Category:

Hobbyhorses and General Ranting

Two new bread pans: a report

by Diane Duane June 13, 2021

We’ve been using the standard garden-variety North American style of home bread-baking pan for a long time, but there comes a moment when you realize suddenly that you’ve been using the wrong tool to produce the effect you want, and you start looking around for something that’ll do the job better.

In particular, though high-risen loaves with domed tops are undeniably lovely, Peter and I found that about half the time the loaves we made in the standard bread pan were showing a preference (once they’d risen to the pan’s top) for, during the further rise, expanding sideways rather than upwards. With more highly hydrated doughs, this definitely turns into a problem. The loaf-in-process sags over the sides of the pan while it’s baking, and afterwards you wind up having to chop the sides off it so that slices will fit into the slots in the toaster… altogether a most unseemly business. So we started looking for taller-sided baking pans that would give the rising dough more support in the upwards direction.

The first thing we tried was a lidded baking pan/baking tin from a US maker now long associated with this type of bread pan: a “Pullman pan”, so called because it was the type of bread pan used in the kitchens of Pullman train cars. (The style turns out to be far older than its use on the railway, though. European bakers were producing so-called pain de mie, “bread made for its crumb” [rather than its crust], for at least two centuries previous. This was the preferred bread for premium sandwiches, canapes, croutons, and toast.)

At any rate, the pan we got from the US company was well made, heavy, and baked a good loaf. But it was both bigger than we needed—loaves made with it wound up needing to be cut in half to fit in our bread box—and also a bit fractious: sometimes difficult to shut, and also often difficult to open. This got frustrating. After a while we passed the USA pan to friends at a local pub/B&B, and went back to the “regular” loaf pans for the time being.

Recently, though, one or the other of us spotted the items below on Amazon. They’re available from numerous different retailers, leading me to believe that they’re being manufactured by one or two companies in China under different badges or marques for different retailers.

This style of pan is available in various sizes and materials, so we decided to get a couple of the smaller ones—essentially one-pound loaf pans—and see how they worked. They come in both steel and aluminum versions.

Here’s the steel one:

And here’s the aluminum one:

...So we sent for them, and along they came. We’ve been testing them for some days now, and briefly: they’re terrific.

As regards materials: the aluminum pan weighs 405g: the steel one weighs 624g. It’s going to take more testing, over more time, to determine which of them does a better crust on the bread (though again, since these are pain de mie pans, the crust isn’t really meant to be the main act).

These pans are both rated for a 450g loaf….though, again, it’s going to take some testing to see how much leeway there is in this rating. Some of the recipes we use produce denser loaves than the house recipe for Just Plain Old White Bread. That, though, is the recipe we’re using at the moment for testing purposes.

The thing to warn you about in advance, if you get these, is that right out of the box, the non-stick coating on these is SERIOUS BUSINESS. The pans will Zamboni around with alarming slidiness on any kitchen surface where you place them. You don’t dare pick them up without having a firm grip on both the pan and the lid, as (given the slightest opportunity) the lid will slide right off the pan and head for points unknown.

Frankly, though, as a baker who’s dealt in her time with more than enough annoyingly sticky pans that should have been nonsticky, this is kind of a refreshing change. I’m going to be interested to see how long this phase lasts and how durable the nonstick coating is.

The important thing, though, is how readily freshly baked bread comes out of these. And the answer is: very readily. Tip them over and the new-baked loaf just kind of falls out. Though the docs suggest that the pans should be greased (indeed, buttered…), it’s looking like there’s no need for that at all. It might prove necessary to grease them when you’re baking things that have a lot of sugar involved in them. I’m thinking about testing the household seed cake recipe in one of these shortly to see how it behaves.

Anyway, here are some pictures, so you can see how these compare, size-wise, to the normal-size bread pan: and how a loaf baked yesterday with the lid off looks. …A note about those three little holes you can see at the bottoms of the pans: those are apparently for air circulation. I have yet to see whether there’s a problem with doing a very wet batter bread in one of these, but I’ll test that soon and add notes on it here.

For those who might be interested in getting their hands on one of these: hope this helps!

(Above: the pans themselves, with the little spiracle-like air holes visible…)

Above: one of the pans compared to a typical non-lidded loaf pan.

And below: the result when we sliced open the latest non-lidded bake…

(PS—disclosure: we’re members of the Amazon Associates plan, so if you use one of the lnks above to buy one of these, we get a wee tiny commission. …But you probably knew that. Just saying…)

June 13, 2021

Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Mythology Poetry things that piss you off Writers Writing

Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and an interface issue: or, The Thing I Got So Cranky About The Other Day

by Diane Duane September 13, 2020

(The other day being April 2, 2014. This post is ported in from Tumblr — I’m in the process of moving some longer posts from there to here, where they belong.)

The passage below, when I ran across it last week, initially caused my mouth to drop open in sheer disbelief. And since then the thought that it is even now wandering blithely about unchallenged has been sort of gnawing at me. So some ranting is about to ensue. If you’re not in the mood for that, best turn your eyes away now and look at some nice pics of kittens drinking beer or something.

…I can’t now even remember what brought me to this particular page, and I want to emphasize that this isn’t in any way about the OP, who doubtless thought the source (or at least the quote) was reliable.

However…

…it’s not. And since this (as some around here like to say) is relevant to my interests, I just want to drop a few notes about this one quote, and leave further considerations to those who feel like going into them.

So here’s the material that got up my nose.

Greek myths mention several Islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men, only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies. The Greeks apparently feared them. They said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores; and the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once. The Greek writers seemed to have no doubt that women could destroy whole populations of adult males, and there was no effective defense against them.
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker (p. 26)

(rolls up her sleeves) It’s hard to even know where to begin shredding this like wet kleenex analyzing this…

In order, I guess:

“Greek myths mention several islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men…”

Okay. Even though the Amazons were specifically known¹ for living on the Anatolian coast of what is now Turkey — this being the location of their main city, Thermyskira or Themyskira, depending on whose orthography / spelling you prefer: Wonder Woman fans will of course recognize the name — well, who knows? Maybe the Amazons had some all-female island colonies as well. (They are reported by a historian or two as having founded Paphos, but that city [on the island of Cyprus] was co-ed, and all the other colonies mentioned in connection with Amazons were in mainland Turkey.) So let’s run with that possibility for the moment.

“…only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies.”

…WHOOPSIE!

Let’s look at the islands in question.

Taurus / Tauros: Or as the more recent ancients came to call it, Taurica. Only an island by courtesy. It’s a peninsula (though one sort of hanging by a thread): in fact, the southernmost peninsula of the Crimean region, which has been somewhat in the news of late. Nonetheless, whether it’s an island or a peninsula, that didn’t stop the near-classical-era ancient (male) Greeks from planting trading towns all over it.

Lemnos:

A genuine island, maybe two thirds of the way between mainland Greece and Turkey. Myrina is its main town.

Lesbos:

Right there southeast of Lemnos, off the present-day Turkish coast. Mitylene / Mitilini is the major city.

…These places’ mythological associations are no less valid just because they’re real than are those of places like Circe’s island of Aeaea or the Isles of the Blest. But because these places do exist, that means we’re kind of forced to apply physical laws and common sense to them.

Two out of three of these places, with good weather and the right wind, are within two to four days’ sail (if not less) of the home harbors of some of the greatest sailors of antiquity. The third one is a slightly longer trip, maybe a week to ten days of coasting depending on the weather. But even if we knew nothing else about these places, their generally exposed nature and their propinquity to a significant group of the time’s major interlocking patriarchal cultures force us to set the odds very, very low against any of these places being woman-only islands… whether the women are Amazons or not.

And as it happens, we know a lot more about all of them. We can handle that issue one island at a time as we move through the quotation.

