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(Before your eyebrows go up too high, you should be told that this is simply the prize for winning the World Porridge-Making Championships. Ready to sign up? Here are the rules.)
Awwww!!
Cleese, who played a lemur-happy zookeeper in the 1997 film Fierce Creatures and hosted 1998 documentary Born to Be Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, the comic now has a new species of the primate named after him.
Researchers at Zurich University have dubbed a tiny, leaf-loving lemur in Madagascar the Avahi cleesei.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer man, if you ask me. (Thanks to Mark Evanier for the link.)
The parrot Koki of the former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito has been put under quarantine as a precautionary measure following the bird flu cases reported in Croatia, DPA reported.
That’s right: Marshal Tito’s parrot has been quarantined.
(bemused headshake) If I tried to put something like that in a novel, I can just imagine what the next phone call from my editor would sound like.
And so I cook.
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
Title: Shin of Beef Stewed in Red Wine
Categories: Beef, French, Meat, Stew
Yield: 6 Servings
6 oz Smoked bacon or salt pork
1 ea Large onion
1 tb Olive oil
5 lb Shin beef off the bone
2 ea Cloves garlic
1 ea Bouquet garni
8 oz Red wine (or more)
1 ts Salt
8 oz Beef stock or water
Cut the bacon or salt pork into small cubes and put them, with a
tablespoon of olive oil, into a heavy and fairly wide iron or
earthenware pot. When the bacon fat runs, add a large sliced onion
and stir about until slightly brown. On top, arrange the shin of
beef, off the bone, into thick pieces. Add the cloves of garlic,
crushed but not chopped, and the bouquet garni (either one of the
"instant" ones, or a small bunch of parsley, thyme and bayleaf, tied
up with a string). Pour in a large glass of red wine (about 8 oz) and
let all come to a fast boil for 4-5 minutes. Add about the same
amount of beef stock or water, and allow to boil again. Add salt. .
Cover the pot with paper or foil and a well-fitting lid. Transfer to
a very slow oven, 290 degrees F or gas mark 1, and in about 3 hours
it will be cooked. Or you can half-cook it one day, remove it, and
finish it the next. Serve with potatoes or rice to soak up the sauce.
(Egg noodles also work well if you thicken the sauce slightly.) This
dish can also be simmered *very* slowly on top of the stove.
MMMMM
…The latter approach makes it easier to take the lid off every twenty minutes and go “Oh, wow, just smell that!” But for the moment, I’ve stuck it in the oven. It’s a pretty afternoon: we’ll walk down to the pub and have a glass or so…then wander back, boil some potatoes, smash ’em up, and have the stew over. (To the anguished cries of cats, I’m sure: they were yelling loudly enough while I was cooking.)
Happy birthday, sweetie…
Uh. Er.
Do not play in two halves. Rather play in one half or three halves in order to completely differentiate yourselves from the heretics, the polytheists, the corrupted and the disobedient.
(headdesk, headdesk, headdesk, headdesk)
I’m sorry…I feel a sudden urge to go out and dance around the Irminsul or something similar. I’ll be back shortly.
From the weblog of the alter ego of the guest star of Wizards at War, pp. 525-527:
I found out the other day that there exist in Japanese lyrics to Star Wars’ “Imperial March” theme. Some claim that they were actually included in very early releases of the film, but most agree that they were simply invented by sci-fi geeks at a convention. Here they are, with hyphens to help you sing along.
tei-ko-ku wa totemo tsuyoi
se-n-kan wa totemo dekai
Daa-su Bei-daa wa kuroi
toruu-paa wa shiroi
De-su su-taa wa maruiOr, in English, “The Empire is very strong/ The battleships are very big/ Darth Vader is black/ The [storm]troopers are white/ The Death Star is round.”
(I had to cut out the Japanese characters because they’re not showing correctly in my blog for some reason: click here to see the originals. …And thank you, Matt…)
From Variety:
Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme are headed back to NBC. Peacock has won an intense bidding war for the next TV show from “The West Wing” duo, an hourlong drama dubbed “Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip” that’s set behind-the-scenes at a longrunning Los Angeles-based sketch comedy show. It’s believed the net has made a rich 13-episode commitment to the Warner Bros. TV project.
“I hope it’s going to be what ‘Larry Sanders’ did with … talkshows [Sorkin said.] …I would like to do that with latenight sketch comedy — with ‘Saturday Night Live’: in other words, behind the scenes at a network latenight sketch-comedy, edgy show.”
Sorkin wrote the pilot script for the project before the pitching process began. That strategy helped build interest for the project among the webs…Sorkin is expected to personally deliver the script for his project to networks as early as Friday.
And now I’m going to go off and sing and dance some more.
