Wis[s]e Words

Apple crumble

Published on January 29, 20123 Comments

Yesterday my parents had come over for the day and I thought it would be nice to make some apple crumble, having been inspired by this guy. Unlike Vuijlsteke though I hadn’t had the sense to take pictures, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it went alright for something that I had never done before, thanks in no small part to this very simple to follow recipe. This is the sort of thing Sandra used to do before she got too ill, so it was only natural that I started to think of her again.

Not that she’s much out of my thoughts anyway, her absence running like a subconscious thread through my day to day life. I’ll be doing stuff, looking around me and in some way be reminded of her again. With cooking especially, because she put so much of her heart and soul in it, took so much pleasure in it. She was a much better cook than I ever was. Whereas I would depend on premixed sauces and stuff she’d make meals from scratch and quicker than I could open a package. Cooking ran in her family, her father having been a cook in the army if I remember correctly, having also worked as a chef afterwards. He taught her the tricks of the trade, of how a professional kitchen works and she kep using these for the rest of her life.

She was an excellent baker, with apple crumble being one of her staples, together with bread pudding, banoffie pie and brownies, both the regular and the enhanced kind. It’s not recommended by the way to eat one of those, decide nothing is happening and then eat three more. That was an interesting evening, even if I spent most of it staring at my own hands. Groovy.

But also did classic Georgia barbeque (having lived and worked there in the eighties, telling stories of stopping at a roadside shack after work and picking up barbeque and some melon, not to mention having an R. C. “coler” and moon pie for lunch. Then there were the Sunday roasts, the Christmas dinners, the… Sandra put a lot of love in her food and she showed her love through food, through getting you to eat right and eat well. I try to keep some of that alive by taking the time sometimes to look at food as more than just something to keep the body going, by not going for the cheap prepackaged snacks but make my own.

How the internet works

Published on January 29, 2012Leave a comment

How do things like this get made?

MetaFilter regular Ad hominem explains:

Nyan cat is like most things on the Internet. It is a confluence of various parts, gathered and assembled that somehow make up an magical whole.

First there was the song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya that features vocaloid Htsune Miku.

Then there was a remix of the song using a voice synthesizer with the Momone Momo voice that added the nyan lyrics.

A gif of a cat with a pop tart body somehow popped up because a guy was taking drawing requests online and people kept asking for drawings of cats and pop tarts so he just drew one drawing that contained both. He called it Pop Tart Cat.

How it all got added together is the magical part. The gif got mashed up with the song and uploaded to YouTube titled “nyan cat” and we are left with the pinnacle of 21st century culture, Nyan Cat. A “crowdsourced” work of art with no definite purpose or meaning combining disparate elements harvested from the Internet.

Explains so much about the twentyfirst century so far, doesn’t it? It’s silly, it’s dumb, but an endless source of creativity nonetheless and certainly more fun and harmless than what socalled responsible people were up to in the real world…

Fantasy: inherently conservative?

Published on January 28, 2012Leave a comment

For a change, why don’t we take a post that I mostly agree with and take a side issue to nitpick? Here’s a short extract from Gareth Rees’ excellent credo for critics

This objection eventually amounts to a denial of the legitimacy of criticism on political or moral grounds: that an author’s choice of setting and political ethos for a work of fiction cannot be subject to criticism. Brahm: “Writing does not need to be didactic or satirical in order to be important or insightful: you seem to view the situation as that either Martin should be condemned because he supports the medieval feudalist system or that he should be damned because his work is not a satire and therefore meaningless. Why he can’t simply write a story in a medieval world, that realistically shows the workings and limitations of the system as well as the mindsets of those that inhabit it, is beyond me.”

Ethical criticism has got itself a bad name because it’s at the root of the Victorian idea that books must be morally improving. But you can reject that position without denying the legitimacy of ethical criticism tout court. I don’t necessarily agree with every point McCalmont makes but I think his argument is basically right: fiction that treats of kings and queens without any kind of satire, irony or other form of undermining is implicitly endorsing conservative and authoritarian ideas.

I think that is wrong, or at least not the whole truth. Sure, on the one hand there are fantasy authors, with the most obvious example being Tolkien himself, who do believe in the idea of a rightful king and all the baggage that implies, while on the other hand there are legions of lesser writers following the footsteps of a Tolkien, unthinkingly taking the same bagage with them, but that doesn’t mean that all fantasy set in a medievaloid setting with kings and queens has this bagage, or that fantasy authors explicitely have to reject these ideas not to have it. There needs to be room for writers who want to use a medieval like setting to tell stories that aren’t political in the sense Gareth is talking about, who take the political and sociological implications of such a setting as a given, rather than something to be endorsed or condemned.

Who knows where the time goes

Published on January 27, 20126 Comments

Memo to self: do not listen to maudlin Sandy Denny songs when already feeling a bit blue. This and Meet on the Ledge can always get me.

I never really rated Fairport Convention, or Richard Thompson or any of the other English folk rock acts until recently. Too quiet, too earnest, too embarassing to like if you’re not an aging baby boomer. All prejudices I had to rid myself off before I could get to appreciate these sort of artists. I’m glad I did, even if it hurts sometimes listening to these songs.

How hard is it to be polite?

Published on January 26, 2012Leave a comment

It’s steam engine time when it’s time for steam engines and right now it seems to be “being creepy around transgendered people” time. This time it’s a Canadian gay and lesbian magazine ignoring one person’s request to address they with the pronoun of their choice:

It started in November when Xtra refused to honour artist Elisha Lim’s request to be referred to by the pronoun “they.” Although the magazine did run a story quoting Lim saying these words, it would not honour the pronoun switch. A few weeks later Xtra interviewed Lexi Tronic, a trans and sex worker’s rights activists. Edmontonians may remember her for the time she spent hosting weekly drag shows here and others might have caught her as one of the original stars of Showcase’s breakthrough sex series KinK. The story’s editor, Danny Glenwright, decided to share the story on his personal Facebook wall and when he did so he added Tronic’s birth name. Tronic was naturally uncomfortable with this, especially since it turned out the two had known each other since childhood in Winnipeg and shared many acquaintances. Glenwright, an editor at an LGBTQ paper, claimed he didn’t know sharing the birth name of a trans person was a faux pas, which would mostly be OK if he had just removed it after Tronic asked. Instead he defended himself profusely, used the creepy “some of my best friends are trans!” argument and basically reacted in a variety of transphobic ways.

Among the excuses offered for this faux pas has been the argument that singular they isn’t good English, an ugly neologism that’ll confuse readers. Something that, as the Wikipedia article on singular they shows, would be news to some of the greatest English language writers:

Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy. — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)
Arise; one knocks. / … / Hark, how they knock! — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)
‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet
I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
That’s always your way, Maim—always sailing in to help somebody before they’re hurt. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Caesar: “No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.” / Cleopatra: “But they do get killed”. — Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)

Even if this argument did hold merit, surely a basic politeness should trump a rigid adherence to inadequate grammar rules? If it is all that confusing, just explain it up front. There seems to be a certain mulish willingness here to cause offence, an anger at people being so awkward as to insist to want their identity represented a certain way, something a bit surprising in a magazine for people who quite likely have some experience at being misrepresented… It’s not active malice perhaps, but more the sort of stupidity you get when you do something dumb and insensitive, get called upon and get angry about being shown your errors. It’s a trap progressive people especially can fall in when we do say something unwittingly racist/sexist/othering, because it’s obvious we’re not bigots and how dare people assume we are!

It shouldn’t be hard to be polite and respect the wishes of others about how they would like to be addressed, but we can get right nowty when we do get it wrong and are corrected, something I still struggle with myself.