But first a warning about something specific: the phrase “were said to be…”. Anyone who’s spent enough time on the Discovery Channel to find themselves watching some of the dodgier documentaries — the ones where the bar for telling where you got your facts is set fairly low — will recognize this phrase and its friends “It is said that…”, “Legend has it…”, “Some say…”. This formulation is a sign of someone who either can’t be bothered to provide you with a solid citation or doesn’t have one and just wants to get on with selling you their own merchandise without being bothered too much about the sordid details (i.e., “verifiable data”). Any use of these phrases, especially in a scholarly work, should make the reader slow down and look carefully at the details.

So, island by island:

[The Greeks] said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores…

Bzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. No women of Tauris. In fact, no women. Just one.

The writer is here referring to the myth that is the source for Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Agamemnon’s daughter, theoretically sacrificed by the King for good winds on the way to the war in Troy, is instead actually caught away in the act by Artemis (who as protector of maidenhood and young innocence wants no such crap done in her name, thank you very much). Artemis proceeds to dump a deer with its throat cut onto the ground by the altar as a substitute sacrifice, and then deposits the doubtless very confused maiden in Tauris to be priestess of her temple there.² Iphigenia is understandably shocked and horrified to find that her duty as priestess is to sacrifice to the Goddess all strangers³ who come to Tauris. Not just the men: all woman strangers too, should any turn up.

And there are definitely men living in Tauris, before, during and after the unfortunate princess’s arrival. When Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his best friend show up to rescue her, the messenger who brings the news that she’s going to have to sacrifice these strangers is male. Additionally, Iphigenia at one point, doubting whether Artemis is actually behind this barbarous rule at all, says to herself, “Would a Goddess command such things? Would she take pleasure in sacrificial murder? I do not believe it. …It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the Gods.”⁴ And finally there’s the King of the Taurians, whom Iphigenia refuses to be allowed to be killed as part of her rescue because “he was kind to her”. You would think all-female cultures who only send out for guys when they want to have babies would generally be kind of short on kings. Also: you will look in vain for any evidence of the women of Tauris being Amazons.

…So we have a bit of misrepresentation here about the population of the island, and about who they were killing, and (granted, the motives being unclear by the principals’ own admission, but we’re plainly meant to think it was a let’s-all-us-women-kill-all-the-men thing) about why. …Well, maybe the writer got confused, or it was an error: these things do creep in. Let’s move on.

…[the Greeks said] the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once.

In myth, this did happen once. But it was (a) “a long time ago”, and (b) extremely situational and something that the participants seemed willing, if not glad, to get over and done with.

The tl;dr version of this story comes in a number of versions spread across five or six centuries. Basically it breaks down like this:

Women of Lemnos fail to perform proper rites honoring Aphrodite for (apparently) several years. No one seems to know why.
Aphrodite gets pissed off at the women and “afflicts them with a foul odor” which causes their husbands to avoid them and instead run over to Thrace and raid the place for female sex slaves. These they bring home and screw instead of their wives.
The Lemnian women, very very annoyed by this turn of events, all kill their husbands (some writers say their fathers, too). The only woman in on the plot who fails to do likewise is the Lemnian princess, Hypsipyle, who manages to smuggle her father the King offshore before the mass murder goes down, and then becomes Queen of an all-female island.
Jason and the Argonauts arrive. They apparently have no problem with any foul odors and during a visit of at least several months quickly bed down with various Lemnian women (this turn of events being from all available data quite consensual). Numerous children are conceived. Most if not all of these children are boys, as they’re given Argonauts’ names when they’re born. Regardless of their maleness, they are not killed or sent away.
Jason himself hooks up with Hypsipyle during this period, and she later bears twin boys as a result, one of whom when grown becomes King of Lemnos and turns up in the Iliad. (There are ancient writers who claim that this was the cause of the odor problem: Medea, they say, inflicted it on the Lemnian women in revenge on Hypsipyle for Jason’s infidelity. In any case, you wonder what the heck he was thinking; you’d think he’d have worked out by then that you seriously did not screw around with / on Medea. But it’s also true that evidence suggests Jason was not exactly the sharpest knife in the block.)

Anyway, the ancient writers go out of their way to make it plain that this long-ago event, distant even in mythological terms, had been a temporary situation (cf. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 114: “Lemnos happened to have no males at the time [when the Argonauts visited the island]”) and had nothing to do with the way things normally went on Lemnos.

So… a wee bit more of the truth being bent, there? Or not being completely told, in order to buttress a point the writer’s trying to make? Also: these women are not Amazons, either. Somewhere along the line, with all this other stuff going on, someone surely would have mentioned.

Anyway. Last of all comes Lesbos, “said to be…” one of three “all-female societies.”

Well, not in any myth I can find a record of. And, historically, never. Certainly the mother-goddess Cybele was worshipped there in deep antiquity, to judge by the pottery, but there is no sign of the island ever having been an all-female reserve. As one can judge from the Lemnian situation, when such things existed or occurred, notice was taken in the literature.

Sappho in particular would probably have been amused to hear about this allegation. She lived in the island’s main town of Mitylene for most of her life, as far as we can tell, and had two (maybe three) adult brothers who to present best knowledge show no signs of having been murdered or exiled for their maleness. Yes, she sponsored a thiasos where the possibility or benefits of an all-female society were discussed with the participants. But Lesbos was co-ed — cf. famous male Lesbians⁵ like Alcaeus, Phaenias and Terpander. (And still no sign of Amazons.)

(sigh) So.

The multiple errors in the paragraph above could have a number of causes: (a) A confused writer. (b) A lazy writer. (c) A writer who’s pushing a specific thesis or agenda and doesn’t mind the reader being accidentally misled into it. I am not a mindreader and can’t be certain of which of the above might be accurate. But the impression I’m left with is that of someone trying to bend a complex set of facts to her own purposes.

Now, in fiction, as fiction, that kind of thing has its place. But in what purports to be a genuine history of the suppression of truths about female roles in religion, mysticism and spiritual life in the ancient world? Engaging in jiggery-pokery with the facts as they are known is not a good thing, no matter how good one considers one’s own intentions to be. One does not combat lies or suppressions of the truth with misrepresentations and other truths themselves bent out of shape.

All I can say further about Walker’s book (as I don’t have it and have never read it in detail) is that I have dipped into numerous quotes from it here and found a significant number of them to be at best kind of factually suspect and at worst as potentially error-ridden and misleading as the single paragraph discussed above.

I’m not saying that the book will not have been useful in forming (or opening up) potential feminist thought in many ways for its readers as regards the ancient world and what has happened to the Goddesses of old, and as regards women’s interior/mystical/mythological lives and how they may be enhanced and enriched by thoughtful reclamation of the lost, strayed or stolen. But I do want to suggest that content in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, and checked before internalizing. Because if the above is broadly representative… then it needs checking.

…That’s all.

¹Appolonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 370 ff (trans. Seaton): “[regarding the Black Sea coast of Anatolia :] Onward from thence the bend of a huge and towering cape reaches out from the land, next Thermodon at its mouth flows into a quiet bay at the Themiskyreian headland, after wandering through a broad continent. And here is the plain of Doias, and near are the three cities of the Amazones, and after them the Khalybes…” Plainly not some vague description of Someplace Far, Far Away In The Story, but a landscape the writer thought might possibly have been familiar to some of the people reading or hearing this. It’s like something out of a Michelin Green Guide.

²One has to wonder whether this particular misfortune of Iphigenia’s is meant to be thought of as a near-final operation of the curse of the House of Atreus, a godawful karmic trainwreck that had already gone on for generations. Certainly the ancient writers return again and again to the family’s alternately horrible and tragic doings with a near tabloid-like fascination.

³Edith Hamilton‘s great classic Mythology (liberally studded with Hamilton’s beautifully clean translations from original sources) narrows this specification down to “all Greeks”. Whatever: gender isn’t the issue here.

⁴Hamilton, ibid., pp. 366ff.

⁵How often does one get to use that phrase legitimately? I couldn’t resist.

September 13, 2020

Computer stuff Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Life

Pulling The Lever

by Diane Duane May 26, 2020

This post is as much a marker for me as anything else; the sign of a lot of (sometimes deeply annoying) work finished, and a return to more normal operations around here. I hope.

