On purple soup - I once made a curry with coconut milk base, purple cabbage, and broccoli. The broccoli became bright green, and the coconut soaked up the purpleness from the cabbage, becoming very bright as well.
On cardboard/deadmice soup - it was just drinkable haggis, wasn't it? (As a vegetarian, my normal recipe for drinkable haggis is to consume the single malt myself and leave the haggis for the carnivores, but back when I was still omnivorous I did have scrapple fairly often.)
Steve@66, et al.@166ff, the New York Times today has an article on Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists, and "the otherwise excellent" Mad Men gets special mention for using typefaces in their advertising that either didn't exist at the time or weren't in common use in the US. (Other worse offenders also get mentioned, such as Titanic having Helvetica type faces 45 years too early; had The Philadelphia Experiment done that, it might have been excusable...)
I just saw a really wonderful story in the NYT that seems appropriate here - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/business/energy-environment/10nukes.html?_r=1 - It seems that about 10% of US electricity currently comes from nuclear reactors running on decommissioned Soviet nuclear weapons. There's also some running off of decommissioned US nukes. It won't last forever, even if some of the decommission-more-weapons agreements happen, but it's a Really Good Thing.
John@35, Jaegermonster it is. (I had some Czech Becherovka liqueur yesterday, just by coincidence.) My memories of those days are somewhat conflated - the Scorpions "Winds of Change" video with the Wall being torn down was actually from a year later, but it's what sticks in my mind. And while Tienanmen Square was retaken, China was opening up, and later we had the events in Russia. I'm in my mid-50s, so the Iron Curtain had already fallen when I was growing up, and my first political memories were of neighbors digging bomb shelters in their back yards during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Velma@25, my "turn on the TV now" phone call was on 9/11. One of my many frustrations about it was that after fifty years of Cold War and nuclear terrorism had ended, the Soviet Fracking Union had even fallen apart, and we'd had that cheerful if brief economic boom in the late 90s, the world had finally been turning out to be a fairly decent place again, in spite of all the people who wanted it to be otherwise and in spite of a new administration that would have liked a Cold War of their own.I first went to Eastern Europe in 1993, a Libertarian conference in (still-Czecho-)Slovakia where we were talking about how to let the workers get ahold of the means of production before the ex-Communist bosses stole everything :-)
By ~1998, when I went to Berlin, there were a few parts of the wall left, but we had to drive a while to get to them. They'd mostly been built along the boundaries between different parts of Berlin, typically rivers or the boundaries of old towns that Berlin had absorbed, so some of them weren't in the way of newer progress. Checkpoint Charlie had been preserved, though it was now in the middle of a parking lot with the Wall gone, looking far less imposing than the gateway into the Evil Empire that it had been in so many spy novels, but the museum nearby was still very moving. Berlin was by then a city of construction cranes and scaffolding, with shipping containers forming temporary villages for construction workers, and the Reichstag was wrapped in plastic while they sandblasted it. The parts of East Berlin I saw were a mixture of old graceful buildings, Communist-era crumbling cement apartment blocks, and newer commercial buildings. There were two rather notable towers - the Radio/TV tower in Alexanderplatz in the East, and the Monument to German Imperialism in the park in West Berlin (it had some more formal war-memorialish name; it was a big statue of Nike, and was originally built for either the Franco-Prussian war or the war before that, but updated for later wars, and may the Cold War be the last of them!)
PJ, Ginger, Chris @174-179, yes, Delaware. I suppose it's also north of the line, since part of the line is at the bottom of the state, but it's more fun being east of it.
Having grown up east of the Mason-Dixon line, my reaction to any discussion of the conflict in North America in the 1860s is affected by what term you use for it, which tends to indicate what side you're on, or at least whether you've thought about which side you're on...
So DonBoy@53, a war between humans and zombies really shouldn't be called a Civil War - it's a War Between The States...
Not necessarily intended for NaNoWriMo or including vacuum cleaners, but it's in the right sort of space. Today's Two Lumps 2009/11/04.
