Thursday, November 20, 2014

Ode to a Cranberry

Cranberry Sauce
Apple-Cranberry Sauce
Cranberries are wonderful and versatile too. it's great in cranberry sauce, but you can also use it in pies, brads and puddings.

My cranberry sauce recipe I so good that even people who don't like cranberries love this cranberry sauce.  And it is all natural--fresh cranberries, apples, raisins, and maple syrup--no refined sugar. Additionally it is easy to make.

Read all the recipes plus get ideas for using leftover cranberry sauce here.

Apple-Cranberry Sauce Recipe and Other Cranberry Recipes.

I love cranberries so much, I wrote a poem about them called Ode to a Cranberry

Dried Cranberries
Braga Organic Farms
Dried Cranberries
CLICK HERE
Be sure to buy an extra bag or two. They freeze great. Where I shop at Publix, it is always "buy-one-get-one free" so I always have an extra bag. Cranberries are only available fresh in November and December so stock up. ( I used the cranberries in my freezer from last year's purchase to make the cranberry sauce shown above. It looks and tastes great.)

You can  buy dried cranberries year around if you don't have any in your freezer.

Cranberries are also wonderful in pies, breads, and puddings. Here is my recipe for cranberry-cherry pie.

Cranberry Cherry Pie with Walnut Crunch Topping



Thursday, November 6, 2014

The People Who Hate Me are Making Me Rich

Coins Raining Down
Pennies from heaven?

The people who hate me are making me rich. 

OK, not exactly the people who hate me.  It’s the people who hate my ideas who are making me rich. 

OK, not exactly making me rich. I’m still only earning pennies per day from my web essays. But it did go up to 49 cents one day which is way better than the 10 to 20 cents a day I usually get.  

I wrote an article called “The Billboard Wars: Good without God.” It was based on a presentation that Fred Edwords, National Director of the United Coalition of Reason (www.UnitedCoR.org). He gave the presentation at the FreeFlo Humanist Conference in Orlando in October 2014. 
 
Good without God
 
Fred gave me permission to adapt his presentation for the web. I carefully edited to create an objective piece of reporting.  I explained how some free-thought groups started putting up billboards and ads on the sides of buses. Most of the ads were promoting the idea that people can be good without God.  

These ads got some Christian groups so incensed that they put up counter ads. This brought lots of publicity to the atheist ad campaign. The publicity brought in lots of new members and donations to the atheist groups. Ironically, it was the people who hated them who made them successful.   

I write for HubPages and HubPages encourages their writers to comment on each others’ work (hubs). When someone comments, everyone who “follows” that person will see their comment.  One person got really nasty.  At first I was upset. Then I realized he was giving my hub a lot of publicity within the HubPages community.  The more he ranted, the more views I got and the more money I made. 
 

Some of my other hubs generated a little bit of controversy, but not enough to make a real difference. Check out What is Secular Humanism? and Thou Shall Not Kill: The Morality of the Death Penalty. 

Death Penalty MoralityAdditionally, these two hubs were a little bit shocking to a few. Right Livelihood: The Quest for Ethical Work and An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism. 

So if you hate me, maybe you’ll do a comment on facebook and google+.  Better yet, if you love what I have written, please like and comment. Or you could link to these articles on your own websites. (These links are like manna from heaven.)

Unitarian Universalis Chalice