Freckles & Doubt

That was a lovely weekend. Season 2 of Fringe (woe Charlie!), lunch at Overture yesterday (Evil Landlord's thank-you to jo&stv and sven&tanya for all the heavy lifting of furniture during the renovations - I'm not sure why I was included, my buggered arm means I've been perfectly futile as a heavy lifter for months). Today, gardening (third vegetable planter now full), fed jo&stv for supper, lemon roasted chicken, guinness cupcakes, Hobbit on sofa being perfectly ridiculous as the shameless attention-slut he is. I am tired, grubby and happy with creative things like cooking and planting and watering good-smelling earth. Also, it's been raining off and on, which always makes me happy. As the delirious cherry on the top, next weekend is four days long. Bliss!

Completely random query: do any of you Capetonian types want a DSTV decoder? It's the one we bought for my dad - six months old, perfect condition, going free to a good home which (a) has access to a dish or (b) doesn't mind installing one. They're worth about R500 new, and I really can't face the thought of Gumtree. Since I don't watch TV, have no intention of acquiring a dish and spit upon the name of DSTV since they took the SciFi channel off their menu, it's no bloody use to me. Let me know if you want it.

Also, bonus Hobbit. Being ridiculous.

Gawsh, still happy. The approaching holiday must be doing its thing. Today I am gladdened by:

1. Rain! It's raining! gentle, soft, completely unseasonal summer rain which is making things misty and slightly cool, but not cold. Of course, this is further evidence of climate change and what have you, and we're all screwed, but I'm happily damp.
   
2. Improv Everywhere. They're kind of the Non-Evil Twin of candid camera: do weird, wacky stuff that makes people unexpectedly and laterally happy.
   
3. Chicken pot pie. I pretty much forgot to eat yesterday, besides the brownies, so wandered home and made chicken pot pie for supper. It's comfort food. Also, a really nice recipe with leeks and gammon in a creamy sauce flavoured with lemon and mustard. Happily unhealthy.
   
4. Supernatural motel décor. I swear, those boys scour America for the most trippy, psychedelic, catastrophically ugly motel rooms imaginable by man or demon. The set designers must have a blast creating them. I'd do a list, but the mad fansites beat me to it. Some of them have truly awful themes - the orange/bullfighter one and the black and silver disco one crack me up. Happily.
   
5. Last day at work! Despite the fact that I'm going to have to spend part of the next two weeks working on Orientation material, Holiday! holidayholidayholiday! Happy!

Two things I realise I love, God wot: (a) hanging around with geeks, and (b) the Oxford English Dictionary. The other day at Jo's game Jean made a beef cobbler for supper: that's the supremely British dish with a sort of stewey thing topped with scone dough. It's all the best kinds of British cold-weather stodgy goodness, with a side order of self-indulgence and arteries-going-clang. Fired with emulatory¹ enthusiasm, I constructed one last night and presented it to the Evil Landlord for supper. He did his usual suspicious-German act, prodded it a bit, muttered things about misshapen alien fungi over bubbling lava pits, and then demanded to know why it was called a cobbler. I hazarded a guess that it was something to do with being cobbled together haphazardly out of bits. Then, being fundamentally a geek, I researched it.

The OED is generally a dry, wordy, knowledgeable god, although actually not entirely to be trusted on cooking terms. (Mad SCA cooks are often able to spot mis-attributions, misunderstandings and, quite often, earlier cites than those the OED has dredged up for certain medieval cooking terms). For a start, the OED has no idea where the term originates, and spurns with a slightly inexplicable disdain the notion of a root verb meaning "to join". Apparently a cobbler is also "a drink made of wine, sugar, lemon, and pounded ice, and imbibed through a straw or other tube", which strikes me as being a recipe for sweet, sweet, hiccuping drunkenness. (Dickens refers to "sherry cobbler", which has to be murder through a straw). The OED food definition, however, cites only the fruit version, with an 1859 cite describing "A sort of pie, baked in a pot lined with dough of great thickness, upon which the fruit is placed; according to the fruit, it is an apple or a peach cobbler". Subsequent examples reflect the more modern version, which has inverted it so that the dough (still of great thickness) goes on top. This food history page finds an earlier cite (1839), still American and fruity rather than meaty.