The DianeDuane.com main site and webspace got hacked in late March, and nearly all my time between then and now (except when I managed to wrestle away some writing time as well) has been spent putting that right. The complications were manifold. The site was on an old server host that couldn’t progress past using php 5.4, which is no longer secure against the depredations of naughty people.

So everything was going to have to be moved to a server that could handle php 7.x, which is the present supported and secure version. And all the website stuff presently stored in the old hosting space had to be either converted to handling php 7.x-and-better, or thrown out and replaced with something better.

This in itself should only have taken a matter of days to sort out. But the next, deeper layer of the problem was that the version of the Drupal platform on which the old main site was built — version 7.x — was aging out. Upgrading it to v.8, with v.9 already looming over the horizon in beta, was going to be just one straw too many on this camel’s back. And replacing the site in a new server but still running on D7 would just have been tempting Fate. What was hacked before could (and very probably would) be hacked again. …And: for some time I’d been thinking about moving the DD.com site over to WordPress, as it really better suited my needs than Drupal did, these days.

So, having made that choice (which I’d been putting off for a long time because implementing it was going to be such a pain in the butt)… the serious work began. Getting onto the people at FXDomains and explaining what I needed of them for this migration. (And a shout-out to the excellent Blake, who made that part of the work so easy.) Installing a fresh copy of WordPress over there to house the Drupal-to-WP migration of the main site. (Fortunately this blog has been running on WP for a long time now: migrating that would just be a case of migrating its database and directories to a new install running under php 7.x. This too had its complications, and involved a week of testing, swearing and kicking things. But it got sorted out at last.)

Dealing with the main site was more of a challenge, as it involved finding a theme I liked (in this case “Uptime” by TommusRhodus: I commend those folks to you for terrific and patient customer service), getting it up and running, and then cutting-and-pasting hundreds of pages of text and portfolio material into it. That work is still not complete — many entries in the new website are still missing metadata that for various reasons couldn’t be forced to follow over from the old Drupal install. But it’s now complete enough to be going on with. More can be done casually, day by day, as opportunity presents itself.

And then, after everything was finally in place: the insertion of various security plugins, to keep this mess from happening again. Then: backups. Backups of backups. Several different modes of backups, to be sure, because DAMN I am not planning to have to do this crap to my own site again any time soon. I’m already now contemplating getting our last site that’s running Drupal off of there: and with that a long chapter will close. I’ve been running our household sites on Drupal since v4.7, but we’re done now; time’s too short and life’s too busy. Arrivaderci, old friend.

And with all the backups done, and the pages loading as fast as they’re likely to for the moment (though more work can and will be done on this), it’s time, as the woman said, to Throw The Lever. That you’re seeing this means it’s finally happened. May great Thoth the Webadmin of the Ennead, the divine Patcher of Code, prosper the undertaking.

…Now where were we before I was so rudely interrupted? I’m sure I was in the middle of writing something…

May 26, 2020

Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Medicine, nursing, health Obscure interests

The hiccup cure

by Diane Duane April 25, 2017

First of all: why did I use the image above? Because I don’t like any of the stock art available for the term “hiccups”, and I do love Toothless and his boss. So if you think this is going to be anything to do with How To Train Your Dragon, please be disabused of the idea. This post is about curing hiccups.

It’s a copy of information that appears elsewhere about the one true “magic” trick I know. Somebody just retweeted the Google Plus post I did about it some years back, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a copy here at my own blog. Seems like an omission. So here it is.

Disclaimer: I know that this is one of those endlessly contentious subjects, and there will be people who rise up immediately and insist “That’s not how it works at all” and will cry BUSHWAH and so forth. I’m entirely happy for them to do that, and I wish for them that Their Mileage May Vary in peace, and that their hiccup cures may always work. As for this explanation: I trust my source implicitly — he was busy very effectively and good-naturedly saving lives on a 24-hour shift when I ran into him — and, most to the point, this strategy works: reliably, repeatedly, past any possible doubt of its effectiveness when considered statistically, and to the endless amazement of many skeptical (and badly hiccuping) people across two continents.* Nuff said.

And now for the details on How To Cure Hiccups. ADDITIONAL AND IMPORTANT ADVISORY RIGHT UP FRONT: if you are on a sugar- or sodium-controlled diet of any kind, this solution is most likely not for you. Consult your physician before attempting it.

One afternoon [in 2011] while working, I found myself listening to a local TV station’s “science lady” attempting to explain the cause of hiccups… and getting it all wrong. As usual, this event makes me want to share what I was long ago taught about the subject by a medical resident in the emergency room at New York Hospital (now Cornell/NYH Medical Center). He took five minutes to explain the physiological mechanisms behind hiccups, and then taught me a simple, foolproof three-step method for stopping them dead.

So here’s The Hiccup Cure. (And if you share this around, please do so in some way that will allow as many people as possible to see it, so that more folks can be spared the Curse of Hiccup Embarrassment. Thank You For Your Continued Support.) 🙂

The explanation: Hiccups are the result of an chemical imbalance in your blood — a temporary derangement of the normal acid/alkaline balance of your blood electrolytes. There are all kinds of reasons why this can happen all of a sudden, but the most common ones are talking too much while eating (my favorite), and eating or drinking too fast, and some kinds of emotional stress, and periods of sudden exercise (running for a bus, etc). Different causes tend to induce different kinds of imbalance, but the commonest ones are these:

(a) Respiratory acidosis — too much CO2 in the blood: and
(b) Respiratory alkalosis — too little CO2 in the blood.

When you get one or the other of these, the body’s tendency is to try to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs’ contents in and out a lot faster, so that if there isn’t enough CO2, some more can get into the bloodstream, and if there’s too much, some can get out.

The body doesn’t want to bother your conscious mind with this, so it handles the problem in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your diaphragm spasm repeatedly, compressing the lungs and trying to shove a significant percentage of their tidal volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.

Now, understanding this, you’d think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly, and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem right. Well, probably it will. But it takes forever, and you meanwhile are sitting there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can themselves keep making the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to take more drastic measures.

It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups themselves is to quickly increase the electrolyte imbalance significantly. The simple three-step intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn’t work, the less common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you’re most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and hiccuping.

Step 1: Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry, in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden extreme change in the blood chemistry, “calls off” the hiccups as ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The “spoonful of sugar” approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of hiccuppers.

If this doesn’t work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.

Step 2: Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It’s gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang, right away.

If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis, but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.

Step 3: Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it. (Or alternately, give them a small spoonful of vinegar if no lemon is available. But lemon works better.) Their hiccups will then vanish.

WARNING: It is vitally important to do these things in order and not try to cut back on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and you’ll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying, especially if you’re on a low-sodium diet or just don’t feel like retaining liters and liters of water the next day.

But if you follow these instructions faithfully, the hiccups will vanish. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with this routine.

A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane’s Law of Necessitative Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you’ll fall very low in their estimation if you don’t, they will always be alkalotic, and you will always have to run through all three stages, feeling dumber and more desperate every moment as you go along and nothing seems to be working. (This law first became plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my producer for the “Science Challenge” educational series I wrote at the BBC: if I hadn’t proven I was good at the science part by curing him, well, you can imagine.)

And a note in passing: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures are, in one way or another, attempting to exploit this electrolyte-shift mechanism (though most of them are fairly ineffective at it). Scaring the person (causes acidosis: see The Andromeda Strain), drinking water upside down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto), whatever: they are all merely thin pale versions of the One True Cure.

So there you have it. May it do you (and those around you) good. 🙂

*Still working on that third one.

April 25, 2017

Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Online life Politics

Mindfulness

by Diane Duane January 29, 2017

It’s such an overused term, these last few years. It was originally a technique for achieving a fuller view of the world-as-it-is and a deeper sense of one’s place in that always-fugitive here and now. But more recently it’s been co-opted as a technique for improving work output in corporate settings — a use that’s probably about as far from its original purpose as can be imagined.

The world shifts. You can try to avoid seeing how it’s shifted, how it keeps on shifting — but (in my experience, anyway) that’s a mistake. Turn your head away for too long and when you feel like turning it back again, some new and bigger shift has come that’s twice as hard to deal with as it would have been if you’d kept watching.

