Coffaro Block 4 Blues: Thursday, June 19th

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. -Salman Rushdie, writer (b. 1947) 

Picaroon:

MEANING:

noun: 1. A rogue, thief, or pirate. 2. A pirate ship. verb intr.: To act as a pirate.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Spanish picarón (scoundrel), from picaro (rogue). Earliest documented use: 1624. 

Hi bike expert! I moved my bike out of storage to the front of my car - #G8. If it needs servicing I will walk it up the street but would appreciate if you put air in the tires for me and thanks for doing the bike lock piece for me. Cheers,
Joanne.

Hi JT! Sorry that I've not responded sooner but we had a busy day yesterday with Coffaros and then a wonderful bbq last night with Californians and self-invited Freeloaders! Hope you will join us this evening, anytime after 5:30 pm.
 

I have things to prepare for tonight, over next few hours, but I should have time to take a look at your bike in the early afternoon, if not sooner. If you are around, pop down, and we can chat. Talk later, one way or another. Cheers, Patrizzio! 

Hi JT! I pumped up both your tires. We can talk about positioning of wall bar tonight. Cheers, Patrizzio!!!                          Bit of a late sleep-in after last night's festivities! Once up, I started to prepare the ingredients for my antipasto dish, interspersing clean-up activities with food preparation. 

Cora Lee was off to her series of meetings so she was of little if no help but what can one expect of The Sisterhood anyway! 

Finished putting the antipasto together by noon and placed two full dishes in the fridge to chill before I went into the parkade to inflate tires on Joanne's bicycle. That minor chore accomplished I returned to wash the floor ibefoer rearranging the furniture for the evening's gathering. After this was done went next door to The Annexe to see how Coffaros were faring. They had been content to stay inside and read, probably feeling a few effects from last night's soirée. We had a pleasant chat while David made me an expresso. He carries his own small machina with him when he travels. 

While sipping my delicious brew we made plans to go to Long Table for a tasting, at 4:00 pm. I wanted them to meet owner, Charles, and taste his wonderful product. Thanking David for the java, I went back to The Islay Inn to find Cora Lee home, re-arranging the furniture, as I knew she would!

Leaving her to make the changes she deemed necessary, I went to shower and change and by the time I was bathed and beautified it was time to collect Coffaros. We took Aquabus to Hornby dock and then strolled up to Long Table. 

Unfortunately, for us, there was a private event that evening so it wasn't a good time for a visit, even a brief one. I introduced Pat and David and Charles poured them a slug of Cucumber Gin before we left. Made arrangements to see Charles another time as I wanted to giv ehim a taste of the Diplomatico rums I'd purhcased.

Since Long Table was a bust, we decided to visit Liberty Distillery on GI and actually had a wonderful tasting there. I was quite taken with all their product: Truth Vodka, (42%), Endeavour Gin, (45%) and Railspur No. 1 White, (47%). Nicely buzzed we strolled back to The Islay Inn finding that Cora Lee was busy putting out appetizers. 

Shortly thereafter, first guests started to arrive. [Thanks again, Patrick and Corinne, Wesley, Colin's son, is delighted to come. See you shortly! Colin and Yumi] I was charged with opening wine bottles at an alarming rate and then served my antipasto dish. Started on the patio as skies were clear and blue but as sooner had Sarge started to bbq, the heavens opened and drove everyone inside, or at least under the umbrella or covered part of deck. It must be said that Sergeant Preston did an incredible job of grilling the chicken and sausages in spite of the torrential downpour.

What with all the lovely salads, vegetable dishes and desserts everyone feasted rather well. So well, in fact, that there were hardly any overlefts! I had anticipated giving "doggy bags" of antipasto to those guests who wanted take-away but there was almost nothing of the dish left! Glad people liked it so much, of course. I had to be content with handing out recipe instead. Unfortunately, for my malt cabinet, rowdy guests didn't want to leave so we burnt the midnight oil until about 1:00 am! Still, in spite of my extended speechifying, a fine send-off for the Coffaros and a wonderful opportunity for friends and family to meet both Pat and David.

From Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer. The individuals with the most prodigious memories, those that win the United States and World Memory Championships, use a technique called the "method of loci" or "memory palace." Since the human brain is highly adept at remembering spaces and images, they simply visualize a house or palace, and visually place each item on a path through the house -- using a highly unusual and memorable visual association for each item. Then, to remember, they simply take a mental "walk" through the house on that same path and "see" each item they need to remember. It turns out that this "memory palace" technique was used by the greats of antiquity during times when -- because of the absence of the printing press and the internet -- memory was a much more highly honored ability:

"Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training ... were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written some­time between 86 and 82 B.C. ... The techniques introduced in the Ad Herennium were widely prac­ticed in the ancient world. In fact, in his own writings on the art of memory, Cicero says that the techniques are so well known that he felt he didn't need to waste ink describing them in detail. ... Once upon a time, ... memory train­ing was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.

"In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct. Just look at Pliny the Elder's Natural History, the first-century encyclopedia that chronicled ... the most exceptional memories then known to history. 'King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,' Pliny reports. 'Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people. King Pyrrhus's envoy Cineas knew those of the Sen­ate and knighthood at Rome the day after his arrival ... A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading them.' ... Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they'd been given to him. St. Augustine tells of a friend, Simplicius, who could recite Virgil by heart -- backward. A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge.
 

"The [technique] is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the 'method of loci' by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a 'memory palace.' Memory palaces don't necessarily have to be palatial -- or even buildings. They can be routes through a town ... or station stops along a railway. ... They can be big or small, indoors or outdoors, real or imagi­nary, so long as there's some semblance of order that links one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar. 
 

The four-time U.S. memory champion Scott Hagwood uses luxury homes featured in Architectural Digest to store his memories. Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, the effervescent Malaysian memory champ, used his own body parts as loci to help him memorize the entire 56,000-word, 1,774-page Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. One might have dozens, hundreds, per­haps even thousands of memory palaces, each built to hold a different set of memories. ...

" 'The thing to understand is that humans are very, very good at learning spaces,' [memory grand master] Ed Cooke remarked. ... 'Just to give an example, if you are left alone for five minutes in someone else's house you've never visited before, and you're feeling energetic and nosy, think about how much of that house could be fixed in your memory in that brief period.

You'd be able to learn not just where all the different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimensions and decoration, the arrangement of their contents, and where the windows are. Without really noticing it, you'd remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects and all sorts of dimensions that you wouldn't even notice yourself noticing. If you actually add up all that information, it's like the equivalent of a short novel. But we don't ever register that as being a memory achievement. Humans just gobble up spatial information.'

"The principle of the memory palace is to use one's exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally. ... The crucial thing was to choose a memory palace with which [you are] intimately familiar [such as] the house you grew up in. ...

"'It's important that you deeply process that image, so you give it as much attention as possible,' Ed continued. [So if, for example, you want to remember the cottage cheese on your shopping list,] try to imagine [Claudia Schiffer swimming in a tub of cottage cheese]. 

And make sure you [visually place this cottage cheese image in a specific room in your mental house] ...  The Ad Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one's memory palace: the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better... 
 

The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus. What distinguishes a great mnemonist is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Which is why [memory champion] Tony Buzan tells anyone who will listen that the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity."

The Temple of Time

Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer, The Penguin Press, 2011. Tesla Motors, Inc. is an American company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrain components. Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA. In the first quarter of 2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its ten year history