But only because it’s too late for us to endanger mammoths much.
Fossilized mammoth ivory scrimshawed bracelets, $800 each.
[tags]scrimshaw, mammoth, ivory, bracelet[/tags]
This has been in the pipeline for a while.YoungWizards.com is now running under the Drupal content-management system, which will make it capable of handling its own blogs, forums, and other goodies. YW.net will follow suit shortly.
Feel free to stop by and kick the tires!
[tags]Young, wizards, Nita and Kit, Diane Duane, wizardry, So You Want to Be a Wizard[/tags]
Whatever else may be going on around here at the moment, there’s one event that I have to mention.
Twenty years ago, Peter and I were married.
If the past twenty have been anything to go by…the next twenty are going to be a blast.
Happy anniversary, sweetie!
Young Pip was killed by a car this morning: we just found him by the side of the road.
No more blogging for a while.
Cleolinda has a gift for finding the right word. Or, when necessary, inventing it.
Like the new word for July 21, 2007: Potterdämmerung.
Or, “The fear of death in literature.”
A British book retailer plans to set up a counseling hotline for all heartbroken fans of Harry Potter, in case he dies in the much awaited next book.
As a former psychiatric professional, I can kind of see the point. …But I do start wondering, sometimes… Are human beings actually less robust, more fragile, than they used to be — or are we just being encouraged to believe we are?
And I remember clearly the resilience and fortitude of my younger patients as compared to the so-called “adults”. The kids were endlessly more pragmatic and better at handling pain than the grownups. Any bets on the percentage of over-eighteens who wind up being counseled, as opposed to the under-eighteens?…
We take them for granted. We shouldn’t.
During my visit to Tapp’s apiary just outside Chapel Hill, I asked him, “I’m wondering, does fifteen billion dollars worth of food a year depend on a bunch of retired hobbyists?”
I fully expected him to tell me I was exaggerating. Tapp turned his head, looked me in the eye and with a straight face said, “Well, yeah.”
The New York Times food critic Frank Bruni walks all over Gordon Ramsay’s new place in NYC. Goodness!!
The cautious palette foreshadows a cautious menu, as reliant on default luxuries and flourishes like foie gras and black truffles as on real imagination. Most ingredients are predictable, most flavors polite, most effects muted. Mr. Ramsay may be a bad boy beyond the edges of the plate, but in its center, he’s more a goody-two-shoes.
And for all his brimstone and bravado, his strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one, built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less vaunted pedigrees.
Hooboy!
Chapter Six has now gone freerange for those of you who’re not subscribers. Enjoy, folks!
(Chapter Seven should be going up on Sunday for the subscribers. Check the Big Meow site for details.)
I roared. Someone email this to JKR, quick…
The seventh and last installment of boy wizard Harry Potter and his antics at Hogwarts, sinisterly titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Gallows…
Whoopsie! (snicker)
[tags]J. K. Rowling, JKR, Harry Potter, deathly, Hogwarts, July, 21[/tags]
…I mean nostalgia in its original sense of something that causes you a slight yearning pain as you think about things past and lost.
No telling what brought on today’s attack of it. I was writing, and got the urge for something crunchy and sweet, but light. And suddenly the memory broke surface: brown-edge wafers.
How many years has it been since I last sat down to decimate a box of Nabisco Brown Edge Wafers? I used to love those things intensely. Indeed, there is a place in The Worm Ourobouros where Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha, and poor Mivarsh Faz (I still feel bad about the crocodile) drop in on Queen Sophonisba the Fosterling of the Gods at her place inside the mountain Koshtra Belorn, and the Queen has them served dinner —
“Behold, ambrosia which the Gods do eat and nectar which they drink: on which meat and wine myself do feed, by the bounty of the blessed Gods. And the savour thereof wearieth not, and the glow thereof and the perfume thereof dieth not forever.”
So they tasted of the ambrosia, that was white to look on and crisp to the tooth and sweet —
— and when I was fourteen, or whenever it was I read this book for the first time, something in my brain sort of chucked out the “white” part, but kept all the rest of the description, and immediately flashed on what they must have been eating: Nabisco Brown Edge Wafers!
(Sigh: even then, such a food geek. And Queen Sophonisba could probably have used some vegetables in her diet as well, but that’s not the issue. …Still chuckling over the new cover on The Worm: they’ve got Tolkien blurbing Eddison. This is delicious, considering that Eddison blurbed Tolkien first, back when Tolkien was the new unknown writer and Eddison was hot…)
Anyway, in the course of the nostalgia attack, I went online and found, to my grief, that they’re not made any more (see here for a rather depressing list of all-gone goodies. Jeez, if I’d known the box of Cheese Tid-Bits I ate in NY four or five years ago was the last one I was ever going to ingest…! Why didn’t I buy a case when I had a chance! Argh. And as for the noble Oysterette, I’ve been mourning that loss for years already).
But no point crying over uncookie’d milk. So I made some Brown Edge Wafers. (The picture will come later. Peter went out to do some research and took the camera with him: the phone’s camera is no good for this, and my Clie is up in the charger.)
…The recipe about halfway down this page (now available only via the Wayback Machine) works pretty well. However, I found I needed to beat a few tablespoons of milk into it to get the wafers to spread properly. Only after I was almost through baking did I find this page (also now Wayback only), which has a slightly different recipe that purports to be crisper. Must try that next time.
Notes for those of you who might try the first recipe:
(a) Sweet butter, not salt. UK users: Lurpak is best. Also: cake flour, not all-purpose or plain / “strong white”.
(b) Cream the sugar and butter really well. Get obsessive about it…it pays off.
(c) Even if you’re using a nonstick cookie / biscuit sheet, you must grease or spray it. Otherwise the little monsters will adhere, doing demure little backflips when you try to spatula them off. Frustrating.
(d) Letting them sit on the sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to the rack seems to help.
(e) Watch the timing. Eight minutes was about right for these in our little fan oven.
…Sigh: back to work.
(And now that I’m thinking of it, what were those cream wafers that the Lady Prezmyra was eating in chapter VII?…)
Those of you who’ve been following the The Big Meow project will have noticed some changes at the site as we’ve changed hosting providers and brought up the new Drupal installation. Now that that’s bedding in, I get to add some cool new stuff.
One new feature: research materials. I keep these on my home machine using Onfolio, which also makes it easy to publish stored material online. So here’s a link to where my Big Meow research material can now be found online.
The page material will automatically update as I add new items (which happens every now and then), remove stuff (ditto) or reorganize things. For those who’re interested in finding out right away when there’s something new, here’s a link to the page’s XML / RSS feed.
While going through this material the other day, I did notice that some sources (particularly the New York Times items) hadn’t stored correctly. I’ll be seeing what I can do about this.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of cool stuff in there. My favorite at the moment: a recording of the original LAPD officer who made the phrase “Calling all cars” famous nationwide.