The failure of the OED to reflect the actually very common English usage for a dough-topped stew or casserole is, I have to say, fairly characteristic. So now I am left sort of semi-informed, and with a terrible urge to go and acquire a bunch of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks so I can track the damned thing down definitively. (It's not in Mrs. Beeton. Phooey. And I forgot to dig through Elizabeth David last night, owing to thing.) I have a deep, dark, partisan sort of feeling that the British meat cobbler predates the American fruit cobbler, but I may simply be prejudiced.

Today's entry in Random Ginormous Fantasy Series Month is a sort of semi-diss, mostly because I recently re-read it and it didn't stand up at all well. Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series was one of my huge favourites when I was a young, naive Masters student. It's a terribly post-Tolkienien fantasy realm, complete with Elves, Dwarves and Sauron-analogues, with additional world-hopping by people from our world. It's rather nicely rooted in Celtic and Arthurian mythology, including gods, and Kay is pleasingly able to off main characters satisfyingly and inevitably when the plot calls for it. But, ye gods! the man's writing style! It's an early work of his and I didn't find the same degree of irritation in his most recent one, Ysabel, which I really enjoyed; but Fionavar is all about the Torrid! Portentuous! Adjectival! Overwriting!, mostly in great crumbling flights of sentences all starting with "And". Emotionally overwrought doesn't even begin to cover it. Thank the borrowed Celtic gods he Got Better. And it's a great pity, because the world of the series is beautiful, compelling and mythically rich.

In a nutshell: elves, dwarves, goblins, Big Bad Evil, epic battle, epic romance, loss, love, rape, seduction, politics. Emotionally overwrought. Sexy gods and goddesses, sex with same, resulting conflicted half-gods. Dragons, heroes, seers, kings, princes, monsters, thundering herds of sort of deer. Doomed love triangles across time and space. Emotionally overwrought.

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¹ Why does that sound as though it should have something to do with emus?

Oh, joy, after a week of exhaustion, weird spaceyness and the short-fuse temper from hell, the head-cold part of this bloody 'flu thing has hit. Once again I am a disgusting object, with Sid the Sinus Headache joyously laying cement in my skull. I managed, however, to distract myself from it sufficiently this evening to help the Evil Landlord produce a fondue evening for jo&stv and sven&tanya, which was fun, particularly since I elected to try out tempura batter in the fondue pot for the first time. (Verdict: good, and lightens the meat-heavy quotient of your average oil fondue, although it's difficult to get the fat truly hot enough on the tiny spirit flame). We fondued thin bits of sweet potato, butternut, brinjal, carrot and asparagus. Also, tempura-battered prawns ftw.

The really weird meeting of minds I have with Jo can be indexed in the perfectly serious fifteen-minute discussion we subsequently had about the exciting and inevitable art installation we could mount by disassembling a brand new latest-model Japanese small car (Honda or Toyota, or possibly a Suzuki motorcycle), and tempura-battering and deep-frying its component parts before reassembling and suspending it in exploded-car-diagram format. We feel this would constitute profound and self-aware cultural commentary, emblematising the interchangeability of consumer-cultural paradigms while simultaneously investigating notions of "freshness" and "value"¹. We are open to grant offers which would enable the realisation of this promising but expensive and technically challenging work. Or, for that matter, to franchising.

The Telkom saga continues: while they actually installed my dad's phone line on Thursday, we've been unable to phone any international numbers. When I phoned the helpline to report the fault, they told me, in tones of dulcet surprise, that oh, no! of course you can't get international lines, they're automatically locked with a new phone, and you need to have them unlocked. No, of course you can't do it via the helpline, you need to go into the Telkom Direct store and do it in person. No, of course no-one in any of the five different discussions you had with helplines and the store before installing the line actually mentioned this. That would constitute service, which runs counter to everything Telkom stands for.

Bastards. Also open to grant offers which would enable me to employ ninja assassins, preferably with a wholesale option.

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¹ Or "Japanese".

