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Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
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8:52 pm - He Who Cannot Cook, Cooks
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 I have always been quite proud of my self-sufficiency, which sounds like a grand achievement until I explain that it's largely based on only eating sandwiches. But in the past week I've been cooking various recipes drawn from the pages of Edouard de Pomiane's 1930 masterstroke, Cooking In Ten Minutes. Largely I've been expecting them to go horribly wrong, on account of how everything I've ever cooked, ever, that is not poured from a tin, goes horribly wrong; and also because any book written about convenience food from 78 years ago must be long past the use-by date and lacking in sensible things to say about modern eating. Thus far, though, these apprehensions have proven most pleasantly groundless.
(Oh, I went to a Half Man Half Biscuit gig last night. That will have to remain an aside for now, though, because I want to talk more about food.)
I couldn't wait, once the book arrived, to start cooking from it. Perversely, I wanted to prove wrong Julian Barnes's recommendations of straightforwardness that I'd read, so I started with the tomato soup recipe: to quote the article, it apparently makes "a bowl of beautifully pink semolina sludge with some indissoluble lumps in the bottom." If it went wrong for a cookery writer, surely it couldn't fail to fail for me! And yet somehow, when I made it, it just made excellent tomato soup. A little bland, but nothing a panicky last-minute drop of Worcestershire sauce didn't fix - and nothing that next time, a little extra tomato extract in the preparation wouldn't address. (Protip for Mr. Barnes: stir in the starch using an egg whisk. Guaranteed success.)
Buoyed by this unexpected triumph, I wondered what other previously inconceivable challenges could be surpassed. Until last week, for example, I had never in my life made what one might call a sauce, and so I rather flippantly decided to cook up the Sauce Suprême - a white sauce with cream and concentrated stock to flavour. Unfortunately, though inevitably, the decision to make a sauce carries with it the burden of preparing an entire meal to go alongside it. Aiming for simplicity I opted for pan-fried pork chops, with asparagus, and a tomato salad. This basically made itself - maybe in longer than ten minutes, but it's early days still. The sauce again seemed bland, but this time the fat from the frying pan went in to save the day, and the result was very passable - even, dare I say, even quite good.
A day or two later I found myself boiling a panful of haddock, which I served with peas and mushrooms à la crème. This was less successful, but mainly because I didn't have nearly enough mushrooms to make it properly. Also, the fish needs a lot more melted butter than I gave it to make it palatable, and ideally also some lemon juice, which we didn't have.
 Undeterred, I pushed on today with something more ambitious. Back to the pork chops, but cooked this time with haricot beans, and served with beetroot à la crème, and Sauce Robert. As before, my spirits were low and my forecast bleak: three pans on the go at once for this, and cooking for three while the recipes in the book are for one. Preposterously, and unforseeably, I still didn't make a hash of it, and now I have a happily full tummy and a very real sense of accomplishment (with which I have by now no doubt managed to nauseate you.)
It is not all quite so practical - I can't picture the day when I make fried calf's head, breaded pig's tail, or sheep's brains with black butter - but it is invaluable. The economy of the writing is a blessing all too rarely found (e.g. "Plaice Meunière: Wash the cleaned plaice. Dry it. Flour it. Fry it in a pan containing smoking butter. Salt. A slice of lemon.") yet always wise and warm, often hilarious.
As anyone who knows the range of my natural facility in the kitchen will already be able to ascertain, these recipes go beyond a point of being merely foolproof. They achieve peerlessness. The transformation in my attitude to cooking is just as miraculous: why would I ever go back to sandwiches again?
But where did I misplace my Joy Division oven gloves?
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| Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
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10:25 pm - Grimace (composer)
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Grimace (also Grymace or Grimache) was a French composer active in the mid-to-late 14th century.
Grimace was active in the period of music history known as the ars nova and was probably a contemporary of Guillaume de Machaut, since his compositions lack the complicated rhythms of the Ars subtilior (Günther 2007). Grimace's birth and death dates are not known; little is known about him outside of attributions in medieval music manuscripts. Five works are attributed to him securely; two doubtful attributions have been proposed based on stylistic similarities. His virelai, A l'arme, A l'arme, is his most often performed work in modern times.
The works attributed to Grimace are:
* Dedens mon cuer (ballade)
* Des que buisson (ballade)
* Se Zephirus/Se Jupiter (ballade)
* Je voy ennui (rondeau)
* A l’arme/A l’arme/Tru tru (virelai)
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| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
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12:28 am - The Accidental Gardener
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I'm not one of life's born gardeners. Plants for me means twiggy things sticking out of neglected pots on kitchen window sills, and really nothing further. And that was much how I liked it. Every house I've lived in - at least, ever since leaving my parents', of course - has had paving slabs by way of a garden. In fact the flat me and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) cherade9 first moved into in Edinburgh didn't have even that. It had a car park.
