What A Horrible Idea, And Yet...

Baked Brains

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F
Prepare by soaking, skinning and blanching:
___ 1 set brains
Chop coarsely and combine them with:
___ 1/2 cup bread crumbs
___ 2 chopped hard-cooked eggs
___ 6 tablespoons cream
___ 1 tablespoon catsup
___ 2 peeled chopped green chilis
___ 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice
___ Season to taste
Place in a greased baking dish or in individual dishes. Sprinkle the top with:
___ Au Gratin II
Bake about 15 minutes.

(from Rombauer, I. S. & Becker, M. R. (1975). The joy of cooking. (Late ed.) New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company)

So the plan is - invite everybody to a theme Zombie/Undead party. Make sure they come in costume and pay attention to detail. When they compliment me on my delicious food... tell them.

Horrid, I know.

Funny?

How would I avoid eating my own cooking, though...?

We're off! We're off!

I went to Wellington for the weekend with Michael, who was visiting niecelings.

Went to an Ultimate Frisbee practice with Steph, which was enjoyable. Napped all Saturday afternoon. Avoided a party on the grounds that I was feeling a bit poorly. Went to a fair Sunday morning. Wombled down Cuba Street a little (and bought books). Went flannel shirt shopping with Stephanie. Went to see Mrs Henderson Presents with Stephanie, Michael, Ned, and a friend of Steph's called Frank. It was a good movie. "Ah, so you are Jewish." My eyes! My eyes!

Came home. Within half an hour of our arrival, Michael had hot chocolate cookies. Now that's a flatmate...

Oh My Gosh: You Killed Kenning!

Because Steph asked, here is a rough description and example of kenning as used in Old English poetry that I gave in a poetry forum last year:

"A kenning is basically a two-word riddle:

"And then the word-wights ___ riding in ring-necks
Took the swan's road ___ a stormy sea
Said "Riddling songs ___ shall be our meat"
Said "Metre, rhyme, ___ and rhythm: word-toys
Of weak-willed workers ___ wrist-limp songsters,
Slaughtered they ___ on our sharp-sword tongues.
We'll toss their entrails ___ their word-lines, winding,
Rich food for red-beaks ___ ravens' banquet
Bloody bones ___ from fragile verse

"Or:

"And then the poets ('word-wight' = word-being = poet), riding in ships with curving prows, went to sea ('Swan's road' and 'ringnecks' are classics). They said, "We prefer songs with riddles in them. Poets who use rhyme and fussy rhythms are limp-wristed Nancy-boys and we'll kill them and throw the guts and bones of their inferior poetry to the birds (er, 'red-beaked' because they've been eating fresh, bloody meat).

"I'm sorry, I can never write in the Anglo-Saxon style without getting both incredibly gory and very boastful. It's just what the form likes, okay? The kennings I made up weren't exactly the best of the type. For a really great example of it in modern dialect, see if you can track down 'Grendel's Dog'."

(It's wonderful having a wicked twin to goad me into things, it truly is.)

Extravagantly Baggy Pirate Pants

So I'd acquired some solid, hard-wearing, stripy cotton for a reasonable sum. I thought I'd make myself some Pirate Pants. Can you honestly say that you have never had this desire? I used a pattern from The Renaissance Tailor (a seriously nice website) for One-Cut Pants.




As this particular pattern uses artful folding and one big slice to make trousers out of the whole two metres (or 2 x 1.5 = 3m2), when the pieces were all connected but the outer seams not sewn up, it covered an entire bedroom floor:

One problem I had was cutting the ankles a bit wide. As I didn't want to resew the outer seams to taper the ankles, or gather them in like the waistband, I ended up doing a series of pleats, which I think looks interesting. Even so, I might have to sew a couple more - the ankles are still a bit wide:


Finally, BEHOLD MY GENIUS!!!

Why My Flatmate Is Not A Sniper Assassin

It's the interior monologues: he hates them.

He was explaining in great detail to me just how much he loathed the (long) interior monologue in a comic book that he had just been reading, and somehow brooding assassin types came up. As I pointed out, when you're stuck on the chilly top of a building for a couple of days waiting for the perfect hit, there's not much to do but monologue. He agreed (which is always buoyant for my spirits).

Entertainment for assassins aside, the thing about interior monologuing in a comic book is that there is all this yummy visual detail available, along with the text of the story. We should be able to tell what the characters are feeling largely by what they say and do, and by the expressions on their faces. Getting a chance to read their thoughts is useful, occasionally very touching. Five pages of inner monologue in a comic book are possibly pushing it.

I am reminded, somehow, of a story I read recently by Harry Harrison ("Portrait of the Artist") of a dark future wherein the drawers of comics mainly used rubber-stamps and machinery: "Girls, of course, all had the same face in comic books; the HEROINE was just a note to the machine not to touch the hair. For a VILLAINESS it would be inked in black since all villainesses have black hair." The story was probably written in 1964; I think in many ways his prediction didn't work out: art styles in current day comics have a great exuberance about them and vary a great deal. Still, there are set conventions on how to draw superheroes and villains that keep coming back. Evil Ming eyebrows on the women. Huge muscles on the men. Skin-tight costumes or swaths of cloth that always drape right - that sort of thing.

I am reminded also of a not quite current trade paperback collecting the series V for Vendetta (v. good). One of the nice things about collecting it all in one book is that Alan Moore stuck in some notes on how he and David Lloyd (the artist) created it. And Mr Moore pointed out that there was not a single sound effect in that book. Neither was there interior monologue. Apparently Mr Lloyd had wanted it that way, very much, and Mr Moore had gritted his teeth and had a go at writing that way. It works well. The characters express themselves in gesture, in conversation, in grand speeches to the air, the empty air, and to statues of Blind Justice. Interesting creative technique.

