Since this is an open thread, I hope I can use it to ask for advice. I tend to have vivid semi-lucid dreams that would make great novels. Only my talent and skill is non-fiction writing. So I thought of starting a blog that simply describes the dreams along with boiler plate that puts them into the public domain. The problem: in my experience the last thing most fiction writers need is story ideas. They have plenty of their own. So if I started such a blog in hopes that someone would actually use the ideas, would I be wasting my time?

Holy botanical inaccuracy, Batman!

Gar Lipow @1 So if I started such a blog in hopes that someone would actually use the ideas, would I be wasting my time?

Perhaps? The process whereby people come by ideas for writing stories is individual and mysterious. It could be that one of your dreams would spark something, although perhaps not anything recognisable from your dream. If you want to blog them, then it's got to be because you want to blog them. Anything coming from it would have to be a bonus.

Of course, I say that, when I had an especially vivid dream last week, woke up and scribbled down the plot in great detail. Here's what I wrote:

She breaks people out of prison and gives birth to robots.

Solid gold there, I reckon.

Well, it just goes to show. You can't judge a banknote before you've botany thing with it.

I am amused to note that the article on Batman villains includes a call-out to S.M. Stirling's Changed World series.

In the world of Mira Grant's novel Feed, there's a horrific zombie epidemic, but at least there is no common cold. Is that really such a bad trade? cough, cough

janetl, 6: Speaking as one who has just learned that it's possible to have a cold and a sinus infection at the same time...no.

While there is no common cold (or, in fact, other infectious agents) in the Newsflesh world (Feed and the other two books in the trilogy), the risen dead are a rather dramatic problem in their own right. Much as colds suck, I think they're snot a problem in comparison to a worldwide zombie outbreak.

Well, no other infectious agents isn't quite right: there's the Kellis-Amberlee virus, which is the zombification vector. I'm quite fond of the story Seanan tells about how she came up with it, which boils down to "ask virologists questions and come up with something that elicits an immediate 'combining those two virii would be really, staggeringly bad' reaction"

Re: botanical accuracy (what a great site!), I discovered when my kids were small that plant illustrations, particularly in children's books, are an encyclopedia of You Don't Know What You Don't Know. Examples: clover flowers are not the same size as peonies. Asters and jonquils do not bloom at the same time.

(For similar problems with animals, see for example: leafcutter ants don't live in Africa (I'm looking at you, The Lion King). Lions don't live in the jungle. Penguins don't live in the Arctic. Sesame Street gets this stuff wrong ALL THE DAMN TIME. Do their writers think all the animals on earth are in Central Park Zoo?)

As I recall, Kellis-Amberlee was a combination of two, and one of them was a cure for cancer. So not just no colds, also no cancer. How about that as a tradeoff?

Maximilian Schell died yesterday.
He was 83.

Philip Seymour Hoffman died today.
He was 46.
Heroine overdose.

Have I yet seen a bankote without an error? And given the grimness of the subject, I can't help but wonder at the agency of a heroine overdose.

Sandra Boynton's otherwise totally delightful Going to Bed Book became spoiled for me when I realized, after reading it to my child for the umpty-hundredth time, that a crescent moon can't possibly be rising when the sun has just set. If it's rising when the sun sets, it has to be a full moon - it's simple geometry, damn it!

I've never enjoyed that book as much since, which is too bad, since it's very charming. (Well, also it makes no sense for all the animals to take their baths, get into pajamas and then go exercise before bed. They'll get their pajamas all sweaty! As a parent, I feel qualified to say they should exercise first and then take baths and get in their pajamas, and then they can read a little if they want before bedtime.)

Although England is by and large a green and pleasant land there are still some rather desolate looking bits that can double for other places. The quarries of Dr Who are a famous example. For landscapes with a little plant growth however there are a number of pitfalls. Watching an enthralling Middle Eastern set episode of Ultimate Force I earned no popularity for exclaiming "That's Rosebay Willowherb you won't find that on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border!

Just read Abi's parhelion about the ghosts of the tsunami.

I'm about as hard-boiled a case as you can be--rationalist, materialist, atheist, etc. etc. I think when you are dead, nothing survives, and that's an end on it.

But.

Reading that series of accounts is very, very moving. It would be almost beside the point to ask, "but are the ghosts real? are these cases of possession, or merely biochemical imbalance?" It would be almost impertinent.

The cause of these episodes is the death of 20,000 people in a tsunami. What the intervening links in the causal change from those deaths to those episodes may be, whether ghostly possessions or psychological distress, is less important. Bless the people who care for the victims.

It bugs me when I see CGI-animated dinosaurs (that are being portrayed as in their own time period -- not dinosaurs in our time, etc) and grass in the same frame. There, I've admitted it.

Clifton @ #14, not to mention that exercising right before bed makes it harder to get to sleep.

oldster @ 16: indeed. I hope they can find the necessary peace and the social will to both heal and mend.

I admit that I've been watching for reports of how the mass trauma in Japan would manifest*. I can't say I expected ghosts, but I expected something different from the way it manifests in western cultures because Japan is more communitarian and group-oriented. When the culture says that displaying grief and horror makes one an object of attention, and also says that being an object of attention is bad for the community, it makes sense to project that grief and horror onto someone else. Even if that someone else is a ghost. After consideration, it doesn't even surprise me much that the various incidents are so uniform -- Japanese cultural cohesion and homogeneity being what they are, and given how Not Talking About It seems to be the modus operandi.

It seems to me an imminently rational way to cope, all things considered. Given the cultural expectation of nearby persons who happen to be dead** who are entitled to community respect, and the culture-wide lack of spoons to deal with the disaster... having recurrent episodes of possession allows for cathartic grief and to help the society as a whole grieve.

*Because professional interest. Trauma psych is my main focus this decade.

** The whole concept really reminds me of SIASL's Martian Old Ones.

#14: Comparatively few mammals sweat. [/rare pedantic mood]

Lila: that depends. Cardio, no. But stretches, light strength work, or yoga? not always bad. I have found letting the blood circulate a little after sitting for a while actually makes going to bed slightly easier. Not that i do it enough regardless.

(And in an extreme case, if my wonky hip gets restless, if I don't respond by getting up and doing exercise (Strength/stretch) I will not sleep until I am miserable exhausted.)

Gar Lipow @ 1: I have dreams that sometimes get turned into novels by me. But I wouldn't have much interest in doing so to someone else's.

I've also heard a couple of people say there is nothing less interesting than hearing about someone else's dreams. I have not always found this true, but the exceptions were notable for a reason, and that reason is the grain of truth.

However, while you say your talent lies in non-fiction writing. Have you made the experiment and don't like the results? (And if so, is this simply because you're less practiced at it than at your usual writing style?) Do you simply wish to not adopt another writing hobby? What makes you so sure that the products of your own imagination are not ripe for your own plucking?

Gar Lipow @ #1, I have lots of vivid dreams, but memory of them rarely lasts very long. I'll make a present of one that did to any fiction writer who comes along and finds it:

I had a dream that I was driving around some politician who looked suspiciously like Chris Christie in an early Sixties car, kind of like this one (a Ford Fairlane): http://tinyurl.com/mktdzbr. It had been fully restored, but the price paid was that the rear window was covered with decals advertising all the shops who had put in the time to restore it. We had a lovely conversation about cars (I knew this was a dream because in it i was knowledgeable about cars, which I'm certainly not in my waking hours) and ended up at a restaurant where his staff had already arrived. There was a beer in a pilsner glass in front of each of the two empty seats along with a plate with what looked like a full serving of Tony Roma's Onion Loaf (http://s3-media3.ak.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/NzeI1E2t44FKlydc9-ETyw/l.jpg).

My cousin noted on FB that the Christie connection with Fairlane is pretty clear, given the GW Bridge traffic plot. Other than that, I have no explanation.

I have made the experiment. Non-fiction is not just a hobby. I have been published, am good at meeting deadlines. Fiction - have tried and failed. Maybe I could learn, but presently don't have to skills

Also I understand your skepticism about a dream yielding a decent plot. So here is an example:

==========
It is a sort of spinoff from Oliver Twist, where at the end Oliver is happily situated and the Artful Dodger life is spared, but the Dodger is transported to Australia. So in my dream, the Artful Dodger has to survive the brutal conditions for Australian convicts. His survival instincts serve him well, but as the slave labor portion of his sentence finishes, he has to choose between true redemption and just becoming a more respectable type of predator. Meanwhile in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the Dodger is transported to the Empire's moon colony where he faces a similar dilemma. In 21st century Bangladesh, still another Dodger, part of a notorious group of email scammers, who recruit mostly from the gigantic social medial "Like" click farms, escapes jail time after saving the life of undercover police agent "Twisty", but faces a decade long exile from the internet which is part of his release terms. This 21st century Dodger confronts a moral dilemma of his own when he is offered a chance to return to the electronic world if he will become an agent for a corrupt and brutal task force jointly run by the NSA and the Bangladeshi police force. All three Dodgers dream of and learn from each other. Could all these worlds be real? Are any of them real ? Does some dark truth underlie the connection between the three "Artful Dodgers" in their three different universes?
======================

Now I don't get dreams that detailed all the time, But often enough. Dunno, if I'm going to post them I'd like there to at least a slim chance of them being useful to someone. At any rate don't think the above is a typical boring dream narrative.

Update: The books I posted about here have now all been spoken for. May their new owners find them useful and/or enjoyable!

@ Serge Broom - And Pete Seeger died aged 94 last week, which reminded me of a Private Eye comment a few years ago on the death of Googie Withers:

"THE 94 CLUB

"The tragic death of the actress Googie Withers at the shockingly late age of 94 has created another new member of what has come to be known as 'The 94 Club'. Miss Withers was merely one of that galaxy of outstanding cultural figures whose lives were suddenly cut tragically long at the fateful age of 94. The star of 1940s revues joins an elite band of those other untroubled geniuses who never lived to see their 95th year.
"The glittering roll call of fame includes the playwright Bernard Shaw, the novelist Anthony Powell, the legendary journalist Bill Deedes, the food connoisseur and bon viveur Egon Ronay, the inventor of Superglue, Harry Wesley Coover, and quite a lot of others whose names can be found on Wikipedia. The question, as ever, remains the same. Why are so many of our great creative geniuses snatched from us at this particular age? What is it about the number 94 that spells the end for so many [cont. age 94]"

For those who don't know Private Eye, it's a fortnightly British satirical mag and "cont page 94" is a standard get-out spoofing tediously long newspaper articles (there is never a page 94). Googie Withers died the same month as Amy Winehouse, who of course sparked a slew of hand-wringing "27 Club" articles about Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain etc.

On dreams... I did wake from an exciting dream this morning, where I had jumped off a very tall building. I wasn't trying to kill myself, in the dream it was a way down to the ground on a route that I had taken before, but on the way down I couldn't recall how to land safely, and I was thinking about where to aim for while bumping off the walls. In the end I just landed on my back in some gravel and woke up.

Oddly, though, thinking of that dream when I woke reminded me, for some reason, that I had gone back to university in my 40s to do a politics degree. But in fact, after a few more moments wakefulness, I realised I hadn't in fact done that, I was merely re-remembering some other largely-forgotten dream from some years ago. Somehow the place where deep dream memories are buried had been jiggled, I guess.

CZEdwards @19--

It would be fascinating to see how the current reactions in Japan compare to the reactions in Indonesia after the Aceh tsunami of 2004. Whatever is happening is, as you say, at least partly mediated by the culture in which it is occurring. So it might show somewhat different manifestations in a different culture.

DIfferent (and less sober) thought for a comparative anthropological study:
I'd like to see how much disorderly and destructive behavior occurred last night in Denver, and compare it to a similar post-defeat night before marijuana legalization. If only we could get British football hooligans to switch intoxicants!

Lenora Rose @ #21, true. But IIRC in the book in question, the exercises shown are cardio and weight lifting.

Stefan Jones @ 193.913 ...
> I am collecting Kira's fur for yarn-making purposes!
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/4799299303/in/set-72157624384568387/

I've been thinking about trying needle felting with feline fur[0] -- it certainly mats up nicely when rolled, so it seems like it should also be willing to needle felt.

On the other domestic front, there were no unfortunate substances of any sort this morning, all felines were accounted for, and no incidents other than some minor hissing.

This seems entirely too reasonable for a Monday morning, and I'm waiting for some spark-ish surprise to pop out of the woodwork.

[0] based on the sudden showers of cat hair, I'm thinking it's -that- time of year again.

Yesterday, I caught a rerun of "Special Victims Unit", in which Alex Kingston, aka River Song, played a character called Miranda Pond.

Monday Morning Engrish.

I'm looking to buy a Baofeng UV-5 ham radio transceiver. I can figure out what the description is supposed to say, but the engrish is amusing.

You get up to 128 memories.
...I hope I make more than 128 memories before this radio breaks.

Upgrade the frame material.
...and with that upgrade comes
Metallic, more durable and more fashionable.
...I hadn't realized fashion was something that motivated a ham.

The new English,German,French instruction, more convenient and more humanized.
...I'm not holding out hope the new, humanized edition is better written.

The New 2013 packing,more beautiful and quite well-done.
...The beauty of the packaging is, of course, essential.

With full high two colors LED definition display, the screen exquisite clarity.
...I'm looking forward to finding out what this actually means.

And thus ends your engrish lesson for Monday Morning. Have a nice day.

Hyper-Local News: Local woman has discovered that salmon-sushi-flavored potato chips exist, though she has not worked up the courage to open the bag yet.

@ Gar Lipow no. 1: There used to be a hugely entertaining magazine called Dream International Quarterly that featured exactly that, along with dream poetry, short fiction based on dreams (including a horror story that has stayed with me for years), etc. It proves that no matter what the etiquette writers say, other people's dreams can be interesting. You might see if it's still around.

I have dreams like that, BTW.

Re the second act of the Potterdammerung: A commenter at another site said that Rowling's opinion should be meaningful only to people who were "still trying to grind out fanfic." And I immediately thought, Still?

Here's an exercise that may restore people's faith in cockeyed humanity or plunge them into despair at human foibles:

1. Go to three letters you know what they are dot fanfiction dot net.

2. Click Browse, then Books, and find the Harry Potter archive. Look at the running tally. Jaw-dropping, isn't it? And that's just for fics rated through Teen.

3. Now find the Filter button and add these conditions in this order, checking the tally after each click: Over 100,000 words, Complete, English.

4. Adjust the Filter settings to "Rating: All" and look again. Either laugh or scream.

5. Make a note of the title that appears at the head of the results. Check back in a few days and it will probably be the second one down.

TL;DR: At this one site alone, there are over 3,200 completed novel-length Harry Potter fanfics just in English, with a new one appearing about once a week. The total number of HP fics at this site, from novels down to drabbles, exceeds 0.6 million.

In the deep silence, when the heavy snow
had closed the ways and frozen every road,
each of us certain that no river flowed
and turning inwards for the gentle glow
of home and hope that love will soon bestow
on all of those who have found out the code
of normal joy, there's no more human mode
for us to find nor for the heart to know.
Yet as the dark descends on the cold city
we're held together by another light,
clearer and kinder than we might deserve,
safe in a time we know for rough and gritty
and made secure by truth instead of might;
we find the gold around the final curve.

Gar Lipow @ 24

It's a damn shame that you aren't a fiction writer because that sounds like a truly fabulous story. (And definitely an exception to the standard wisdom that dream-based story ideas are of interest only to the dreamer/writer.) What I'm amazed at is that you were able to retain that level of detail on waking in order to record it. I can generally only do that if I have iPad or paper standing by right when I wake up.

I don't know if this is ML-worthy:
A personal injury lawyer bought local Superb Owl time for this two minute ad, described in the link as "batshit amazing."

Contains flaming sledgehammer, power chords.

Caution: the "Christmas on the Theremin" link plays sound with no warning, no option, and no way (that I could find) to turn it off. Might be interesting stuff on that page, and I'll find out when I'm willing to listen to "We Three Kings" played on the theremin while I'm reading it. Right now I've got the radio on.

Ven Crane @ #15:
I earned no popularity for exclaiming "That's Rosebay Willowherb you won't find that on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border!

Is that the stuff that colonizes bomb-sites and scorched earth?

Jenny Islander @35 - I'm running on the theory that J K Rowling is actually an internet troll who gets a kick out of reading fandom_wank and other such communities.

@ Sarah no. 40: Yup. Epilobium/Chamerion angustifolium, AKA great willow-herb; here we call it fireweed for exactly that reason. It may grow more than six feet tall; you can use the new sprouts like lemon-flavored asparagus, the leaves for tea, the stems for fiber, and the fluff for pillows. Also, its flowers make an excellent syrup called homesteaders' honey.

A relative E./C. latifolium, likes gravel banks near permanent fresh water; for this reason it is known as riverbeauty.

grackle @13: And given the grimness of the subject, I can't help but wonder at the agency of a heroine overdose.

...?

Clifton @14: If it's rising when the sun sets, it has to be a full moon - it's simple geometry, damn it!

Neil deGrasse Tyson is always on at talk show hosts for having their celestial mechanics all wrong: "Conan O'Brien, your moon is in the wrong part of the sky!" "Jon Stewart, your Earth is rotating backwards!" I always think to myself, "Neil, son, you're gonna wear yourself out." I wonder how he deals with the science in the skiffy in movies and TV?