And I wasn't even terribly keen on the idea, two years ago in the summer, that we move away from it. The estate agent's photos of the proposed new flat - in fact, a bungalow - looked dreary; the location was yet further out of town than even the marginal Slateford flat we already possessed; it wasn't clear to me that there was even very much more space. But it did have a garden, and two things that can't be denied are that first, sitting out on grass in summer is a very pleasurable way to spend an afternoon; and second, growing eight-year-olds need some good space for mucking about in.
The rent was better, and on going to look at it, it did have more space.
And the garden was enormous.
Now, we're not talking green fields and acres of land and a river at the bottom. It's a corner plot, lawns front and back and to one side. A decent sized garden and then some, we're talking.
It took 12 months to work out how to use the petrol mower in the shed. Up till then I had a Flymo, generously donated by cherade9's Dad. It worked perfectly well, except that to mow the lawn properly required emptying the grass catcher bit at the back about fifty times.
The lawn though is really the least of my problems. I mean, it's a lawn, bit of a bugger keeping it short in the summer, but nothing too bothersome. And once I worked out the gas-guzzling petrol beast in the shed, it's not an hour's work (and only needs emptying five or six times.)
I'm talking about shrubs. We have them. Rose bushes. What do you do with that? Flower beds. Whose principal crops to date have been monster dandelions and rocks. Hedges. Privet. Trees, for heaven's sake.
So far my instinct has been to let them get on with it. And it must be stated that leaving things be has also appeared to have been the policy of generations of previous leaseholders before us. Things may not have been running entirely wild, but garden maintenance doesn't seem to have been top of anyone's priorities, here, ever.
And slowly but surely there's been things to deal with that cannot be left to tomorrow. Hedges that need trimming. (Again, cherade9's Dad came to the rescue to save the hedge from a grimgrim wielding shears, with a sort of hand-held lawn mower device that works on hedges instead of lawns. I have the knack of it, just about, I think.)
Rose bushes that tended to eat postmen. I followed the cue of Edinburgh City Council's municipal park workers with these, and brandished the secateurs threateningly at them (the rose bushes, not the park workers) back in February or so, unexpectedly failing to kill them in the process (the rose bushes again.) Doesn't seem to have harmed them too much, so next year perhaps I'll give them a harsher trim. Prune, I mean.
I seem to have wandered off the point. What I actually meant to talk about was flower beds, and particularly dandelions.
This is what I used to think about dandelions:
 
Bright things. Fluffy things. Nice things.
This is what I think of them now:
  
Bastard things. Bastard things. Double bastard things.
I've spent about 8 hours today and yesterday forking the bastard things up from the front flower beds -- each of them scarcely two meters long and half a meter wide, titchy little flower beds. And the bastard things were coming up - eventually coming up - with roots thick as carrots and twice as long. It is safe to say that if the bastards come back now they will be getting much less civilised treatment from me.
The gardening gloves are off. I am now officially at war with dandelions.
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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12:56 am
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| Saturday, April 19th, 2008
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6:50 pm - DRAMA
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| Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
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9:06 pm - I7 makes MUD.
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So someone had the brilliant idea of getting Inform 7 code to compile into a MUD/MUSH/MOO or a "talker" as I prefer to call them. Having done that, they then disguised the announcement as an April Fool's joke. But it ain't, it really ain't, and you can submit your own Inform 7 creations and see them magically brought to life on-the-fly. Magnificent.
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| Thursday, March 6th, 2008
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9:03 pm
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IF names generator from r.a.i-f. Splices two existing IF titles to form a hybrid. Expect an IF competition in which entries are inspired by names from here, any moment.
Orpington Sherlock
A Crimson Whirled!
The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm Stupidgame
The Secret of Bastow Worm in Paradise
Pyramid Tell: The Game!!!!!!!!!!!
Fight or (A (Love) Story)
Farmer Brown's Inevitable
The Balrog Nether Regions
The Oily Chase
etc.
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| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
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11:57 am - Lyrics Quiz results
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Full answers are here, and the final scores are:
1. random_c, 7 points
2. cherade9, 6 points
2= kevandotorg, 6 points
3. ruudboy, 1 point
4. gipsy_dreamer, nil points :(
Congratulations to random_c!
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| Monday, February 25th, 2008
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4:18 pm
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11:06 am - First-line lyrics quiz
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The last one of these I did was a magnificent failure, consisting almost entirely of music that no-one has ever heard. However it occurs to me that my music player, Amarok, can be configured to produce weighted random listings, such that the songs that are most likely to come up are the ones I actually listen to the most: I wonder if that'll make it any easier.
