Out of Ambit
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Travel
  • Home life
  • Media
  • Obscure interests
  • Hobbyhorses and General Ranting
At the Young Wizards end of things: an...
2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series
Maluns
Owl Be Home For Christmas
Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”
From the Young Wizards universe: an update
Irish life: The things you don’t discuss, Halloween...
Q&A: Why is my Malt-O-Meal lumpy and how...
From the Baking-While-You-Write Department: Spicy Apple Pie
Peter Morwood on Moroccan preserved lemons
Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and...
Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited
Outlining: one writer’s approach
A project in progress: translating “La Patissière des...
Pulling The Lever
Weird bread
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Travel
  • Home life
  • Media
  • Obscure interests
  • Hobbyhorses and General Ranting
Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

Category:

History

BakingFood, restaurants and cookingHistory

The Bundt Pan Booklet

by Diane Duane December 9, 2016

Some years back, maybe four or five years ago, I was doing a lot of cake baking and realized that I needed a tube cake pan besides the gugelhupf pans that have been filling up the cupboard-almost-higher-than-I-can-reach in the kitchen, where such things live. After a bit I thought of my mom’s old Bundt pan, and I thought, “Okay, maybe I can find one of those on Ebay.”

It took about thirty seconds. Soon enough I came across one of the old, heavy aluminum ones, still in its original packaging and dating back to the 1970s. It didn’t cost a whole lot, even with the postage, so I snapped it up.

The item itself is quite wonderful, and because of the thickness of the aluminum (about 4mm) it produces beautifully evenly baked cakes. But there’s more! Along with it came a printed booklet published in (apparently*) 1972, and this contains a dozen pages of recipes meant to suit the full-size Bundt pan. The rest of the booklet is a kind of mini-catalog of other Nordic Ware cooking equipment (gelatin molds, cake molds, lasagna pans, ebleskiver pans, popover and cupcake pans, rosette irons, etc etc) and recipes to use with them.

The booklet also contains the kind-of-unfortunately-named-(these-days-anyway)** recipe for the Tunnel of Fudge Cake. Having done a little research into this, it’s now no wonder to me that it’s the first recipe to appear in the booklet. The Bundt pan’s use in this recipe by a Pillsbury Bake-Off second-prize winner apparently revived the Nordic Ware company’s fortunes and turned the Bundt pan into something that a lot of home bakers suddenly seriously wanted. An interesting sidelight: remember those gugelhupf pans I mentioned? It seems that the concept for the pan was brought to the company’s owner by a group of Hadassah ladies who were looking for a modernized US-made version of the guglhupf pan.

(BTW, it seems that the original recipe in the book became “broken” within a matter of years when Pillsbury discontinued the kind of icing that was a vital ingredient. The details of this situation, and the replacement recipe, are documented here at Cook’s Info.)

…Anyway. The booklet got tucked away in the pile of Things That Really Need To Get Filed that lives near my desk, and yesterday for no good reason (except possibly entropy) the pile fell over, and the Bundt pan booklet — expansively and enthusiastically titled Unusual Old World And American Recipes*** — fell with it, more or less at my feet. I picked it up and remembered that my intention, a good while back, had been to scan the thing in PDF and store it in Evernote so I wouldn’t have to keep wondering where I’d stashed it.

So here it is for the possible delectation of others besides me who’re interested in food history and food fads and trends, tucked into our download space at Box.com. The food photography alone is worth looking at, as the bar has over time been raised a lot higher in terms of what we’ve come to expect. The cakes by and large look edible, but some of the other foods, the molded gelatins in particular, look… a bit unnerving. To my eye, anyway.

Additionally, some of the basic concepts illustrate a sort of Procrustean approach to the cookware. “Sausage cake?” Really? (I read the recipe twice in some disbelief. Yeah, real sausage. And not a savory recipe: the spices are unequivocally sweet. It’s one of those WTF WERE THEY THINKING recipes.) And probably the less said about the “party” Bundt meatloaf the better. (They even photographed it with a rose. Aw, bless.)

