Sterling Session
Monday, March 16th at 05:00 PM

PRESENTERS
* Bruce Sterling – Wired.com

DESCRIPTION

His state-of-the-cybersphere analyses are always a highlight of SXSW Interactive. Don’t miss what the veteran science fiction writer and industry pundit has to say about the wired world this year.

MONIQUE’S NOTES

Let’s talk about our relationship. Yours and mine.

I’m an author. I’m a journalist.
There’s my business card.
With a phone and fax number.

Look. These artifacts are called books. I know you’re not used to seeing them.

Let me explain how they work.

I write a lot of words in a row. A whole lot of words. Not even character count. Then I go back and carefully restructure them and move them until they have a coherent storyline. Then I send them to my agent who sends them to a publisher who sends it to an editor and eventually it goes to a distributor who handled cult activities like author tours. And it goes to retailers who sell it to people and then return unsold copies.

This whole business has hit the skids.

Publishing has never been such a parless states. If you were an author in this system, you go 4-8% in a not really accurate royalty system. But that was ok because you, as an author, were likely to go screwy anyway.

As an author and journalist, I feel much more sorrow for the state of editors.

Editors/Publishers model is not working out. Now you have the cliched perfect storm of troubles.

Sterling on the book
I have them. I thought about spamming the audience with them. Or hiding them and geo-locating them …

No this belongs to someone who is young. Under 20?

There is not a teen in the room? So much for this being a teenagers. Think. Just break times’ hourglass. Just take them away young people. I don’t expect you to read them. You txt.

How do we face this problem?

Twitter feed: media is dying

Print media spent 20 years making fun of a paperless society.

Could I put it on Kindle? Oh it’s there. Am I happy about that? No. Will anyone be reading a Kindle when one of them is my age? No. It’s like an atari.

Traditionally authors burn all their love letters on their death bed. Now we issue them under creative commons.

WIRED Italia. Look at the size of the ads in this baby.

[ … monique distracted … ]

What concerns me is the death of the audience. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’m better off than most authors I know, most journalists I know. There was a period of greater prosperity. I wonder why, why do I have a relationship to you. Why do you have a relationship to you?

My twitter group is bigger than you, more widely spread than you. They are probably a better audience than you. They can put up with more than you. They’ll RT me. I know some of you are gathering together in the back conspiring … drifting … you’re the people formerly known as the audience. And you’re forfeiting the benefits of the audience. Paying attention to the point of being able to discuss it.

[Bruce opens a drink. I used to have a great parties. It was my house. We were there to enjoy ourselves. Opens chips. You thought you were getting chips, but I was in control of the chips. The servers. They were in my corner.]

MT: Best laugh out loud.

Old social media (parties) were bring who you trusted.

The party audience was replace by social media influencers. Their capacities were built up. It was impossible to open up to this audience because they’d tweet their buddy list. It’s a technologically transformed situation and the loss is a social loss.

There’s a loss.

How do we restore those days? They aren’t coming back. Why do I keep up author appearances? Why do I have to keep up a level of respect? You’re not my friends. I’m not your host.

[cookie eating now]

Even if you’re broke, you will still be densely connected.

Connectivity is a symbol of poverty.

I might become boring enough that no one comes by anymore. You can lose your fame to the point that no one shows up.

I can’t throw a party and sit around and talk about vinyl and books. I feel the loss keenly. Playing lost vinyl for your friends. This has vanished.

I have little parties in those places with which I have similar relationships to this one. Lift Conference is getting bigger every year. Reboot in Denmark, great conference again. Amsterdam is on top of their game.

USA could be like Canada. We’re afraid of French, Germans. We’re liking Canadians: cute, cuddly. They’re afraid of being us.

Let me read this silly stuff to explain what’s happening:

“Melt down money-quake yuppy flu end of the world as we know it the long emergency bush’s legacy the great reset the inflection un-real estate communism 2.0 … the long doom.”

This is what I think books will look like in the future. Austin is a bookish town. Book culture will mutate on the way down.

Austin bookstore I saw on the way into town. HP Lovecraft: greatest, most creative … and when he wasn’t getting commercial work he basically started blogging. Here are his miscellaneous writings. A small fraction of his discourse and it’s bigger than his collective works. This non-fiction, community organization was more time than his stories.

Within his community, he was trusted. The American Amateur Press Association was his blog network. A lot of writers came out of this association. Robert Block. The Lovecraft circle who grew up from a B.

He perished.

What does the future look like?

Go to Brave New Books in Austin. Right-wing nutty.

This is a harbinger of something interesting. The tactics are more important here.

[ … more to come … 15 minutes of battery left … ]