Uses for Binder Clips - Birch Bark and Tree Needle Display

Zoom writes:

I don't know if you've covered this kind of binder clip application yet, but just in case you haven't...

When you get back from the woods with a strip of birch bark and some tree needles, you don't have to leave them lying on your coffee table with the junk mail till tidy-up day.

You can clip them to the string that hangs down from your blinds, where they'll be artistic and inspirational.

The ways in which I am prepared for the apocalypse

or Why you should invite me into your fallout shelter

1. I was certified as an Emergency Medical Technician in Massachusetts in 1984.
2. I can make beer and wine from scratch.
3. I cook without recipes and and am creative with substitutions.
4. I am good at finding things.
5. I can swim far.
6. Nuclear sunset by Ennor.
   I know how to raise chickens.
7. I have already survived malaria, paratyphus and typhoid.
8. I can tell a joke on any topic you mention.
9. I give a good shoulder rub.
10. I have an axe, a crosscut saw, a sledge hammer and a wood splitter.
11. I also have a good supply of binder clips and I know how to use them.
12. I know how to live without a refrigerator, hot water heater, washing machine, dryer and dishwasher.
13. After 39 years as an omnivorous science fiction fanatic, I am ready for virtually every post-apocalyptic nightmare that can be imagined.

(Marcie recently reminded me that I'm overdue for a list, and Nik's fascinating description of a 4am stroll got me thinking about how well prepared I am for life after an apocalypse. I may actually be less prepared for life without an apocalypse. My basic plan there is relying on my mother's lottery winnings. Mom tells me she still plays her 6/49 numbers every week and brings her tickets to an honest clerk. If she wins $10 million, I get a million and I'm sure that'll take care of everything.)

Uses for Binder Clips - Protecting Water Fountains

Pearl kindly sent me this earlier today:

Our water fountain is about ready to open for the season. With a bit of rubber liner, the binder clips kept snow and leaves out all winter.

From her blog, I can tell Pearl is a thoughtful person who weighs her actions.

This must mean that she has concluded that the greater good of protecting her water fountain from snow and leaves outweighs the harm exposing her beautiful, multi-functional binder clip to rust.

[I just realized that I momentarily forgot the point of binder clips. They exist to be used so that other things may achieve their purpose, not to be cherished in and of themselves. Does anyone else ever forget this about binder clips?]

Now UNICEF is puzzling me

I received this envelope today. I haven't opened it yet.

I am guessing that when I open it, I will discover how UNICEF thinks $0.05 (CDN) can save a child's life. Here are a few theories:

1. Maybe you can make enough rehydration fluid with five cents to prevent a child with diarrhea from dying.
2. You could use the nickel to bribe a child to stop doing something dangerous: "Say, kid, I'll give you this nickel if you stop running with scissors."
3. If you were in a place where guns get fired often, you could put the nickel on the ground. Maybe just as a gun is fired, a child would bend over to pick up the nickel and be saved!
4. If a bad guy planning to commit murder took a child into a bathroom stall, you could use the nickel to unlock the stall door and rescue the child.
5. You could put the nickel on a string, then swing it back and forth in front of a child who has started smoking and hypnotise the child into giving up cigarettes.
6. You could photocopy a page of instructions on how to survive various dangers [like these] and give it to a child.

All this to show that I am not puzzled by how a nickel can save a child. What puzzles me is why they sent this life-saving nickel to me. I'm not around children very much and when I am, I can almost always get a nickel or a nickel substitute.

I think I'll put it in the next mojo kit I make.

A Mock Winter Photo Roundup

Tim Horton's Today

I was out at the Provincial Offences Court with Matt C today. Before we came back downtown, Matt insisted on getting a coffee at Tim Horton's. Even though I didn't have a free coffee coupon on me, I decided I could buy one for a change. At the counter, he ordered a medium black and I ordered a large black. His came in two nested Roll Up the Rim cups. My coffee came in two nested ordinary cups. "This isn't fair," I said. "I don't get a Roll Up the Rim and he gets two?"

Just like I'd failed to persuade a justice of the peace earlier on a fine recommendation, I failed to persuade them to give me a Roll Up the Rim cup.

As we were leaving the building, Matt said, "Just so you know, if either of these is a big winner..."