Stefan@35, saying that "the best science fiction is really about the present" is in no way contradictory to saying "the worst science fiction is also really about the present" .... I haven't gotten to The Caryatids yet - it's the kind of work that could easily be done badly, and is hard to do well, but it's Bruce Sterling who's one of my favorite authors, so it's got a good chance of being good. I have to agree with your comment on Holy Fire, and Distraction worked really well for me also.Cory also mentioned William Gibson's Spook Country. I liked its predecessor Pattern Recognition better, partly because it was the first time I'd seen Gibson writing in the near present instead of the cyberpunk nearish future, but partly just that I liked the directions he took it better.
Me@26 Of course, when I was ranting, I was focusing too far back - my mom didn't have to take any citizenship tests or oaths, since her parents were both American citizens, but she was born in France where they were studying, so she's also technically an immigrant as well as technically a citizen. Since she was still a baby when she moved here, she'd have had to do paperwork to document being a French citizen if she'd wanted to move back there and vote, and she decided not to; apparently that means my siblings and I don't get to become Europeans because of it.One of my wife's uncles moved to Italy because the family in New York was too crazy. His kids were dual citizens, because the US was ok with that by then, though they moved back here when the boy was approaching Italian draft age and he gave up his Italian citizenship at the time.
"descended from similarly technical Americans" - While I may be a very technical boy, and a number of my ancestors were also similarly technical, I don't think any of my ancestors who immigrated to North America had to take a citizenship test, and probably none of them had to swear an oath either, though it's possible that the Irishman who showed up in 1805 was forced to, and a few of them signed the Mayflower Compact or joined other ships' companies to pay for their trips across. Most of them got to here by the pre-governmental-interference method of just going somewhere and trying to get along with their neighbors. It's a shame that most places don't let people do that any more, insisting that they be subjects of some organization instead.
Oh, dear. Those are amazingly fabulous and shiny objects of desirability.
I'm going to have to digress and say I really admire Ann Coulter. Right-wing ranters like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are generally uncreative and crude about their diatribes, and if they've got any creativity it's generally used in deciding how to get their followers to ditto along with them.
The Evil Ms. Coulter, on the other hand, regularly says things that are so over-the-top wrong that I find that the only responses I can come up with are sputtering incoherence and inability to find a starting point for rational discussion about how appalling whatever she's just said is. And that's entertaining and unusual, with a level of skill and talent that probably would have been wasted if she were using it on the side of Good rather than Evil. And AFAICT, almost nobody on the right wing tries to take her as a serious pundit, unlike the lesser wingnutfotainment purveyors, so she's Mostly Harmless.
Paul@62 - sure, take it if you like it, no need for attribution.
And my cat vacuuming this month isn't vacuuming the cats themselves (fat chance of that, though one cat will put up with brushing), but I do need to vacuum up the spare fur from the rugs and couch again.
I'm afraid that my science fiction writing and most of my artwork are for work, along the lines of "The customer wants the router to do [six impossible things]. They promise they'll get us the requirements by [breakfast, during the French revolution] which they think will give us plenty of time for a [simple matter of programming]. The network looks like [picture of something that is obviously Not A Pipe] but if you include all the requirements they've hinted at it's more like [video clip of Cliff Stoll's Klein bottle wine bottle from the recent Ted talk] and the equipment manufacturer says it'll work Just Fine because they're already building in non-Euclidean network topologies for a customer in R'lyeh that should be released Real Soon Now."
(And I really should be leaving fiction that involves information technology departments and tentacles to Charlie...)
Haven't had trick-or-treaters here in a decade, though we had a few before that. We've long since stopped buying candy for the occasion; there was a six-pack of good ginger ale in case anybody showed, but nobody did. Some years we've given out childrens' books.
I'm in an upstairs condo, in a neighborhood of condos and apartments, but there don't seem to be a lot of kids around; it's mostly tech workers and retired people, and I guess the people who have kids go find houses or at least larger apartments. I'm somewhat at the border between the mixed-techie area of town, the small-commercial area, and the mostly Mexican area, and I'm guessing that the Mexicans do Dia de los Muertos instead of Halloween. I took a walk last night and only saw one group that looked like they were trick-or-treating, plus somebody in a car wearing cat ears.