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the live-action film version of Where The Wild Things Are (trailer here, I'd be interest to know what you Sendak-fan witterers think). Possible pros: it's live-action rather than CGI, it's not being directed by Stephen Spielberg, the trailer features my favourite Arcade Fire song, it's Spike Jonze. Possible cons: they're making a film of a beloved book, which by all the rules is doomed; I'm not sure it'll survive independently of Maurice Sendak's incredible artwork; the Wild Things talk; it's Spike Jonze. I shall content myself with the mantra Alan Moore occasionally mouths (post James Cain) but never quite got behind: Even If The Film Turns Out Crap The Book's Still On My Shelf.

In other news, Elizabeth Bear's cat talks in alliterative skaldic verse. Apparently. And, appropos of nothing, tonight I initiate jo&stv into the mysteries of lasagne-construction. They have to swear an oath, and get the tattoo, and everything. Also, we're going to watch Wanted.

Last Night I Dreamed: a confused journey to Mars, which was unexpectedly terraformed and growing forests and vast fields of vegetables. I think Venus may have been as well, only the fields were all on raised platforms held up by giant pillars, so the excessive moisture could drain out of the soil. Much of the dream was taken up with preventing atmospheric sabotage, and with the whinging of the spaceships full of farm workers who didn't like the long commute.

I've just fielded a phone call which went as follows:

PHONE: ring, ring.
ME: *suppressed muttershutup* Hello, extemporanea speaking.
PHONE: Fine, how?
ME: Um, sorry...?
PHONE: (impatiently) Fine! How??
ME: ...

I know that there's a tendency in southern Africa for second-language speakers to weirdly shorten and mistime the usual greeting litany, so that you'll often find someone telling you how they are before you've actually asked; this, however, has to be the most insanely compressed version I've ever encountered. I don't know if the effect is a desperate stab at conversational efficiency, or if they're simply confusing the words.

I suppose it's only fair to note that I'd probably do even worse if suddenly asked to take my part in the heavily ritualised and status-conscious Shona greeting, which I last practised when I was about 14. I vaguely remember it had "Ndarara. Kana mararawo" somewhere as a response to the standard "Mangwanani". (Good lord. Apparently I'm saying I slept well. I would, in fact, have pulled it out of distant memory without waiting for "Marara sei", i.e. the actual question. Which just goes to show.)

I spent the weekend doing absolutely nothing. Other than finishing up Season 3 of Farscape (woe! I was getting all fond of Crais!), I honestly can't think of anything I actually achieved. Oh, made banana bread for wolverine_nun. New Seekrit Ingredient in banana bread: dark rum. Lovely flavour.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was one of a party of children trying to defend their island home against pirate attack. Fortunately these were stupid pirates, and our somewhat simplistic ploys of sneaking around setting booby traps seemed to work quite well. I personally pushed several of them off a cliff before the huge swirly impressionistic storm rolled in.

Too weird. Cooking malva pudding is apparently a pervasive process, to the point where I can still smell it on my hair after two days. I am not sure if the effect of this is to mark me inescapably as a stay-at-home domestic type, or if it'll operate closer to David's well-known Vanilla Theory Of Seducing Women (men smelling of vanilla are comforting and safe and associated with kitchens, baking and nurture, therefore get rebuffed less). While he has never adequately demonstrated the validity of this theory to my scientific satisfaction, I possibly ought to go and stand hopefully in a well-ventilated area full of interesting men just in case.

I have emerged from the fog sufficiently to finish this batch of marking, which is something of a relief as I was becoming more than somewhat bored with dragging the pile fruitlessly between home and campus in order to studiously ignore it. Having marked the lot more or less by pretending not to, I have to conclude that students are odd. They had an option between a slightly tricky question on World of Warcraft and its potential for online eroticism, and an easy, wide-open one on the kinds of narrative gaps fanfic usually fills. I spent three lectures on fanfic and half a one on WoW. The WoW question answerers gave me some lovely essays, whereas the fanfic ones were uniformly blah. Memo to self: less information next time, the resulting panic seems to inspire students to actual intellectual activity.

Last Night I Dreamed: an epic dash through forests and into the cellars of houses to evade the golem armies staggering through the trees. I woke up abruptly with my heart pounding at the point where the traumatised girl in the white dress sat bolt upright on her bed and screamed because of the incredibly significant shapes of the ceramic jugs on the cellar wall.

Actual time to post! Owing, mostly, to waking up ungodly early and wandering up to campus at 6.45am. The rest of the day is solid curriculum advice and wrangling academics, the new sport.