"I know," I said, "I'll get nothing."

"That's right."

But you know what? Later in the afternoon, Matt came over and gave me one of the cups. One with a "win/gagner un café/a coffee" on it. "Just so you know, Matt," I said, "If the coffee I get with this wins the car, I'll be keeping it and giving you nothing in return."

"That's right!" he said. After eight months of small claims court, we like having things like this spelled out in advance.

[The cup pictured above was found on Lisgar, already rolled and not a winner. In the garbage can I was putting it in when this photo was taken there was another cup that looked like it might not have had the rim rolled because it still had its lid on. But there was a bunch of Lisgar Collegiate teachers right behind me and I was too embarrassed to fish that cup out.]

Sign of Spring

In the bottom left of this picture is a blurry image of a robin. When I first spotted him, he was standing in the snow. Of course, once I got the camera out, he walked onto the grass and then kept getting farther and farther away from me until I spooked him enough that he flew away.

But at least this is proof that it is not actually winter here.

Binder Clip Research

In the comments to Uses for Binder Clips - Parchment Bag Cooking, Jennifer asked if the paint on binder clips will stand up to cooking temperatures. The binder clips pictured here were in a 400F oven for two hours and show no ill effects, not even the yellow one. (Alas I didn't get it together to make date squares, only an easy oven meal thing.)

Christmas Lights

The weekend before this past weekend, I took down my Christmas lights.

I'm tempted to say that this is the earliest in the year I've ever taken them down. This would be a truthful statement. But given that I'm supposed to be striving to be "ethically ambitious", I should acknowledge that this is the first time I've taken Christmas lights down since I moved into this house in 1993. Three things prompted me to take them down.

1. Only three of the bulbs lit up the last time I plugged them in (probably six months ago).
2. I have a secret plan for the dead bulbs (this photo shows them in sudsy water before I scrubbed and rinsed them.)
3. Pam, my lovely next door neighbour, asked if I would mind if she took down the string of lights on the side of the house we share. (Pam is very good at the technique of getting me to clean things up by offering to do it for me.)

Two Signs that Puzzled Me

Walking on Elgin Street today, I glanced into the Standard. Their chalkboard said "Hockey, Sushi, Quarts... What more could you want?"

Even though watching hockey bores me, nothing leapt to mind.

But, it looks like they erased something between "Hockey" and "Sushi".

Could it be there is something more you could want that they ran out of?

____________________________

On Gladstone, I passed this car with a bumper sticker directing us to support organic farmers. Do you think there might be a more effective way to promote the people who grow food without using synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and growth regulators than by placing stickers on gasoline-powered vehicles?

Uses for Plastic Containers - PET sea creatures

close up jelly fish, Volvic water bottle, 2005 by Miwa Koizumi

Zoom, one of Ottawa's most generous bloggers sent me an email today that said:

I saw this and immediately thought of you and Megan and the quest for alternative uses for plastic containers: http://miwa.metm.org/PET_project/index.html It's extraordinarily astroidean, don't you agree?

I do agree! And I bet Megan will be totally into it when she sees that soldering irons and heat guns are involved!

Uses for Binder Clips - Poster Display

Megan's heroic Eric is not only a fine spider-removal man, he is also an expert user of binder clips. Today he sent me a link to a photo of a poster he has carefully displayed with four binder clips.

Of course, an observant reader would have noticed his binder clip usage back when Megan gushed about him a couple of weeks ago.

(Some bloggers might be concerned that Megan will not be gushing when she finds out that Eric gave me this scoop before giving it to her, but not me. All this lovey-dovey stuff is okay I suppose, but if this provokes a fight that livens up her blog, not only do I get a scoop, but we'll all have something exciting to read.)

Uses for Binder Clips - Parchment Bag Cooking

Weeks and weeks and weeks ago, the Other Kerri sent me a clipping of an article describing binder clips used for en papillote (or "parchment bag") cooking. It thrilled me that she'd been so kind, that it was a completely new use of binder clips and it was a cooking method I had never heard of!

So why has it taken me so long to post it? Well you see, she got the clipping from Cook's Illustrated magazine and when I went to their website it became clear that while some of their content is online and can be linked to, this article was behind their subscriber firewall.