CZEdwards @19: ** The whole concept really reminds me of SIASL's Martian Old Ones.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. In fact, I can't help but wonder if that was one of the sources for Heinlein's idea.

Gar Lipow @24: Fiction - have tried and failed.

In the spirit of Lenora Rose's most excellent inquiry, what does "failed" mean? Tried to write fiction and was unable to write it? As in: the words didn't come? Or, as in, the result was unsatisfactory? Tried to publish and failed? Which is to say, didn't sell?

Narmitaj @27: Somehow the place where deep dream memories are buried had been jiggled, I guess.

My brain will quite happily spin up any and all memories necessary to support the conceit of a dream. I have a recurring dream where I'm stuck having had to go back to living back with my mother. If only I could get my own place...oh wait, I used to have my own place...oh wait, I do have my own place, if I could just get back to it...then I wake up, and it takes a few minutes of reviewing my "live action" memory to remember that I never did go back and live with them after moving out at 20.

oldster @28: It's not the reaction to defeats we have to worry about. It's the wins.

@38: Wow. My prime impression? $$$$$ went into making/showing that ad.

oldster, #28: I'd like to see how much disorderly and destructive behavior occurred last night in Denver, and compare it to a similar post-defeat night before marijuana legalization.

The change hasn't been in place long enough yet to have a significant effect on the culture. In another decade or so, that would indeed be an interesting study to see.

xeger, #30: There's a book about that.

Velma, #33: The last time I was in LA I saw sriracha-flavored potato chips. Alas, they were only available in full-sized bags, and I didn't quite have the nerve to invest that much money in an experiment. I would definitely have tried them if I could have gotten a snack-sized bag.

Jenny, #35: I know. I have the same kind of reaction every time I hear some (usually male) pundit say that women just aren't interested in male-on-male sex. "PLEASE, for the love of ghod, somebody send him a link to fanfiction.net!"

In this case, I think part of the issue may be that this person thinks that fanfic only happens (1) around the things that they hear about it happening around, and (2) only while those things are still the Hot!New!Thing! The idea that fic happens about pretty much anything somebody somewhere likes, and that the age or popularity of said thing is irrelevant, is just not on the radar at all.

Sandy, #38: That is badass.

I wonder how he deals with the science in the skiffy in movies and TV?

My favorite example of that is in Ladyhawke (not a great movie by any standard), where there was a total eclipse of the sun the day after a full moon night. This never happens.

Of course, if there are multiple moons . . .

There weren't.

@Stefan Jones no. 46: Aside from details such as the bad timing of the eclipse and the weirdly '80s soundtrack, Ladyhawke is such a pitch-perfect work of medieval fantasy that it seems like a retelling of some troubador's masterwork. No, the story was made up of whole cloth by a scriptwriter. It's just that good.

I thought it was horrible. Broderick's accent was pure cheese, Hauer's acting was lame at best, and...well, that's enough. I admit it wasn't the story that I thought was bad.

I remember Ladyhawke well, except for the music; I haven't seen it for a few years, and the Suck Fairy may have been at work.

A related question- because the curse in Ladyhawke was SO wonderful. As an RPG rules lawyer, I've always tried to come up with some reason why successful curses are always so poetic; never "You, turn into a goldfish; you, diarrhea until death." Anyone have a plausible in-world excuse? Or is it just artistic license?

Aesthetic appeal makes stories endure?

Jenny Islander (48): In fact, I spent a while trying to track down the "original" story--or at least figure out if there really was one.

I like Ladyhawke a lot; I expected the music to be jarring, but it worked (for me).

I was helping run I-Con out on Long Island on the year we got a sneak preview copy of Ladyhawke.

Unfortunately we didn't have the proper lens, so the characters all appeared . . . stretched.

There was one edit that had half the audience convinced we had missed a reel of film.

Afterwards, there was a spirited discussion among some in the lobby as to what went on between the lady on the wolf. Ehrrm-ahem.

re: Ladyhawke

I've tried several times to watch this, but the horrible soundtrack (did they screw up the recording so badly they had to loop everything?) bounced me right out.

The concept (from what I've heard) is intriguing.

@39 Xopher Halftongue

Caution: the "Christmas on the Theremin" link plays sound with no warning, no option, and no way (that I could find) to turn it off. Might be interesting stuff on that page, and I'll find out when I'm willing to listen to "We Three Kings" played on the theremin while I'm reading it. Right now I've got the radio on.

It did not autoplay for me; I had to hit the play button to the left of the title, "A Theremin Christmas Pudding - Peter Pringle" (which then turned into a pause button so I could stop it).

I'm using Firefox 26.0 with NoScript installed.

Jenny, #48: The soundtrack was done by Alan Parsons. I remember my then-husband and I spotting that in the credits and saying, "No wonder we liked it so much!" and going out and buying the album. As to the story, I'm pretty sure I've seen that concept elsewhere, but whether before or after the movie I couldn't say. The movie may have added a trope to the set!

Re: the Ladyhawke curse. I really enjoyed the movie, despite the soundtrack. (Actually, I don't mind Alan Parsons Project at all, but I agree it's a little jarring for a "medieval" story.)

But the curse was "...a night without a day; a day without a night". Or something very similar. It *should* have been "A night without a sunset; a day without a dawn."

Grumph.

Oh, the other thing I remember liking about Ladyhawke: it was one of the few movies I've ever seen where the Big Climactic Swordfight actually looked realistic to me. I'm used to critiquing these things from the POV of having watched a lot of SCA fighting and being able to see where one or both fighters are using horrible technique or missing a wide-open shot. My impression of that fight could be summed up as, "wow, those guys know what they're doing with those 2-handers!"

I watched the Superbowl Scientology advert on Slate.

It looks like something a movie adaptation of a dystopian-future YA novel would include to indicate that there is something weird and sinister going on. You can imagine the teen characters watching it on their classroom VidScreen while ominious music plays.

And . . . seriously, knobs and dials? If you're going for a retro-future vibe, COS, you should have gears or Nixie tubes!

@Lee no. 56: Yes, I've heard it described as the only realistic fight with medieval swords on film (as of the date the comment was made). I like that it isn't flashy, it quickly becomes less than graceful, and before the end both combatants are exhausted and trying to kill each other by any means available.

If only the swords didn't look like highly polished cast metal wallhangers.

A curse saying, "You, become a goldfish" is in the backstory of Seanan McGuire's October Daye urban fantasy series. (I got the first book as a freebie at Worldcon, and just finished reading the second; I anticipate reading the rest in due time.)

My favorite thing about LadyHawke might be obscure: the horses are all having AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF FUN, especially the bignormous black draftie Hauer rides. Tail flagged high, all his body language shouting "OH BOY OH BOY WHEEEEEEE OH BOY YAY I LOVE THIS."

A nice change from some other movies, I tell you what. I first started specifically watching for it after I realized a lupus-born Bone Gnawer Garou (werewolf -- in this case, born a stray dog and then were-humaned at puberty for those of you not WW-fluent) character of mine was watching Wishbone on PBS not only for the learning-English practice, but to laugh at how bad the dog-to-English 'translation' voiceovers supposedly from Wishbone's POV were.

Oh, one more of note: in some werewolf-and-vampires movie (Underworld? It was a while ago) there's a scene where Hellish Dobermans dash feverishly at the protag (who is scrambling over a wall to escape them), supposely with blood on their minds.

Even with a day-for-night filter and careful editing, it's really hard to disguise that those dogs are DARN CHEERFUL and clearly playing adorably in the jump-on-the-human sense ...

I may have to rewatch Ladyhawke.

@Elliot: I rewatched "The Box of Delights" recently. At the end of the first episode, and the start of the second, the lead is menaced by wolves. A couple were real wolves, filmed trotting along and not looking fierce at all. The rest were big dogs, possibly one of the Belgian shepherd breeds, looking very happy for the chance to romp around.

Lee #58 and Jenny Islander #60: The swordfighting in Ladyhawke is great because it was choreographed by William Hobbs, who is great. He's also responsible for the fights in the 1973 Three Musketeers and Rob Roy, among others. I remember thinking the Ladyhawke fights were a little more hokey than his other work, but they matched the tone of the movie well.

65
And 'Robin and Marian'. That fight near the end looked real.

The big black draft-looking horse in Ladyhawke is a Friesian. Gorgeous horse. I admit to watching the movie multiple times because of the horse.

I also enjoyed Matthew Broderick's character's method for talking with God, and have adapted it for my own use.

Oldster @ 28: apparently, there was almost no disorderly last night, at least according to news reports I heard today. It sounded like there was less than on a weeknight St Pat's or a Wednesday Halloween. (Not a fan of the game(1) at all, so we watched Farscape and had a nice quiet day off.) I'd say it was too early for legalization to be a factor -- we really are still working out the new shape of What It Means -- but give it a few seasons(2). Of course, I also think that, given the news reports of how utterly lopsided the game was, the potential for any rioting on either side was low. It wasn't a hotly contested event. Fans on both sides had several hours to absorb what was apparently a foregone conclusion, and generally, people respond better when events are predictable. On the winning side, there was little tension to be blown off by overturning cars or smashing windows, just a smug strut to be performed. (I'd say the same if Denver had won -- Broncos fans can be repulsive winners as well as repulsive losers.) The losing side had time to process, and according to reports, gave up on the whole thing early and went home to sell their stocks. From all of the post-mortems of other sports riots I've read, the thing that seems to predict if it will be a bad night to be out is how close the final score was, and how fair and impartial the umpires were perceived to be. Blowouts don't make for good improvisational, spontaneous street theater.

Unfortunately, the 2004 tsunami mass trauma is really not showing up in the literature, for I think a couple of reasons. First, relative affluence of the respective areas is a big factor. There are simply more psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and psych-savvy semi-pros (like the priest in the article) per capita in even northern Japan than in Indonesia, and Japan has a more functional emergency response infrastructure -- it's hard to worry about psychological trauma when tetanus and malaria are more immediate threats. Second, we learned from both 2004 and 2005's Katrina how better to identify and mitigate acute stress reactions in mass trauma events(4), but in the learning, we got behind the publication curve. Third, Indonesia can't really be called a unified culture -- if I recall correctly, Indonesia has something like 700 spoken languages, each representing a specific micro-culture, which makes the cataloging of culture-specific acute and post stress reactions far more ahem interesting.

Xeger @ 30 and previous thread: whew. Glad to hear they're taking their protest puddles in shifts. And yes, to me that sounds like a temporary truce to organize a resistance. Have you considered sleeping whilst wearing an SCBA rig? Because with ours, that sort of nice usually presages an attempt to smother us in our sleep.

Re: Ladyhawke (and other fictional poetic curses): in-world, the poetry could be necessary if you take the idea that the structure of the language is the framework or the machinery for the power of the curse. A declarative statement (You're a goldfish) by necessity has less frame on which to hang the power so less space in which to weave the interlocking threads. It also has less space for creative weaseling to dispel the power. To create a potent, declarative statement curse requires so much more raw power that it's effectively impossible (as in, rolling a boulder uphill), but creating a poetic curse is like using a wedge and lever to get the boulder uphill. The mechanical advantage of the poetic machinery is such that the cure is more efficient, but has more points of failure.

(1) that's an understatement. My work is with mental illness and mental injury and the idea of paying people to take multiple brain injuries for fun'n'profit has horrified me since I saw my first on-field concussion when I was a 13 year old second clarinet wearing a silly, furry hat. I am fundamentally unequipped to understand the attraction.

(2) assuming local disgust doesn't manifest as selling the franchise to Upper Paducah at a fire sale discount and being done with the whole enterprise.(3)

(3) hey, a girl can hope.

(4) those being the majorest natural disaster mass trauma events to have occurred since we started getting a better handle on acute and post trauma stress in the early 1990s. War/genocide provides a lot of data and unfortunately a lot of casualties, but there is an enormous difference in reaction to human on human violence than to planet on human devastation.

@ Sandy B. 50
"You, turn into a goldfish; you, diarrhea until death."
I was actually just playing around with as story that featured the later as threat (it doesn't end up getting used). Mostly because I like puns, so there is plot relevant grimoire that has "cursing the crap out of your enemies" as a chapter title.

1) Yeah, I love Ladyhawke. Never got some of the subtleties. Just enjoyed the movie.

2) >the spirit of Lenora Rose's most excellent inquiry, what does "failed" mean? Tried to write fiction and was unable to write it? As in: the words didn't come? Or, as in, the result was unsatisfactory?

Tried to write fiction and it came out garbage. Tried to write fiction and it was going great guns and then I got stuck. I have completed some flash fiction I considered successful and even was published. But that was pure inspiration and inspiration without skill apparently can't last past a few hundred words.

3) Someone asked how I remembered dreams in such detail. Suffer from fragmented sleep, which means I constantly wake up and fall asleep and wake up and fall asleep throughout the night. Not insomnia but a sleep disorder nonetheless. Dreams in their pure form are fragmented images. Dream narrative is created in the twilight zone between sleeping and waking as you wake up. So if you suffer from constantly interrupted sleep then you spend a lot more time in that twilight state making up stories - or sometimes one long coherent story. And if they seem like good ones I write them up right away. Not all my dreams are worth writing down. Plenty of boring stuff like last nights: being chased by dinosaurs while the back of my neck is gnawed by a weasel.

Elliott Mason @62: A nice change from some other movies, I tell you what.

Sadly, I'm given to understand that they actually shot the hawk. Don't recall the specific source, but it seems that (Spain?) doesn't have the same animal welfare laws as the US.

I've had a lot of dreams with interesting set-ups that end up devolving into tedious trips on foreign mass transit systems.

#38: I feel like I'm missing something. Is it a piece of american culture (or culture local to that specific part of america) that makes the connection between a guy losing his brother, and setting stuff on fire and becoming an ambulance-chaser? I mean, losing his brother to crime and going away from criminal defence I can see, but the rest of it just baffles me.

#24 & #70, Gar Lipow: I was under the impression that one typically tried and failed multiple times before succeeding, in most things involving a learnable skill. Also, sounds like an interesting story.

#69, Beowulf: I remember reading a (comedy/fantasy) book in which a wizard who didn't think his powers actually worked cursed a guard's bowels to liquefy, in a fit of pique. Not unto death, but the guard did get in trouble with his superior. I had forgotten about that story until now. I think it also had a carnivorous talking donkey in it.

Grump grump grump grump.

Yet another site I used to/would like to post at has retooled its posting procedure. Yet again I see on the left, "Sign in with any of these services, identified by the nifty symbols," and on the right "Or use Disqus." So I sign in on the left. And what I get is a registration form for Disqus. It doesn't matter that I already have a username and password for one of the services shown on the left because I cannot proceed until I agree to sign up for Disqus.

No. No, I do not want another whimsically functional and dubiously secure service bouncing my personal information around the ether, no, I do not want to curate a goddamn personal profile, no, NO, I do not want to net or face or like or tweet or whatever the latest Awesome Thing is. I want to talk to people on the Intertubes about things that interest us both, without first having to let some third party go through my purse!

Even a magazine to which I have a subscription will not allow me to comment on an article I read in the dead-tree edition without first signing up for Disqus. You know what I say to that? I say I still have a roll of Forever Stamps and Disqus can kiss my grits.

> I was under the impression that one typically tried and failed multiple times before succeeding, in most things involving a learnable skill.

Yes. And it is also true that the learnable skills I already have take time to practice and improve. Even if I were a skilled fiction writer I have more dream narratives that would make good novels than I will ever have time to write. Given the time it will take me to acquire fiction writing skill in my spare time, it is a certainty that I will write between zero and a fraction of the novels I can conceive. I would love the rest to have a shot at not going to waste. Anyway, I hope I have not taken too much time with this stuff. Many topics of more interest than my little dilemma, but this really was (from a selfish point of view) the right place to ask the question. (That is, I received genuinely useful answers and thought provoking questions.) So thanks to you all, and won't bring it up further except in answer to specific queries.

PJ Evans @ 66... And 'Robin and Marian'. That fight near the end looked real.

It's my understanding that the fight (seen HERE) was overseen by one of the top people in that kind of things.

Speaking of Medieval Affairs, "The Lion in Winter" has been called by CJ Cherryh one of her favorite Christmas movies.

Elliott Mason @ #62, I think those hellish Dobermans were in one of the Omen movies (a series that also features James Earl Jones in a leopardskin hat solemnly intoning "if they try to come here, I will spit a leopard."

gleomstapa@ #65, oh--that Rob Roy fight is my go-to for "looks like an actual sword fight."

janra @ #73, no, I don't think you're missing anything. The guy is using his dead brother and the evil mayor (not, interestingly, the person/people who actually killed the brother) as fuel for his righteous transformation into SUPERLAWYER. It left a horrible taste in my mouth. I hope my death is never used in a commercial. Especially by one of my relatives.

Xopher writes in #45:

My favorite example of that is in Ladyhawke (not a great movie by any standard), where there was a total eclipse of the sun the day after a full moon night. This never happens.

Stefan Jones, #46:

Of course, if there are multiple moons . . .

Xopher, #47:

There weren't.

Perhaps it was a stunt moon.

