Hello my friends
I'm very happy you are visiting!
Hello my friends
I'm very happy you are visiting!
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Saturday, April 6, 2019
A formal, written apology, sent from a government to a group of people that the government had harmed.
Bill H. Gong - Own work
It’s never a question of someone’s making a mistake.
Mistakes are inevitable.
Separate mankind from angels.
It’s always a question of how the errant responds to the error.
Apologies that acknowledge the error, express regret for it, and take responsibility making good the loss or injury leave the injured party no place to go but acceptance and forgiveness.
It’s never a question of someone’s making a mistake.
But apologies are not made in a vacuum and the delivery, that is, the timing, the phraseology, the tone will add or detract from the recipient’s readiness to accept it.
And listening to the delivery, the injured party may decide to seek revenge, avoid the errant, or renew the relationship as was before the mistake.
The apology is the gravamen.
It’s never a question of someone’s making a mistake.
Dinner of Pork Chops and Vinegar Peppers.
So flavorful!
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Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Saturday, April 6, 2019
My 365th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 365 posts we’re at the 7.30% mark of my commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 12.01am.
On Saturday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 63* with a feels-like temperature of 63* with a chance of rain.
Including today, only one day in the next seven dips below 50*
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
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The question and answer segment of today’s blog will be replaced by another installment of HD’s wonderful series of “My Cafe Life.”
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Love your notes.
Contact me at domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Kali L:
Dear Dom,
I am so happy to hear you have discovered peace in the midst of any kind of chaos or emotional growth swirling about.
Isn't that moment so beautiful and to be cherished -
you're a blessing!
Kali
Web Meister Responds: And although it’s taken me two lifetimes and dramatic help from my friends to get here, I cherish the place I’m at. Thank you for your kindness.
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Chuckle of the Day:
A man walks into a bar looking sad.
The bartender asks him what he’d like.
“Oh just a beer”.
The bartender returns with the beer and sets it down saying, “You look depressed today.”
“My wife and i got into a fight, and she said she wouldn’t talk to me for a month”.
The bartender says, “So what’s wrong with that”?
“Well tonight the month is up.”
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Occasional Notes
by Howard Dinin
In France, the café is where you go to get two things. There’s coffee, of course (with a menu of drinks concocted thereby), but as importantly, there’s social engagement, conviviality, and even without exchanging a word with a stranger, even if you’re sitting by yourself, the eternal anodyne of being part of some bigger thing, of being of a community.
But of course, that’s not all that’s on offer.
In France, you don’t have to spend too much time in any part of the country, and as soon as you depart from the well-trodden pathways of the tourist trade and sequester yourself however briefly in the usual and typical haunts of the natives, you discover that cafés and café life do not necessarily center on coffee. It’s necessary, and at the same time secondary to a larger motive. I prefer the French way of centering aspects of one’s daily life on a certain I’d call it almost a prescriptive amount of time in a café, and that is, a venue that you discover quickly becomes your preferred nest. As with most things in this life, any life anywhere, however, it’s not enough boldly and baldly to assert such a thing. It’s personal, and it’s substantive.
You have to go back to the 17th century, and in particular in England, to understand what is at the roots of my preference for the superiority (for me) of the French idea of a café, as a place to relax, have a coffee, and contemplate whatever... Coffee was the preferred drink in a certain type of establishment, called in a fully predictable way a coffee house. The custom of seeking out a venue dedicated nominally to the consumption of a beverage that came from the “mysterious” east—actually it’s generally understood to have been Turkey, but its actual roots probably derive further east—established itself quickly.
Here’s my local hang when I’m over there in France. It’s an interior view of a place you’ve seen in this space previously; the Grand Café du Cours, in Aups, Provence. This is the scene mid-morning, on a brisk day just three days before New Year’s Eve. Typical
And no, it’s not an accidental bad photo. It’s shot with a slow shutter on purpose, to catch the liveliness. These people don’t all sit still, not all at once, and they are in constant engagement. That’s the patron (what the Italians call, as, like cofé, it’s a cognate, the “padrone”) over on the left, either taking some ribbing, or handing it out, along with the change for someone’s drink order.
Coffee, and one reasonable argument about derivation adduces that the name of the drink comes from the Arabic, variously translated, but essentially it was qahwah (pronounced kava, which may sound beguilingly familiar). Qahwah has always had ascribed to it certain miraculous properties, often associated with health-supporting effects on the physiology of humans. It has always been understood to provide a feeling of energy and well-being.
As it was derived from a plant that thrives in certain climates and relevant environmental conditions associated with certain other measurable dimensions related to geo-location, but is botanically a plant that originally thrived growing wild—I guess it’s technically a shrub or bush that bears fruit; the coffee bean is actually a seed of the berry that grows on it—it became clear that for all its seemingly miraculous properties, it had the additional unassailable quality of being relatively inexpensive to produce. Thus it was destined to spread like wildfire as a consumer desirable.
There are better settings than this one to consider the intriguing circuitous and complex route the custom of drinking coffee as a beverage that always apparently has seemed best suited to the modality of social engagement. In short, it has historically always been something consumed in the company of others. Suffice it to say, as the historical evidence more than makes plain that eventually it reached England, and there it thrived.
And from there, it (the “it” is not coffee, which found its own route to other destinations in Europe, but the specific venue of a place to drink coffee—in England it was the coffee house) popped over to France, where it became the café, seemingly the same, but very different. But that’s another part of the story for another time.
What differentiates the French café from the English coffee house, and even more so from the American coffee shop (even, if not especially, of the derivative Starbucks model). In advertising lingo, it’s not just for coffee. For one thing, past the morning rush, there’s not much call for coffee the rest of the day, except as a respite for lone customers, or as a cap to a meal. Coffee starts the day, and it also means, entirely, blissfully, symmetrically, the day is over.
For one thing, you cannot live by coffee alone. Folks have other needs, and sometimes other thirsts. It’s France after all, which had wine going back 2500 years to the Greeks, long before anyone in the known world had coffee.
I have a list of eleven apologies that are not acceptable.
I make reference to it when I’m being wooed.
__________________________________Good Morning on this Saturday, the Sixth Day of April.
Today we talked about mistakes and apologies.
About the weather, calendar, and dinner, Pork Chops and Vinegar Peppers.
We posted a joke and the next lovely installment of My Café Life by our Howard.
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your Love