Speaking of dumb bimbos, Clancy isn't much for the over-emotional female trope either, but he has a doozy in _Clear and Present Danger_ IIRC. She approaches policy issues as if they were personal attacks and responds accordingly and she doesn't like to be confused with the facts. Unfortunately, she's very close to the sitting President.
Funny thing about the Clancy movies--I'm pretty sure that Clancy would be happy to put a thinly disguised Palin in one of his novels, but she wouldn't be a heroine. She would be a dupe, an obstacle, or a clever faker with some dastardly plot going on behind the scenes. Clancy did put somebody who had no idea what he was doing in the White House, but he also showed his character screwing up, needing extensive tutoring, and buckling down to _learn his job._ Politics aside, Clancy tends not to be very kind to know-nothings in his fiction.
Here's a dinner that looks like a gag from Archie McPhee, but tastes great:
Take the leanest ground beef/turkey/bison you have and saute in a cast-iron pan along with some chopped celery and onion. Spoon off excess fat if any. Throw in some white rice. Pour in milk, cream sauce, mushroom soup diluted with water, or something dairy-ish. Season with celery leaves, celery seed, powdered sage, celery salt, black or white pepper, and paprika. Put into the oven, cover, and cook slowly until the rice grains burst. Taste, correct the seasoning, stir, and serve hot.
Oddly, I found this in a 1960s spiral-bound church cookbook, but the basic method goes back to the Middle Ages.
There are at least two small pickups driving around our town that proudly proclaim their manufacturer to be "YO."
I stumbled across a randomizable Making Light Flamer Bingo card the other day, but I can't seem to get it out of Google today. If the person who created it is reading this, could you let me know where to find it? Also, I would love to make one for another blog I post at, but I am completely ignorant of how to start. Was the card created using an app I can download?
Could somebody who is better at parsing the language of bills explain something to me? I mean, we've got two problems, right: people who can't get health insurance because nobody will insure them (or because they just got dropped for the high crime of needing to use their policy), and people who would love to have health insurance only they need that money to avoid freezing/starving/whatever. Is the health care reform bill seriously intended to solve these problems by forcing people to buy health insurance on pain of heavy fines? Please tell me I'm missing something here. It sounds like legislation written to address a burning issue in some other dimension where the people are entirely different.
@janetl #706: "Never the twain shall meet?" I am trying to imagine my husband standing up and saying that at the next parish vestry meeting. I think our priest would respond with hysterical laughter. Religion _exists in_ community; if it doesn't it's either a dead thing of outward forms or a destructive cult. A very large chunk of the Christian New Testament, for example, is a record of ways in which the twain are made to meet.
I grew up in a town next to a former Navy base that was still a target after it became a Coast Guard base. The Cold War was like the vicious dog I had to walk past every day--maybe this time it would get through the fence and kill me. When the Wall came down, I felt as though I could take off and fly.
Right here, right now,
There is no other place I want to be.
Right here, right now,
Watching the world wake up from history.
The song has been jossed by time, of course, but when I hear it, I still remember watching the sections of the Wall tilting and lying down on my roommate's TV.
@Erik Nelson #634:
Minds.
The premise of the series is that the "spark," the big glowy thing in the middle of the chassis, is the Cybertronian; everything else is just a way for it to interface with the physical world. Cybertronians are dimly aware of one another at all times in a purely telepathic sense--unjammable--and the thing that Cybertronians do instead of sex is essentially a mind meld. Exposure to the Allspark renders certain humans telepathic with Cybertronians and it turns out that mind melding feels darn good to a human. The Cybertronians involved in these "sparkbonds" present themselves as male while on Earth (they don't have gender, but understand that they can't go by "it" without unfortunate implications), while the human partners in the two existing interspecies sparkbonds happen to be XY.
@Mez #90: How did the repeated mentions of "sweet old Detroit rolling iron" in The Stand come across?
I think that King used brand names very effectively from a USian point of view in that novel. The first scenes take place in a Texaco station just outside city limits, which calls up an immediate set of associations for most USian readers: a little grimy, lit by unforgiving fluorescent lights, a place where nearly everybody local stops and nearly everybody who's just passing through for that matter, but starkly utilitarian. One of the characters is addicted to chocolate Payday bars, which were dropped from the Hershey's lineup shortly after the book was first published, putting the original edition firmly in the 1980s. (It was set in 1990.) Paydays are very sweet, salty, and rich--essentially a handful of salted peanuts held together by caramel--and covering them in chocolate makes them messy to eat as well, especially in the summer heat; they fit the character very well. The different models of car that the travelers stumble across on their journey say something about the people who owned them if you know what they are; in fact, they're practically epitaphs, since the people in question have mostly been anonymized by death.
I figured the shooter went bugnuts a la people who start believing that Jesus lives under the sink. Just Muslim-flavored.
I don't normally read slash, but I stumbled across a series with a couple of excellent Transformer*/human** subplots that elevated the idea from the usual kink or contrived challenge fic into good space opera, examining why the couples would have formed in the first place and how they would negotiate their lives together. As a bonus, the aliens feel alien while still being friends of the humans, and vice versa from the Transformers' point of view.
*Technically male.