Jenny Islander, #48:

Aside from details such as the bad timing of the eclipse and the weirdly '80s soundtrack, Ladyhawke is such a pitch-perfect work of medieval fantasy that it seems like a retelling of some troubador's masterwork.

Jenny, you point toward the perfect way to reconcile my fondness for this movie with my hard-SF-fan urge to point out technical flaws:

Its screenwriters* have concocted such a pitch-perfect work of medieval fantasy that it seems like a retelling of a masterwork of some troubadour who didn't understand astronomy very well!

This thought makes me happy.

Xopher, Ladyhawke is a great movie by my wife's standards: it's her all-time-favorite. It has what she's looking for when she wants to see a movie. I, too, am very fond of it, for the reasons discussed here. It's the first movie I purchased when I acquired a DVD player.

Okay, Matthew Broderick's character is too American-kid to suit me, and doesn't seem to belong in the same movie as the other characters. But it remains a solid fantasy film.

* Story by Edward Khmara, screenplay by Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas, Tom Mankiewicz, and David Peoples.

Serge 77: Mine too. I try to watch it every year.

The Lion in Winter, Die Hard, and It's a Wonderful Life: the triple feature for when you want mood whiplash.

I don't like It's a Wonderful Life, in large part because George Bailey is such a jerk. In the end sequence he has reason, but he's a jerk well before that.

re 67: ... and one of the most magnificent movie horses ever.

Ladyhawke is one of those movies that manages to transcend a multitude of faults and for me succeeds in spite of them. I like Alan Parsons, but the score was just not right; Matthew Broderick's character is good be he just couldn't quite look the part. And let's just not think about the astronomical problem. But it was well-written and stylish.

And the horse.

One of the best parts of "LadyHawke" was the late Leo McKern. You can't go wrong with Leo McKern.

Re Ladyhawke: It's my hazy and possibly wrong recollection that the hawk used was a red tailed hawk. Buteo jamaicensis. A bird much used by modern austringers but not known by pre-Columbian Europeans.

So...what is this New World bird doing in medieval France? And it's my understanding that birds in genus Buteo are called buzzards in British English (any British Fluorospherians are of course welcome to comment on this). So shouldn't the movie title be Ladybuzzard?

Anne Sheller @84, I'm hardly a bird expert, but there are lots of red-tailed hawks in my area of northern Illinois and the bird in the movie Ladyhawke looks just like them. Tail included.

Possibly due to the discussion here, I had a heavily plotful dream this morning, complete with several impressive "should be a CGI action setpiece in a big budget movie" scenes. While waking up I endeavored to tell it to myself repeatedly to help it stick in my waking mind; I think I have succeeded in that.

Unfortunately, if I were to try to shortstoryify it (or at greater length), I'd have to come up with Good Reasons behind some aspects of the dream that are Just Like That Because Hey Look That's AWESOME.

It uses post-apocalyptic at-least-30-years-from-now-US-based setting, very sparsely populated, with a lot of people using what remains of our sturdier housing stock as much older nomadic bands of humans used cliffside rock shelters. Though that's not the cool part, it IS the part that would need a lot more worldbuilding effort expended to make it Not Stupid.

The cool part is the monster: protean, eldritch, shape-shifting packs of 'direwolves' (it came with the name attached) that pour across the landscape like a cross between a tsunami and locusts. They howl as they approach. They see and hear very well, but do not scent-track. They cannot climb anything more challenging than stairs, but they can leap 20 feet vertically with no particular trouble. A very periodic scourge something between a plague and a boogieman, which then, of course, as Our Protagonist interacts with it, becomes more complicated than that.

Oh, and I should note: direwolves only eat the living (down to bugs and yeast). Food stores and corpses that were corpses when they arrived? Untouched.

Hmmm, that implies some kind of mystical origin for them.

I'm imagining the fortifications on old apartment blocks now. "No one lives below the third floor", and a lot of inter-building walkways and rooftop gardens...

@73, janra I would read that if you ever remember the name.

Anne Sheller @84: If you're willing to regard the movie charitably and/or the hawk anthropomorphically, we could call it an example of race-blind casting rather than an anachronism: it's a red-tailed hawk playing the role of a European hawk....

@73, janra I would read that if you ever remember the name.

So...what is this New World bird doing in medieval France?

She's clearly a magical hawk; perhaps using a non-native species reflects that. After all, why should the magic be restricted to local birds?

ISTR that he's a fairly generic (though also magical, obviously) wolf; does anyone know what species?

Carrie S: Far less frequently than that. Like, twice in a single person's lifetime would be AN AWFUL LOT. At least in the part of the world where my dream was set (very sparsely populated, relatively few structures remaining -- former farmland in our time).

The Big Twist happens when our protagonist (who is having far more direwolf exposure than is either statistically likely for her or AT ALL DESIRABLE) runs across someone who actually says he knows how to fight them, and then is revealed to have a connection etc etc.

Gah. I wish I could write better. I know what HAPPENED, but every time I try to convey it, it ends up being like Some Dude pigeonholing you at a convention to tell you ALL ABOUT his roleplaying game. I have occasionally taken successful dictation from my muse, but when it's not the heat of the moment I have nothing to fall back upon.

ANOTHER ONE! I cannot talk to people about yet another topic because Disqus!

Is there some secret level of gold and awesome to Disqus that I don't get to see because I refuse to join? Some point at which the tendency of Disqus to shift usernames around, forget to load comments, etc., is offset by, I dunno, a Disqus team using my personal info to find and paint my house?

76
Serge, it's the same choreographer.

Jenny, you know Disqus suqs. I don't have anything in my profile except the avatar picture, and it's set to private to keep out the @#$%^& trolls. That's about as private as I can make it.

#89, Beowulf:

Once I started thinking about it, more details came to mind. As I recall, the title character goes to barbarian school, and in one of the sequels spends some time at a resort called "thongs" (sandals being a real resort chain). It's silly fluff and I think it's been ten years since I read it.

"Ronan the Barbarian" by James Bibby.

Sergre Broom #76 - so that's where people get the idea they can fight with an axe and a single handed sword! I've seen it many times on the re-enactment battlefield and it usually looks pretty lame, as did that fight. Well okay that's a bit unfair, there's some reasonable bits in it. I can easily imagine tired men flailing about a bit at close quarters in the hope of hitting the legs when they can't see anything obvious and the draw cut on the maille was nice, although I'm not entirely sure that would cut real maille in real life.

Elliot Mason #86 - that is indeed a complex and cinematic dream. I have often thought people like you, and indeed myself, could make a living by piping our dreams out as stories to other people. My one last night involved coming up with the idea of doing a short tv series of Charlie Stross's "Halting State", but there were some odd things going on in dream Edinburgh at the time and I never got anywhere with it.

Jenny Islander @94, it's my understanding that lots of sites use Disqus because it plugs into the code of an existing site and allows you to have comments without having to code it all yourself. Some people who use social media professionally also like to use it themselves because it lets them have one profile across many websites.

Given that those folks are also often involved in choosing how comments are enabled on their employers' websites on a technical level (e.g., Do we have to code this all ourselves, or is there a plug-in we can use?), you see how it became widespread.

Regarding that fight in "Robin and Marian"... I had heard praise about it from someone who does swordfighting. Maybe he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does.

I was looking for info about the bird used in Ladyhawke, and the best I have found so far is this: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070825142239AAovyrn

It does say that it's a red-tailed hawk, which is indeed an anachronism, but was probably done because they are easier to train. It also says that the bird went on to work in one of Universal Studios stage shows, so it seems unlikely that it was actually shot during the making of the movie, which is good to hear. I've always enjoyed Ladyhawke, and knowing that they'd killed the real bird would have ruined for me.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to find the actual source link that the answer used, but I'll keep looking.

About the eclipse in Ladyhawke: the screenwriter says, "While the original script was not based on a myth, I did not research eclipses during the writing of the screenplay. The original screenplay used a different dramatic device, and did not feature an eclipse." So I guess the issue with the full moon/eclipse proximity was added during production.
(source: http://www.bleeding.com/~fable/fable.com/ladyhawke.html)

Serge #100 - it all kind of depends, because we've got very little evidence of how people fought in the putative time of the legend, i.e. late 12th century. We've obviously got MS illustrations, and I don't recall seeing one so odd as an axe and a sword at once, but they are notoriously difficult to properly interpret. We've got the circa 1300 book on sword and buckler, i33, held at the Royal Armouries in Leeds (I have touched and looked at it *hisses golum like*)
which shows a well developed style of sword and buckler fencing that, it has been argued by an expert on Byzantine history, is based on techniques you can see in illustrations from 2 or 300 years earlier in Byzantium.

Now what i33 shows is, allowing for the fact they are using bucklers and so things are different, are attacks to the head, some wrestling, stabbing in the gut, and of course when you try turning the 2D into 3D you get the kind of set aside I think I saw at least once in that clip. But you certainly don't raise your sword and swing down with your entire body weight to bury it in the earth, because that leaves you wide open to your oponent cutting you somewhere.

i33 also shows the priest entering and doing a draw cut on the extended arm of the scholar. Of course neither are armoured, so such attacks will definitely cause damage.
A thrust to maille will almost certainly finish someone off, going through the maille, as the clip shows.
But on the other hand, thinking about it and having a look through the internet, where lots of enthusiastic americans have helpfully tested all sorts of medieval weapons against armour and photographed it* as well as read the old stories, and it seems that swords could cut maille, just not so often or so easily, obviously not with a nice draw-cut, it'll need more than that. In fact you're more likely to cause massive bruising, perhaps break a bone, without cutting the maille at all.

Also knowledge of historical fencing has improved massively since even the 90's, so we need more historical films to show it, he typed hopefully.

* there's a thesis in there somewhere about how digital cameras make it much easier to provide good helpful pictures thus aiding improved understanding, but it's probably so obvious you don't need that.

Guthrie @ 103... it seems that swords could cut maille, just not so often or so easily, obviously not with a nice draw-cut

I figured that they wanted something more cinematic than Robert Shaw going ouch. By the way. that scene is the second time that Connery and Shaw went at it each other in a movie.

In response to PNH sidelight about the rightwingers and Coke's latest commercial.

Most of what I've seen reported is people who have no sense of history going off half-cocked. See also the comments on Scalzi's blog. A lot of educated and aware conservatives are okay with Coke's latest ad.

HLN. Enjoying the snow storm from the comfort of my home. (Yay for closures and weather awareness!)

While following links of interest I came to a realization. You know you're a knitter when... you can tell the difference between a chain mail coif and a garter stitch coif at a glance. Although, when push comes to shove, it takes more than one kind of geek to realize They Got It Wrong.

Victoria:

There is *always* some group of idiots protesting whatever thing they don't like, often apparently just to get attention. Not uncommonly, some moderately well known people will jump on the bandwagon, because moderately well known people (especially pundits and radio/ TV personalities) are often not all that smart or wise.

The whole form of blog post / media article that amounts to "get a load of *these* idiots" seems like one that doesn't add much value to the world. The internet is vast, and full of idiots.

In light of Ms. Rowling having second thoughts about Ron and Hermione, what might other authors say (posthumously) about their plot choices?

Sophocles: "If I had to do it over again, I'd probably leave out the whole mother thing. You won't believe some of the fanfic that's been generated."

Herman Melville: "Ishmael? I shoulda stuck with Robert. But I was thinking about fish, and the -ish sound kept coming up."

Open threadiness: Ursula Vernon, on the intersection of D&D and ICS.

Lee @ #44: The idea that fic happens about pretty much anything somebody somewhere likes, and that the age or popularity of said thing is irrelevant, is just not on the radar at all.

I occasionally browse the index of fandoms at AO3, and it always fascinates me to see what's inspired fanfics (so far) and what hasn't. Of course when you get down to the less-widespread fandoms, the difference between a half-dozen stories and zero stories is often one single enthusiastic writer.

109
Um, you just linked to this thread.
Maybe you wanted this site, the second post?

Sarah @110: Of course when you get down to the less-widespread fandoms, the difference between a half-dozen stories and zero stories is often one single enthusiastic writer.

There's a particular fandom on AO3 that currently has 91 works. 59 of those are mine; 11 more are gift fics for me. So, yeah, there is a lot to be said for what a single enthusiastic writer can do, especially if they can convince a few other people to be enthusiastic too.

Cheryl @ #101: Red-tailed hawks also have a rather distinctive whistling call, which in the movies gets dubbed onto every bird of prey, owls only excepted, up to and including griffins. It's the Wilhelm Scream of bird calls.

Semi-snotty linguistic question. Can I ask when the word switched from "mail" to "maille"? Because "maille" is not English but French; why are people acting like they're Normans when even the Normans didn't call it that?

114
I think it's to keep it from being confused with stuff that goes into mailboxes.

Cheryl writes in #101:

I was looking for info about the bird used in Ladyhawke, and the best I have found so far is this...

There are Web sites devoted to planes in movies and to guns in movies. Surely some bird enthusiast has put up a Birds in Movies site-- to help answer questions like this?

The redtail's scream is even more impressive when he's telling his buddies he just spotted lunch...

My Chihuahua.

(The hawk would follow us from the house to the park, ever hopeful.)

PJ, 115: But that's what context is for.

Bill Higgins @#116
Many years ago, birder and fan Barry Kent Mackay remarked that he found most movies with outdoor scenes unconvincing because the bird song is nearly always Californian.

Jenny Islander #94. I use Disqus for my blog because I don't know any other easy way to allow comments on Tumblr. It sucks less than not allowing comments at all.

(the blogs that annoy me are the ones that require a Google/Facebook/Twitter ID and a CAPTCHA and then stick the comment in a moderation queue. Overkill much?)

Henry Troup @119: Universal Hollywood sign for 'it's nighttime and quiet' is either crickets (far from universal worldwide, or even across the US) or the Pacific treefrog, Pseudacris regilla* (link goes to an mp3; for a wider variety of mp3s of different sized groups go here.

Why? Because if a sound recordist needs a new recording of either they can go into a reasonably quiet backyardy place in southern California and record some. Despite Hollywood's testimony, however, the Pacific treefrog occurs neither in Chicago, Boston, nor sub-saharan Africa ... and howler monkeys don't live in Africa either, they're South American, even though their noises are shorthand for "Jungle!"

--
<*> Formerly, in my childhood, it was called Hyla regilla, which was wonderful for singing to the tune of Hava Nagila. Alas, Pseudacris may be more taxonomically accurate by current standards (there's been several waves of lumping versus splitting since the 80s), but it doesn't scan.

Yes, I was the kind of child who memorized scientific polynomial names (Paromyscus leucopus novaboracensis was one that impressed my mom, though as she's the one who dymo-taped it on the aquarium that ours lived in, I think it's at least partly her fault) of living critters AS WELL as fossil charismatic megafauna. That was the part of my childhood where I thought I was going to grow up to get a PhD in zoology (and do my gradwork either in Lawrence, Kansas, or a tossup between Scripps or Woods Hole). Ahh, the alternate universes next door, the paths not taken ...

121
The palm trees in 'San Francisco' are another one. It isn't that there aren't any, but many of them are Phoenix palms and old.

I saw a movie on tv, name of which I have mercifully forgotten, that did the red tailed hawk scream for a great horned owl. I was not amused.

TexAnne at 118: try doing a google search for "mail". I don't like maille much either, but it's better than chainmail.

My personal favorite cinema oops was the oak tree that produced apples. Can't remember the name of the movie, but when I mentioned it to my friends who were watching it with me... "And that your only problem with the movie?" We'd been having a good time watching Bad Movies with a Theme -- that day's was theme had to do with fairy tales.

@97 Thanks.
As for Disqus it helps that it is less sucky on the blog/forum creator end, but mostly its just that it lucked into becoming the standard and there is a lot of benefit to having a single system that can be used on a lot of sites.

I would just like to state that I do not understand why the world needs a remake of Robocop. In fact I'm pretty sure it does not.

Sad news -- Mark Rogers, of Samurai Cat fame (the graphic novels were published by Tor), has died. Heart attack while hiking, according to his Wikipedia page.

TexAnne, #114: I consider "maille" to be along the same lines as "Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe" -- basically, someone is being either cutesy or pretentious. The same goes for the overuse of "y" as a substitute vowel for either "i" or "e".

TexAnne #114 - so what did the Normans and later people call it?
Here in the UK, we've been switching away from the definitely wrong "Chainmail" for a few years now, moving to the more accurate "maille" coming from french for net, IIRC. If you have any better words I'll see what I can do to get them used.

Note- arms and armour are not my area of expertise, I just read a lot and it overlaps with archaeometallurgy which is something I know a lot about.

Xopher #127 - indeed it does not. Apparently it's going to be a PG-13 as well, so certainly not an accurate documentary on the policing methods of the future or a satire upon current police work and the operations of big corporations.

gaukler@124

...but it's better than chainmail

Oh...was it never really called that? As someone whose entire knowlege of pre-modern weaponry and armour comes from AD&D, I know a lot of terms but am wrong about what they mean (and the number of their referents one can sensibly carry) in varied and interesting ways.

Russ - wikipedia has information on it; it seems it came from Sir Walter Scott and his ilk, thus is a long way from the medieval period.
You might be interested to know that you call a suit of armour a "Harness", not, well, a suit of armour. I've read the word myself in 15th century texts.