(I've been thinking about how to use it in my own (very amateur writing), and I'll see how it goes.)

And I am glad that aesthetic qualms on David's part have turned him from a Life of Evil.

**

In other news, they're making a movie of Stardust. In the words of the author: "Brilliant day. Any day you get to walk the deck of a ship that fishes for lightning in the clouds with your family has to be a brilliant day."

:-D :-D :-D

I Have A Headache

Much to my surprise, when I was at the Raven training this morning, I saw Conal teaching the newbies backwards ukemi. I volunteered as a demonstration model, and soon found myself working through half-forgotten Aikido techniques as translated to sword-play. It was fun. It was tiring. My arm hurts, and I've had a headache ever since, probably from dehydration.

Then I went to the centre of town to buy some buttons for a waistcoat that I've just made. It's very pretty. When I've sewn them on, I'll get my flatmate to take a picture and show you. I also picked up some stripy, tightly woven cotton to make Pirate Pants out of. So it was designed for mattress ticking? Nobody ever makes mattresses out of that stuff anymore, so no-one will know except for you kind readers. You won't tell, will you?)

I haven't really been doing much of interest, so I'll stop now.

What Have I Been Reading Lately?

Hmm... Some of the highlights:

Band of Gypsys by Gwyneth Jones.

So here I am, back in the modern world, after seven years in fairyland. Traffic fumes, cable tv, air travel, internet connections, swimming pools, movies - and everything that happened to us in those strange days vanishes like a dream... I think it was a dream. My boyfriend was never the king of England. The European Crisis was a global-economic-meltdown sideshow. My father didn't rip Sage to pieces, on the beach at Drumbeg...

I'd written a fairly long description of the series, and why I liked it, but then realised that it was all Spoiler, so I deleted it. So I'll just write this: Like John Varley's Titan books, it mixes utter lunacy with a very grim and gritty attitude on the part of the characters, who are human, and flawed, and ultimately good people, that makes it all very real. Even as something else incredibly weird and horrible happens... I have become addicted to the series. Give it a go. Not for skim-reading: you'll lose track.

**

Speaking of John Varley, I recently read his Titan trilogy backwards. This makes more sense than it sounds - I'd never read Book Three, Demon, and spotted it on my flatmate's bookshelf. Then I remembered how much I'd liked Wizard, so re-read that, and decided to go for Titan while I was at it. It was rather strange seeing the backwards progression of Gaea's personality, to see Cirocco who, in the last two books is made out of horseshoes and nails, act somewhat diffident in the first one. This is another set of books for environmental lunacy mixed with very sane people. Strange. Sad to see what happened to Eugene, and then read about his beginnings...

**

The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, otherwise known for composing Onward, Christian Soldiers. This is basically a collection of folklore and textual evidence about that beastie beloved of horror writers. There is some philology and excursion into African were-hyenas and the thematic link between lycanthropy and people who just taste human flesh and become insane for another bite. It's pretty good - lots of very gruesome stories, told in a scholarly way. Some of his conclusions make a lot of sense, too. I have been perusing it for scholarly reasons, not a taste for the macabre, as I am mining it for content for a roleplaying prop. Well, okay, maybe a bit of macabre somewhere.

**

Finally, A Case of Conscience, by James Blish. Again, I raided my flatmate's shelves, and this is a good 'un. So, we've got a four-man team who have just surveyed a planet (this is in the future; space travel is well established), and they are discussing what their recommendation to their superiors will be. Two want to brutally exploit it for its mineral resources. One hates the idea because a) the natives are naturally wonderful people and b) mining on the scale the others want is unworkable (well, mostly a), but he was using b) to talk them down). The last is a Jesuit priest, who thinks about things very carefully, but from premises rather different from my own. It was fascinating following his reasoning. I don't agree with what he did, though. There's still quite a lot of the book to go, though, so maybe I'll change my mind. I can't tell you more for fear of spoiling it, just: The natives were naturally wonderful people, and that bothered the priest a great deal.

There Are Times...

when I really wish that stuff in sf books was real:

"Tell me about Sandbenders," Masahiko said...

"It started with a woman who was an interface designer," Chia said, glad to change the subject. "Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electrnoics were made, a ckouple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidixk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there.... And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone.... And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions."

..."And it turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started to get commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick...."

Well, I'm not happy that a fictional character got sick and died, but I would dearly love one of his creations.

It's quarter past ten, and I'm feeling a tad short on spoons. Despite my house being quiet as the grave all week, today was visitor day, some invited and announced, some not. They were all welcome, but I'm a bit tired - and all the cups in the house have been washed at least twice. The good news is, my Chinese friends that I called over to make sure they knew what to do with the census have already filled in the forms, no problem. The bad news is I lost three chess games. *Sigh* I never said that I was good at it.

I am sipping 'Sleep' tea, which tastes like a very weak form of peppermint tea. I could really use a coffee, but I gave it up for Lent.

Sucks to be me.

Just out of interest, how many people actually read this blog? Feel free to comment.

Johari Windows

It seems that everybody has been doing these lately. I didn't want to join in, at first, because I'm not sure I can stand to know what everybody thinks of me.

Still, courage is a virtue, which I too often lack, so I am going to be brave and follow the crowd:

My Johari Window