I don’t think anyone with interests based in the United States can have failed to notice, in the last week or so, how fast the status quo is shifting under all our feet. To say the trends are alarming is (for me) putting it pretty mildly.

The place where the effects of the shift are unfolding most rapidly is on Twitter. Now, normally Twitter is a place where I spend time in a relatively lighthearted mode, and so when I tweet and retweet there tends to be a lot of art and graphics and photos I like, and news about ongoing writing projects and sales at Ebooks Direct*, as well as Irish news and weird-or-strange news, and travel and cooking and other similar subjects that affect me personally at the European end of things.

Now, since the middle of last year, with the Brexit situation ongoing — and its fallout onto and into Ireland, like the results of a very very slowly growing mushroom cloud — and then the US election, the seriousness-level of my Twitter feed has been increasing. It’s been unavoidable, really, but I’ve tried to maintain a general balance.

The events of the last week have shifted my attention pretty hard, though, and this too is unavoidable. Even at a great distance, I take my US citizenship seriously. When I see the country I grew up in being twisted into unconscionable new shapes, my Twitter feed’s going to reflect my opinions about that and those of others I think need listening to.

I doubt that people who follow me because of an interest in my written work will jump ship just because I’m being mindful of something besides writing and mass media and entertainment. And what I am very mindful of right now is those people who went through the already-significant vetting it takes to get a green card in the post-2001 world, people who went abroad on holiday or to see relatives or for other reasons more urgent, and have suddenly discovered they can’t get home to their families again. I’m mindful of legally-issued court orders that US officials are refusing to obey. I’m mindful of spite and bigotry and stupidity running loose in places where they should never have been permitted access. I’m mindful of Angela Merkel having to explain the Geneva refugee convention to the present inhabitant of the Oval Office. I’m mindful of people who’ve escaped death in other countries and were hoping for peace and a chance to start over in the US, now most likely being shipped back — very possibly to their deaths — without due process. I’m mindful of all kinds of things, norms of law and behavior that we’ve taken for granted for a long time, apparently starting to unravel — thus demonstrating how institutions that seem robust may prove terrifyingly susceptible to accidental or purposeful sabotage by the reckless or thoughtless or cruel.

I have to be mindful of these things when I notice them, at the cost of betraying the priorities that make me write what I do, and the way I do. So if you’re someone who hangs around my Twitter feed mostly for entertainment and you find this level of mindfulness troubling, then I invite you to mute me for a while and come back later to see if the environment suits you better.

I make no guarantees about this, mind you. What passed for normalcy just a month ago now suddenly seems lost in a distant golden past — and if I bear weight on the concept of what might happen tomorrow, I can already hear thin ice cracking underfoot. So I’ll react to new events as I must. But I can promise that I’ll keep on working, and keep letting folks know how it’s going when there’s news on something new. Right now it seems important — when anyone comes looking — for me to be found at my post, doing what I’ve been doing for the last few decades: telling stories that will give both you and me something else to be mindful of… if only for short periods.

If (under the circumstances) your preference is to stop paying attention to my Twitter feed, then go well, and look out for yourself. You’ll be missed. If you’re sticking around, though, strap in and we’ll make what we can of the ride together. Your company’s very welcome, even if things around here get so busy that I can’t tell you so myself.

And a final note, in a slightly more typical mode. Try this cupcake recipe; it’s really good even without the frosting. Nobody can be mindful all the time, and while I was in the middle of typing this up I said to myself, “Screw this, I need some chocolate.” …Also, hot tip: I didn’t have quite enough cocoa for the recipe, so Peter suggested I top up the amount by adding Americano-style coffee powder. My God did that work out well. (I just had one with nothing but sour cream on it, and it was fabulous.) Give it a shot.

*Yes, we’re having one at the moment. Go take advantage if you like.

January 29, 2017

Europe Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Ireland Random musings

The 5 Warning Signs of Autumn (Rural Ireland Edition)

by Diane Duane October 21, 2016

This is about when it begins to happen.

The first part of October can be surprisingly dulcet in lreland, seeming more like an extension of September than anything else. The weather doesn’t often oblige with prolonged, still, modestly-warm periods of the “Indian summer” type, but at least it tends to settle a bit. Later in the month, though, comes the shift, when you know the true autumn is upon you.

Here are five ways to tell autumn has genuinely (in its sneaky way) arrived in the countryside here.

(5) You start hearing “Sure aren’t the [leaf] colors getting lovely” from the neighbors

I should say “neighbours”, really, in this instance. And “colours”. And you know what? They’re okay. (Meaning the colours. The neighbours are far better than okay: they’re brilliant.) But for those of us who come from places with hard winters, the colors are kind of… meh.

The problem comes in two parts: the local flora and the local climate. Even now, with climate change way too well in progress, Ireland hasn’t historically run to cold winters: the Jet Stream has seen to that. (When it’s been where it’s supposed to be, that is, at least judging in terms of the behavior of the last half a millennium or so. And don’t start with me right now if you’re one of those “The recent climate is a blip” people: just go have that conversation somewhere else if you’d be so kind.)

I say no more than necessary here of the godawful winters of 2011 and 2012, which dumped feet of snow all over everything (our little road never did get plowed in 2011, and thank God for our neighbors who would run us down to the shops or bring heating oil up for us in jerrycans to make sure our central wouldn’t conk out, because the fuel trucks couldn’t make it up the hill through the snow) and killed damn near every palm tree in the country. But those would be the serious exception to the rule, and the rule is: mild wet winters with temperatures that only rarely fall below freezing, even here on the high ground, and even then only for short periods.

Which brings us to the flora. Around here we’re short on the kinds of trees that develop great color. No maples here (though we have quite a lot of sycamore (the species is invasive, and has crowded out some of the trees that used to be more prevalent). Most of the rest of what we’ve got locally is oak and beech — a lot of beech. So the available colors are pretty much brown and yellow, with a bit of soft orange. And since what it takes to trigger the leaf chemistry that develops into dramatic autumn color is relatively cold weather, drama is pretty much what Irish autumn color lacks in a normal year. It’s nothing like the eye-vibrating yellows and reds that you can get on the East Coast of the US in autumn, even in the suburbs.

So our neighbors’ cries of delight leave me a little underwhelmed. After a few decades of practice I now find it possible to not immediately segue into mutters of “Are you kidding, this is nothing on Vermont, or even the Catskills…” and so on. But it’s a trial.

Well, this too will pass. And I’m not speaking figuratively, as in places up here the leaves are already saying “The hell with this, I’m done” and coming off the trees almost before they’re finishing acquiring what modest color they’re going to get. (Peter’s line is that there are only sixty days in a year when the beech trees surrounding us are not dropping their leaves. Sometimes I think he has a point.)

(4) Waking up the central heating

You wake up in the morning to find that too-familiar condensation inside those windows in the house that aren’t double-glazed, and say, “Uh oh. Time to turn it on…” For much of the year (in recent years) it seemed like sort of a game to see how long you could go without needing the central. Then fuel prices dropped and there was just a shade less virtue in gritting your teeth and Not Using Up The Oil. Now, though, you start doing calculations of whether you want to get the guys up for a delivery, or wait a bit longer and pay some other bill instead. The Lesser Calculus of Climate…

(3) Bed socks become a thing

Even with a good heavy duvet and a warm husband/wife/other, feet can get surprisingly cold without warning, these nights (especially when #4 hasn’t yet shifted to “oh go ahead, turn it on for a bit”). Or maybe you just run to cold feet normally, and taking the easy way out and shoving them up against a nice warm bit of your nice warm partner is not, um, particularly appreciated. So: time for the bed socks.

