Category: Culture

This a broad category covering a range of cultural topics, including national, regional dress, events, ceremonies, food, cultural markers, etc.

  • Family Photo Albums

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    Family Photo Albums

    In this tutorial I cover two topics on dealing with traditional (paper-based) family photo albums: I have a collection of family photo albums from both sets of grandparents, my parents and then for my wife and I. We are now collecting photographs of our grandchildren. To this point I have scanned some 1628 photographs dating…

  • Spam

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    Spam

    After the meat treat, the word conjures up images of nuisance e-mails. But wait, there’s more! There are those telephone calls that are from some telephone company, a courier service, the VISA Security Centre, or they are in Chinese or there is just silence. A visit to the mailbox usually finds it full of flyers…

  • Unintended Consequences

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    Unintended Consequences

    Prison walls are typically built to keep people in. Similarly the Great Fire Wall of China is intended to keep Chinese inside the moderated Chinese “internet”. But, with the threat of a TikTok shutdown in the United States, hundreds of thousands of users of that service have opted to move to “Red Book“, an alternative…

  • Care Package from Germany

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    Care Package from Germany

    The postal strike delayed the delivery of my care package — a selection of lebkuchen, sometime referred to in the vulgate as gingerbread — that I usually receive before Christmas. I was in fact so desperate that I made my own. Twice I have made them, and having passed the little granddaughter test, meaning they…

  • Perceived vs Actual Age

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    Perceived vs Actual Age

    An article in the Wall Street Journal noted: “As American 30-somethings increasingly bypass the traditional milestones of adulthood, economists are warning that what seemed like a lag may in fact be a permanent state of arrested development.” I noted earlier that I have been going through old photo albums. It struck me how the people…