The PDF is just shy of 15 megs. To download, click below:

Unusual Old World and American Recipes: The 1972 Bundt Pan Leaflet


*It’s a guess. There’s no formal copyright statement in the booklet, but on the back the notation”4-72″ appears in the lower right-hand corner; and there’s a ZIP code in the address, which means that it was published after the 1960s.

**If this description reveals my mind to be in the gutter — well, seriously, it took you this long to notice? But there are some interesting stories to be found in the gutter, and there’s no point in being a snob about it. Anyway, some of us are looking at the stars.

***In service of the Old World part of the concept, there are some interesting touches in the recipe section. A recipe for potica, for example. But also, one notation that struck me a bit oddly: “Bundt Coffee Cake. (JEWISH ORIGIN)”

December 9, 2016
5 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
The White House
HistoryPolitics

“True Republicanism”: on slaves building the White House

by Diane Duane July 27, 2016

I see that Bill O’Reilly has taken it on himself to enlighten the present First Lady regarding her assertion that slaves built the White House. “Yes, but they were well clothed and fed,” he says. (The implication apparently being: So that’s all right, then.)

Unfortunately for O’Reilly’s thesis, First Lady Abigail Adams (who had the benefit of being actually on site at the time) doesn’t agree. From an 1800 letter to her uncle Cotton Tufts:

The effects of Slavery are visible every where; and I have amused myself from day to day in looking at the labour of 12 negroes from my window, who are employd with four small Horse Carts to remove some dirt in front of the house. the four carts are all loaded at the same time, and whilst four carry this rubish about half a mile, the remaining eight rest upon their Shovels, Two of our hardy N England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12, but it is true Republicanism that drive the Slaves half fed, and destitute of cloathing, to labour, whilst the owner waches about Idle, tho his one Slave is all the property he can boast, Such is the case of many of the inhabitants of this place.

…Yet O’Reilly claims to have to speak up on this subject because he’s got that “history teacher” thing going on. Not very hard, apparently. What kind of history teacher can’t be bothered to check a primary source?…

Save

July 27, 2016
1 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
AstronomyEuropeHistoryHome lifeHumorIrelandMediaOOA2tumblrpredicting the futurepredicting the future badlyreligionthings that piss you off

Dude, where’s my Apocalypse?!

by Diane Duane December 21, 2012

Does anybody have an 800 number for the ancient Mayans? Because I need to lodge a complaint.

Seriously, 2012 has been something of a wash all around.  Tragedies. Mass shootings. Anguish of all kinds. Local cataclysms of the flood-and-earthquake variety. Wars and rumors of war (well, yeah, we always have those, but this year has seemed worse than usual for some reason).  Superstorms. Droughts and famines. Endless human pain. (And other species are suffering too, obviously, but in typically human fashion it’s our own pain we notice most.)

A nice hefty apocalypse would’ve really taken the edge off all of those.

Because just think of it.  No more… well, no more [fill in the blank with whatever really gets on your case]. I have my own list:  full of the great tragedies above, but also full of many lesser ones, of annoyances and  disappointments and things that just get under my skin. No more Prometheus.  No more robocalling marketers. No more fiscal cliffs.  No more spam. No more Windows 8.  No more Apple Maps.  Crash a runaway planet or so into us and it’s all over with, and good riddance. (I really would miss never seeing season 3 of Sherlock or the remaining Hobbit films, but when so much evil would be wiped out at the same time, it seems petty to complain.)

Yet after all this effing buildup, what have we got this morning?

Bupkis!

It’s been beyond annoying, really: partly because we were promised two others of these this year. One of them was going to be a few days after my birthday. I thought, “Yeah, typical. I hit a landmark year and then have three days to enjoy it: whose good idea was this??” And the day came — it was supposed to be one of those raptures or something similar — and what do we get?

Nothing.

Then immediately the guy responsible for the math says, “Whoops, no, calculation error, God moves in mysterious ways, I haven’t been told everything, uh, human error, that’s the ticket. It’s going to be October.” The designated date was right after Peter’s birthday this time.  P. simply said, “Great, I get a party and no hangover!” — trust him to see the bright side of an apocalypse: this kind of behavior is the reason I married the man. And the day comes, and we have our little party, and the day goes, and what do we get?