Xopher @127, Guthrie @130 Quite apart from the PG-13/12A rating, my swift look down the cast list seems to indicate that in this version Robocop has no sassy female (ex-)partner. Unless it is frighteningly clever it does seem a poor choice of remake. Maybe next time someone thinks of a reboot, they could make an original dumb action film instead.

As for moons, I once wrote a story in which a character was to be trapped in a room that would be flooded by the tide, so I made it a spring tide, with a full moon. So far so good. Then they went in while the tide was out. At that point I realised the time most likely for them to go in would be about midnight which would usually be high tide at full moon.

I solved it by deciding it was a long way up a tidal river on the East coast of England, so the tide came in later. The top of the tidal reach of the Thames would be perfect, except it was supposed to be a lonely house in a marsh, and somebody put London in the way.

http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/typecasting

Another example of reporting glaring (to some) inaccuracies: movies that use typefaces that did not exist in the period they took place.

Erik Nelson @135: the most egregious example of that in my experience is the 2007 Sense and Sensibility mini-series, in which the camera focuses on a "family Bible" with space for births and deaths at the front, and the entire page looks as if it's been taken from an 1880s volume, with the florid display faces and all. The allegedly handwritten names are also pretty clearly printed in a calligraphy-script that isn't characteristic of the early 19th century, but they're not as glaring as the solid Late-Victorian feel of the header!

Anachronisms... Anybody else remembers the miniseries "Mysterious Island", with Patrick Stewart as Nemo? Bad enough tha the Nautilus looked as cramped as a tricked-up U-Boat, but when asked about the island's various huge critters, he explained it was caused by radio-activity and nobody went 'what?'. That's when I switched channels.

guthrie@132

Thank you - my ignorance has diminished an iota.

Caroline @192/847: Any recommendations for where I might go to talk to other people who have been living organ donors

I have forwarded contact information to abi for a friend of mine who's a kidney donor. If you email her at her nym here at this domain, she can get that to you.

Can I just say, apropos of nothing, that Saga by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples is absolutely amazing work--brilliant, funny, high-stakes, hugely entertaining, and with some of the best comics art I've ever seen? It also mixes sci-fi and fantasy in a way that creates a very quirky world which is nonetheless believable.

Elliott Mason @ #121: and howler monkeys don't live in Africa either, they're South American, even though their noises are shorthand for "Jungle!"

See also: the kookaburra, native to Australia and to the soundtracks of movie jungles.

And furthermore: The cry of the loon, shorthand for "you are now out in the Big Lonely," and thus used in movies set in deserts.

HLN: Local woman experiences the rare sensation of having her eyeballs frost over upon leaving the house this morning. Even wearing ALL THE CLOTHES, she reports that she is not overwarm.

Carrie S. @92: ISTR that he's a fairly generic (though also magical, obviously) wolf; does anyone know what species?

IMDb's trivia page says, "Four Siberian wolves were imported from California to portray the lupine alter-ego persona of Captain Etienne Navarre (Rutger Hauer)."

Heh:

... Several different hawks were used. One to sit on Rutger Hauer's arm and another for the flying scenes. A third [hawk] proved to be mostly unusable, as it enjoyed Hauer's company so much that it would ruffle its feathers when seated on his arm, making it look more like a chicken than a stately hawk.

Lori Coulson @117: The hawk would follow us from the house to the park, ever hopeful.

Sticks in my mind that's one reason the national parks want you to keep your dog on a leash.

Henry Troup @119: Many years ago, birder and fan Barry Kent Mackay remarked that he found most movies with outdoor scenes unconvincing because the bird song is nearly always Californian.

I love me some Murder, She Wrote, but one of their foley artists seems to think that "outdoor bird noises" = budgies. Nevermind if it's California, New England, Europe, ...? This got better in later seasons, but I'm still noticing it about every fourth episode.

it enjoyed Hauer's company so much that it would ruffle its feathers when seated on his arm

I heard that most of the snakes in Conan the Barbarian would just fall asleep on James Earl Jones, and would have to be prodded between takes so the audience would know the budget had stretched to real snakes.

A couple of years ago I saw video of an injured wolf being rescued in Italy (sadly, it appears as though the wolf ultimately did not recover) and was struck, among other things, by how different it looked from a N. American wolf -- smaller, for a start. They named it Navarre.

It sure sounds like Hauer, whatever his inadequacies as an actor here (he was fine in Blad Runner), was someone in whose presence animals were very happy. That speaks well for him.

Ad featuring the languages that were rejected from Coke's multilingual Superbowl ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18mS4cLPOb8

Style Guide for Das IntarWeebz.

#143, Jacque:

"one of their foley artists seems to think that "outdoor bird noises" = budgies"

I saw an outdoor budgie several times at one work site. It had made friends with a flock of little brown birds about the same size, and despite being bright blue and always the last to leave when a human got within ten steps of wherever the flock had landed, it stayed with them. I suspect its friends were the only reason it was still alive. (It was wearing a leg band.)

In re keeping one's chihuahuas leashed around raptors ... the efforts to aid the recovery of bald eagles in the Hudson River valley have succeeded to the point that they now circle over Manhattan not infrequently.

Central Park DOES have signs stating clearly that if your pet weighs less than 30lbs you should ONLY walk it ON A LEASH and UNDER TREE COVER. And yet multiple times a year someone tries to sue the parks over their yip-dog running free in Strawberry Fields being snatched up by a baldie and carried off to feed its young.

DNR does try to reunite owners with collars, when they clear out the nests at the end of season ... some of those collars are really expensive.

Bill Higgins #79: Perhaps it was a stunt moon.

LMAO!

Gar Lipow #70: Ever Tried. Ever Failed.

Also, David Malki and Ryan North are having fun with their Bookwar

janra: Heh. When I was living in Minneapolis, I happened to be walking to a Sacred Harp session when I noticed, on the lawn ahead, what looked like an albino in the flock of sparrows feeding in a lawn. Got closer: that's not a sparrow, that's a budgie! She didn't bolt with the rest when I got close, and so I leaned down and offered my finger for her to climb onto. She didn't fly away until I actually touched her.

So the second time, I didn't bother offering her my finger. I just slowly reached towards her and when I was close enough, grabbed her. Wrapped her in a fold in my shirt and took her home with me. ("Scream scream scream!" Bite bite bite!) Named her "Ruth" because the green male I already had was named "Mnementh."

Where I live now, I see an escaped budgie in the trees every few years. Most recent one was obviously very happy, with the puffy face and the smug talk-talk. Didn't survive the first cold snap, of course.

The last time I got on a scale was mid-2012, at a clinic operated by the homeless shelter where I could have had my cats with me. When opening my case with them, I had to have a medical exam and TB test, and I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. (Considering the amount of stress I was under, this in no way surprised me.)

I made my last trip to that clinic (while I had my post-accident rental car) to see if they wanted to renew the scrip for my BP prescription, and my weigh-in was something between 255-260 lbs, at which weight I had actually been pretty stable for a number of years. Again, considering the stress I was under, plus the cheap high-carb meals usually served at the shelter where I was living at the time, I was surprised I hadn't gained weight.

Lately, my clothes have been feeling slightly looser, so I just weighed myself on a digital scale in our shipping department...

240.5 pounds.

I haz a happy. :)

We have feral budgies in Amsterdam and thereabouts. Flocks of them, sitting in green clusters in the trees. They're not escapees, but rather, descendants of escapees, now thoroughly wild.

Takes some getting used to at first.

Neil W #134.

In fact, high tide and moon at zenith do not always, or even as a general rule, go together. I know not about the UK, but here in New Zealand, at any given time every possible state of the tide exists somewhere on our coastline. The cycle is linked to the moon, but not the phase.

At a recent RASNZ Conference a speaker put up a display demonstrating this, and we watched the pretty colours representing the tides chase each other round the coast.

Naturally, the two ends of Cook Strait are way out of sync. Hence the ferocious currents that run through Cook Strait (which are why it was not swum until the 1960s in spite of being less than half the width of the English Channel).

The only way to be sure is to look up the published tide tables for the area that interests you.

J Homes

abi @ 154... feral budgies in Amsterdam

That sounds like the premise for a Monty Python skit.

"It's not pinin', it's passed on!"

"Samen leven."

abi @154: I don't know if it's the same species as the ones over there, but we've got lots of feral parakeets in Brussels too.

It's quite likely. I suspect the number of species that are both common enough to be pets and hardy enough to deal with our shared climate is relatively small...

Are budgies and parakeets different names for the same thing? Or are they different birds?

I've tried to look this up several times, but my brain always goes all woozily at the explanation.

Budgies (budgerigar*) are often called parakeets, but apparently the latter technically refers to a different class of critters, more like what you see in Pendrift's link. The Wikipedia page says that "parakeet" is a "non-taxonomical term that refers to any of a number of small parrots with long, flat and tapered tails."

* I've been told (non-authoritatively) that "budgerigar" is a corruption of an Australian Aborigine word that means "little green thing that's good to eat." (Though I think you'd have to be awfully hungry for budgie meat to be worth the trouble.)

wrt the species in Ladyhawke: I did production on the Compleat Anachronist issue on falconry a few years before the movie came out. For some reason I remember that the would-be falconer's first bird (in the U.S.) must always be a red-tail, because they're common; you could work with other species after you had a license saying that you knew enough not to break their birds. Possibly the red-tail was chosen because there would be no issues about training it and taking it abroad? (Leaving unanswered the question of why they didn't hire local talent -- are there fewer cinematic-level animal trainers in Spain?)

Steve C @ 108: I don't think leaving out the mother thing would have worked; IIRC the myth was established well before then. But I can certainly imagine him ruing the sequel, Oedipus at Colonus, in which he used an undefined part of the story to promote Athens: "I made them look good, and see what they did to me!"

Elliott @ 150: that's impressive; I didn't know a bald eagle could lift that much. OTOH, I thought they were more fish-eaters -- but I suppose they'll take whatever prey is handy.
    People do tend to underestimate birds; I once saw a local tell a tourist on the Boston Common that not restraining her yapper from a gander during chick season was a Bad Idea, likely to result in a broken dog. I understand the local branta Canadensis are bigger than the migratory variety; they certainly aren't impressed by anything smaller than them, and not by most bigger things.

Syd @ 153: congratulations!

in re budgies -- does anyone remember a somewhat-recent ~documentary about feral parakeets(?) on Telegraph Hill? IMDB search doesn't seem to understand "and".

Jacque (161): Thanks. No wonder I'm confused. Hopefully the explanation will stick this time.

CHip (162): Would it be The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill? (I googled it, and that IMDB entry was the first link.)

Parrots, I thought. Big green parrots.

I've never seen The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill but I've trimmed thousands of flyers for it down to bleeding edges.

On feral budgies, I live close to Cornwall Park, Auckland, a large park in suburbia, much of which is a farm. There are of course many escaped pets, including breeding populations of Australian Rosellas. I've recently started spotting a very fluffy bunny (as opposed to the wild rabbits), which has been very lucky in the paddock it has chosen - it's one that people don't let their dogs run free in, due to the proximity of the farm manager's house.

CHip @162: Baldies would much rather steal a fish from an osprey, as their first choice; second is either catching a fish themselves or finding something dead and eating it. But apparently there are two or three individuals within easy flight of Manhattan who occasionally go looking for rabbits. Well, dogs, actually, but the eagle isn't to know that until after they've caught it ...

Elliott: Well, dogs, actually, but the eagle isn't to know that until after they've caught it ...

Oh, I don't know about that. I'm given to understand (by a falconer I met at a Highlander convention, of all places) that their eyesight is more than good enough to make that distinction from altitude. And I can easily image that a nice fat, lazy peekapoo woud be a major improvement over a tough, stringy rabbit.

HLN: Hollow Log has been freed. Apparently destined to become a beehive in its old age.

The "Three Russian Bogaturs" is a series of hilarious short cartoons, pitting medieval heroes against adversaries as diverse as Darth Vader, the iceberg that sand the Titanic, and Freddy Kreuger.

There a good selection in this blog post:

http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=11237&page=11#Item_1

Jacque #161 (Though I think you'd have to be awfully hungry for budgie meat to be worth the trouble.)

They do come in large Costco-sized multipacks, for example

Think of them as like aerial sardines.

The Harry Potter stuff is making me think about that universe again.

Ron and Hermione's relationship always bugged me, because it was a very specific, very common type of overused trope that irritates me. Essentially: "smart powerful cool girl ends up with normal guy who brings nothing to the table except the fact that he's liked her for a long time." This is distinctly different than "smart powerful cool girl ends up with a guy whose expertise and skills are in completely different areas and not directly comparable." I like that fine.

I'm not going to do my full Ron rant right now, unless the Potter discussion gets more lively here. Let's just say I am drawn to fictional couples by the kind of emotional and intellectual interaction they're shown having, and most of Ron and Hermione's romantic interactions seemed to consist of nothing more than "I've known you forever, I find you physically attractive, and I decided I'd date you when I was 12, thus we are destined to be a couple." I can understand how that'd be wish fulfillment or nostalgia for some people, but... not for me.

That said, I was never completely sold on Hermione and Harry, either. They had a slightly better dynamic, where they'd learn things about functioning in society and self-discipline from each other. But the relationship I thought was being set up for romance was Harry and Luna. She saw to the core of his deepest flaws - his anger, his stubbornness, his willingness to rush to judgment - and helped him calm down, be more mindful, and let things go. Interacting with her taught him to focus on the difference between things he was really certain about, things he really cared about, and things he was wasting his energy raging about for no good reason. It was a subtle and interesting relationship, and I was impressed with what Rowling was doing with it...

Then I realized it was all an accident. She hadn't meant any of that subtlety and emotional growth to mean anything special. The same thing is true for my other favorite part of the series: the complexity and sympatheticness of Snape's character. Rowling said in another interview that she thought the only reason people could possibly like Snape was that they were picturing Allan Rickman - but I liked Snape long before the movies were cast.

So my two favorite things in the Potter books were accidents that didn't end up having any meaningful resolution. I still like the books, and you can learn a lot about the power of a particular type of non-standard worldbuilding from them. The world is the part I still enjoy instinctively (despite the many logical problems I can see with it.)

I'm not sure if there's a lesson in this, but I find it interesting.

I'm always willing to toss out what an author said in an interview, versus what they actually wrote. Especially when it's years after publication date.

Authors have selective memory just like the rest of us. (Plus they flail for something interesting to say when a microphone is shoved at them, ditto.)

Also -- geez, if you start rejecting story elements that started as *accidents*... (Long retro-analysis of _The Lord of the Rings_ deleted as too obvious to mention.)

Re: feral parakeets, there is a bird called a monk parakeet which is pigeon-sized, noisy, and bright green, and has established breeding populations in several locations in the United States, including New York, Connecticut, Texas, Illinois, Oregon, and Florida (why, yes, I looked it up - why do you ask?). I've seen them at their Brooklyn College athletic grounds hangout.

Budgerigars are much smaller and more slender (and not always green). My understanding is that they're not hardy enough for our climate except in Florida. I'm surprised to hear they're hardy enough for the Netherlands - is it possible it's a different parakeet, Abi?

AKICIML, food edition:

My has-newly-become-a-vegetarian cousin is in town visiting for a month or so, staying with her grandmother. She's still learning how to cook for herself (she's 18), and her grandmother is totally hapless. Gma's a terrible cook to begin with, and she really has no grasp of the word "vegetarian" (when asked by another cousin if gdaughter was vegan, Gma replied, "no, she eats all her vegetables". The next day, she offered gdaughter a hot dog for lunch).

So, I'm going through my recipe collection looking for things she can make, and I'm realising how many of my no-meat soup recipes contain dairy!

My question for the Fluorosphere: what's the best substitute for milk and/or cream in a soup? Rice milk? Almond? Coconut? I wouldn't want the flavours to change too much...

Since I'm pretty sure poor gdaughter hasn't had much more than dry rice krispies and some apples for the past two days, I'd really like to get her grocery shopping tomorrow. If nothing else, I'll tell her to pick up all the beans/legumes/grains that she can.

Cheryl @ 174: If she's vegetarian, not vegan, then there's no need to avoid dairy and eggs. If she is vegan, then I recommend hunting down vegan recipes online, rather than experimenting with substitutions for dairy. When we've tried substitutions, results have varied a lot.

@175 janetl

If she's vegetarian, not vegan, then there's no need to avoid dairy and eggs.

She doesn't refer to herself as vegan, but I know she doesn't eat dairy or eggs.

If she is vegan, then I recommend hunting down vegan recipes online, rather than experimenting with substitutions for dairy.

I'll certainly do that too, but I was hoping for a simple way to convert some of my favourites.

When we've tried substitutions, results have varied a lot.

Thanks for the info!

On the Harry Potter romantic resolutions:

Harry and Hermione are both outsiders, muggle-raised. and highly talented. They have a different view of the wizard world because of that. Harry has the family connections that Hermione does not.

Ron and Ginny are insiders of a particular sort. They're not aristocrats. They're a very rural, middle-class at best, sort of family. Yeoman wizards, if you like, the semi-mythical heart of English wizardry.

It's The Darling Buds of May with wizardry, maybe the TV version rather than the original.