( 25 this time )
Hm. Yes, a lot easier actually. See how you do.
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| Monday, January 28th, 2008
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2:37 pm - I would get about 4 of these.
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First lines lyrics identification quiz; 20 random; entire mp3 collection. You know what you doing.
1. OK? -- (Yes thank you.) -- Look at me, who am I s'posed to be? Who am I s'posed to be? Look at me, what am I s'posed to be? What am I s'posed to be?
2. Bet you're looking to find a place, to settle your mind, and reveal who you are.
3. I think I feel a little hurt, my fists are turning coal to diamonds.
4. Aha, make me tonight. Tonight, make it right.
5. I wish I had a window over the bay, and a black horse grazing on the green all day. I wish I had a well to draw my water, and a warm log fire for when the summer is gone.
6. Oh you are so very sweet, sometimes I think you've gone insane, is it hard to remain sane in this giddy world?
7. Hate to hear your heart is breaking, if it's all the same mine is aching too, no matter where I go.
8. Oh, now, don't you never disappear, on a night where the moon hangs so low. Hold me amongst fallen stars, on a night where the signal turns to "go."
9. Well, the king will take the queen... and the queen will take the knave... and since we're in good company, more liquor we must have.
10. Sunday, Sunday, here again in tidy attire, you read the colour supplement, the TV guide.
11. Blank Frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction, yes he is the one who will set you up as nothing.
12. Take him out the back, throw him in the bin, dump his grimy clothes, wash your dirty hands.
13. I hear that the Emperor of China used to wear iron shoes with ease, mmm... We are the tablecloth, and also the table.
14. Spring is here, spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer. I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring, I do, don't you? - 'Course you do!
15. We come on the sloop John B, m'Grandfather and me, around Nassau town we do roam.
16. Let's go down to the fashion show, with all the pretty people that you don't know.
17. Prop my eyes open with chemistry, got a three hour drive and a man to see.
18. I chop and I change and the mystery thickens, there's blood on my hands and you want me to listen.
19. Take the way home, that leads back to Sullivan Street. Cross the water, home through the town.
20. "A shooting star flew from one horizon to the other, and landed on a small vicarage."
Answers tomorrow.
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| Saturday, January 26th, 2008
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11:34 pm - The only matter that matters.
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(Some notes on "The Matter".)
I have no gift for poetical analysis, so it is fortunate that the poem doesn't need any: it speaks for itself more clearly and perfectly than any commentator could. Having said that, I'm now going to waffle on for several pages about what "The Matter" seems to say, and particularly the way in which it says it.
In seven short lines, and a quietly misleading title, this poem dismantles itself, neatly, and utterly. The reader is gradually invited to obliterate fragments of their mental picture, until there is nothing left to wipe out but "an arrangement of words", and we are left with the disquieting realisation that there is "no matter": that there was never any matter, but only a series of pictures flickering in the head of the reader.
In the poem, we are invited to pull the arms and legs off the mental image of a doll: one by one, we learn that limbs we presumed to be there, are not there, and so we must amend the picture in our head to reflect the new information; but then, straight away we discover we must also erase the remaining limbs, and finally the torso, and head; there is nothing left. The implicit presumption that these things exist is challenged, and the challenge is finally taken through to its ultimate conclusion.
Having dismantled one doll, we are invited to examine another, this time in the hope -- "no matter" -- that it will turn out to be something more substantial. But it evaporates again, just as swiftly; in fact more swiftly, using fewer words.
Having done the job again, it is a simple matter to imagine going through the entire box, which of course is full: however it is hard to picture a box which is full of dolls we know in fact not to exist. The box is full of emptiness.
And then, the mental camera pulls back, and even the imaginary box is put to the mental eraser. And then, then here is the genius: even the man, a man who has barely existed in the first place, a man whose existence the reader has barely even had cause to acknowledge, this man loses his paltry existence as well.
To get an appreciation of the trick that has been pulled, we have to go back a step...
"In it were the things a man kept, otherwise they were not in the box" is a meticulously constructed beginning. It is like magic. "A man kept things in a box" is what we seem to learn, but no other writer would have communicated this triviality in the way Edson chooses to. It is not a matter of obscure poetic style for its own sake, either: the author is like a magician, a skilled magician who sets up his act in such a way that the underlying trickery is not noticed. The "magic" is, as always, hidden in plain sight, in things which the viewer simply ignores.
Here, the trick is to hide the man. "A man kept things in a box" would be the beginning of a poem about a man: this man is subject of the sentence, its first noun, star of the show. But instead Edson creates a structure similar to this: "In a box were the things a man kept." It is as if the man is only mentioned by accident; a distant being, only worth mentioning in that he happens to give reason for the all-important box to exist.