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

What’s the saying? Once might be an accident. Twice could be coincidence. But the third time? Enemy action. The third time, any sensible person would pick up the phone and call Customer Service and say, “This is unacceptable. Something is really wrong at the fulfillment end. You need to do something to put this right.”

But who do I complain to?

Because now we’re going to hear the old song again…  all the stuff about how complex the problem is, how you can’t possibly blame any one person or organization. It was this writer. Or that broadcasting personality. It was a runaway meme. It was publicity-seeking New Agers — that’ll be a popular one. You can just see what the news is going to look like tomorrow, as all these people who promised us an End Of The World that could actually be worth something start pointing at each other and trying to shift the blame.

“Miscalculations in the calendar” — I bet that’ll be the most popular excuse. Rounding errors. Failure to correctly convert metric to imperial, or the other way around. (At least one Mars probe went God knows where because of that: you’d think people would’ve learned better by now! Seriously.) Or wait a moment, no, it’ll all have been a translation error, won’t it? Such a subjective art. Yeah, let’s blame the translators. Like they don’t already have enough on their plates.

I guess there’s nothing for it but to settle in for a nice long session of watching the fingerpointing, until the news cycle gets bored with it and cycles on.  (And I bet that won’t happen soon enough for some of these people, who’ve thought nothing in particular of inflicting their own crazy paranoias on the rest of the planet at large.) It’ll be just like the week after the US Presidential election all over again, with all the people who thought Romney was such a shoe-in suddenly finding all these great reasons how the other guys in the party screwed it up. “Wait, what? Women? Black and hispanic voters? Young voters? He said not to pay them any mind…! Yeah, him over there. And Romney, pff, I never really liked him anyway…”

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to let this slide.  I want to march up to somebody’s desk and get this made right. I don’t care what it takes: they can bloody well get DHL or FedEx on it, for God’s sake, but I want that runaway planet or whatever the hell it was supposed to be on my desk by tomorrow morning at the latest. And in the meantime, until the email with the tracking number comes in, I just want an answer.

Dude, where’s my apocalypse?!

December 21, 2012
7 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Current eventsEuropeFeaturedHistoryIrelandMediaTV in general

An afternoon at Trinity

by Diane Duane May 17, 2011

Just another day in the great Long Room of Trinity’s famous library. Except for once it wasn’t being “borrowed” without credit by George Lucas.

Having earlier stopped in at Áras an Uachtaráin to be greeted by the President of Ireland, and having then laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, Queen Elizabeth II went to Trinity College. She had a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, and then met with various folks associated with Trinity — including one Professor Doctor Sir Terry Pratchett, his stalwart assistant Rob Wilkins, and the erudite Colin Smythe, writer-publisher extraordinaire.

Flash video is embedded below. For those of you who have trouble accessing it through the embed, use this link to access/download the .mpg file directly. We’ll also have an iPhone friendly .mp4 file up later.

We have a few stills as well, but when installed on this page they broke the page formatting, so we’ve moved them here.

 

[flv:https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/media/Terry_Rob_Colin_And_The_Queen.flv 640 480]

 

 

May 17, 2011
3 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Current eventsHistoryHumorMediaNews

A royal wedding sentiment

by Diane Duane April 29, 2011

As usual, old Sam Pepys says it best in his great Diary.

“December 25: To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day: and the young people so merry with one another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them…”

Pepys' famous quote on seeing a marriage

April 29, 2011
6 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Film and TVHistoryliterature

What, no Burton?

by Diane Duane April 22, 2011

Was watching the BBC program last night on the Arabian Nights, featuring Richard Grant. When they started dealing with the issue of translations, it surprised me a little that not a single word was said about Sir Richard Burton, though a fair amount of air time was spent on Edward William Lane, whose version of the Thousand Nights and a Night was extremely sanitized.

