Recent Blog Posts - Behind the Hedge

Rabbit Holes, Barrow Mounds, and Biblio-Burros: Does no one care about scholarly rigour anymore?
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A casual reading of Guglielmo Spirito’s “The Legends of the Trojan War in J.R.R. Tolkien”1 sent me down a polyramified rabbit hole the other day, questing for attribution, a bugbear of mine I’ve touched on before (see also the Tom Stoppard footnote below). Spirito begins his paper wit...
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Haggis-filled Baked Perogies
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Haggis-filled Baked Perogies
Burns Night is a little different this year — no big gatherings due to the pandemic, of course.  But also, there seems to be even more of a desire among the momentary Scots to take part somehow in a tribute and a toast to the Immortal Memory.  As my part I’ll share one of my...
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The Merry Widow Fizz
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In my post about The Helen Twelvetrees Cocktail I suggested that later I would dig up more on The Merry Widow Fizz mentioned by Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan. Well, now it’s later and here’s what I’ve found by searching through cocktail books on hand. Yes, a google search...
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The Helen Twelvetrees: or how an old cocktail let me witness ignorant pompous snobbery in the Edmonton beverage world
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The internet has become a wonderful resource for readers. When I was young, I enjoyed referring to Benet’s The Reader’s Encyclopedia and often found myself going down a rabbit hole of interlinked entries, much as one can become lost in a digital reverie when researching online. A few ...
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The Witch of Edmonton: A Cocktail
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The Witch of Edmonton: A Cocktail
This is a little trifle in the martini family that I came up with as a bit of a special Edmonton thing. The name, of course, comes from the title of the Elizabethan Play.  I won’t tell a big story, just straight to the recipe: To a cocktail shaker add 3 parts Strathcona Spirits Barrel-...
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“Lost in That Dream”: Some thoughts on Audrey Alexandra Brown’s “Laodamia” and a few associated poems.
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“Lost in That Dream”: Some thoughts on Audrey Alexandra Brown’s “Laodamia” and a few associated poems.
Audrey Alexandra Brown is a poet unjustly neglected. I certainly had never heard of her until I found, in a rural Alberta antique store, a first edition of her somewhat surprisingly titled collection A Dryad of Nanaimo. (It is from this 1931 copy from Macmillan that all quotations below come.) Wh...
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What Edmonton Theatre Could be in this Year of Plague
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  Four hundred years ago, the theatres in London were closed by Royal Decree as plague ravaged the city. For two years the theatres remained shuttered. But the theatre companies did not remain idle. They got creative, travelled to the provinces, the rural areas. They performed shortened vers...
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A Brief note on “Norse Poems” translated by W. H. Auden and Paul Beekman Taylor
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A Brief note on “Norse Poems” translated by W. H. Auden and Paul Beekman Taylor
One of the joys to be derived from second-hand books is the faith that the volume one holds and reads was held and read by someone in the past — one walks this new road with an unseen companion. I have written previously about this sort of experience — but with companions well-known t...
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On Certain Events Along the Shores of ‘Nnalubaale, Separated by a Century
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History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their viewpoint. — Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India. In his account of his circumnavigation of ‘Nnalubaale (now known as Lake Victoria), Henry Morton Stanley describes a moment of tension and violence on the La...
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Bread Recipe for Michael
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Bread Recipe for Michael
My friend Michael in this time of plague isolation had a bit of trouble with one of Jamie Oliver’s bread recipies, so, I’m sending her my recipe that makes pretty much all of our bread at home, plague or no plague. Feel free to try it yourself and let us all know in the comments [R...
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A Meditation on “The Ordinal of Alchemy”, A Real Book of Magic
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It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever see, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and […]
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Concerning a TEDxAntwerp Talk About the Global Monetary System
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Two issues I will take with the Tedx talk a friend posted to Facebook a few days ago about the global monetary system is that: a) Yes, the banks create fiat currency to finance loans/innovation seen as profitable and repayable. They don’t grant €100K to every potential furniture maker or we...
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A Brief Note on Cordwainer Smith’s “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” & “Under Old Earth”, Raleigh’s “Pilgrimage”, and the Adjective in Biblical Hebrew.
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But there was another voice somewhere, a voice which grated like the rasp of a saw cutting through bone, like the grind of a broken machine still working at ruinous top speed.  It was an evil voice, a terror-filling voice. Perhaps this really was the “death” which the tunnel underpeople had mista...
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A Midwinter Midsummer Night’s Dream
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The Malachite Company has been doing Shakespeare in Edmonton for four winters now, and what a treat it has been to have Old Strathcona’s grand old Holy Trinity Anglican Church filled up with light and laughter and warmth and a few bits of Elizabethan tragedy each January. Last night the fou...
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The “Merry Devil of Edmonton” and “The Witch of Edmonton”
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The following is adapted from the introduction to my adaptations of The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton. Out of Shakespeare’s Shadow That fellow from Stratford casts a long, virtually impenetrable shadow over the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Few today would be able to t...
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