In the 60's, fondue was all the rage, at least in our neck of the woods.  Slow eating was in.  Cool folks huddled around  hot cooking oil in a communal pot on the dining room table.  Little cubes of beef sizzling on a sharp fondue fork,  frequently falling off the fork into the pot;  some-time chefs fumbling around with their fork, poking to find their cubes and knocking off everyone else's meat in the process.  In time some skill was acquired but the greasy cube was carefully  hauled across the table avoiding  dripping on the table or everyone else and dipped in creamy dill or plum sauce. Clearly I was not fond of fondue but others were and the pianist also pursued chocolate fondue with fresh strawberries and  cheese fondue with bread cubes.
       For those who enjoy a languid, more cognitive eating style, it could be a conversational bonanza so while your little cube is cooking, your mouth empty and working overtime talking, despite the constant attention to keeping the oil boiling, the meat from being overdone, the gymnastics with the forks at the minimum, plus  deciding whose fork is whose. To achieve that languid space you just had to decide to eat less. Fondue is not a guy thing. Crude  as it may seem I was always driven more by my hypothalamus and parotid gland to fill up,  so mercifully for me,  fondue has succumbed to time and the rat race.
       The Garden at Lotus Island always had a few artichokes.  They are beautiful when growing and in flower.
Eating the chokes is in addition to fondue another contribution to the Slow Loris eating industry. Sucking and scraping away at the sepals of the flower bud after dipping in garlic butter the eater will need to recondition himself to get rid of the grease and fuzz. Dipping the soft and tasteless bases of the calyx requires preemptive action of slow dissection, ridding oneself of the  nascent fuzzy petals which guarantees that the rest of your meal will get cold while filling the garbage pail with the 90% that is the inedible part of the choke. My advice to artichoke lovers is let them flower into their magnificent purple thistle like head and have a table centre for them  with your meat and potatoes and ketchup.  Quelle delicatesse!

      In Anthony Trollope's fiction  Barchester Towers his character Mr. Arabin says to Eleanor Bold,  "I can become equally convinced of the logic of completely opposite points of view."  Another inconsistency would be the  assertion that one " always believes the last thing he was told or heard."  Myself on the other hand has in some ways envied those who have strong and lasting points of view,  though possibly they fall into the category of  " frequently wrong but never in doubt".
        I remember when my turn as Chief of the Medical Staff at the Royal Jubilee Hospital began, my predecessor saying to me,  "You're going to have trouble with this job unless you get rid of your naivety.  There is a difference between being open-minded and having " holes in your head" .  I told her I thought my ability to see all points of view gave me the opportunity to mediate, a valuable resource as Chief. She said that argument, is often marshaled in a facile  way by the dogmatic and manipulative, that can beguile the open minded. 
         As we talked of decision making and points of view I thought of Mr Arabin and Eleanor Bold. If one hears reasoned argument for opposing points of view  and does not have time for the logic, then put it on the shelf till you do. There is nothing like time to resolve issues and the urgency is rarely ours. Where urgency exists, Eleanor's observation to Arabin was apt to me as well. She believed he had strong points of view which he was unwilling to reveal. She had to give him a nudge but he loved her and she knew it. Those who care for you will always tell you their truth about yourself.  Though my relationship with my predessor was that of stewardship of the hospital rather than love, I valued her opinion, but like Arabin tried to soften strong points of view, for unity ! 
       

I was testifying in the Supreme Court as an expert witness on behalf of an insurance company in an accident claim. The previous day my esteemed colleague had testified for the plaintive.  This was a jury trial.  The plaintiffs lawyer was challenging my written report that had been earlier submitted to the court. My opinion differed from my colleague's opinion that had been rendered the previous day.
        I was sitting in the witness box, still under cross-examination, when the judge made an observation to the jury.  He said, as nearly as I can remember,  "You the jury, have heard two distinguished physicians arrive at different conclusions based on consideration of the same set of facts. This reminds me, "he said, " of old judge So and So, QC who defined an expert witness as a sonofabitch with a briefcase."  I was speechless. So were the lawyers. There was a long pause as the jury members looked at one another and inwardly digested the lord's remark. After the fact, I thought of many clever things I might have said, but the judge is Master of the Court and contempt towards it is not easily undone.
        To anaiyze, we often place a jury in a difficult situation when evidence of both witnesses may be equally persuasive. Medicine in many instances is  not an exact science. As you may expect this observation swung the scale and the plaintiff received a large settlement. The defense had the basis for appeal on possible grounds of judicial bias but did not do so.
        In retrospect the judge may have been expressing a frustration many judges and juries do have and that is having to choose between testimony they believe is conditioned by   "who pays the piper calls the tune". In fact, having reviewed many such scenario's the truth that is much more usual is  "the payer {lawyer} shops for those pipers{doctors} whose tune he knows he can dance to." Judges should know this of course since lawyers judge shop as well as witnesses. It's a question of shopping, not collusion and is not really mystifying.