Not all the aristocrats we see are of the Malfoy sort, nor are all the urban wizards somehow im-natural, but Ron and Ginny are more than just individuals. They are expressions of a particular mythic archetype of English lore.

And maybe passing them off as somehow stupid or inadequate is to be part of this modern age that casts off too much of the past. None of them need be quite real people, but the Weasley family are people who, eventually, say "Enough!", and get on and do something.

jonesnori/Lenore Jones @173

On the one hand, I don't have very fine distinctions among pet bird species; when I moved to the UK, I found that what I was accustomed to calling a parakeet was being called a budgie. That's about the limit of my sophistication.

On the other hand, the birds I'm referring to are a good deal smaller than pigeons.

A little web research tells me that they're probably Rose-ringed parakeets.

Russ #138 - you're welcome.

Hey, the WashPo is analyzing the Koch empire.

Andrew Plotkin @172: I'm always willing to toss out what an author said in an interview, versus what they actually wrote.

Bradbury always seems to agree in interviews that Fahrenheit 451 was about censorship, whereas to me the significant part of the story was that most people had already stopped reading books by the time the government in that story had banned them, which is why there was no significant resistance to the law. Admittedly this leaves one wondering why so much effort is put into hunting books down and burning them -- my various headcannons are (a) it's a make-work project, (b) it's making an example of non-conformists, in order to keep everyone else in line, or (c) it's actually a reverse-psychology attempt to get everyone reading again by making it cool and rebellious.

J Homes @155

Tides are complex as all get out. I admit that I was basing the tides on East Kent and the Humber estuary in England, which is where I've lived the vast majority of my life. Which worked out fine as that is where it was set.

New Zealand tides, as I've just discovered by taking a look at the Wikipedia, run completely differently to ones in the UK. Clearly I will need to research this before writing about tides there. (High Tide runs around the archipelago in a counter-clockwise circle? What madness is this!)

Leah Miller @171 I didn't think that Hermione and Ron getting together was especially implausible*. I do think that for them to still be together (20?) years later glosses over what must have been some stressful and difficult changes to their relationship. But then again, no one gets divorced in the wizard world.

* Combine the powerful bond from the shared experiences during the fight with Voldemort, some general attraction and teenage hormones and it could easily happen.

Cheryl @ 174

I'm neither vegetarian nor vegan, but I have to avoid dairy products. What to substitute for milk and cream depends greatly on the recipe, and what role the milk/cream was playing.

For thickened sauces with fat (white sauce, many cream soups), and in much baking, water is a fine substitute for milk; if you are substituting for cream, increase the fat content of the roux to compensate.

Where the milk is smoothing the flavor (think of the effect of milk in coffee, or tomato soup), nothing is a perfect substitute; rice milk, thin white sauce made with water, and coconut milk can all sort-of work depending on the recipe.

Where cream is serving as a fat source, oil and water often works (in French-style lentils, for example.)

My experience is that it's often better to give up on "how do I make this without milk" and move to "what can I make that doesn't have milk."

One really good source of non-dairy recipes is Jewish cookbooks.

A fair number of the recipes in the Fast Cheap Good thread are vegan.

Cheryl #174: Unfortunately, none of the ur-milks I've seen is really suitable for substitution in cooking, mostly because most of them in the markets are sweetened to varying degrees, and if you can find unsweetened forms, they have fairly strong flavors and sometimes texture issues.

Of course, it's different if you're building a recipe around the particular ur-milk, but alas, it sounds like Grandma is unlikely to have that sort of flexibility.

My dead-simple, emergency or no-spoons vegan suggestions: hummus, store-bought or handmade from canned chickpeas. (Just take the 5 minutes and squirt the canned, rinsed chickpeas through your fingers to remove the skins.) Pita or pita chips, Non-dairy guacamole, aka mashed avocado plus a little fresh salsa, if you can get a small amount from the deli. Avocados should be cheapish this time of year. Canned pumpkin or butternut squash soup. (Acquire 1 can of either, 1 can of unsweetened coconut milk, vegetable soup base or broth or granules, some curry powder. Mix squash, coconut milk, 1 cup of reconstituted vegetable stock in sauce pan, bring to simmer. Curry powder & salt to taste. Also works with canned in water sweet potatoes, but requires mashing.) Bean chili, made with canned beans and canned tomatoes and a packet of bog-standard chili seasoning -- follow packet instructions, but sub beans for meat. Produce. Nut or peanut butter. Bread products. We were partial to cauliflower and zucchini korma, made with a jar of korma sauce (Tiger Tiger brand but Patak's isn't deadly), a bag of frozen cauliflower, one zucchini chopped into half moon slices and a diced onion. Sauté veg in oil/ghee, pour sauce over top, let simmer while rice is cooking. Baked potatoes and sweet potatoes. Pomodoro sauce (tomatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms, all chopped and cooked lightly in olive oil with some dried Italian blend seasoning) tossed with pasta. If you're feeling both adventurous and decadent, scallion pancakes are very easy, very vegan, tasty and filling, but nutritionally iffy and require kneading.

CZEdwards @ 186

Note pleae that korma sauce almost always has butter or cream in it. (And curry paste very often has seafood of some kind.)

CZEdwards@186, doesn't bread have egg in it? Is there such a thing as vegan bread? (I don't know; that's why I'm asking.)

#171 ::: Leah Miller

This reminds me of how much I appreciate the Modesty Blaise/Giles Pennyfeather pairing. She's an expert fighter, and her platonic friend Willie Gavin is a fellow expert fighter. So she ends up with a doctor who's notable for his emotional skills, and has sufficient courage and toughness to do well in the Blaiseiverse.

I'm very fond of Luna. Any recommendations for Luna fanfic? I did want to see more of her in canon.

Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation is an excellent fanfic about Hermione during the year after the end of canon. Unfortunately, it's not finished (though there's still hope).

Ron doesn't work out, and Neville is the better choice.

I'm not sure this is a fair reading of canon, but it's been a while since I've read canon, and I like the fic enough that I don't care.

It's basically a very smart Hermione up against massive obstacles sort of story, not to mention having what happens when a computer programmer designs magical defenses.

Cassy B: Bread must contain flour, water, yeast, and salt -- that's it. It may also contain almost anything else, from an egg or some milk to chunk additions like raisins or various spices, but flour/water/yeast/salt is your classic bread algorithm.

Elliott @190, thanks; you can tell I'm not a baker. <smile>

Nancy Lebovitz: It's so far from canon that it's definitely out at the crackfic end of the spectrum, but the Case of the Unwelcome Owl is (a) awesome and (b) contains Luna Lovegood. It also explains a lot about the Sherlockverse. :->

I also haven't found much luck in swapping out fake-dairy in soups. I have, however, found a lot of luck with Moosewood cookbooks. My go-to "anyone and everyone can eat this" recipe comes from there, and a number of other recipes work well for handling almost all dietary and allergy restrictions.

Lima Bean Stew is my strong recommendation: canned or frozen lima beans, corn, tomatoes in roughly equal amounts, cumin, onions, some garlic. Serve over rice/couscous/quinoa and add avocado/cilantro/cheese as desired. I recommend following the recipe, but that alone will get you something edible.

It's gluten-free, vegan, can have cheese added for the non-vegan, and is generally safe for most allergic folks. (There's always the corner cases who can't eat tomatoes or whatever.) You can spice it up with some cayenne if you like, and the avocados make it taste a little bit decadent.

Serge Broom @ #2
Holy botanical inaccuracy, Batman!

I am almost positive that should have been Holly botanical inaccuracy, Batman! It is winter after all.

Abi @178, interesting. That parakeet sounds almost a menace!

Cheryl@174: One easy vegan-compatible soup we've been playing with lately is a sweet potato, ginger, and miso soup. We've used cauliflower for the thickening originally provided by dairy, with no detectable loss of flavor. Proportions are approximate and flexible; the recipe is pretty forgiving:

3 medium onions, sliced
2-3 tbsp grated or sliced fresh ginger
3-4 medium sweet potatoes, cut in chunks
1 medium head cauliflower without greens, cut in chunks
olive oil
stock to cover
miso to taste (we've been tending toward 1/4 cup)

Saute the onions in olive oil until slightly browned.
Add the ginger and saute until the ginger becomes fragrant.
Add sweet potatoes, cauliflower, and stock to cover.
Simmer until everything is soft.
Blend.
Add miso.

The strongest flavors are from ginger and miso, with sweet potatoes coming up second, which makes everything else extremely flexible. We've added other root vegetables like carrots, and it's been fine. For stock we've used chicken stock and we've used water with vegetarian bouillon, and both have been equally good. For miso we tend to a strong, dark akamiso, but again, the recipe is flexible. If you don't have a miso strainer then it's probably best to first mix the miso with a bit of the soup in a separate bowl before adding it to the pot.

By the way, this is the kind of recipe that makes us fall in love with our stick blender. We would probably make a lot less soup if we didn't own one. Being able to do the blending step without decanting is really, really nice. If you're looking for a gift for someone who makes this sort of soup, I strongly recommend looking in that direction.

I meant to add, speaking of stick blenders: they're also handy for making hot chocolate; which, going back to the original question, comes out very well made with almond milk.

#192 ::: Elliott Mason

Thanks for the Luna fanfic link. I'm checking out more by FayJay.

****

Any thoughts about capitalizing on the taste of hemp milk instead of just using it as a milk substitute?

Mishalak @ 194... Groan. :-)

Mushroom barley soup is another nice, hearty soup with neither milk nor meat. Sauteed onions, add mushrooms, herbs and spices (I use sage, thyme, and black pepper), and a bunch of water. Simmer until the mushrooms are thoroughly cooked and it smells like soup; add much less barley than you think you should, simmer until the barley is done (about half an hour).

I haven't given amounts, because tastes vary and recipes abound. It's my favorite soup (except the one that starts the same way but then adds flour and milk instead of barley, but that's a dairy soup).

Cheryl@174 There are several different brands that sell more or less premade Indian entree's. All are vegetarian, and most are vegan. If you also make some rice they work well as a meal, I just finished on of brown rice and Kitchens' of India's lentils http://www.kitchensofindia.com/US .

(When you add too much barley, it thickens the soup too much. And if you have a whole lot of mushrooms in there as I usually do, it becomes Mushroom Barely Soup - Almost Stew.)

I once, as an experiment, blended soft silken tofu with vegetable broth to produce a vegan "cream" soup base. Good texture, tasted a little beany. Once I added chopped mushrooms, onion, and garlic, sautéed in a bit of olive oil, it became a quite acceptable soup.

Leek and potato soup is different, but extremely good, with coconut milk instead of dairy.

It's even better (but not vegan) with a bit of Thai green curry paste -- one could add as many of the ingredients of green curry paste as were available and allowable.

[some self-identified vegans don't mind the amount of seafood you get in green curry paste, but one would, of course, have to ask]

@Potterfans: One thing Ron brings that Hermione might find interesting/attractive is family and lots of it. Hermione isn't as isolated as Harry, but she's an only child (I believe). And Harry certainly liked being part of the Weasley's.

It's been a very long time since I read the books, and I don't remember how much we know about Ron and Hermione when Harry wasn't around. I don't even remember Ron getting that much screen time in the books. Maybe R&H have a shared interest in unicorn scrimshaw and barbershop quartets, for all I know.

ARGH. "Weasleys". Spotted it the second after I hit post and before it posted.

unicorn scrimshaw

Gathered, not hunted, I hope???

Xopher @202, Oh, but I *like* "Barely Soup" -- if it's thick enough to eat with a fork, I'm not at all unhappy.... <grin> This would be a case where tastes differ, I think.

thomas: "[some self-identified vegans don't mind the amount of seafood you get in green curry paste, but one would, of course, have to ask]"

It seems strange for a vegan, but it makes me glad I decided to go from vegetarian to pescitarian, as I never knew green curry was made with fish sauce (and apparently, shrimp).

In the Bogglingly Inconsistent Right Wing Nutcase department: someone on Fox News seems to think that the right of smokers to buy the stuff trumps the store's right not to sell it.

My Unintentionally Vegan Minestrone, which I make at least every other week:

1-2 onions, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
About half a carrot, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped
1-2 potatoes, peeled and diced
2-3 carrots, peeled and sliced into thin rounds
1 can each kidney, cannellini, & garbanzo beans
1 small (8oz?) can tomato sauce
about 2 quarts water or veggie stock
Bay leaf, oregano, thyme, rosemary
3/4 cup dry ditalini

Saute the chopped veggies in olive oil, with salt. Add the herbs and tomato sauce, and saute a little longer to meld the flavors. Drain and rinse the canned beans, and add them in along with the potato and sliced carrot, and then add the liquid. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, until potatoes and carrots are tender (this is the minimum time, you can leave it simmering as long as you please, just add more liquid if it reduces too much). When ready to serve, cook the ditalini separately, drain them, and add them in. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.

I am sure you could use cooked dried beans, but I have a very poor track record over the last 25 years of cooking those without boiling them dry, so I've given up. Using canned beans means this can be ready in an hour. :)

People keep forgetting that Ron Weasley is very, very good at chess, and is willing to work hard to learn things he doesn't know even when people with loads of natural talent have gone before him, as with Harry and the Quidditch team. I read their relationship as two highly intelligent people, one of whom is more grounded and practical while the other is more apt to question conventional wisdom.

But frankly I didn't want any of them to just up and marry their high school sweethearts, without even an aside about the years it took to get to that point a la Tangled.

Also I wanted Snape to go "Sod the lot of you, my bitterness and I are going to America," and discover that in America wizards have therapists. Really, the British Wizarding World was like one ingrown backwater small town spread over umpteen square miles.

A vegan favorite recipe: Wedding Lentils[1]

2 cups red lentils (masoor dal)
Rinse, cover generously with water, put on to boil.
2 cloves garlic
1 piece ginger about an inch long
Chop and add to the lentils
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 tsp tumeric
Add, cook until lentils are tender.

1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp crushed coriander seeds
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves

Simmer a bit, and taste; add more salt or cayenne if needed. Finish immediately, or refrigerate until ready to eat.

When ready to serve, heat up (microwave is best). Add:
1 can coconut cream (NOT cream of coconut, which is sweetened)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 bunch cilantro, chopped.

Good with rice, or on bread.

1) Named because I made them the first time for our wedding in a mad scramble after realizing that there was nothing but bread and fruit for the vegans.

On inaccuracies: my personal favorite was some years back when Scientific American put out a special issue on geophysics. The cover featured a color drawing of a planet made of gears...meshed so they could not turn. And sometimes I think that might explain some things...

I am amused by the custom logo Google has come up with to mark the opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics. It depicts a set of athletes engaged in Olympic winter sports, against a multi-colored background -- not the colors of the Olympic rings, though, more a... what's the word? Yes: a rainbow.

Also, in the space under the search box there's currently a quotation from the Olympic Charter featuring the phrases "mutual understanding" and "without discrimination of any kind".

>> ... simmer until the barley is done (about half an hour).

This depends a lot on altitude, or maybe on your definition of "done". At 5200 feet, I usually cook barley for an hour and a half.

Was it here that I saw the German Olympic team uniforms described as "Basically, 'Screw you, Putin, you homophobic jerk' in clothing form"?

News of the me: I'll be at Boskone the weekend of 14 Feb.

Other than that, I have etrogim blooming my window, orchids on the kitchen counter, yarn growing on the spinning wheel (commissions can be arranged), and generally a decent slice of life, if a bit busy (I have a photo project in mind, which I've been testbedding on my phone; need to talk to the advocate to arrange for the best way to go back to school, am getting married in May, spending a month in England/Ireland/Canada in August, etc.).

218
Congratulations would appear to be in order!

Terry Karney (218): Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials!

I'll look for you at Boskone.

Nice to hear from you, Terry! That all sounds like good stuff.

Cheryl @ 174: Here's a suggestion in the stuff-hapless-grandmother-could-cook category:

One of our standard household meals when everybody is exhausted but hungry is completely simple: Make whole wheat spaghetti (more flavorful and filling than plain kind), serve with reheated jarred tomato spaghetti sauce (e.g. Classico Tomato-Basil) and some sort of steamed or microwaved veg to go with it, usually broccoli or cauliflower. It's healthy and vegan as long as you don't dump a bunch of cheese on top (though the cheese helps with protein.) Teach your cousin to make that, and she need not starve in the future. It's a fairly cheap meal too, especially as we get the w.w. spaghetti in bulk from Costco.

Rikibeth: That's not entirely unlike my huge vat of minestrone recipe, though I usually do cook dried beans from scratch. (If the beans are really old, though, there's a distinct possibility of the beans still being a little crunchy the next day.)

Regarding curry: I think I specified curry powder, which is usually turmeric, fenugreek, clove, anise, cinnamon, pepper, and sometimes salt in varying amounts. I like Penzey's blends but Spice Island aren't bad. Store brands are often stale and nasty. I don't play with green (thai) curry paste. It pings some super taster bitter-sour for me.

Bread technically doesn't even require commercial yeast. Sourdough being a thing. Many commercial raised breads are or can be vegan, especially the simpler ones like pita, supermarket French/Italian, and (shudder) Wonder Bread. Many quick breads (like muffins in a loaf pan) are not.