I find myself wondering whether some scholar involved with the program had a bug up the butt about Burton’s fairly explicit translation. Granted, it’s not as if the man isn’t a source for continuing controversy: you run into scholarly opinion suggesting that Burton had committed that most heinous of offenses, “getting too close to the material” — the literary version of “going native”. Stilll, it’s odd to see an analysis of the Nights that doesn’t even mention his name. I wonder what was going on…

It’s interesting also to note in passing that Burton discusses Lane in his introduction to his own translation. “That amiable and devoted Arabist,” Burton calls him, and then gently takes him to task for “converting the Arabian Nights to the Arabian Chapters. Worse still, he converts some chapters into notes. He renders poetry by prose and apologizes for not omitting it altogether; … he is at once too Oriental and not Oriental enough. …Worst of all, these handsome volumes are rendered unreadable …by the stuff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was perhaps the worst in Europe.” (Well, don’t mince words, Sir Richard, tell us what you really think…)

April 22, 2011
8 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Film and TVHistoryPsychology / psychiatry

In the O RLY? Dep't: Dinosaurs helped build the pyramids

by Diane Duane August 24, 2008

Srsly.

Now all we need to hear is that Hitler was somehow involved and we’ll have the perfect documentary pitch for The History Channel.

(It could have made a good Stargate SG-1 script too, but unfortunately it’s a little late for that. See, the Goa’uld started experimenting with re-evolved saurians as hosts, but then the Ancients…  oh, never mind.)

Tags: dinosaurs, dinoceros, Job, Hitler, pyramids, Stargate+SG-1, Discovery+Channel
August 24, 2008
1 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Computer stuffCurrent eventsHistoryMediaOnline life

A timeline of Internet memes

by Diane Duane August 7, 2008

This is cool!

And apparently it’s still growing (to judge by the “Add An Event” button).

 

Tags: Internet, history, meme, online
August 7, 2008
1 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Current eventsEuropeHistory

In the "You Could Not Make This Up" department

by Diane Duane August 6, 2008

…And it’s fascinating.

Purported descendants of the Knights Templars are suing Pope Benedict for recognition of the seizure of a hundred billion Euros’ worth of their ancestors’ assets and property in the mid-1200s. (The seizure was secondary to accusations that the Order was heretical, and involved — among other things — in devil worship: but these accusations now usually thought to have been a smokescreen intended to allow the appropriation of the Templars’ great wealth.) 

[Those suing the Pope] claim that, when the order was dissolved , more than 9,000 properties as well as other commercial enterprises belonging to the knights were appropriated by the church.

Their legal claim, they say, is just to “restore their good name.” In a press release, the self-proclaimed “sons of the knights” declared, “We are not trying to cause the economic collapse of the Roman Catholic Church, but to illustrate to the court the magnitude of the plot against our Order.”

 

Tags: Templar, Knights, Pope, Benedict, Order, France, Crusades, Crusaders
August 6, 2008
1 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Graphic and plastic artsHistoryTravel

Sung dynasty porcelain: yum

by Diane Duane February 19, 2007
The Transcendent Pig salutes a cousin

While working on something else, I just caught a teaser on Euronews about this exhibition marking the reopening of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

I’m a sucker for antique porcelain, and this stuff is sublime.

(BTW, Gung hei fat choi, everybody. It’s the Year of the Fire Pig, which is supposed to be good for us Dragons. We’ll find out…)

[tags]Sung, Soong, dynasty, porcelain, National Palace, museum, Taiwan, Chinese new year, Year of the Pig, Year of the Fire Pig[/tags]

February 19, 2007
2 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
HistoryScience

Stonehenge…where the party animals go! …Er, went.

by Diane Duane January 31, 2007

Archaeologists have found the remains of an ancient settlement two miles from Stonehenge which seems to have been built specifically to celebrate the Winter Solstice… big time. 

The new finds at Durrington Walls, two miles northeast of the stone circle, indicate that the entire region was a large religious complex where the early Britons gathered in midwinter for raucous feasts and solemn ceremonies before sending their deceased on a voyage to the afterlife.