        Wallace Stegner, a Canadian. was a professor of literature at Stanford and lived in his early life in the Palliser Triangle in Saskatchewan. In his growing up in Willowbunch he describes in the Canadian classic, Wolf Willow the cutting of meat in the icehouse from the frozen side of beef as his job as a kid.That took me back to the identical job I often did for our family as a boy, going to the icehouse and sawing off a piece of meat from the frozen side of beef we had there. I had no idea whether it was steak or roast or whatever. It was just a chunk of beef. It seems to me I sawed off about the right amount that we could eat without identity of any features and my mother never objected to my offering. I assume it was because she wasn"t strong enough to saw off a hunk of solid frozen meat and I was. At that time we lived just north of the Palliser Triangle.
          Boyhood discarded by both Stegner and me, I guess we became more refined, whatever that means at least in respect to meat and he became interested in human behavior at Stanford and I moved to becoming a Sawbones and on to carving a different kind of muscle in Victoria.
            When I met my prospective father-in-law in Winnipeg he told me he been a dollar-a-year man serving on the rationing board for the Canadian government during the second world war. He was responsible for the rationing of meats and strict adherence to the meat charts and responsible for both the cutting and distribution. That would have been a lot of responsibility  for his pay of the annual dollar but it was the holy grail to him. I don't think I ever told him about my dodgy icehouse meat activity or Stegner's either. He would have forgiven us because it was after the war and after rationing but he would have known that the aspirant to his daughter's hand and heart would have had such a rudimentary approach to meat.

Three ravens visited our plot that day, prompting a vigorous pursuit by the crows, who really own the place.The ravens  (Corvus corax} appear to produce extraordinary rage on the part of the crows (Corvus caurinus}. The crows do not seem to mind the eagles, seagulls or herons, though they maintain distance, However there is something about ravens that always produces a noisy pursuit.
       The crows seem to have a congregational life and the teamwork they display is remarkable. They always have a Watchbird and a distant early warning system to alert the pianist and me  of the approach of an enemy. The crows play frequently,  diving and wheeling and rotating at intervals with one another. Life for them does not always seem serious. Whereas the raven seems more a solitary bird and an outsider, largely unwelcome at least by our birds.
       Unlike the raven,  the range of vocalizations of the crows appears large but it is hard to know what they are saying. Certain phasing does appear identifiable with specific situations. They seem very smart and have learned from the seagulls how to drop clams on the shore stones to crack open. They can compete with the gulls for shore side delicacies whereas the gulls are too stupid to learn anything from them. The gulls seem to congregate,  but have no time for one another as they always compete,  other than team work like the crows. Our crows knew when the small tree fruits ripened and they preemptively ate them two weeks prior to the time we would pick.
          I often wondered at the choice of the Steller's Jay  (Cyanacitta stelleri)  as the provincial bird of British Columbia.  They don't have the skill, intelligence or "savior faire"  to compare with the Northwestern Crow. They may be beautiful but they are noisy, obnoxious, and have attention deficet disorder. Beauty before brains was the operative phrase when the B.C. Committee made that unfortunte choice  I guess.

My friend Earl told me years ago that his prospective in-laws, who had never met his parents, came to visit them unexpectedly at their home. The old boy was out, said to be turning over his compost pile, so the enthusiastic visiting mother of the bride to be volunteered to get him and rounded the house to catch him unaware, taking a pee on the compost pile. Since he was an Englishman he raised his hat to her.     What else could he do?
       I was relating this story to my family at dinner as I thought it was funny and the pianist said to me,  "You've never done that have you?" She looked at me through querulous eyes.
        " No. " , I said
        My daughter said, " Yes he does.  I've seen him stand and pee on the compost. "
        You can rarely get away with anything in a family!
        I told this whole story to my friend Ez'.  I included my little exposure from my daughter. I excused the behavior based on the fact that both Earl's father and I lived in a secluded area of Lotus City that was quite private. We were less likely to offend anyone and our compost would be healthier.  On the other hand Ez' lived in a wealthy enclave of Lotus City that was much less secluded.
          I said, " You, on the other hand couldn't get away with it because your properties are more open.  Your neighbors would see you."
         " Yes, " he said, "that may be true, but my neighbors have too much  ' je ne sais quoi ' to say so."
         Touche !

Bill Shakespeare has the Duke say, " If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; for, like an ass  whose back with ingots bows, thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey and death unloads thee. " And also,  if you're not young but old----"When thou art old and rich, thou hast neither heat , affection, limb,  nor beauty, to make your riches pleasant."  (Measure for Measure.}
       Wealth has taken a beating these days and maybe it's a good thing.  Maybe we should adopt the "Year of Release" every seven years when all debts are forgiven and we start again. Fat chance !  I really don't believe that anyway. It might have worked in the ancient tight little colony of the Hebrews.  Maybe we should have a a Hebrew  " Year of Jubilee " every fifty years when land is returned to the dispossessed. If the Dukes of Sutherland had thereby left a nobler legacy, most of us would have never found ourselves in Canada. If you believe that Bill Shakespeare had it right it still "cuts no ice." Some will still cling to what they have until the agonal state arrives.
      On the other note  a more modern playwright,  Frederico Fellini, had his wealthy dying Grandee saying, I paraphrase,  "If you eat me you will partake of my bounty. "  The penultimate scene in Fellini Satyricon is the inheritors sitting around a large table munching doggedly on the corpse to fulfill the conditions of the will. They are clearly not enthralled by the means to the end but it shows where Fellini puts the bounty hunters.
        How much, money seems to rule.  How much misery it has caused.  How much sacrifice it has driven.  How little stability it really provides.  How much joy it has erased.  How manipulated those who receive. Of course we all know that money per se is not evil ;  it is the love of money that leads to destruction,  Money can provide ease ; the love of money provides dis-ease.
       Our values have been so skewed by reward,  that it is difficult to carve a path that combines the growth of the soul with the necessities of the flesh.  People give up trying.  They become cynical.  Anger arises at the fetters that have become bonds and chains. Ambivalence confounds even the gentle.