So, I could have written them and asked for permission to reproduce the article that Kerri sent me, but I didn't because it annoyed me that they didn't make the content freely available in the first place. Especially because it looks like they got the idea from a contributor, Jana Volavka, and all she probably got was a free issue of the magazine or something.

There are all sorts of places you can go on the web to find out about cooking en papillote. Until a few minutes ago, none of them mentioned the use of binder clips. But now in Wikipedia we see:

En Papillote (French: "in parchment") is a method of cooking in which the food is put into a folded pouch or parcel and then baked. The parcel is typically made from folded parchment paper, but other material such as a paper bag or metal foil may be used. The parcel holds in moisture to steam the food.

The moisture may be from the food itself or wine, butter, water, oil or another moisture source may be added.

En Papillote is perhaps most often used to cook fish. Choice of herbs, seasonings and spices depend on the particular recipe being prepared.

The pouch may be sealed with careful folding or through the use of staples, paper clips or binder clips.

External Links A basic Fish en Papillote recipe How To: Cooking en Papillote Using Reynolds® Parchment Paper

This is the beauty of Wikipedia: If it is missing something important, it can be fixed.

Meanwhile, I'm not even going to give a link to Cook's Illustrated. If they want to guard their intellectual property that carefully, they can't expect free advertising.

Uses for Plastic Containers - Spider Removal

I've been feeling bad about not providing more clever uses for plastic containers,^{Note 1} and so I am happy to report that Megan's gallant beau, Eric, came up with a use I would not have thought of: Spider Removal.^{Note 2}

The photo shown here is the used container and lid after it had been used and placed in the recycling. In deference to Megan's phobia, you will have to imagine for yourself the spider it held.

Note 1: One idea I had for containers was using them to make space helmets for your puppets. But it turns out that my puppets all have heads that are too big for a 10cm diameter container.

Note 2: If it was summer time, I'd have thought of using a plastic container for removing bees, hornets or wasps, but for spiders I've always used my hands. Except for the time my cat in Africa was sparring with a tarantula. I used a biology text dropped from knee height to "take out" that spider.

Do you know this cute family?

Back during the real winter, I found this little frame with family photos on the sidewalk on Laurier St. W, just west of Elgin. A light snow was falling, so I picked it up with the intention of blogging it that very day so that it would be timely and have a better chance of winding up with its owner.

Instead, I forgot all about it until yesterday when I cleaned out my man-bag.

I have a tendency to pick things up and forget about them. There is a roll of film in my overcoat pocket that I found at the bus stop on Rideau Street more than a year ago. One of these days, I'll take it somewhere and have it developed. But I won't be taking it to Walmart or Costco. I don't want to get arrested if there are naked pictures on the roll.

Speaking of finding things on the sidewalk...

I'm no Dave X (reported on at Zoom's Blog), but I do make the occasional good find.

Lately I've been walking past a lot of Tim Horton's cups.^{Note 1} On Gladstone last night, I passed one near Metcalfe. For the next block, I thought about that 10-year-old girl in Quebec who demonstrated several fundamental principals of property law when she found the SUV-winning cup in the school trash can last year. So, the next cup, just after O'Connor, I stopped and rolled the rim -- "win/gagnez un café/coffee ©". ^{Note 2}

I am now a Tim Horton's coffee cup spotting robot. Unfortunately, of the rest of cups spotted on the walk home, three had "please play again" and one must have been a winner because the critical part had been ripped off the cup.

Note 1: Apparently I'm not the only who notices more of these cups on the ground during "Roll up the Rim" season: [National Post: Tim Hortons contest a litterbug, critics say: Roll up the rim begins]

Note 2: I've been reading a lot about copyright lately and find it very interesting that Tim Hortons appears to believe they can assert copyright ownership in "win/gagnez un café/coffee". If I was a lawyer I would be able to express an opinion on the issue, but I'm not, so I won't.

Impersonate those in power

Someone has fastened this work of art to the phone pole just north of MacLaren on Elgin Street.

Materials: oval mirror, wood, wood screws, paper, glue, and ink.

The caption is one of those instructions I've been following without knowing I was supposed to.

Update: There have been similar sitings by Robin, Zoom, and Pearl!

[Google Map of the installations]