💾 Archived View for mcornick.com › posts › 2023 › 07 › 03 › 5q-july-2023 captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:55:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-07-08)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Posted on 2023-07-03
It's that time again?
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/christyotwisty/phlog/2023-July-Five-Questions.txt
What's your favourite way to stay active?
I have always enjoyed bicycling. My prior home (in Washington, DC) was in a neighborhood that was not too hilly and had good bike infrastructure, such as bike lanes, so I would bike often to and from places that were a little too far to walk but a little too close to drive (the latter list being made longer by the fact that parking in DC is scarce and expensive.) My home before that (in Greenbelt, MD, a suburb of DC) was a few miles from the closest Metro station, so I would bike from home to the Metro and lock my bike in their bike garage (very handy!) then take the train into work.
These days, I don't bike as much, for two reasons: (a) I can walk to most things that I need (a supermarket is on the ground floor of my building, the nearest Metro is a little more than a five-minute walk, and my office is between my apartment and Metro); and (b) I have an elderly dog who gets audibly upset if I leave him alone, and taking him with me on bike rides isn't a realistic proposition.
What's the best way to stay focused and productive?
Don't watch TV. If you must watch TV, don't watch TV news. If you must watch TV news, don't watch the 24-hour cable TV news. If you must watch that... no, you seriously shouldn't.
(I don't watch TV news, but I do watch soccer and hockey on TV. So do as I say, not as I do, I suppose.)
If you could have any sport or game instantly mastered, unrelated to your current interests or abilities, which one would you choose and why?
I would choose basketball, so that when people who see my unusual height (6'4", 1.93 m) crack jokes about me playing basketball, I can answer in the affirmative, instead of coming back with "no, do you play miniature golf?"
Share with me an interesting trivia tidbit about your favourite historical event.
One of my middle school teachers was in the running for NASA's Teacher In Space program in the mid-1980s. She was not selected. Of course, the teacher who was eventually selected, Christa McAuliffe, died aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.
(This is not my "favorite" historical event, but is one that was quite memorable for me. I remember it like my parents remembered the JFK assassination or the moon landing. I was in high school, about to go to science class where we were going to watch the launch, which would have happened just before the class started. Instead, we watched the aftermath. Hard to forget something like that.)
Share a summer recipe.
Cold Brew Coffee
Ingredients: 2 cups cold water; 1 cup coffee beans (increase as desired, maintaining the 2:1 ratio)
Equipment: Coffee grinder; Chemex or French press; Chemex filter (optional)
1. Grind the beans as coarsely as your grinder will allow.
2. Mix ground coffee and water in Chemex or French press.
3. Refrigerate for 12-24 hours.
4. Separate the coffee grounds from the liquid and discard. I find removing the mixture from the Chemex, then running it through a filter back into the Chemex works well. (If you used too fine a ground in step 1, this step is much harder.)
5. Taste a small amount. If it's too strong for your taste, add water.
Serve chilled without ice; I prefer it black, or with a little vanilla or caramel syrup.
---
Previous: Five Questions June 2023
Next: Five Questions August 2023
Copyright © 2023 Mark Cornick. This work is licensed under