Go Aaron! Go Tommy! Go Aaron! Go Tommy!
(etc.)
…that blogging was a Russian inwention?
Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, 1803-1869, was a gifted man. Apart from writing philosophical books, stories for children and composing pieces of music, he also wrote science fiction, trying to imagine what his country would look like in 2,500 years, in 4338.
Odoevsky suggested in future there would be a kind of connection between houses that would allow people to communicate quickly and easily, the way they do now via the Internet.
“Houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate,” Odoevsky wrote.
Even more interestingly, Odoevsky suggested every household would publish a kind of daily journal or newsletter and distribute it among selected acquaintances, a habit which Russian bloggers immediately recognized as blogging.
“We received a household journal from the local prime minister, which among other things invited us to his place for a reception,” one of Odoevsky’s characters tells a friend.
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently with a book I’m really fond of — E. S. Turner’s Boys Will Be Boys: The story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al. It’s a retrospective of the “boys’ papers” and “story papers” of the 19th century — the bridge between the adult prose periodicals of the 1800’s and what we now would recognize as comics.
For the storyteller working in children’s literature, this book is full of information that it may not actually be important to have, but can nonetheless be a whole lot of fun to get into. The book investigates everything from the economics of the “penny dreadfuls”…
Each penny part weighed a mere quarter-ounce against the two ounces afforded by such meritorious publications as Leisure Hour and the Family Herald. [James Greenwood, author of The Wilds of London] declared: “It is the infinitesimal quantity of trash that may be palmed off for a penny that serves as the carrion bait to attract toward it the flies of the book trade.”
…to the rivalries, large and small, that went on between/among the publishers…
In 1866 the Reverend J. Erskine Clark published his Chatterbox at a halfpenny, in a bold effort to undercut the “penny dreadfuls”. Sir James Barrie, who was an eager consumer of sensational literature in his young days, admits that he was side-tracked onto the Chatterbox, which broke him of the “penny dreadful” habit, though not before he had tried to write one or two himself.
…to the public attitude to the people working on them (not incredibly high, from the looks of things).
Despite the advance of education, complained the Edinburgh Quarterly, such works as Joscin the Body Snatcher and Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles,
were still there “to dispute the favor of the poorer class of readers with translations of the improving romances of M M. Zola and Paul de Kock… In a lane not far from Fleet Street is a complete factory of the literature of rascaldom — a literature which has done much to people our prisons, our reformatories and our Colonies with scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells.”
The Quarterly’s critic claimed to have private knowledge of the authors of many of these penny publications — ” — not as a rule very distinguished members of the Republic of Letters, though in some few instances their antecedents are better than might be expected.” …The critic knew of a maidservant whose father wrote novels from ten to four for a cheap publisher: also of a cook who, taxed with dilatoriness in the preparation of meals, explained that she was busy in the kitchen writing novels.
Hey, I didn’t know I had a previous life in London. 🙂 But no, wait, this description’s even better:
…the miserable beer-swilling wretches who write them…if such a word as write could be applied to their work!
As a rule they are drunken, sodden creatures whose lives have been one long unbroken story of failure. Sometimes they are University men who in the flower of their youth gave promise of being noble men but giving way to the temptations of drink they have gradually sunk lower and lower in the scale of life until at last they reach the depths of degradation and their natures have become so debased that they are fit only to write evil stories which fill the pocket of the man who prints and sells the “penny dreadful”. …Where do they write? Communal kitchens of cheap lodging-houses, the bar parlours of dirty back-alley “pubs”…
Hooboy. But Turner himself is dryly funny all through:
Who will withhold sympathy from a hack presented with, say, six pictures showing a redskin dancing round a captive, two Frenchmen fencing, a highwayman holding up a coach, a smuggler’s boat landing in a cove, a detective looking at a footprint through a magnifying glass, and a bound and gagged woman, with instructions to “keep it down to 20,000 words” and call it “Guy Gaspereau, the Brigand Chief”?
I’ll be coming back to this subject in some blog entries next week, because there are some things in this book that are just too good not to share. But here’s something very cool in the meantime:
Stanford University has an online “window” into their Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful Collection. There is a “guided tour” of the dreadfuls, and a timeline. Additionally, titles of papers and thousands of (usually, cover) images can be browsed, though something weird seems to be going on with the text-search facility — it keeps demanding some kind of Stanford-based login procedure. But the clunky interface doesn’t interfere all that much with the sheer wonderfulness of the basic material, once you start getting into it.
I really wish that the British Library would do something like this with its own famous “penny parts” holding, the Barry Ono Collection, which is apparently really something to see. (It’s been microfilmed, which is all very well, but I really wish someone would CD-ROM or DVD that output…)