And then you go searching for them. But where the hell are they? You want the good ones, the soft fluffy ones that came from Marks & Spencer. Except they’re black, like an alarming amount of other clothing around this household, and therefore God Herself only knows where they are in a closet that’s full of black things already. And the ones you do find are those crap thermal socks from last year, the ones that were OK until you washed them. And they’re hot pink. Oh God what possessed you. “Where are the Marks ones!” the cry goes up. And Echo answereth not. Maybe you’ll find them by spring. Wait, is this a black one? Oh no, wait, it’s one of those ones with the rubber nonslip ribbing on the soles. And anyway, there’s only one of them; the other is missing. (And the rubber is hot pink. What were you thinking? Another question for the ages.)

Finally you just put on whatever you can find. Because, seriously, no one in their right mind would walk barefoot on the tiles in the kitchen, the way they’re feeling at the moment. And it’s only going to get worse.

(2) The sweaters / jumpers / pullies come out

In the Spring you folded them up and shoved them right to the back of the drawers / closet shelves. But now, especially if the conditions mentioned in #4 remain as yet unaltered, they’re starting to look awfully good. And admit it, when you were in town the other day you looked in the store windows in Grafton Street and began to lust after some of the sweaters you saw there. Not to mention the cashmere in the Hermès boutique in Brown Thomas. Insanity even to think of it at those prices, but it looked so lush. (Never mind. The wannabe-cashmere from Marks is still quite nice. In fact, you have some of that. Go put it on right now and then go on downstairs and make some tea.)

And finally and possibly most diagnostic of all around here:

(1) Microwaving the butter

Summer in Ireland is when you don’t have to microwave the butter after it’s been out on the counter all night.

But summer routinely doesn’t last long. And eventually one morning you realize that the toast would get torn to shreds by butter in the consistency it has at the moment. That’s when you know: Yes, autumn is truly here.

Ten seconds is about right for our present microwave. (Our old fan oven-microwave would let us do five, but alas it hasn’t been replaced as yet.) …At least you know by now how long it needs to hit that magic point between not-quite-enough-to-spread-yet and WHOOPS, okay, I’ll make some pasta con aglio-olio-e-peperoncini and pour this in it.

…And now you can butter your toast, and sit down and have your tea, and think about whether or not you really want to turn on the central.

October 21, 2016

Computer stuff Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Online life things that piss you off Windows

Do. Not. WANT.

by Diane Duane July 28, 2015

ETA: Thanks to those who set me straight on the non-mandatory side of the upgrade. I’ll take refuge in Rick’s excuse here: “I was misinformed.” As for the rest of it, the “download opportunity” still behaves like malware: you should be able to decline the download. Not allowing your users to make the choice themselves is abysmally bad practice.

I don’t often get stirred up enough to go into full-blown editorial mode, but today is one of the days when that seems to be happening.

A lot of you who have Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines will have noticed the appearance, earlier in the month, of a little white Windows logo in your system tray. This, when you click on it, munificently offers you a free upgrade to Windows 10. Those of you who have experimented with the thing will probably have noticed there is no way to get rid of the impending update download — or at least, no obvious way. And that it starts rolling out tomorrow, July 29th.

For those of you who do not want the 3-gig download and would like to turn it off, let me point you at this webpage:

How To Remove The Windows 10 GMX upgrade nonsense

This cranky and civic-minded person has laid out, step-by-step, a method by which you can get rid of that pestilent little icon in your tray and stop the unavoidable downloading and implementation of three gigabytes of material you don’t want and have no intention of using.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I understand perfectly well Microsoft’s rationale behind this, or at least their stated rationale; to keep security upgrades consistent across all the installs of their new OS. That said, rolling it out in this particular way is really unsavory. It smacks of the behavior of malware installers, rather than that of any responsible company with any kind of interest in keeping its customers on board.*

(Also, it’s worth noting in this context that many people who have already updated to 10 — particularly users with Nvidia graphics cards — have been reporting horrific driver problems with the new Windows version, secondary to this ill-thought-out policy of “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. Only just now has the beginnings of a fix for this particular problem begun to propagate, but this strikes me as a sign of more bad things to come, a slow-motion trainwreck better watched from outside it than inside.)

Now who knows, over the course of the next six months or so, when I get ready to build my new desktop machine, I may indeed go for Windows 10 — once I’ve had time to make the choice, the informed decision, as to whether it’s right for me, and whether I can find alternatives to the various programs whose function I like and would like to keep. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll go whole hog and just switch over to Apple. (I know a lot of you who’re Young Wizards fans, considering the frequent appearance of hardware with the Biteless Apple on it in the books, will be surprised that this is an issue for me at all. However, in this as in many other parts of my tech life, I am an amphibian and have for a long time worked happily on more than one side of the divide at the same time. But this present behavior of Microsoft’s is trying my patience way more than usual.)

Anyway, I’ve used the method detailed in the webpage above on my present Win7 desktop, and it seems to work perfectly. I strongly recommend that if you are ambivalent about the prospect of this forced update of your software, you go over there and have a look at it and decide whether it’s an option you’d like to avail of.

*I also understand that in recent online talks, Microsoft upper-level management have let it be known that people who find ways of avoiding this upgrade will eventually be cut off from normal product updates. And you know what? I can think of no quicker way for them to drive me straight into what Euripides called “the apple-laden land.” Yeah, there’s just one of me, and I doubt my loss is going to break Microsoft’s corporate heart. (shrug) No matter.

July 28, 2015

book sales ebooks Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Online life Online life reading

When is a “library” not a library?

by Diane Duane January 19, 2015

From over at the Tumblr:

freyaliesel:

o.o tuebl has all of Young Wizards in the library.

BEST NEWS EVER

It would be if (a) I’d given them permission to have the books, (b) I was getting paid anything for their presence there.

However, (a) I never have, and (b) I’m not.

ETA: To the person who commented on the Tumblr post saying, “writers get paid for libraries carrying their books?” Why, yes, we do. The libraries buy our books to lend out. And we’re glad to have the libraries lend them out as many times as they can after that, because that’s our mutual understanding of what libraries do. Public library sales are traditionally a significant part of any YA writer’s income. Sometimes as much as 10 to 20% of a smallish print run will go to libraries — sometimes more!* — and this can be a significant reason why early print runs of a book “earn out”, thus encouraging your publisher to buy your next book. So libraries, and librarians, are very much our friends. (They would be anyway. But this is an additional reason.)

Also: in some markets, like the UK and Ireland, the author earns additional royalties from the book being lent out by libraries — the more libraries buy and lend your book, the more money you get. This is never a huge sum, but it can be helpful even for the midlist writer. Peter and I just got a payment of this kind from one of our UK agents. It’s hardly a lottery win, but it means that we can replace our suddenly-dying clothes dryer this month instead of sometime in the spring.

Tuebl, however, is not a library in the commonly-understood sense (and certainly not in the public-library sense that Ben Franklin intended when he started the first one in Philly). Tuebl does not pay any writer up front for their books, or for the right to make them available for download. People upload books to Tuebl at will, frequently without any real concern about who owns the copyright. Tuebl then dodges this particular legal bullet by making the assertion that they assume only people who have the rights to upload material are doing so. (It would be really interesting to see how this “assumption” holds up in court when someone eventually gets around to challenging them on it.) Additionally, they offer authors some nebulous possibility of “earn(ing) money by giving your books away for free” — which may or may not work out in the long run: right now my preference is to let other writers do that and tell me how it worked out for them.**

If I’d decided to try this experiment for myself, the results, for good or ill, would be my problem to deal with. However, when people take it upon themselves to give away my work for free without my permission — while implying as hard as they can that it is happening with my permission — that gets up my nose enough for me to make an issue of it in public. In particular, I note that somebody or other (having perhaps mistaken me for a vast multinational publishing conglomerate) bought one of my books from my own store and uploaded it at Tuebl for people to download for free.

I sincerely hope people can understand how the above might make me cranky.

(sigh) Anyway. Onward to the next problem…

As an addeddum: someone else (anonymously) asks:

Regarding authors getting paid when a library houses their book(s), what happens when someone donates the book to them? do they still have to pay you?

In countries where “lending rights” laws obtain, yes they do. (In such countries, the money to pay the writers comes from the government. See, for example, this page at the UK site for this program.)

