Sprenzy Shopping Blog

Recently, I watched Wordplay, a documentary movie, which features “Will Shortz, NY Times Editor and NPR Puzzle Master, and his brilliant, entertaining and often hilarious contributors as well as surprising celebrity fans. Wordplay takes us through the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament where almost five hundred competitors battled it out for the title “Crossword Champ” and showed their true colors along the way.”

The movie is extremely entertaining and I have a new found respect for the crossword phenoms. The A division competitors can solve the New York Times Sunday puzzles (hardest day) in 4 minutes. That is simply amazing!

Besides being in awe of the elite level competitors, I realized that I don’t exercise my brain enough. I have always been focused on physical fitness but have neglected mental exercise. From a recent NPR article…

“It’s called “use it or lose it” – the belief that exercising your brain will keep your memory and thinking skills sharp as you age, and maybe even ward off dementia and Alzheimer’s.”

“Gatz believes that you should start challenging yourself mentally when you’re younger, rather than waiting for old age to take Italian or piano lessons.”

So, before I “lose it”, I’m including more mentally challenging exercises to my everyday routine. My first goal is to do a crossword puzzle every other day. As a crossword puzzle newbie, I’m easing into it before I make it an everyday event. I’ve already signed up for a year subscription of the New York Times crosswords and tackling the Monday puzzles (easiest). It takes me 40 minutes to an hour to do a Monday NYT crossword. Hopefully, I can progress to the harder puzzles in the near future.

It is my understanding that doing puzzles (crosswords, scrabble, sudoku, etc.) is good for the brain, but only exercises a portion of it. Just like physical exercise, you wouldn’t just workout your biceps and nothing else. So the key is to cross-train your brain by varying activities that will stimulate and challenge your mind in new and different ways, such as learning a new language, playing a new instrument or taking a drawing class.

I have had becoming fluent in French on my to do list forever. Learning to play the guitar is also on my list. Which one should I do first? Man, deciding which new challenge to try next is making my brain hurt!

 

Related Resources:

Wordplay: The Official Companion Book - for those who enjoyed the movie and want more background info on the crossword craze.

American Crossword Puzzle Tournament - the official crossword tournament site.

Building Mental Muscle: Conditioning Exercises for the Six Intelligence Zones by Allen D. Bragdon and David Gamon - “is one of the most stimulating books ever written about how the brain works and how you can maintain, even increase, your own mental ability. It will help you develop skills in six important areas: Memory, Emotions, Language, Math, Visualization, Executive Planning & Social Interaction.”

Spellbound - if you enjoyed Wordplay, you may also like Spellbound, which “is the extraordinary documentary that follows eight teenagers on their quest to win the National Spelling Bee competition.”

Well, I don’t hate Valentine’s Day. Hate is such a strong word. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of February 14th. If you are truly dreading V-Day, I would pick I Hate Valentine’s Day by Bennett Madison to help guide you through the day.

“Finally there’s no shame in hating Valentine’s Day! Whether we’re single, dating, married, or divorced, the dreaded February 14 arrives each year to ambush our self-esteem. No other twenty-four-hour period convinces otherwise happy folk that they’re in fact social pariahs. But now comes protection from the ritual onslaught of Whitman’s Samplers, saccharine cards, and suffocating expectations.

I Hate Valentine’s Day is a bitingly funny guide to getting through the Big Day painlessly, including tips on: People and places it’s best to avoid Ways to take your mind off being single How to score an emergency date Alternative ways to celebrate the holiday – or obliterate all thinking Crossing the minefield of gift-giving Romance for the unromantic Running into the ex Last-resort measures It’s only one day. Tomorrow it’s just dead flowers, empty calories, and a wicked champagne hangover.”

For a more sarcastic view, check out The Anti-Valentine’s Handbook by J. More…

“The mushy sentiment, the lousy candies, and the pressure of finding a date make February 14th a day that many wish didn’t exist. This pocket-sized companion to Flirtology will help lovelorn readers laugh their way through the most brutal of holidays. Learn which movies are best for a night alone (Love Stinks). Identify signs that a date isn’t going well (“HELP ME” written in his mashed potatoes).

Discover why having a date can be worse than not (four words: better looking ex-girlfriend). Skip the heartache. Make this book your V-Day companion!”

Thankfully, I don’t have any heartbreaking Valentine’s Day experiences to share. Sure there were lonely days in high school when I was a shy and slightly awkward teenager but no tragic events to recount. I’ve been a serial monogamous since my college days, so fortunately I have been rarely alone on Valentine’s Day.