The more serious problem was that my oven thermostat died recently, so I can't go acquiring pumpkins to make pie with, until I get the thing fixed. Anybody have a good pumpkin soup recipe?
Lucy@302, Chinese turnip cakes are trivially easy if you live near a Chinese grocery store. They come pre-made, ready to fry. If it's a larger store, you can even find vegetarian ones, though most of the brands include dried shrimp. I generally make a soy/ginger/garlic sauce to put on them. I haven't tried making them from scratch; the prefab ones are pretty good, and they also have similar taro cakes.
The Tay Bridge Disaster thread's been silent a couple of weeks, but the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had a few parts fall down in the wind a couple of days ago, and they still don't have it fixed. (Fortunately not a Disaster; three cars were damaged and one person non-seriously injured, but they've closed the bridge for safety until they get everything inspected and repaired, and traffic's a mess for anybody who lives near there.)
They did a bunch of work over Labor Day (which here in the US is anti-leftistly at the end of summer instead of in May) to put in a temporary side-piece so they can do major earthquake retrofit to the main span, and had to patch some parts that broke during that operation. This week there were some cables that blew down in the wind-storms, and then some of the parts they'd patched broke, dropping a few tons of material on the section below.
The broken section is between Treasure Island and Oakland - it's supposedly still possible to use the western span to reach Treasure Island. Unlike in William Gibson's bridge trilogy, squatters haven't settled on the bridge yet...
dcb@219, Pendrift@220 - On the "oh, you mean *real* snow leopards" sort of thread, my wife and I were once visiting her relatives in ~Phoenix, and her aunt asked us to fetch something from the garage, and apologized in advance for its appearance because "we have a bit of a packrat problem". Had I said that, it would have meant "we've got all kinds of junk piled in the garage", but we saw the pile of string and shiny things in the corner and realized she meant that there were actual packrats around, not just metaphorical ones.
Renatus, is there any reason for your sister to even think about going enlisted as opposed to ROTC? If her objective for joining the Navy is college as opposed to sailing/flying/trombone-playing/fighting, then it gives her control to get the college parts nailed down first thing instead of hoping that the bonus she gets when she's out will do the job. (That's separate from any opinions I have about whether or not joining a military is a good idea - as an Air Force Reserves general I used to work with said, "if you put on the uniform, you're agreeing to pick up the gun when they need it", and that's a moral choice she'll need to think about.)I've had two friends who've been in US military bands. I used to go to a Southern Baptist church near Fort Monmouth in NJ, which had the Army Chaplain School and a bunch of electronics stuff there, so our church had a lot of Army people and we'd often have Army chaplains preaching either when we were between pastors or our pastor was on vacation. I later went to a Quaker meeting in the same area, and one of our members there was an assistant in the chaplain school who'd originally joined the Army to play sousaphone, since the number of professional sousaphone jobs outside the Army is pretty small. He was the only Quaker there; he'd found religion after he joined, and the chaplain school was the place he was most comfortable finishing his time commitment. One of the Baptists played trombone in the Army band, and said that his time in Germany, where they mostly played at officers' club bars, convinced him that he had the most useless time-wasting job in the military; I think he'd switched over to doing electronics.
We also had an Army recruiter in our Baptist church - I didn't get along with him that well, because he was the hard-driving Type A used-car-sales type, but wow I wouldn't have wanted to have his job. Apparently Army recruiters then (and according to the newspapers, still) get abused like any impossible-quota boiler-room telemarketers, browbeaten and yelled at by their bosses, and expected to do whatever it takes to meet their numbers no matter what the political and economic climate is that affects people's willingness to be recruited. That was the run-up to Gulf War I, when GHWBush was busy telling everybody that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were endangering our troops over there and that we needed to send a much bigger army to protect them, but it was after the successful Panama invasion so there was some popular support for the military.
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