One of the Patak's and two of the Tiger Tiger bottled sauces are dairy free (or the other way round -- memory being friable). All are yellow, mild, with a distinct Anglo-Indian curry flavor. They use coconut and arrowroot as their creamy thickness. Those are the ones in the emergency box, because they have a longer shelf life.

We were never vegan, but accommodating. While we personally sometimes practiced Don't Ask Don't Tell vegetarianism (usually with soups because the spoon cost of demanding a complete list of stock ingredients got excessive) I know others don't, especially those who are veg* for ethical rather than health reasons. Thus, always reading recipes and ingredients.

Updatery. Kidney stone smashed to smithereens at Phoenix's Saint Joe's hospital via lithotripsy. I feel quite a bit better, though I am definitely not 100% and still need too many pain meds to function. But I'm upright and eating again. I've lost fifteen pounds, but I can't recommend this particular diet. Still on IV gentamicin for the foreseeable future. This is an evil drug all around, but better than being dead ...

Turns out I had "severe sepsis" when admitted to Payson, which explains why I felt like dying crap at the time. It also occurs to me that Payson Regional might have saved my life -- time from arrival tp heavy doses of an IV antibiotics was probably around half an hour. They changed antibiotics a couple times while I was in the hospital, too, either because the bug wasn't sensitive to it or because, allergic patient is allergic.

In the past, when I've gone to other hospitals, I've had very poor treatment for kidney stones and kidney infections -- sometimes so bad that it was like, "Why bother?"

Anyway, life is looking brighter now.

Oh, and it's supposed to snow tonight. Assuming we don't get snowed in, this is a good thing. We've had dustings of snow twice this week without even enough moisture to make the ground wet -- this is supposed to be 3-5 inches. Perfect. It needs to do this every few days until spring! Yay for moisture from the sky, and double yay for freezing temperatures. (We have thick red clay. I much prefer it frozen to muddy around here. I can put on a jacket much easier than I can clean mud off of everything including the animals.)

Cassy 208: Oh, me too.

Bruce 216: I'll take your word for it. I live at sea level. Hoboken is on the Hudson Estuary (so the Hudson flows "upriver" when the tide comes in).

Well, OK, not at sea level. But most of the altitude of my kitchen is the three flights I walk up to get to it.

Carrie 217: Yes.

Terry 218: You kinda buried the lede there! Congratulations!

HELP ME IDENTIFY A TV SHOW

It ran in the early 70s, on Saturday mornings. A kiddie show, but not a cartoon. Artsy and brainy.

It might not have been a network show. I vaguely recall that it ran on WOR Channel 9 in the NYC area, but I could be wrong about that.

The framing device: A troupe of medieval entertainers visit town. Intro shows them rolling in in wagons as a theme song is sung. I could hum you the song, but don't recall a single lyric.

It was a variety show of sorts. The performers do sketches, sing songs. One regular bit: Two robed philosophers deal in tangled logic.

Any ideas?

@Cygnet: Glad things are looking up. Amazing what difference teh right facility makes.

* * *
Portland & Environs got hit with what for the area was an astonishingly fierce snowstorm. By Midwestern standards it would likely be considered a brief flurry, but it made quite a mess. I managed to break the sturdy push-broom I was using to sweep off my driveway; snapped the brush when I whacked it on the end to shed some of the snow. Oh well.

It's been raining lightly in my corner of LA this evening. Chilly, too, but not so much that I didn't go out for a while this morning.

I can hear a nor'wester blowing in now. It's supposed to dump up to 4 inches of snow on us before swinging to the east and dying down. This after we got clover, dandelions, sorrel, comfrey, and snow-on-the-mountain coming up and the buds breaking on native berry bushes even in the shade. This is the worst warm snap I can remember. Also it was the third warmest January in recorded local history.

Thanks so much for all the recipe help!

After talking to her today, I think what my newly-veg-cousin really needs is information. She did get to the grocery store, where she bought mostly fresh vegetables and some pasta. As far as I can tell, she hasn't had any protein since she got here, and based on our conversation, I think she is not getting anywhere near enough.

I've already said that her Gma is a terrible cook, but I don't think I really conveyed the whole truth: Gma will eat four things.

- white spaghettini (NOT spaghetti) with Prego sauce
- Kraft Dinner (Macaroni & Cheese)
- rice krispies
- steak, which has been covered* in "barbecue" sauce and cooked in the oven on a cookie sheet (served with mashed potatoes, no veg)

I'm leaving out various desserts and junk food.

Her daughter does eat a wide variety of food, but she never actually learned how to cook any of it. She lives on restaurant take-out (or eat-in).

So, gdaughter is kind of starting from zero. I'm happy that she's interested in what she eats, and wants to change it from what she's always had, but she has no experience with just day-to-day cooking, let alone figuring out how to balance nutritional needs.

She's offline at Gma's house, so I'll try and find info online that I can print for her, and I'm happy to cook with her and teach her what I know - I'm not vegetarian, but I have vegetarian friends and I like to feed people - I'm just afraid of infodumping, and of coming off like I'm her instructor, you know?

Thanks again for all the help, and if you have any good sites for the newly veggie/vegan, I'd be grateful for any more!

*by which I mean, no meat is visible through the coating

Xopher: Terry 218: You kinda buried the lede there! Congratulations!

No, I didn't. Since we have limited space the ability to invite is limited. What was important in the message (of a timely nature) is that folks who want to see me in Boston can do so.

I did forget to say that the London/Ireland trip includes LonCon and ShamrocKon.

CZEdwards: Most commercial curry powders also have some chile peppers. I know this because Merav can't have nightshades.

Garam Masala is usually chile free, and has cumin, fenugreek, roast coriander, turmeric, and anise. It may have clove.

Having been forced to learn how to make non-chile curries, the secret is the fenugreek, though curry leaves help.

I have Spice Hunter curry seasoning and garam masala.
The curry seasoning does include chiles (fourth ingredient), but the full list is:
cumin, turmeric, coriander, chile pepper, mustard, cardamom, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, red pepper, cinnamon, black pepper, saffron
You could probably leave out the chile and red pepper without it being too noticeable. (It smells wonderful.)
The garam masala is cumin, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, and cardamom.

Cheryl @229: gdaughter is kind of starting from zero. I'm happy that she's interested in what she eats, and wants to change it from what she's always had

A cookbook I've encountered that might be useful: The Gradual Vegetarian by Lisa Tracy. She also has a website.

Neil W @182

Auckland has two high tides about 3 hours apart, one in each harbour. And there are Portage Rds in 3 different parts of Auckland which tells you just how close together the two harbours are - I think the smallest gap is less than a mile.

So yes, like J Homes, my reaction to a high tide at full moon having to be at midnight was "but it can't be the same everywhere!"

Congratulations Terry!

@234 My only visit to New Zealand, when I arrived in Auckland I had crossed 13 timezones and due to not being able to sleep on the planes had been up 42 hours. About three days later I suddenly felt myself again and knew all the streets within three blocks of where I was staying, but had no actual memory of walking them. I had taken pictures and made notes on the pictures, so was able to recreate most of what I'd done. I'd ridden at least one ferry so may have learnt about the tides and then forgotten it entirely.

Later, and out of the cities, I did have a moment when I stepped out of a pub and looked into the sky and thought "I don't recognise these stars AT ALL. How drunk am I?" before remembering about the Southern Hemisphere.

PJ Evans @ 232... Spice Hunter

Starring Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald.

Open threadiness addressed to Jim MacDonald: In the interests of making sure any EMS responders that I have to deal with have ready access to my relevant medical information, I have been looking into some means of providing that information digital, options I have come up with so far are: Smartphone app (Android in my case), a high tech version of a medic alert bracelet, and rolling my own with a teeny tiny USB flash drive (form factor, not capacity) that fits in a silicone wristband (I need a good way to secure the wristband).

I suspect that the USB medic alert bracelet is overkill, and would rather not roll my own if I can avoid it. That leave Android apps, of which there are quite a few. I've been trying to figure out just what information I really need to store. The obvious things are emergency contact information, relevant medical conditions, drug allergies and current meds. Was there anything else I should keep in such an app? Can you recommend any specific apps?

One app I found had a pretty nifty idea; put an emergency contact and the most critical medical information on the phone's lock screen with an ID photo so the EMS responders can get the info even if you're unconscious. Sadly, I found the implementation lacking.

I am taking a big step, and changing ISP.

The switchover should be late next week, and fairly smooth. Since I possess my own domain name, which points to one of the big email services, There's nothing that needs changing. A few odd pictures and files might vanish from web-space, but there's nothing recent.

My phone provider changes as part of the deal, but the number doesn't change. It's one of those conveniences arising from the history of the British telephone network and the development of its regulation.

It is remarkable how suddenly you get passed to senior managers and offered a plethora of engineers as soon as you say you want the code number needed to facilitate the move. The normal help to customers is nothing like as enthusiastic.

One big change in the latter half of 2013 was the rise of streaming video services. I reached the conclusion that my old ISP was not going to get enough backhaul capacity to cope with the increased demand. There's a radio station I sometimes listen to which has a 48kbps stream, and even that is unreliable in the evenings.

They have not even said anything about a future deployment of IPv6.

Will the new ISP be better? It should be, and I have nothing to lose.

While we're recipes-ing, I have a vegan split-pea soup that got people at an SCA feast come up and be belligerent at me. It was billed as both the vegan option and the low-spice non-adventurous-food option (out of a buffet of soups/stews that included Chicken and Quinces and a mongolian spiced goat thing, among others). They insisted it had ham hock in it, they could TASTE it, how DARE I make vegans eat HAM HOCK!

I assured them that a pig had been no closer to it than being adjacent in the freezer while it was stored, but they didn't believe me. :->

The last step is made much easier by the application of a stick blender, if you have such a thing. It is adapted heavily from a recipe called 'Hernerakkaa' from the Sundays at Moosewood cookbook. Freezes/reheats beautifully. I made over 15 gallons of it in large batches and can testify that it's fairly simple and automatable.

Hearty Vegan Split Pea Soup
serves ~6.

- 2 cups dried split peas (yellow, green, or a mixture)
- 8 cups water
- 2 medium potatoes
- 2 large carrots
- 2-3 stalks of celery
- 1 large onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 2-3 teaspoon dry mustard
- 1 generous pinch allspice
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 1 teaspoon sage
- 1 teaspoon thyme
- salt, pepper to taste

Rinse peas in large pot; pour off water. Bring the measured amount of water and rinsed peas to a rolling boil. Lower heat to a simmer; add spices and vegetables (all veggies should be chopped into pieces no larger than 3/4" cubes). Simmer 1.5 hours or until peas very soft. Puree to a smooth texture.

Split pea soup always tastes like it's got pork in it to me, even when it's only been made with peas, water, and onion. Beats me.

Xopher @202: Barely Soup

:-), but I do that a lot.

Cheryl #229: If she's starting from zero, I'd hand her the original -- Lappe's Diet For a Small Planet.

Elliott Mason #240: I wouldn't puree, its nice to have some texture....

Terry #218: Congratulations!

Dave 242: Me too!

Lappe is fine as a cookbook, but the argument she presents doesn't hold up. It is, however, the argument that made me try being vegetarian "for a week" in 1978.

Xopher Halftongue #244: Which argument are you thinking of? Her big thing is the resource usage for meat, and that's still an issue.

Because AKICIML, in re Rainbow Loom -- does anyone know where I can go to get INSTRUCTIONS on the patterns, and not 'tutorial videos'? I really hate sitting through step-by-step videos, I'd much rather have text with good pictures.

True, Dave, but it's not like we can take the grain fed to cattle and ship it to the hungry in the third world. It's much more complex than that.

Cheryl #229: Rather than Diet for a Small Planet, I'd recommend Laurel's Kitchen. It has a good nutrition section and gives good advice on structuring meals when there's no meat involved. I also like its recipes better than Lappe's. For laying out a basic general approach to vegetarian cookery, I think Laurel's Kitchen can't be beat. The first edition (1970s) is better than the second edition (1980s), since the latter came out during the low-fat craze.

That's for basic cooking. When I'm feeling festive, I pull out Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant.

Xopher Halftongue #247: True, Dave, but it's not like we can take the grain fed to cattle and ship it to the hungry in the third world.

Actually we could, but getting it past the abusive governments, warlords, and profiteers, would take way more than food choices. :-~

In any case, we could certainly take the water used for cattle and use it elsewhere. The critical resources shift, but the theme remains.

That's part of what makes it complicated.

Too much of the world is cattle range, and too little is forest, and the percentage is getting worse all the time. If everyone were vegetarian, it would help a lot on global warming, I bet: trees sequester carbon, and cows fart methane.

So, let's kill all the meat cattle (hey, I gotta have my milk butter cream cheese stuff) by shooting acorns into their heads! Problem solved.*

On a more serious note, this is the demonstration I was at yesterday. I think I was standing just to the right of the photographer when that first pic was taken.

*No, I'm not serious, either that this would be a good idea or that it would solve the problem.

One issue with Lappe (whose cookbook I learned a decent lot) in this case is that Diet for a Small Planet relies heavily on eggs and dairy products for protein.

I tend to make vegan food that comes from cultures where it's common; resources I like:

Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian (weighted toward Indian, a really helpful guide to grains and legumes)
The still-up but not been updated in years Tigers and Strawberries (All cuisines, but more for cooks with a fair amount of experience and well-stocked pantries.)
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo The Chinese Kitchen

Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is good too--more varied and more beginner-friendly than the books above.

Stefan #225: Megan Arnott might be able to help you out. She gave this paper, Saturday Morning Medieval at Kalamazoo a couple years ago. The paper is about cartoons, but she may know or be intrigued by the show you're thinking of.

If the US were to go 100% vegetarian, I see zero reason to think this would actually decrease hunger in the world at all. There are sensible moral arguments for vegetarianism (I don't buy them, but they exist), but this isn't one of them.

As I recall from Oceanography and marine biology courses, the tide is (more or less) A six hour cycle, with the higher of the two high tides being about an hour behind the moon's position. This isn't true for places like the Gulf Coast of the US which have a twelve hour tidal wave (so there is one high tide a day), and the geographic features of the landmass can affect that a lot (so that some places have a sudden influx, and then a stasis, and a sudden outflow, as well as things like tidal bores (see the Severn River).

The way the Golden Gate affects water flow means there is a fair bit of difference in the tidal shift as you go south/north in the bay. The patterns for a given piece of beach are predictable (which was useful to me in planning photography sessions: I could look at the moon and get a pretty good idea where the tide was; though if had been a few months since the last one I might be correct about being near the turning of the tide, but not which way it was running).

In, tides have rules, but they are far from simple, which means one can (generally) put them where one needs them for a story; so long as there isn't a need to keep track of them for the sake of continuity, one is going to be just fine.

Apparently the "Ron and Hermione" interview has been skewed and oversimplified considerably . Who could have foreseen such a thing?

#249 ::: Dave Harmon

I think it would be much harder to ship significant amount of water than to ship grain. Am I missing something?

Neil W @236 When I moved to the UK from NZ (temporarily, for my "Overseas Experience") I was sitting in my cousin's yard in the late afternoon. The sun was annoying me, but I thought "the sun will move, and the shadow of that tree will shade me." Five minutes later, I realised the sun was moving the "wrong" way!

I just read Sandy B.'s mention of the "Ron and Hermione" interview followed immediately by Nancy Lebovitz's "I think it would be much harder to ship significant amount of water than to ship grain" and was momentarily very confused when I misread a verb (twice) in the second.

#258 -- "shipping grain", so that's how they came up with the idea for Double Chex!

Water/grain OTP!

Q. Pheevr@260: Water/grain OTP!

Spouse looking over shoulder says, "Please! It's water/grain/yeast OT3!"

Continuing re Cheryl @ 174, 229:

The best vegan food comes from sources where you don't need to substitute anything for dairy, because there wasn't any dairy in the original recipe. Generally if there's milk or cream in a recipe, as in a cream soup, rather than substitute some kind of nut-milk or soy milk, I'd first look at whether it could be simply made without it using water or vegetable stock instead and would still be good. Frequently the answer is yes. The more you are substituting for milk, cream, butter, or cheese, and the more integral they are to the recipe, the more "off" the results will be.

General good sources of vegetarian and/or vegan recipes:

Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking (which I think is the one Sam Chevre was referring to) is awesome. Because it contains many recipes from parts of the world where dairy and eggs are not in heavy use, it contains a lot of "automatically vegan" recipes. (This cookbook is also notable as one of the few things which my ex-wife and I are in full agreement about.)

All the Moosewood cookbooks; I think I end up actually using the first Moosewood and Enchanted Broccoli Forest the most. However, the Moosewood cookbooks come out of the same US vegetarian wave of the '70s as The Vegetarian Epicure so there's a tendency to the latter's "Not delicious enough? Add more butter and cream!" recipe style. They have enough vegan-compatible recipes to be useful, though, and for a beginning cook they're very encouraging as they help promote a free-wheeling approach to cooking: don't have this ingredient? try throwing in any of these instead!

The N.Y. Times "Wellness" section has had a surprisingly high proportion of delicious vegetarian and vegan recipes in recent years.

I love The Vegetarian Epicure aka Veg Ep and originally learned a lot of my cooking from it, but there aren't a lot of recipes in it which I could feed a vegan or a very health-conscious vegetarian.

