I was in the habit a while back of going on line and typing in an entrée I wanted to make and getting, immediately, links to many recipes. Then one day, this was no longer possible. Instead, I had to download sites, had to sign in and register and input a password and get their never ending offers by E mail. And when searching their menus, rarely found anything I wanted to make. One of them should have been called “Sugar Heaven”. So, I stopped looking and foomfed along with my limited repertoire. We all know I am unwilling to make anything with more than 8 ingredients, and particularly if those are not things I normally stock. I am not a Philistine. Feta cheese is always in my refrigerator.

But all that has changed again. On a whim, I started to look for recipes and was amazed to see they are instantly available, as they used to be. I am guessing they weren’t too successful at totally controlling the recipe environment. Few or no takers (maybe there is a god).

Next impossible task is getting obituary information for free. All the sites say free free free but they mean searches. We FOUND IT, they all shout, then they want you to sign up for a free trial in order to actually see what they found, and this assumes that out of the zillion or so people with the same name, if it is a reasonably common one, you would click on the exact one you need. Whereas if you could just see the bloody obit, you would know right away.

Of course, I could register to get a free on-line newspaper subscription for the city in which I believe the person I am searching for was living, and this would translate to a very large list of newspaper subscriptions, since I am of an age where many of my acquaintances, far-flung as they were, might have passed. Such a subscription would give me genuinely free access to their obit pages. I don’t pay for searching The New York Times, I can tell you. And, golly, gee-whiz, I just want to know who is still around.

But I am not willing to pay to know. Snarl.

Xx, Teal