…Durrington Walls “is either the richest site or the filthiest that we have ever found for this period,” Pearson said. “It’s absolutely stuffed full of trash or rubbish: broken pots, chips, flints, burned stones used for cooking and animal bones. Many were thrown away half eaten, a sign of conspicuous consumption. This is an enormous feasting assemblage. People were here to have a really good time.”

Significantly, there was no evidence for the processing of grain or baking it and little evidence of crafts. “This was not a full-time, year-round community, but one for specialized activities.”

Like partying!

[tags]Stonehenge, Solstice, winter, Durrington Walls[/tags]

January 31, 2007
1 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
HistoryHobbyhorses and General RantingMediaWriting

Goody Two Shoes

by Diane Duane January 21, 2007

Not about Jade. (Well, only peripherally.)

So, finally, it was over and it ended, of course, in tears. By an overwhelming majority, the viewers voted to expel Jade and keep Shilpa.

 

Who? What?

…Quite.

The inevitable comments are starting to come out of the British newspapers regarding the Big Brother bullying-and-racism flap. A few of the articles are making puns on Jade’s last name, including a very specific one: Is it too late to be Goody Two-Shoes?, etc. And something about that brought my head up. What’s with these references to the name of the main character in a children’s book two hundred fifty years old… a book in which even the identity of the writer is in doubt, and which (I would be willing to lay down at least a ten-Euro note) almost nobody who uses the phrase has ever read?

It seems lots and lots of English-speaking people know the phrase, even after the source has been almost completely forgotten in (at least) popular culture. What kind of book remains so long alive in the language — if only in title — while no one knows much of anything about it? Why this strange etiolated fame? …I’m as familiar with the phrase as anyone else, but had never given a moment’s thought to the source. After seeing these news stories, though, suddenly I got curious and went hunting.

“Goody Two Shoes” (with or without the hyphen) turns out to be a shortened version of the proper title, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, one of several titles for a work first published in England in 1765. (The title page itself is worth mentioning, as it looks like this — )

T H E

H I S T O R Y

O F

Little GOODY TWO-SHOES;

Otherwise called,

Mrs. MARGERY TWO-SHOES.

W I T H

The Means by which she acquired her Learning and Wisdom,
and in consequence thereof her Estate;
set forth at large for the Benefit of those,

Who from a State of Rags and Care
And having Shoes but half a Pair;
Their Fortune and their Fame would fix,
And gallop in a Coach and Six.

 

And you might be forgiven for thinking, Oh no, here comes another ghastly “improving” work of that period… if the author didn’t immediately tip you the wink, giving himself/herself away:

 

See the Original Manuscript in the Vatican at Rome, and the Cuts by Michael Angelo.

Illustrated with the Comments of our great modern Critics.

…Uh huh.

I confess to having been suckered in, so I took the half an hour or so required (I was making dumplings at the same time) and read the book online at Gutenberg. It’s not very long. Yes, it is moralistic, yes, sometimes the dated style and phrasing will nearly send you around the bend: but there’s some funny stuff in it…and I can believe that in its time it may have seemed groundbreaking. It turns out to be a rags-to-riches story in which a poor little girl named Margery, made homeless and shortly orphaned by the connivance of a greedy farmer-estate manager and his boss (a thoughtless absentee landlord) manages to make something of herself. She does this — and here she instantly wins my support — by teaching other kids to read. And the book has some other surprises in it, among them possibly the earliest instance of product placement I’ve ever seen (medical preparations referred to in the text have ads at the end…), and some very serious discourse on animal rights, surely not something you’d routinely expect of a work produced in the mid-1700s. Margery has a lively time of it: some scary things happen to her, some amusing things: and at last she comes out on top.

Yes, the author does let you know that Margery’s success is at least partially because she is Good and Behaves Like A Good Girl while those around her are behaving badly. (There is a certain Polyanna quality to her behavior: and there we have yet another character whose name remains famous though most people haven’t read the book — though certainly Disney has intervened on her behalf.) And the author also lets you know that Divine Providence is about, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Whatever. I would need to do some research, but there are dangerous signs in this book of someone writing a children’s book that is both (argh) improving, and (dangerous new idea) funny.