Once more I find myself digging in the word mines and struggling with students who think of the English language as an arcane code of some kind. Either that, or they write their essays at the very last minute.

Thus these declarations:

If women are formally educated, they will be able to attribute more to society, stimulating growth.

She takes a more aggressive approach and directly challenges men to make a change in the way they oppress women.

The first is a simple confusion, the second, on the other hand, had me groaning.

dotless ı @261: And quite right, too. I was being unthinkingly monogamonormative. Mea culpa.

Small update on my change of ISP: it takes effect sometime on Saturday 15th Feb (UK time)

I have seen arguments about how wonderful it would be if everyone was vegetarian or vegan before. Let's take my island as an example.

Our economy depends heavily on fishing, including some of the best salmon fisheries in the world. The fisheries are maintained by catch limits and by sheltering young salmon in hatcheries (this can be as simple as a wire cage in an existing lake) in order to increase the numbers that go down to the sea to develop. However, wild salmon must have clear water running over gravel beds in order to reproduce. This leads to strict laws about what can and can't be done within X yards of a salmon stream.

Our island is very rugged and the climate is extreme. Even in these days of global warming, large areas of the island are labeled either "extremely marginal for most crops" or "better have a greenhouse" on maps made by Cooperative Extension. Some of this land can be used by milk animals, but we have to deal with bears that are so big and so plentiful that the most successful local rancher switched to raising bison for meat instead; bison can protect themselves from local bears, cattle can't. So, in order to go vegetarian, we would have to either remove local pavement and housing in order to keep cattle right in the middle of town, the way we used to, or else shoot a lot of bears. Eggs? Chickens need a lot of grain in our long winters, so we would either have to import it on fuel-burning barges or else use arable land.

Local arable land is either very steep, so you must carefully terrace it and cultivate by hand, or else down in the same valleys as the salmon streams. A vegetarian diet would have us all working on the steep slopes by hand along with doing our money jobs, or else a large percentage of us would have to quit our money jobs and become stoop-labor farmers, struggling to produce a surplus with either hand tools or petroleum-powered one-person cultivators and the like. Veganism would require so much land near salmon streams to be turned over to cultivation that the fisheries would be destroyed over much, possibly all, of the island.

On top of that, we have fewer than half a dozen leguminous crops that will grow here, only one oilseed, and a few grain crops that are all marginal. That's an awfully small basket for our metaphorical eggs.

Obvious solution: eat bears. :-)

Another snowstorm day in Portland!

Actually just a gentle, continuous accumulation, but highly problematical. Fortunately I have a short, easily scraped driveway and walks.

I left work early so I could get home before the roads became insane. I used the extra time to finish off the ricotta in the fridge via another big batch of gnocchi:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/12373063503/

Tonight I boil, brown, and sauce them.

Lore Sjoberg is amused that Disney's last couple of animated features had one-word verb titles.

He wonders if the studio will re-title its classics, and has created matching posters:

http://imgur.com/a/hvLnM

Nancy Lebovitz #256: I was certainly not proposing sending the water away! Unlike Lappe's grain, clean water is rarely surplus these days, and can (should) be conserved or used locally.

Sort of apropos that Coke ad, I'm finding "The Great Language Game" a lot of fun. Listen & see if you can guess which language is being spoken. It's multiple choice & you get three lives. My three goes so far gave scores of 450, 550 & 600. I'm better at picking Asian languages than European ones.

HLN: Back at work after a holiday in Vietnam, Cambodia & Bangkok. That saying that travel broadens the mind & makes you appreciate home all the more? It's true.

Stefan Jones #269: Well, they certainly wouldn't use those titles! I gather Lore Sjoberg is a Rude Boy (regardless of actual gender).

Soon Lee @ #271, that is cool! Thanks for the link.

Terry #218: Congratulations!

Dave Harmon @ 272: I gather Lore Sjoberg is a Rude Boy (regardless of actual gender).
In my early days reading the internet, one of my favorite websites was called The Brunching Shuttlecocks. Sjöberg was one of its creators. He's still being funny on the internet.

The Lore Sjoberg project I miss most is Alt Text.

I know I saw somebody in recent months (?) in some thread on Making Light saying they had wanted to buy a cheap pair of glasses, and how their optometrist or opthalmologist was refusing to give them a copy of their prescription. I thought that was wrong, but didn't have the info to back it up at the time.

While shopping for cheap glasses myself just now, I stumbled across a reference to the FTC's Eyeglass Prescription Release Rule; the link was broken, but I tracked it down to here as a starting point: 2004 FTC overview of its enforcement of the contact lens and eyeglass Prescription Release Rule, which in turn led me here: Prescriptions for Eye Glasses and Contact Lenses

Briefly, it's been legally required of all optometrists and opthalmologists since 1978 to turn over your prescription on request, and they should damn well know about it and comply politely. (If you take advantage of it, make sure they write your inter-pupillary distance on the form, as it's not always included, and you need it to order glasses.)

If anybody remembers who was looking, or on what thread, please feel free to share this with them.

Clifton #277:
Was it Lila here?

Hmmph. "Comatose" isn't a verb. "Sedated" or "Tranqed" seem rather more suitable. Gotta wonder what was on that spindle she pricked herself with.

#30 xeger re needle felting of cat fur.

My cats independently invented felting. Twice.

First there were the longhairs Pandora and Cheesecake, who went through a place I did not get mended quickly enough, where the screen had come loose on one edge of the balcony door. And their fur pulled off on the screen, and with their repeated passages through, they felted it into and through the edge of the screen.

Now there is Rex, who still thinks he is a kitten, my kitten, and kneads his claws into my neck. So in the summer I have to know where my towel is. But in the winter, I wear a knitted headband with alpacas on it, that's too small, around my neck as protection. And he is needle-felting it.

#240, #241:

There was a variety of potato crisps used to be sold around here that always registered to me as tasting like roast chicken, despite having no obviously chicken-related ingredients. If memory serves, the key flavour note was rosemary.

Clifton @ 277, if you're thinking of me, the issue wasn't that he woudn't give me a copy of my prescription; it was that he refused to write me a prescription for single-vision lenses for the distance I'd need to work on the computer. He was perfectly happy to give me a copy of the prescription for the bifocals I have to take off to use the computer. (Though the prescription, still hanging unused on my bulletin board, is missing some of the information I'd need to order my own lenses online; a moot point, since my current bifocals are not very different from what I'd be getting, and I don't feel like spending that much money on something that won't solve my problem.)

Elliott Mason @ 240: I got to be friendly with the owner/chef of a local restaurant which served halal food. One day I asked him how he got his beans so remarkably tasty without using pork to season it. "It's all in the spices," he told me.

He was an interesting cat to talk with. It's a pity his restaurant didn't take hold.

Paul A @281 When I lived in Leeds, they used to sell hedgehog-flavoured crisps. I think there was a court case where it emerged that they didn't contain any actual hedgehogs.

Further research reveals the existence of a fine legal distinction (in UK law) between 'hedgehog flavoured crisps', which are required to contain actual hedgehogs, and 'hedgehog flavour crisps', which need not.

praisegod@285: Delightful!

It's a well-known veggie fakemeat principle that if you want something to taste like sausage, you put sage* and fennel in it. I love that combination, but haven't eaten sausage in decades. The Gimme Lean brand of soysage has a good texture when cooked, but not quite enough sage/fennel for my taste, so I add some when using it.

*I'm very fond of the folk etymology for 'sausage' that claims it comes from 'sau' (sow) plus 'sage', but it isn't true. It's from a Latin word that means "salted." It strikes me as entirely possible that the practice of adding sage to the meat in the preparation process may come from this folk etymology, but I have no evidence for that.

Lila: My misunderstanding, then.

I think for computer glasses, the prescription itself is the same - the Rx just specifies the correction your eyes need for normal vision at a standard distance. To bring the focus closer for reading or computer, the lens maker would just add an adjustment by X diopters. (That's why there is only one prescription needed, even for bifocals, trifocals, or progressives.) If you find an optician or lens maker which offers computer glasses, they should be able to do it with the Rx you've got, plus a measurement of your pupil distance (PD).

See if one of the ultra-cheap online glasses shops, like Goggles4u.com, offers computer glasses - if so, you should be able to get a pair of single-focus lenses with cheap frames for as little as $7-10. If those work well, you can order another pair with nicer frames and still pay vastly less for both than one pair would have cost you from your regular optician.

My optician convinced me a couple years ago to shell out for progressive computer glasses - arms length focus in the top/middle, reading distance in the lower section - and I love them, though those lenses will be more expensive even online.

HLN: Local man gradually convinces recalcitrant elderly cat to become a lap cat. "I've always held out for independence", purred the local cat, "but once I realized I could get a half hour of continuous petting in the morning while he was drinking coffee, using the sunlight lamp and browsing on the computer, I changed my mind. It also turns out laps are comfortably warm!"

Also, congratulations to Terry Karney @218

Fragano Ledgister: She takes a more aggressive approach and directly challenges men to make a change in the way they oppress women.

Lie to me: tell me this was an essay on Ann Coulter.

Clifton @262, Madhur Jaffrey's "World of the East Vegetarian Cooking" and "World Vegetarian" are not the same book (I have them both); the former is older and more limited in scope than the latter, which is truly global. I prefer "World Vegetarian" but both are good. Neither is vegan; both contain numerous "incidentally vegan" recipes, by which I mean recipes that started out vegan rather than becoming that way through substitution or omission of animal-based ingredients. Like many here I find those much nicer than the "soy cheese, soy protein crumbles, fake eggs" parade of many veganized recipes.

Rejected Coke-ad Languages: Klingon, Dothraki, and more.

Lila @282: he refused to write me a prescription for single-vision lenses for the distance I'd need to work on the computer.

Did he condescend to tell you why?

praisegod barebones @285: 'hedgehog flavoured crisps'

An American friend of a friend reported the disconcerting experience of asking for "weasel flavoured crisps" as a jest, and having the clerk actually go looking for them.

And I've neglected to congratulate Terry Karney!

lorax @ 292: Oh hey, awesome! Thanks for the correction and the new cookbook to check out!

Jacque: nope. Just said he couldn't do it. I lacked the spoons to pursue it further.

Terry, congratulations!

I'd like to co-sign the recommendations for the original Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. With the first Moosewood, do hunt around for an earlier edition, not the revised one that came out in the late 1980s or early 1990s, because, like the other one mentioned above, the revision was designed to lower the fat content of the recipes, to the detriment of flavor.

I've been feeding a vegetarian kid since 2004, and maintaining a vegetarian kitchen since 2006. While we're not vegan, and while I favor the "use whole foods instead of substitute foods" approach as a rule, I can cheerfully recommend Morningstar Farms Vegan Grillers veggie burgers as an easy and palatable protein source for the newly veg*. I deal with a couple of very picky eaters, and the Vegan Grillers protein-pucks pass their palates. I suggest giving them a quick spritz of cooking spray before putting them in the oven, because they do tend to be dry.

One thing I endorse doing with a new veg* is sitting down and sorting out how many things they consider normal Things To Eat are already veg*. Already-vegan things include the aforementioned hummus, PBJ sandwiches, bean burritos hold the cheese, oatmeal... I'm leaving out pasta with vegetable sauces because the young woman's already got that.

I'm about to go downstairs and make Unintentionally Vegan Stir-Fry. I have a go-to garlic sauce recipe, but many packaged sauces will be fine (just scan the label for hidden fish), and I use the pre-cubed Nasoya extra-firm tofu because I am LAZY, and because it's the firmest one out there, even more so than the extra-firm block, and using a whole package at once means I don't have to keep track of Changing The Tofu Water. I put in broccoli, baby corn, and water chestnuts, but stir fry is one of those things where you can use anything that pleases you.

Bruce E. Durocher II #291: Fortunately for my sanity, but unfortunately for the student, no it wasn't. I'm not yet teaching a course on inane political thought (in which case Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, Phyllis Schlafly and James Taranto might well be among the set texts).

I'm not a vegetarian; I eat chicken and eggs (free range only) occasionally and fish occasionally, and bacon once or twice a month. I drink my coffee with half and half. But I mostly eat lots of vegetables with legumes or rice/bean noodles or brown rice, and I'm always looking for tasty, quick, simple vegetable dishes. So thanks for the recommendation for the Moosewood Collective Vegetarian Cookbook; I've already found a good breakfast recipe.

praisegod barebones #284

From Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

"If you say 'our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only', then it's got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable. If you just say it's made 'from pears', without the 'only', the betting is that it's probably made chiefly of pears; but if you say made 'with pears' you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you -- such are the niceties of our English tongue"

Miss Sayers worked in an advertising office, so she knew whereof she wrote.

I mentioned this a couple of open threads back, but sweet Spanish smoked paprika (pimentón de La Vera) is another of those spices that can bring up meat associations, adding both richness and smokiness. It gets a lot of use around here. (We're not trying to replace meat; we just really like it.)

Thanks so much for all the vegetarian cooking suggestions, everyone! I'm going to try and spend some time cooking with her tomorrow, so we'll see what she wants to make first.

Apropos of feeding your vegetarian friend, I stumbled across this article in my web searches:
Chicken Stock Doesn’t Count as Meat.

I'm just... stunned. Just at the utterly breathtaking arrogance of this pillock.

I guess the best I can hope for is that all his veggie friends know him for what he is now, and have stayed far away.

302
Some chicken stock has very little actual chicken in it - it's another case of reading ingredients.

@303 P J Evans

Some chicken stock has very little actual chicken in it - it's another case of reading ingredients.

I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about.

My homemade chicken stock is made from chicken. I know this, because I made it from chicken bones and leftover chicken bits.

My store-bought chicken stock has, as its first two ingredients, water and concentrated chicken stock (then, spices and things).

How can you have chicken stock without chicken?

And even if it was "very little chicken", it would still not be right to serve it to vegetarians/vegans.

Cheryl: Not quite as reprehensible as ignoring someone's food alergy.

Cheryl #302/304:

That's asshole behaviour. I would never intentionally feed someone food that's on their no-list. A good alternative I use is Massel, vegan stocks that do a good job of tasting like chicken or beef stock.

Cheryl, I agree with you on that - if someone doesn't eat meat of fish or whatever, you don't use something that includes that. (Products that aren't what they appear: syrup that's all corn syrup with flavors (natural and artificial) about the fifth ingredient down. I have "chicken" bouillon where chicken is the fourth item on the list, after salt and sugar - there's very little chicken in it.)

I once took a double batch of brownies to work. One half had diced green chilies in it, and each of those had a toothpick stuck in it: spiked brownies.

The Language Game is fun, but it's kicking me hard when I get sets like, "Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Dutch".

In that one I have to hope for Dutch, because I can parse the other slavic languages well enough to know they aren't Russian or Ukranian, but not well enough to distinguish them from each other.

What a fucking scumbag. I hope that all his friends realize he has no respect for their personal autonomy at all.

He won't die from eating small amounts of shit and urine. So when I put both in the food I serve to him, he shouldn't complain. Asshole.

As far as computer glasses go, IIR the directions from zennioptical.com correctly, your progressive/bifocal prescription will include a sphere measurement which is how myopic you are, and an "add" figure which is the correction for reading. To figure out the prescription for your single vision computer glasses, divide the "add" figure by 2 and add the result to your sphere measurement.

This faq page might help.

Interesting. Ma in Little House sounds like Ayn Rand's mother, who made her give away her toys, thus convincing her that altruism is the root of all evil. Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, whose contribution to Little House was somewhere between editorial assistance and writing the whole thing, was one of the leading libertarian thinkers of the 1930s.

Arthur Hlavaty @311: That is fascinating. I wonder if anyone has done a study on under what circumstances people's parents directly affect their belief systems?

I've been reading George Lakoff's book Moral Politics, which is summarized nicely in the Red Family, Blue Family link on the most recent DF thread. It makes me wonder where and how those concepts of the family are passed on or acquired.

Also argh, that broth-using meat-centric jerk. Not only does he believe that a vegetarian entree isn't "real" (which is when I stopped reading), he doesn't see vegetable stock as a challenge to his apparently amazing chef skills, which would be a, you know, healthy-for-his-friends way to deal with that.

Terry Karney@308

Although they perhaps shouldn't have included Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as separate languages anyway. My understanding is that linguists would consider them as different "standard" variants of the same language.

It's sort of like if they had included both Quebecois and Parisian French in the game.

Just to clarify, the reason I mentioned Serbian in my #313 is because I noticed it in the list of languages.

(I also notice that the game includes both Hindi and Urdu as separate languages.)

One thing you'll notice if you get way, way down into what's allowable in foods are things like the maximum allowable amount of rat feces in cereal. After a certain point of dilution, worrying about meat in food is homeopathy (homeopathetic?)

@John A Arkansawyer, 315: I don't think anyone else is talking about parts-per-billion of meat here.

Sandy B. @ 316: No, we're not. And I do think someone who intentionally doses a veg* with non-veg* food is doing something wrong. (If nothing else, meat can give non-meat eaters the runs.) But where do you draw the line?

I separate this into two cases: People who don't eat meat because they have ethical qualms against mistreating animals get my utmost cooperation, as do those whose doctors have told them they have to stop.