Still that is not enough: in order that our eyes are firmly focussed on the box, Edson draws our attention to it with an ambiguity. He creates this little mystery of dangling adherence: "In it were the things a man kept" -- in what? In a bucket? A teapot? What is this mysterious it he tantalises us with? -- "otherwise they were not in the box" -- Aha! Voilà! Hey Presto! It is a box he keeps hidden under there!
And with that apparent outermost frame firmly established, Edson is free to pull a tight zoom and make with his magician's patter: in the box there is a toy person, a small thing, and we must pay attention to its individual missing limbs. (I picture, momentarily, a discarded Action Man figure, and begin erasing his arms so the plastic sockets show.)
Soon Action Man is gone completely, along with all his buddies, and very shortly, poof, the box is also revealed not to be there after all. The magician has vanished away the apparatus of the trick, but perhaps after so many vanishing acts, we have seen that one coming, and scoff at it. But then, shazam, the man disappears too. The presumed outermost frame is revealed to have been contained within yet another frame, one we hadn't noticed. It is as if the magician has disappeared the stage, auditorium, theatre and all. The effect is disquieting. Even after all our assumptions have been disappeared away, it seems there are still more assumptions left to dispel.
And then, there it is; the final line reveals the final assumption. The assumption that there ever was anything to disappear. There was of course no such thing. All that there ever was, was "only an arrangement of words" on a page: no dolls, no box, no man, no matter: all these are fictional. They have never existed, so they cannot be made to un-exist.
"The Matter" happens to be self-referential in a way which Edson's other poems universally are not; that is to say, directly so, in that it refers baldly to the poem's existence as "an arrangement of words". I think this is only appropriate. Not the ink, the paper -- nor perhaps the pixels, the screen -- but the letters, and the words they form, these are the matter to which this poem refers.
And that, of course, is the intention. Only now we can appreciate the double meaning behind those carefully chosen words "no matter" - another magic trick of some subtlety there of course, another misdirection pulled off with flawless grace. And if, ultimately, it is all just a trick, it is one I could appreciate regardless. As I read this poem, I am given to marvel at the trick my own head plays on me every day, as it reads and makes sense of the continual flood of words that rush in from around the world; and how do I know that any of it is true? The wonder and trickery of the mind are incredible and splendid things, this poem says, but be warned: your brain fools you; it fools itself, it is fooling you all the time, and it is easily deceived. Do not trust it without good reason. For even the most apparently innocent words are wicked and deceitful lies.
26/1/08
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| Friday, January 25th, 2008
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11:14 pm - The assumption of the illegality of intermarriage between men and shoes
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A lovely Russell Edson article which puts into words a lot of what is remarkable about him. Title of this post comes from there.
A lot of his poems, I do not understand. Here, though, is one where the meaning is sublimely transparent. "The Matter" is from The Wounded Breakfast, published in 1985:
The Matter
In it were the things a man kept, otherwise they were not in the box: a toy person with an arm missing; also a leg.
Actually, both arms were missing. And, as one leg was missing, so was the other; even the torso and the head.
But, no matter, because in it was another toy person. This one was also missing an arm and one of its legs.
Actually, it had no arms at all; same with the legs, the torso and head.
But, no matter, because the box was full of armless and legless toys without torsos or heads.
But again, no matter, because even the box was missing . . . And then even the man . . .
In the end there was only an arrangement of words; and still, no matter . . .
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| Friday, December 28th, 2007
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11:45 pm
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Cat & Kian brought their Wii with them to Liz's folks', and so I got a go, and got to see what all the fun is about. And even this certified bah-humbugger had a good time. So yes, I think we'll be saving up for one.
Lots to write about Christmas, but no time. (It's better this way; if I wrote a lot, you would be bored tearless. Best I leave it all to your furtive imaginations.)
Got a new phone for Christmas offof the folks, too (it goes ding when there's stuff.)
What do you think to this new year's resolution: post an LJ entry every day?
(I do not has poll, so instead you will have to write your answers upon a postcard.)
BYE!
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| Sunday, December 16th, 2007
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11:35 pm
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9:23 pm
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| Monday, December 10th, 2007
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11:10 pm
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| Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
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7:15 pm
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I was e-interviewed about Textfyre recently; here. The prestigious publication in question being, of course, the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games.
current mood:  amused
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, November 30th, 2007
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8:35 am - Nude Images of Minors
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etc.
edit: might have been more pointful if the links worked.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, October 15th, 2007
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11:56 pm - Mary Whitehouse
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I know I'm not wrong in thinking that the Mary Whitehouse Experience - or possibly a Newman & Baddiel show - had the recurring catchphrase "It's all got a bit tricky now" etc.
But what was the context though?
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