The basic idea behind these laws is that the book wouldn’t be there in the first place if a writer hadn’t spent the time and effort to write it (and also the money necessary to keep themselves alive while writing it), so the writer therefore deserves some return from the lending process, even if it’s just a small one. (The law establishes this as an intellectual property right: see this page for much more background info about how the Public Lending Right is handled across the 53 countries where it’s been implemented.)

Whether books are purchased by the libraries themselves or donated to them, they report their lending figures to the government body that acts as a clearing-house for the data, and this body sees to it that the legally-determined amount of money comes to the authors directly or through their chosen representatives.

*Indications are, from my early royalty statements, that something like 40% of the print run for the original (and now very hard to find) hardcover edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard went to US libraries. This enthusiastic uptake would have been instrumental in Dell agreeing to buy Deep Wizardry.

**Yes, I know about Neil Gaiman. Sadly (or perhaps fortunately, from Amanda Palmer’s point of view) we cannot all be Neil Gaiman.

January 19, 2015

Food Halloween Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Humor Obscure interests

Halloween Candy: an idle personal overview

by Diane Duane September 17, 2014

It was seeing this thing that got me thinking about the subject.

…WTF? RT @pattymo: Who will answer for this crime pic.twitter.com/u0h3jqCfIh

— Diane Duane (@dduane)

September 17, 2014

What surprised me after the fact was that the very sight of a “candy corn bar” provoked such a strong reaction from me (“EWWWWWWWWW”) despite my being long past trick-or-treating age.

This response poked me in the curiosity nerve, a little, so I went looking for evidence of whether other people shared anything like it — this idea that some Halloween candies were “right” and others “wrong”.

And a little research suggests there seems to be a bone-deep conservatism on this issue, combined with some regional implications, as various Worst Halloween Candy lists seem to have areas where they agree and then others where they diverge or disagree strongly. (As an example: lists at BC Living, HuffPo (in fact they have a few of these), TopTenz, Serious Eats, Complex, Nooga…) Google will guide you to more if you feel the need for a broader statistical sample.

I always took Halloween very seriously while I was still of participating age, as my family wasn’t particularly well off and there wasn’t that much candy in my lifestyle except at chocolate-heavy holidays like Easter and Christmas. (Fortunately I slipped out of this stage just barely before the OMG BAD PEOPLE ARE PUTTING RAZOR BLADES IN THE APPLES thing got started.* I didn’t mind the apples. I knew they were traditional.) (As they still are in Ireland, which is after all where it all began. Apples and peanuts have been the trick-or-treat staple here for many years: only now are the candies starting to creep into the Irish tradition.)

So for what it’s worth: looking over these lists, I find some common ground, but not complete agreement.

Stuff I liked:

Candy corn… legit candy corn. (And still do.)
Those marshmallow peanuts. (Don’t ask me why.)
Tootsie Rolls. (In the 60s they were better than they are now. There seems to be so much wax in them now that you could stick wicks in them and light them as candles in emergency situations.)
Full size candy bars. I was never a Snickers person: I prefer my peanuts separate from candy, as a rule. (Also, no Reese’s Cups for me: you can keep your peanut butter OUT of my chocolate, thank you very much. If I want peanut butter I’ll go make a sandwich.) …Three Musketeers was (and when in the US still is) my preferred bar. I had a brief flirtation with Baby Ruths but it never came to anything. The US Mars bar was and is different from the UK one, but I like them both. (And steal Peter’s occasionally.)
Licorice, especially the long “licorice whips.” Preferably the red ones, though I didn’t mind the black. I may be the only kid I knew at that period who actually liked licorice. (But then I liked spinach, and liver. Even from a young age I felt that normalcy was boring / for other people: it’s probably no surprise in retrospect that I should have become a Sherlock Holmes fan.)
Nonpareils. Those used to turn up in little boxes in my part of the NY metropolitan area. God, but I loved those things. (And if you handed me a bag of them now you’d get it back empty.)
M&Ms. Chocolate, not peanut. The same as the nonpareils. Then and now I could go through a bag of M&Ms with terrifying speed.
Candy cigarettes. My one attempt to become a smoker failed miserably — how could anyone do that, I thought at the time, it tasted awful!! — but there was just something about the texture of these things, the crunch, that I adored. Suck it until it was gone? You must be joking. Gone in three crunches.
Pixy Stix. Oh God I loved those. Strong sweet/sour contrasts have always been a draw for me.
Space Food Sticks! The chocolate ones. Wow I loved those too. Rare to get them in a Halloween haul, but when they turned up they were memorable.

Stuff I had no time for (and would swap with others who liked them):

Those Necco wafers. Not enough flavor.
Mary Janes. Boring.
Good and Plenty. Something about the candy shells always put me off. (Maybe they were distracting me from the licorice.)
Taffy candies generally, the exception being Bit O Honeys. Those were all right.
Lollipops in general. Normally too much work, not enough taste. Some Tootsie Pops made it over the bar, depending on the flavor.
Gum. Bubble, plain, whatever. Boring again.

Seasonal considerations: There were things I had no time for at Halloween because they were readily available at other times from the store up around the corner on Park Avenue:

The candy buttons.
The wax bottles containing dubious sweet liquids.
The wax lips.
Candy necklaces, bracelets, etc.
Those little wafer “flying saucers” with some kind of tiny hard candy inside them.

…Anyway. Enough of this: I haven’t even had all my breakfast yet.

(Meanwhile, for those of you who’re feeling nostalgic: have a look at OldTimeCandy.com. They have the stuff arranged by decades.)

*Has anyone ever actually found a razor blade in an apple? I mean, verifiably? With pictures? Or is this one of those Urban Myth Coinciding With Early TV/Mass Media Attention Causes Hospital X-Ray Departments Nationwide To Waste Millions Of Person-Hours On One Day Each Year things?

(See also People Being Gassed In Sleeper Compartments of European Trains And All Their Stuff Stolen. I went hunting for non-anecdotal data on this some years back and couldn’t find anything. My firm belief is that back in the day, numerous weary and stressed-out travelers were careless / clueless about making sure their sleeper compartments’ doors were actually locked before they went to sleep, and then desperately needed a face-saving excuse the morning after opportunistic thieves, or in some cases their fellow sleeper compartment occupiers, had ripped them off while they slept through it like the dead. “I mean, I’m a light sleeper, I would’ve heard anybody come in unless something else was going on. It must have been gas! Gas!” …But I digress.)

September 17, 2014

Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Media Rail Writing

The “Amtrak Residency”: Why I Think This Is A Really Bad Idea For A Writer

by Diane Duane March 10, 2014

I’ve felt sorry for Amtrak for a long time. Economic pressures and the unique problems of any rail system based inside the US (where automobile travel has too long been the be-all and end-all) have turned it into a faint shadow of the formerly great passenger and freight rail lines that helped define the 19th and early 20th-century history of the US.

But I’m finished feeling sorry for it as of now. It’s no crime to have fallen on hard times. But offering people what seems to be something wonderful and then to have it look like they might be trying to take advantage of those who take up the offer? Not good.

On the face of it, it sounds like a lovely idea.

#AmtrakResidency was designed to allow creative professionals who are passionate about train travel and writing to work on their craft in an inspiring environment. Round-trip train travel will be provided on an Amtrak long-distance route. Each resident will be given a private sleeper car, equipped with a desk, a bed and a window to watch the American countryside roll by for inspiration. Routes will be determined based on availability.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and reviewed by a panel. Up to 24 writers will be selected for the program starting March 17, 2014 through March 31, 2015. A passion for writing and an aspiration to travel with Amtrak for inspiration are the sole criteria for selection. Both emerging and established writers will be considered.

But then you read the terms and conditions, and the alarm bells go off big time.

Clause 5 is where the trouble starts. From the cautious writer’s point of view, clause 5 can be read as meaning: “When you turn in your application, gee, anything can happen to your original writing. Who knows? We have a billion PR people working for us whose work yours might be [airquotes] confused with [/airquotes]. By signing this you agree that should this happen, you have no recourse, and we never have to credit you or pay you one thin dime.”