My dislike of V-Day stems from the over-commercialism of the day. I don’t like being pressured by marketers and their ads to express my love and affection for my girlfriend on February 14th. I also hate the fact that flower prices are super inflated on V-Day. I’m a firm believer of expressing your appreciation and love for your significant other every single day instead of just one arbitrary day in February.

I have no problems with going out for a romantic dinner or giving boxes of chocolates and flowers. I actually enjoy doing all of these things but not on V-Day when I feel forced to do so. Thankfully, I have a girlfriend who feels the same way. It’s all about how you express your feelings and affection the other 364 days of the year.

Maybe I’ll make individual molten chocolate cakes next Wednesday for my girlfriend because it’s Wednesday, when we allow ourselves to eat dessert (that’s a story for another post), not because it’s Valentine’s Day.

Last year, the only books I read where business books. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the only things I’m reading these days are blogs, magazines and online newspapers. I’m pretty well informed on most topics, but there’s something special about reading a really good book.

I love finding a book that completely captivates me. One that I can’t stop reading at 3:00 AM or one that I don’t want to end. Some books that I put in this “captivating” category were Blindness by Jose Saramago, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

So for 2007, one of my resolutions is to read more books that aren’t business or work related. Looking for good books to read, I found last year’s major book award winners and listed them below.

2006 Man Booker Prize - The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - “Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep.”

2006 National Book Award Winners:

• Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - “On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor.”

• Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan - “The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage.”

• Poetry: Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey - “Published in installments across several decades, Mackey’s two epic series—one called Mu, the other Song of the Andoumboulou—bring the attitudes of free jazz and the reverberating patterns of West African ensemble music to the goals of the American encyclopedic long poem à la Charles Olson. The mysterious, even hermetic, new verse extends both of Mackey’s epics, even (as his prose foreword explains) merging them, so that they form one enormous text describing a mystical quest.”

• Young People’s Literature: The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1) by M.T. Anderson - “Set against the disquiet of Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson’s extraordinary novel takes place at a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim.”

2006 Pulitzer Prize:

• Fiction: March by Geraldine Brooks - “In the classic American novel LITTLE WOMEN, the father is more of a presence than a character. He’s serving in the Union Army at the beginning and comes home to recuperate from illness later on. Author Geraldine Brooks has taken the patriarch of the March family and spun an entire story. It is set in the Civil War, and flashbacks help flesh out the back story of his philosophical growth.”

• Nonfiction: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - “Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words “Mau Mau” still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya’s Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning .”

• Biography: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - “delve deep into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and deliver a thorough and devastatingly sad biography of the man whose very name has come to represent the culmination of 20th century physics and the irrevocable soiling of science by governments eager to exploit its products.”

• History: Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky - “All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines–and beyond.”

• Poetry: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson - “a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems.”

I’m actually going to start with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It was recommended to me by my significant other who recently read the book. She told me it was a great book about “a journey of a man and his son in a postapocalyptic setting.” It’s also a short read to get me back into the book reading habit. I hope I can put it in the “captivating” category!

If you could only have one cookbook,  The New Best Recipe is the one to have. This cookbook is great for the aspiring chef or baker in your home. There are over 1,000 recipes that cover everything from angel food cake, chicken parmesan and rack of lamb to zucchini bread.

The New Best Recipe is written by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated. They also produce the TV show America’s Test Kitchen. In both Cook’s Illustrated magazine and the TV show, the editors and chefs are “renowned for their obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of American home cooking.” This cookbook is much more than a listing of 1,000 recipes.

Each recipe is tested using different ingredients, cooking methods and equipment. The folks at America’s Test Kitchen explain their rationale for the recipe that gets into the book, which they determined to be the best recipe after extensive testing. They also provide tips and advice on proper cooking/baking techniques. You’ll get advice on brining poultry, butterflying chicken, cutting stew meat and everything else in between.

The editors also explain the food science behind cooking such as, “how brining works to ensure juicy meat and why butter should be added before dairy for the silkiest mashed potatoes.” I’ve tried dozens of recipes from this cookbook and each dish I’ve prepared has always been delicious. Below is a picture of some pot roast I made a few years ago. Had I known I was going to post the picture one day, I would have given more thought to the presentation. 

I particularly enjoy the dessert recipes in this book. The thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies, brownies and individual fallen chocolate cake recipes are a staple in my dessert offerings. If you are looking for pretty photographs or personal anecdotes, this book may not be for you. However, if you like to learn about proper technique, choosing the appropriate cut of meat or ingredient and using the right equipment then you are going to love The New Best Recipe!