**Definitely male.
I just made a recipe out of The Joy that turns cabbage into a luxury. You need a skillet with a lid. First bring half a pound of carrots (peeled and sliced) to a boil with a cup of water or chicken broth and a tablespoon of butter. Cover the pan, reduce to a simmer, and cook for a few minutes until the carrots are tender and sweet. Meanwhile, shred a pound of green cabbage. Put the cabbage into the pan with some fresh or dried dill weed or some dill seeds; if you like, add 2 tablespoons cream. Cover again and simmer for about 10 minutes. (The cookbook says, "until the sauce is syrupy," but the cabbage always scorches when I try that, so cook until the cabbage is just done.) Add salt and pepper to taste and serve hot.
If you make this with Matanuska carrots, it's sublime! Matanuska carrots are as crisp and sweet as apples even when they are the size that is usually used for horse fodder. Even the cores are sweet. Unfortunately, they're currently hard to find outside Alaska.
I loathed anything labeled "Romance" until the day I had to clear out my late mother-in-law's library. She had thousands of paperbacks, neatly packed in converted Kleenex boxes, including 2 1/2 boxes of Heyer Regencies, some held together with rubber bands. I wanted to know what such a down-to-earth, witty woman saw in, you know, that, so I sat down on the porch steps to take a look . . .
Several hours later, my husband found me still sitting there, giggling.
Personally, I would start with either Frederica or Venetia. Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle is also at the top of my list.
Re cabbage: Save the cores and make kinpira. Kinpira is a Japanese recipe for using up veggies that would otherwise be too tough to eat. The original calls for burdock root. Google "Forgotten Vegetable Kinpira" for versions that dress up cabbage cores, celery (otherwise too boring to eat IMO), tough old carrots, and broccoli stems.
@ B. Durbin #282: This disease is so rare that even though I am a voracious reader of "My Weird Experiences as a Doctor" memoirs, I had never heard of it. My friend lives in Alaska and she has to go to Wisconsin for treatment.
Stefan Jones #274: Is that really a talking point? In this age of preferred provider networks?
I just--guh. Heartburn or no heartburn, I'm going to bed.
Oh, wait, here's another. A friend of mine has been miserably ill for years in that American way where you drag yourself to work anyway because that's how you pay for the medication. One diagnosis after another proved to be incorrect. Well, she finally has what she hopes is a correct diagnosis. Good news: The list of symptoms fits her previously baffling medical issues to a tee. Bad news: The nearest treatment center is three time zones away. Worse news: She has 18 weeks to get all better. After that, her employer can legally fire her, which shifts her to COBRA coverage that her family may be able to afford for a while, but probably not. After that, she will have no health insurance. If she can get on her husband's policy, it won't cover her preexisting condition, but his premiums will go up anyway. She will not qualify for government health insurance because her husband makes too much money. She will not be able to find a private policy, anywhere. And she will be juuuuuust functional enough not to qualify for SSD.
And the nearest treatment center for her disease will still be three time zones away.
The possible steps from there to a family medical bankruptcy I leave up to the reader.
Here's your All-American safety net for the poor:
My brother-in-law, who owns a small business, broke his neck. Due to prompt and correct first aid and a halo brace, he is walking. However, as a small business owner, he quickly ran through his insurance (this was back in the days when small business owners could afford health insurance) and drained his cash reserves. So he applied for medical aid. Here's what they told him:
*Sell your business, preferably at a loss. (Okay, what they told him was, "No money until you do this," which translates to "Sell right away, which will probably involve taking a loss.")
*Ditto for your house. Where are you and your broken neck going to sleep? Not our problem.
*You may keep one car. No, not your work vehicles, with which you might generate income. Just the old truck you go to the beach with your dogs in. We don't care whether you will be able to feed the dogs.
*Prove that you have destroyed yourself economically in all possible ways. Then we will pay for the medical care necessary to help you become fit for work. If you can prove that you really have a broken neck.
So he chose to go without the aid and work out a payment plan with the hospital, which he could not meet exactly on schedule because he had drained his rainy day reserves paying the initial medical costs and then--whaddayaknow?--it rained, so now he has lousy credit. A man who has never made a frivolous financial decision in his life.
But it could have been a lot worse.
@Paula Helm Murray #190:
Here is a recipe I've been itching to try; the problem is that it requires large, old turnips in good condition, which are almost impossible to find on my island for some reason. It's supposed to come out as a classic medieval illusion food: looks like caviar, tastes like spicy gingerbread--and it's turnips.
Baked turnip pudding. Take a turnip in good condition and cut it into thin slices. Thread them in a line so that the slices do not touch one another as they dry, and hang them in the sun or in a warm oven where bread has just been baked. They should not be watery; let them dry out well. Mash the dried slices and push the puree through a sieve. Put the turnip puree in a clay pot.
Take clear, light-colored honey [I skipped some steps because they aren't necessary with modern honey]--as much honey as you have puree. Add [the honey and] nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and saffron in such measure that no one spice dominates, nor is it overspiced. Seal the clay pot with dough, and steam it in the oven for two days and two nights. Then it will be good to eat. But if it is too liquid, add more turnip puree. It should be the texture of a lump of caviar.--From The Domostroi, Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. & transl. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy.
My notes: Russian ovens tended to be enormous, with hotter and cooler spots. You can probably get the same effect from a day in a slow cooker on Low if you are careful not to take off the lid. The turnip puree can also be gotten by rubbing fresh turnip through a sturdy sieve, soaking, then boiling, rinsing, and draining three times, rolling into pellets, and rubbing through a sieve again. Or mash or grate the fresh turnip, dry thoroughly, and soak for three days, changing the water daily. In any case, it will be somewhat bitter; the right amount of honey is supposed to remove the bitter note while preserving the good turnip taste.
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