Clause 5 by itself ought to be enough to make you walk away. But then comes clause 6, in which you assign to Amtrak the irrevocable world rights to all the data in your application including your writing, forever and a day. And the day after that.

I learned the lesson long ago both from other freelance writers and at my agent’s knee, and the lesson is as important now as it ever was — in this day of the effortless digital ripoff, perhaps way more so. The lesson is this: Never give anyone world rights to any of your writing. Ever. Ever. Because who knows if that one piece of writing is the one that would have made you famous worldwide and rich beyond the dreams of avarice? Or more to the point, what if they later do something with your writing that is absolutely opposite to your intentions and which you find harmful or offensive? You’d have no recourse there either. I wouldn’t sell anyone world rights to a story for a million dollars and that necklace of flawless cabochon emeralds I saw in the window at Harry Winston that one time. And sell away world rights to something for the price of a single train ticket? I don’t think so. They could plate the inside of that sleeper with platinum and lay on catering from Dallmayr and I still wouldn’t do it if it meant they got irrevocable world rights.

Better pay the ticket price yourself and keep the rights to your work in your own pocket than swap those rights for the chance at a single train ride, sleeper or not. (And something else to note here. There is no declaration of who owns the rights to the material you produce on this train trip. There is no way to tell what paperwork you’re going to be required to sign if you actually win. Oh, and did I mention the background checks they want to conduct on you first, to make sure you’re not some kind of crypto-crook who’s going to embarrass them? Clause 9.)

…Now, I hear they’re fixing clause 6 in some way or other (doubtless already having heard the first wave of complaints). That’s all well and good. But I haven’t heard a word about clause 5, which stinks to just as high a heaven. And they originally thought clause 6 was fine as it was. That says way too much about their non-clarity on the concept of what belongs, or might reasonably be expected to belong, to writers.

So please, I beg of you, unless the legal language associated with this offer is amended, you should consider stepping away from the very large diesel-powered vehicle. I too am passionate about train travel and writing… way more than most people might guess on the first count. But this is not the way to go about it.

…Let me add, for clarity’s sake, that I think aiding writers to experience rail travel as a possible source for inspiration in their writing is a super idea. The people you meet who you’d never have met otherwise, the places you see from a train that you see from no other point of view (especially that strange opportunity to see, as it were, into the “back yards” of people’s lives)… they can make a huge difference to the work, no question, injecting the delightfully unexpected into the writing experience. But as usual with any abstract “good idea” when you try to drag it into real-world realization, the devil proves to be in the details. Sometimes, even with the best intentions in the world, implementation can get thorny, and unexpected consequences can get thrown up to complicate the issue.

I’m hardly insensible to the view that there’s nothing altrustic about this particular version of the sponsored-residency concept, and the way this whole business can be viewed as an opportunity for positive publicity for Amtrak. (I wouldn’t have used the word “stunt”, though here and there others have.) Never mind that for the moment. What I think Amtrak needs to deal with now is the apparent one-sidedness of the legal language attached to the opportunity — so that applicants will have some sense that there’s protection in it for them, their concerns, and their work, as well as for the company providing the opportunity.

I very much hope that happens.

Writing on the train on one’s own nickel: the Belfast-Dublin Enterprise, 2004

(CC train image at the top from Jack Snell on Flickr)

March 10, 2014

Drink Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Humor religion

In the Afterlife After-Hours Bar

by Diane Duane November 21, 2013

You know the place. It’s where deities and divinities and avatars go when they’ve clocked off and they need a casual after-work pint or a quick remedial stiff one or some casual conversation with their peers before going home to the family.

So Christ is sitting there nursing a nice Pinot Grigio (he gets so tired of red wine, you have no idea) and he’s saying to the gods and near-gods at the bar with him, “You know what really gets to me, though? The tat. The kitsch. The dashboard ornaments, the endless dodgy art — ”

“I saw that doll,” says somebody down the bar past Mithras and Izanagi: a god with his hood pulled up and a long cloak that looks and flows like shadow. “With the puffy sleeves and the crown.”

“The Infant of Prague, yeah. Take my advice, do not do apparitions after hours in Prague, it’s something about the beer they brew there, what those people will do to you after the fact just does not bear considering. But you know what’s worst? The ‘Sacred Heart.'” He actually does the air quotes, which leave little traces of (appropriately) red fire. “On the front of me, outside my clothes, like I’ve had some kind of bass-ackwards transplant. Usually with rays of light coming out of it. Aorta and vena cava and wobbly bits all aglow. There is nothing that does not appear on. Lunch boxes. Key chains. Night lights, do you believe that? How many kids’ nights have been ruined by having that thing glowing at them like a refugee from a Bill Cosby skit? You should see some of the stores at CafePress. I’m amazed they haven’t done My Sacred Spleen yet. Except probably none of them can figure out where it would go.” He rolls his eyes. “I have it way worse than any of you.”

Mutterings of agreement run up and down the bar. Then a voice speaks up.

“I got that beat.”

November 21, 2013

Dough showing well developed gluten structure

cooking Food Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Ireland recipes

Folklore, string structure, rye dough and Raymond Blanc (with afternotes on a bread recipe)

by Diane Duane March 6, 2013

I was making bread the other day and suddenly found a finger in it.

…Cognitively speaking. (Not a real finger, don’t panic….) But writers’ brains are such strange places sometimes. Here’s today’s example.

My short-term memory is a constant joke around here. You can (as happened this morning) tell me that the weather station’s batteries are kaput and can’t be charged in the normal battery recharger, meaning they have to be put into one of the more technologically challenged ones… and I will still, two hours later, look at the weather station and remark, “Oh look, its batteries have finally gone south” — to the sound of ironic laughter from Himself Upstairs. (And I’ll then recall the whole previous conversation perfectly well, but will have mislaid it between times.) Some of this is Not Paying Attention, but other aspects of it are just Sixtyish Brain Fail.

However. Ask me for a quote from a book I read forty years ago, and no problem, there it is. As you shall hear…

So I’m working with this recipe from Raymond Blanc for the first time, because the other evening I went to sleep with the TV running (I sometimes do) and it was showing an episode of Blanc’s “Kitchen Secrets” series from last year, the one about bread. Now, bread is a passion with me. (A master post about this will turn up in a day or three so I don’t keep losing some of the links I keep looking for.) Bad bread is everywhere — I can’t think of another place where Sturgeon’s Law applies so rigorously; in bread’s case it’s because of the pestilent ubiquity of something called the Chorleywood Bread Process. (More about this in another post, but originally this process was devised as a way to make decent bread in large quantities from the soft wheats that are all that will grow in the British Isles. It uses yeast as a flavoring rather than as a way to develop the bread naturally: gluten is developed in this process by violent physical agitation and the addition of ever-increasing types and amounts of additives. Ick.)

Good bread, though, is something I can’t get enough of. This is one of the reasons I love Switzerland so much. (German bread is almost as good as Swiss, generally, but the Swiss in my opinion have a slight edge.) And any way to make good bread at home is worth knowing about. Add to that the fact that it’s Raymond Blanc sharing his method for pain de campagne on this particular show, and there’s no way I wasn’t going to try it out as soon as I was conscious again. (I really like Blanc. Not only does his passion for good food burn with a pure bright flame that should be visible from space, but he’s funny, dry, not afraid to make fun of himself, and he doesn’t seem to feel the need to prove how great a chef he is by screaming at people.)

So this recipe: like most good country breads of central Europe, rye flour is involved. And rye is typically such a nuisance to work with. It makes the dough sticky, it’s a pain to clean up, it gets everywhere. There I am at the worktop this morning, dealing with the quite sticky dough — look at the way the gluten’s got it stringing in the image underneath here, so lovely — scraping it out onto the floured work surface and starting to get to grips with it. Or it with me, because any dough with rye in it has a life of its own beyond that of the yeast. I slice the dough into four and start shaping it, and the usual struggle for domination begins. It’s climbing up my wrists, it’s trying to attach itself to my clothes, it’s under my nails. I look down at the hands and sigh and wonder where the nail brush is.