This made my morning. Teh Internets unleash random anarchic meme-activity on Scientology. In V-masks!

Also, because you're all very sweet and supportive of my narcissistic maunderings:

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BUBBLING CHOCOLATE TAR-PIT DEATH!

Cake:
250ml flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
2 heaped tsp ground ginger
1 tsp chopped fresh ginger
180ml brown sugar
2 heaped tblsp cocoa
200ml milk
2 tblsp oil
100g chopped pecans or walnuts
100g chopped dark chocolate

Sauce:
250ml brown sugar
60 ml cocoa
350 ml boiling water
100 ml sherry or rum

Sift flour, baking powder, salt, ginger, cocoa; stir in sugar. Mix in milk, oil, fresh ginger, nuts, chocolate. Spread cake mix in oven-proof dish (I use a large, flat, squarish pyrex about 25cm across). Mix the brown sugar and cocoa for sauce, and sprinkle over the top of the cake mix. Pour sherry or rum over, and then boiling water. Bake at 350^o for about 45 mins, or until it resembles a chunk of cake floating in a pit of bubbling black chocolate tar. Eat, cautiously, in smallish servings, with cream or ice-cream.

You can also mess quite nicely with this recipe - for example, it works rather well to substitute grated orange peel for the ginger/ginger, and substitute orange juice and/or cointreau for some of the boiling water/booze.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was having a baby, by caesarian section, in a beautiful bedroom in a mansion somewhere, with the assistance of a nice doctor. No pain or anything, but halfway through I had the sudden thought that hell, I was going to have to share my bedroom with the baby, I really hadn't thought this through at all. Then I thought, no, wait, there's no way I'd randomly have a baby on my own given my circumstances, this is clearly a dream, upon which I woke up in considerable relief.

Darn it. Had a small Culinary Incident the other night, in the course of chopping spinach: misjudged and sliced a neat V-shape into my left forefinger, nearly severing the top third of the nail. Given that I was using the only actually sharp knife in the house, this was quite dramatic, shearing straight through the nail and into the flesh. Copious blood, dizzyness, nausea. Now wearing a plaster to stop me from tearing off the bit of nail hanging by a thread, and feeling (a) pained, (b) silly and (c) bloody annoyed, on account of how the plaster is playing merry hob with my typing.

The typing disability is not helping with this Gaiman/Miéville paper, which currently resembles nothing so much as a tangled ball of string. There's good stuff in there; the research I've done has all meshed interestingly, and it'll be quite a dense, layered piece of writing once I can beat it into shape. At the moment, though, everything's interconnected in this organic snarl and I can't find the end of the string with which to start writing, which has led to a repeat scenario of me batting the bloody thing around in a frustrated and desultory fashion, like an emo kitten.

Last Night I Dreamed: labyrinthine things, complete with David Bowie, which'll teach me to watch half the Bowie on YouTube just before I go to bed.

... in the event of one's hands suddenly deciding to burst into flames as a result of chopping chillis, apply vodka. Liberally. With cotton wool.

In other news not entirely unrelated to webcomics about bands, aliens and stuff, Joss Whedon is completely cracked. So am I, after two days of progression coding. But it's over.

*does victory lap*

Except for the four-hour meeting tomorrow, that is. *sigh*.

Also, The Superest. Competitive superhero design.

Last Night I Dreamed: that khoi_boi and his wife incautiously went away for a few days, leaving me in their house in charge of their 3-year-old daughter - which is, I have to say, an essentially unlikely proceeding fraught with catastrophic potential. In fact, it went quite well, since they'd hired two cars with baby seats for me to use. Highlights included child plus friend spontaneously initiating a session of kiddie-yoga in the garden.

Then I was plunged into my usual dream-campus, which is enormous, completely over-built and filled with odd-shaped buildings, with strange stairs and tunnels and atriums connecting them. The purpose of the dream was (a) to have dinner with d_hofryn, which entailed fondue with lots of meat in a campus dining hall (she's vegetarian), and (b) tracking down the evil SCA person (European SCA, not local) who'd embezzled money and framed someone else for it. Large amounts of guilt for unjustly suspecting the be-framed one.