The Blork Blog

Merguez sausage is one of those things I should like, but don’t really. But why not? Tasty lamb meat spiced with harissa and other goodies then stuffed into slender tubes. Bring it on! But for some reason I find that merguez sausages never quite deliver the kind of sausagy goodness I regularly get from Italian [...]

A week ago Saturday, Martine and I were walking through Union Square in New York when we saw a small group of people holding signs that proclaimed “We are Sorry.” Sorry about what, I wondered, so I went over to find out. They didn’t look very rueful, in fact they seemed to be having a [...]

My friend Jeff Fuchs is going to be in town this weekend (September 13) showing photographs and doing a talk to promote his new book “The Ancient Tea Horse Road” (Viking Canada). It’s a book of text and photographs recounting the 6000 kilometer trek through the Himalayas that Jeff lead in 2006, following an ancient [...]

Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn is one of the beautiful properties under threat from the wildfires raging along the central California coast. According to this article, the inn was evacuated on Sunday, and the fire was so close that a burning log rolled into one of the rustic cabins, although it was quickly extinguished by fire [...]

Via Giulia, one of my favorite streets in Rome, turns 500 this year. According to this New York Times article, via Giulia is named after Pope Julius II, who commissioned the street as part of a plan to square off the streets around the Vatican. That’s fairly odd, as it’s not all that close to [...]

My current digital camera lacks the “panorama assist” feature that I enjoyed so much with my previous one. The feature helps you line up successive shots so it is easier for panorama stitching software to get good results without awkward overlaps or misaligned edges. It’s not strictly necessary to have the assist feature, but it [...]

Hey, you know this “fly to Paris for a week on a moment’s notice” thing? I highly recommend it.