And suddenly I see, in the back of my head, the image of a woman’s severed finger, her pinky to be precise, with a signet ring on it. And a voice speaks up from the depths of time, as it were in narration, or sort of a caption, and it says:

“…This cannot be my wife’s finger, because it’s got rye dough underneath the fingernail, and my wife has never kneaded rye dough in her life.”

And I stop what I’m doing and my mouth falls open. Not so much with the thought “Where the hell did that come from?”, because I know where it came from: I’m kneading rye dough, and the association was instantaneous. The thought that is now making me crazy is, “What fairy tale is that?”

And instantly I despair, because if there’s one thing we have a lot of in this house, it’s books of legends and fairy tales. It is going to take forever to settle this issue, and it’s going to drive me crazy until I do.

…And of course the despair doesn’t last that long. In another time it would have, because I’d have had to go through all those books. But these days, Google Is Our Friend many times every day. So once I manage to get the dough shaped (two baguettes, two oval loaves) and put aside for the dough’s second rising, I go off to Google and search on the phrase “has been kneading rye dough”. Too precise. Knock it back to “kneading rye dough” and “fairy tale” and only one result comes up: a reference to the great Welsh epic tale, the Mabionigion.

So now I know where I am without really having to check the backstory (though I do anyway to see if I remember the setup correctly). And some detail comes up that makes me laugh, because the dialogue might as well have come out of Sherlock Holmes as out of the man who actually utters it, a Welsh Prince named Elphin.

The original material is here and on the page after. (It is, as I expected, Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, which goes back to 1849. (ETA: the pages aren’t displaying at the moment — you may need to check their cached versions at Google.) But let me sum it up for you.

Elphin has been lucky enough to pull out of a weir in a river near his home a miraculous child, the (soon to be famous) prophet, bard and wizard Taliesin. Elphin takes the child home and he and his wife more or less adopt this prodigy (which frankly is a smart move). Then after a while Elphin has to go off to spend Christmas with his uncle, a petty king named Maelgwyn. There is a lot of sucking up to Maelgwyn by all and sundry during this period, especially on the subject of his queen, who is more beautiful and modest and graceful and blah de blah de blah than all the other women in the kingdom, or so everybody keeps telling Maelgwyn, this being the local level of Speaking Truth To Power, i.e. Not Very High.

Well, somewhere in this process — and it’s only fair to suggest, though gently, that these islands being what they are at Christmas, Drink Has Been Taken — somewhere in here, Elphin, who loves his wife a lot, actually commits the tactical error of saying what he’s thinking: that his wife is pretty damn beautiful and graceful and modest and blah de blah de blah on her own, thank you very much, and at least as much so as the queen. …Well, you can see where this is going. Maelgwyn throws Elphin’s butt into the dungeon and sends a courtier off to see if Elphin’s wife is all she’s cracked up to be.

The man sent off to do this is a schmuck named Rhun (“the most graceless man in the world: there was neither wife nor maiden with whom he had held converse but he was afterwards evil-spoken of”). Rhun heads for Elphin’s castle with the intent to prove that Elphin’s wife is in fact not what she’s cracked up to be, thereby gaining favor with Maelgwyn.

It’s at this point that little Taliesin, who plainly has his prophecy engine fully engaged, tells Elphin’s wife that a jerk is heading in their direction to dishonor her. “So here,” says the baby prophet/bard, “is what you’re going to do. Find one of your housemaids. Dress her in your clothes and jewelry. Sit her down at table as if she was having dinner. Let Rhun the Jerk find her instead of you. What happens is not going to be pretty, sorry about that, but it’s her or you.”

And so it is done. Rhun shows up, finds this woman looking like Elphin’s noble wife and doing the things he thinks she should be doing, and he gets to work. She invites him to dinner (typical Celtic hospitality), indeed dinner and supper, and sometime during supper he drugs her wine. She falls over unconscious, and Rhun chops off her pinky — with Elphin’s signet ring on it — and bears it away as “proof” that Elphin’s wonderful wife got so plastered with a total stranger that she didn’t even feel this happening. (The implication being, of course, that he could have done, and maybe did do, all kinds of other things to her as well.)

So Rhun returns to his master, shows him the finger, and Maelgwyn is very pleased. He has Elphin brought up out of the dungeon and “chides him”, saying (I’m paraphrasing here), “Look, dummy, you ought to know that you can’t trust a woman any further than you can throw her, and here’s the proof: your wife’s finger, your signet ring, what can you possibly say?”

Elphin takes one look at the finger and says, “Lord, no question that’s my ring: everybody knows what that looks like. But as to the finger? A few things. First, this wouldn’t even stay on my wife’s thumb, her fingers are so small. But you can see from the marks how the thing’s been forced onto this finger. Second, my wife cuts her nails once a week: Saturday nights, actually. This nail hasn’t been trimmed for a month. And third… if you look under this nail, you’ll see that whoever it belonged to was kneading rye dough in the last three days. And my wife, being a gently-reared princess, has never kneaded rye dough in her natural life. Soooo…”

Needless to say, cheeking a King like this to his face gets Elphin’s butt chucked back in the dungeon again. But it’s all right, because Taliesin the Wonder Kid is on the case. He heads off to Maelgwyn’s castle, springs his foster-father, makes everyone else look profoundly stupid, and otherwise generally saves the day. (You still feel pretty damn sorry for the poor housemaid, though. Fortunately, this being a Celtic culture, she would very likely have been entitled to some form of compensation.)

…Meanwhile, all I can do is sit here and wonder at the human brain, which can pull a fairly complete memory of something like this out of the depths of decades‘ worth of time (because it has to be easily thirty years since I last read the Mabinogion through ) at the mere invocation of the phrase “kneading rye dough”.

Sheesh.

Anyway, now all I have to do is get the rest of the rye dough out from under my nails…

Now that I’ve made this recipe twice: just a thought or three for those of you who might be thinking of attempting it.

First of all: seriously, spring for bread flour if you’re going to make this. The first time I did the recipe it was with a standard Irish “strong white” flour. Not that the results weren’t just fine. But the second time, I used a flour that was a lot heavier on the hard wheat, and the results were significantly better.

Secondly, about the kneading times: This is serious business here. Blanc is very specific about the times in the basic recipe, and following them pays off. The first kneading period is more about mixing and letting the liquid be absorbed, as he says: the second is about developing the gluten in the flour. Then, after the first rise, even though the resulting dough is incredibly sloppy-looking, it is also surprisingly easy to manage once you start shaping it. Hint here: don’t be afraid to use a fair amount of extra flour to make the shaping easier, but at the same time try to knead as little of that extra flour into the shaped dough as you can. (This recipe has caused me to look at all other recipes I’ve used that have cautioned against “overkneading” and made me wonder whether I’ve actually been underkneading all this while.)

Another note: this dough flops out fairly flat as it rises the second time. If you want a higher-standing loaf, use a high-sided pan. (For the baguette above I used a specialist baguette pan.) You could do this recipe in standard loaf pans and it’d work fine, as far as I can tell. But you get more / better crust if you bake it naked. (NB: you would need four US-sized loaf pans if you choose to do it that way. Supported, no question that this dough would fill them.) Additionally: during the second rise I spritzed the loaves with water a few times (mostly because I was out of saran wrap / clingfilm with which to cover them, and had fallen back on damp towels tented over the loaves on upended glasses. This worked very well. May have made the crusts a little crisper as well).

Also, re pre-baking prep: You can eggwash the shaped dough before baking if you like, but it’s not necessary. The baguette above was baked naked and looks nice enough. (Probably also more traditional that way: I doubt that pain de campagne is eggwashed when baked on its home ground.)

Re the yeast: Fresh works better if you can get it. Specifically, the bread’s flavor is improved.

Re additives: I put caraway in the baguettes the second time around (I’ve always been a sucker for a good Jewish rye, something which is a bit thin on the ground in Ireland). It worked brilliantly.

…So there you have it. This is a bread very much worth making. (I tell you… slices of that baguette still warm, with Boursin smeared all over them: OMNOMNOM.)

March 6, 2013

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