The book was much loved by five or six generations, and stayed in print for at least a hundred and twenty-five years or so, being published and republished in many editions on both sides of the Atlantic, ripped off, recast, and otherwise digested by its parent culture. Eventually, as happens, its interest for newer generations started to wane, and it fell out of the public consciousness, except for its title character’s name.

Some people had strong opinions about this growing, general amnesia about what they felt was a good book that deserved to be remembered. Listen here to the great Andrew Lang getting tetchy about the decline of quality children’s literature (he was writing to Coleridge in one of a series of letters to dead writers: there’s another great one here, where he writes to Sir John Mandeville, Kt. But never mind that at the moment). To Coleridge, he says:

Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld’s and Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs Barbauld’s books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

 

Hang them!–I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.

The tone of the complaint sounds kind of familiar… You can take a look at a little of “Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff” over here and see why Lang was getting so riled. It looks to me like an early form of the Dick-and-Jane form of early-reader material, now with Extra Added Didacticism and Mommy holding your hand real tight. Yes, she too was groundbreaking in her way and her time — see this longish article setting out reasons why — but her stuff still sets my teeth far further on edge than Two-Shoes does.)

Anyway. The question I’m left with is: when did “Goody Two Shoes” turn into a pejorative? What happened? Are we just seeing an accretion of scorn, decades thick, for a discarded nursery book whose prose style has fallen out of fashion, and a heroine seen (in modern or pre-modern times) as literally too good to be true?

But also…this whole business makes me look ahead several centuries and wonder if there will come a time when somebody might be referred to as “such a Harry Potter…” …and almost no one will have read the book, or have any idea why the phrase means what it does — or realize that what it’s come to mean may have nothing to do with the genuine trials or triumphs on paper and film of one young wizard. Two hundred fifty years is a long time: even print, eventually, becomes ephemera. Very few are the books still read even a century after they’re published: how many people now know even the names of the superstar writers, let alone the superstar children’s writers, of 1900? Yes, we have the mass media now, and many more ways to disseminate fame. But sometimes I wonder whether that will make the written word more likely to be forgotten, rather than less.

…Who knows. I’m going to go have some of that soup with the dumplings in it.

 

January 21, 2007
3 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Newer Posts
Older Posts

The blogger


40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

Archive

On sale at Ebooks Direct

Recent comments

  • At the Young Wizards end of things: an update report - Out of Ambit on From the Young Wizards universe: an update
  • From the Young Wizards universe: an update - Out of Ambit on Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited
  • Review: <em>A Wizard Alone</em> by Diane Duane – Disability in Kidlit on Young Wizards New Millennium Editions: a little more info
  • Top Ten Tuesday ~ Books that Make Me Hungry – BookWyrm Knits on Seed cake: a recipe
  • Dr. John Watson's CV: Searching for the Secrets on Dr. John Watson’s CV

Now at Ebooks Direct

 

Feel like buying the writer a coffee?


That's kind of you! Just click here.

Popular Posts

  • 1

    What part of the cow does corned beef come from

    March 16, 2006
  • 2

    Lahey No-Knead Bread recipe: one baker’s experiences so far

    December 9, 2006
  • 3

    Seed cake: a recipe

    January 1, 2013
  • 4

    Young Wizards New Millennium Editions: a little more info

    May 30, 2011
  • 5

    The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, The Death of Sherlock Holmes and How The World Took It)

    January 17, 2012

Associated websites


...all divisions of the
Owl Springs Partnership

Previously on “Out Of Ambit”…

At the Young Wizards end of things: an...

2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series

Maluns

Owl Be Home For Christmas

Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”

From the Young Wizards universe: an update

Irish life: The things you don’t discuss, Halloween...

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Tumblr
  • RSS
Footer Logo

(c) 2020 Diane Duane | all rights reserved | WP theme: PenciDesign's "Soledad"


Back To Top