People who don't eat meat because they've got ethical problems with diverting resources from more efficient food production or because they think it's healthier for them? I wouldn't dose them, either, but some of them could be a little less picky as guests.

I'm not sure that the reasons someone goes veggie are any of my business. I mean, sometimes they'll tell me, either as a discussion (interesting) or a lecture (tiresome). But people make all kinds of dietary choices, and in general, I'm as interested in policing those as I am in policing their relationship or sartorial ones.

If I'm struggling to find a recipe to suit their needs, yes, it's more work to be their host. But I'm not sure drilling down into the reasons that they're not fitting into my recipe books is a productive or fair way to deal with that.

Also, and apropos of nothing that I have encountered on Making Light, if I ever hear that anyone has used any conversation that I have hosted, started, or moderated as a reason to twittermob, emailbomb, or otherwise repeatedly hound and distress another person, I will be thoroughly upset. And pissed off. And disappointed. In iterating layers all the way down, past where the turtles run out.

Just in case anyone was ever, in the future, wondering if they should.

I'm not a vegetarian, but two of my kids are, so I have some experience cooking for vegetarians. (Also the one kid who's not vegetarian is soy intolerant, which made things interesting when they were all living at home.)

I wouldn't have a problem with a prospective host saying "we're having meat/pork/raw fish/whatever, I hope that's not a problem for you; if it is maybe we could meet for lunch somewhere at another time." But I would have a HELL of a problem with someone trying to stealth me into eating something I had decided not to eat, for whatever reason. Deciding that your guests aren't competent to choose for themselves what they will consume is not the act of a friend.

#315: Compare the acceptability of these two scenarios:

1. Rats live in grain silos, despite the best efforts to eradicate them. Especially since rat poisons tend to be poisonous to humans as well. If rat feces is noticed in the storage or processing of grain, that grain is removed and disposed of, but tradeoffs of cost and time prevent detailed inspection and analysis of more than just a test sample at any given time. So it is inevitable, but regrettable, that some rat feces will make its way past the sifters and cleaners, and all the way into the final product.

2. Bob knows rats live in his grain-shed. He also knows that the heat and processing of cooking will kill any pathogens in rat feces, so he doesn't care, and doesn't bother to make sure his grain is clean. His customers assume that the occasional black speck in his bread is some sort of unusual seed, and never ask. It's harmless, so why tell them otherwise?

As a vegetarian who eats out, I know there is ample room for accidental exposure to "homeopathic" levels of meat. I know grills get reused without decontamination, that oils and other aerosols get everywhere in a kitchen, etc. And I ignore that, because it's out of sight and not intentional (although I won't eat Japanese hibachi anymore because it's hard to ignore when making the vegetables on the same grill as the meat is part of the show).

But the author of that post is taking more of the latter approach. He knows chicken is unacceptable to his guests, but he is deliberately using it without telling them. He sees no harm, and besides, doing otherwise would inconvenience him.

There are well-meaning, but clueless, cooks out there. I have, under the direction of the cook, carelessly put the mushrooms for my vegetarian quiche into a pan of bacon grease. When I complained, the cook told me "But you always cook mushrooms in bacon fat" (I don't). I have been to a thanksgiving dinner where the hosts thoughtfully changed their stuffing recipe to be vegetarian for me, then thoughtlessly cooked it in the bird. These people were trying, but weren't thinking.

This guy is thinking, and is not respecting his guests. He is making deliberate choices, knowing that if those choices were known it would be objectionable. This goes beyond carelessness, beyond ignorance, and into malice.

Re "trying, but not thinking" about vegetarian cooking: I once picked up an awesome-looking Indian vegetarian cookbook from Reader's Digest Books. Profuse illustrations of process and product, clear descriptions, tons of cooking tips--exactly what I needed to learn the basics of another cuisine.

Except that every and I do mean EVERY main-dish recipe in the book called for chicken broth! What, Swanson's doesn't sell vegetable broth in the same blue and white cans? I explained the problem to the librarian and AFAIK it's off the shelf, but sheesh!

As for the jerk quoted at no. 302 . . . oh, I can't think of anything fit for a Sunday.

I've probably told this story before.

When I was in university, I lived in a co-op with about 60 women. We were supposed to have one "main" dish and one vegetarian dish every night, but our cooks really did not get vegetarian cooking. One week the vegetarian options included broccoli and cheese twice and cauliflower and cheese once. Our vegetarians were, effectively, denied the benefit of having dinners cooked for them.

So a friend and I (neither of us vegetarian) decided we'd bid for cooking one night, and make it vegetarian night with a vegan side option.

Oh. My. God. The complaints. The anger. The hectoring at the house meeting where we announced this. It was...well, it was like talking about cycling on an unmoderated news site. But we got voted in, and we did it. Every week we'd pick another theme: hearty soups, Chinese food, Indian food, etc.

The vegetarians hoarded our leftovers. And, in the end, after we served consistently tasty food, the house came round. The cooks for the rest of the week borrowed our recipies and generally upped their game.

And my friend went veggie, which didn't surprise me in the least.

abi @ 318: It's not something I inquire about, either, but that that doesn't keep me knowing, or from being told.

(I remembered reading that piece a while back. It's an interesting argument which doesn't convince me. I wonder if it actually changed any minds? I'd be really interested in knowing the answer, if it were possible to know.)

I make a good-faith effort to respect dietary preferences. Some folks make that easy; other times, I wonder if I'm being dealt with in the same good faith in which I'm trying to deal with them. I still try, but I do wonder.

But there's a limit to how far I'll go. I wonder where it is?

abi @ 323... it was like talking about cycling on an unmoderated news site

Like the folks arguing about whether to follow the sandal of Brian or his gourd?

@ food subthread:

One of my friends is allergic to dairy in nearly-homeopathic* quantities. Whenever he eats out, he always always calls ahead to make sure they can accommodate his allergy. Except for vegan places, or dedicatedly kosher places, or places that otherwise are scrupulously precise about avoiding cross-contamination. I think there are maybe ten non-food-professional people in the world whom he'll allow to cook for him. Not that the level of care his food requires needs, morally or practically, to be applied to every meal preparation, but I would argue that perhaps one should aim for contamination to fall below the *detectable* level [which happens to be very low in his case]?

abi @323, that sounds awesome. Congrats to you and your friend on changing that food culture so effectively. :)

*for understandable reasons, he doesn't particularly want to look for the lower limit. The only blessing is that it isn't (yet?) an anaphylactic reaction

Cheryl #304: I read the piece in Slate and found it incredibly annoying. Slate has published pieces I've found challenging, but that one was from the position of 'I'm a jerk and everyone who doesn't agree with me had better adopt my world-view'.

This is a
fascinating piece in The Atlantic. I note that half the comments, including mine, when I read it focused on the fact that the writer called Catalan a 'dialect'.

John 317: I'm a vegetarian, but not in any of your categories. In fact I have TWO reasons for being a vegetarian and neither of them is any of the ones you cite. Do I have to explain my reasons in detail before you decide how flexible I'm required to be as your guest?

abi 318: But I'm not sure drilling down into the reasons that they're not fitting into my recipe books is a productive or fair way to deal with that.

Thank you.

Buddha 321: Eloquently put. I agree. Thank you.

abi 323: Excellent! No, I don't think I have heard that story before.

Re vegan vs non-vegan, and trace amounts of this and that in food.

I heard/read, within the last year, and don't remember where, that there are some vegetarian diets which provide adequate protein in India, and not in the US. Because, presumably IIRC, from what whoever-said-it was thinking, bugs in the grain, etc.

But there could also be significant differences in nutrient content of heirloom varieties of grain in India vs agribusiness/ chemical fertilizer/ GMO crops in US.

Bean salad
1 can each cut green beans, cut yellow (wax) beans, and red kidney beans, all drained and rinsed

optional additions:
baby corn, sliced mushrooms, sliced bamboo shoots, sliced water chestnuts, sliced black olives, etc

Assemble and add salad dressing.

Xopher @ 329: Two answers. First, since I don't know your reasons, I'd assume they were good ones until proven otherwise. Second, I don't think you'd be a jerk about it. I've known folks who were.

My personal definition of grace has to do with not being a jerk. One of my best friends went to Nicaragua during the war to fix small engines for farmers. (He said. I wonder.) He's been a vegetarian longer than I've known him. The country was at war and rations were thin, so his skipping meat apparently wasn't noted by the people he worked with, which he realized at the goodbye dinner they threw him, when they served him a nice, thick, juicy steak.

He looked at the steak. Then he looked at all the people he'd gotten to know and love there, and thought about what it must have cost them to get him this steak. Then he ate it.

"It was the best steak I've ever had," he told me.

That's the only meat he's eaten (knowingly--it's hard to always know) in over forty years.

He's got a very sound constitution, plus he was working for the Good Guys, so one of those reasons is probably why it didn't make him sick as a dog. He's also incredibly gracious in ways that I wish I were.

Re. the Laura Ingalls Wilder particle, the thing that struck me, between that one and one that was linked to in the comments to it, was how the family situation was so much part of how the parents viewed the world, and the restrictions placed upon the parents by themselves and by society. Which was then related to how they acted with other people and the government, even if it wasn't necessarily in their best interests.
So I saw similarities with what many people today seem to be saying, about getting the government out of their life, wanting freedom etc, but either they are benefiting from the social services, or are happy to let other people die off. The mindset of the Wilder's is alive and well today.
Hmm, I think the writers did a good job of explicating things, even if I can't convey what I think/ feel about it very well.

Kudos to the gnomes: four infestations cleared before I could report the last!

Re tides, full moons and time of day: (#134,155,182,234,254)

As people have said, different all around the world. Some places 2 high tides a day, equal* , others one. And tides going up a bay are significantly later than on the open coast. Also much more rise/drop, as the water piles up. ie. Puget Sound. Depends on the bottom contour.

On the US Pacific coast, 2 a day, sometimes not much different, but at new moon and full moon there are feet of difference between higher high and lower high.

I was a marine biology student, going down to the Oregon coast for low tides year-round, twice a month at new moon and full moon. Those were the 2 times of the month with the highest highs and the lowest lows.

In the winter, the lower low was at night, say 10:00pm. In the spring and summer, lower low is in early morning, just at dawn. Of course, it changes by (59 minutes? IIRC) every day, but at new moon and full moon that's when it was. It is fun to look at a graphical tide table which shows the waves.

*(New Zealand sounds fascinating, I had no idea.)

Cheryl @ 304

Telma makes chicken stock cubes that are kosher parve (no meat). I've never seen anyone call them on the difference; we're usually to appreciative of the added flexibility. Osem and Imagine do chicken-style and no-chicken broths, respectively. Which both explains how some chicken broths "aren't" (labeling clarity differs) and makes this guy's position even less comprehensible.

For our part, my husband keeps kosher, but we tell people he's vegetarian for simplicity. I suppose being tricked isn't the worst thing that could happen to him, but it's pretty disrespectful. My brother doesn't eat anything with a face for ethical reasons, and I figure it's pretty much the same as my husband's religious convictions, down to the level of respect and straight-dealing required.

Plenty of other reasons have been mentioned and I think those are all important too (very, in the case of allergies or other medical limitations).

Note: Parve isn't necessarily vegetarian. A friend just reminded me that when she first met me she offered me tuna salad, figuring that anything parve would be OK!

Cheryl@302: I'm struggling to resist really unhelpful reactions to that piece. Going for the positive, one of my happiest cooking discoveries was that a large pan of very-dark-roasted vegetables, deglazed and made into stock, provided a more interesting and layered flavor than beef stock. I definitely preferred it in, say, French onion soup, where the broth is a major element of the flavor. (Unfortunately, it's now been long enough since I made that stock that I'd have to do some experimentation to recover the exact recipe I used.)

With regard to guests' eating restrictions, if I can't deal with those restrictions for whatever reason then I arrange another way to get together. The guests who are most challenging are really the ones who won't tell me what their restrictions are. (This is their right, of course; it's just hard to make sure someone can eat if you can't figure out what they can eat. A much easier variant I've gotten is "It's too complicated; let me just bring a dish.")

John A Arkansawyer@332: If you've read Digger, you'll know what scene you've just reminded me of. (If not, I highly recommend the book, but I can't figure out how to describe the scene out of context without making the book sound awful.)

Fragano Ledgister@328: From the Department of Giving Them Too Much Credit: I briefly wondered what they thought Catalan was a dialect of. Is there a pan-Occitan agenda at the Atlantic?

John A Arkansawyer @339, heh. As it happens I've just been rereading Digger, and I know exactly what you mean.

#322 ::: Jenny Islander

It seems like a shame to get rid of an otherwise good book instead of putting a sticker on it warning about the chicken broth.

Bob Shea (co-author of Illuminatus! and author of historical novels) was a variety of Buddhist who was vegetarian but believed that accepting hospitality trumped vegetarianism. I don't know how common that is.

Dotless i #340: I've no idea (unless the writer thinks that all Romance languages are dialects of Latin, which is a viable position). My position comes from annoyance with people who say things of a slightly different kind, like 'Galician is the most beautiful dialect of Spanish'; my response to that being ¡Qué carafio! or simply ¡Merda!

Re Laura Ingalls Wilder--

Yes, it is important to remember that these books are libertarian propaganda, written by one of Ayn Rand's friends, and successfully infiltrated into nurseries all around America.

It is deeply pernicious stuff.

But I am surprised that someone could go on at length about how horrible Ma is, without talking about the genuine horror of Pa.

This is one of the most shiftless, undisciplined con-men who ever lived. He repeatedly gets a new grant of land from the government, strips all of the assets, and then complains that he needs to move west.

Furthermore, he often goes off to the cities, gets drunk and spends all of the money, and then comes back and tells the kids flagrantly preposterous stories about having been stuck in a snowbank for weeks surviving on the candy that he meant to give them.

Pull the other one.

Despite Wilder's besotted oblivion, it is not hard to see exactly what sort of a man he was--a loser, a drunk, and a government dependent.

Who, of course, has been adopted as a brave symbol of self-reliance by libertarians.

re: Pa as shiftless drunk

I loved the Little House books as a kid but have been leery of revisiting them (despite still having the full set) because: Suck Fairy. I don't remember anything in the canon about Pa being burdened with anything but too much wanderlust.

Has this gotten pasted over from the real Charles Ingalls?

That's... reading an awful lot into stories that were basically tales from somebody's childhood. The official biographies that I've read haven't differed largely in the major stuff, just in some things that the author left out or amalgamated.

On that note, my mother-in-law lived for much of her early marriage in a house in North Dakota with no indoor plumbing at all, so the stories on how they got by sound very familiar.

@345--

Just re-read them, knowing what you know now about dysfunctional families.

Speaking of politely eating what you're served: Years ago, I was eating a very low fat diet in an effort to lower my cholesterol. My diet was about 10% fat by calories. We're talking trace amounts.

Went to dinner at a friend's house, and she set aside some plain spaghetti for me, without the rich meat sauce she'd made for everyone else. So far, so good. Then she put it all on my plate and topped it with about a half cup of grated Parmesan cheese. I ate it. I spent the night tossing and turning in misery. Finally, shortly before I was due to go to work in the morning, I threw up. I swore that I would never again eat to be polite.

I should have just pushed it around the plate, smiling, and denied being hungry if asked.

Note to hosts: Don't ask!

dotless ı, OtterB: I'm not sure whether to thank you or damn you, but I believe you've just brought another comic into my life. I'll go with "Thank you!" for now, but if I stay up too late to get to work tomorrow, I may issue a revised edition.

Eat what's put in front of you. My then-not-ex-mother-in-law and I had a discussion on that very topic. She was raised to eat all she was given. She stated that I should do the same because it's the polite thing to do. I asked if it was more polite to refuse food or eat it and risk vomiting at the table. She never answered the question but we had "serve yourself" meals at her house after that.

John A Arkansawyer @349, my earlier response was misdirected to you when it should have been to dotless ı

In any case, I originally encountered Digger due to a recommendation from someone on Making Light; Xopher, I think. I wish you as much joy of it as I have.

They tried to pull that "eat what's in front of you" stuff at my grade school. They stopped after I gave them back the cottage cheese. That's the only time I've had to vomit at the table.

My parents used a modified version of 'eat what's in front of you': if it made you sick, you didn't have to eat it, and you didn't have to eat more than two bites if you really didn't like it. But they also didn't generally serve stuff we didn't like enough to eat.

oldster: I believe -- if I'm remembering the biographies I've read correctly -- that only the Ingalls' South Dakota farm was a Homestead Act claim. The Wisconsin cabin of the Big Woods was bought with a mortgage, and the "Indian Territory" (actually Kansas, not the Oklahoma it says in the book) one was, well, they were squatters, with Pa betting he'd soon be legally able to register a claim, and he bet wrong. I'm less certain about the status of Plum Creek, and the books skip over their time managing a hotel in Burr Oaks, Iowa.

I won't try to argue that he was a good provider. He wasn't. But I give him more credit for at least trying than *spits* Bronson Alcott.

Abi, I liked your story. I'm reading the Heath brothers' Switch right now, about how to encourage people and communities to change, and it helps me see your story with a new lens.

Nancy Lebovitz #342:

It depends on the variant of Buddhism. Eating meat is allowable for Theravada, but not for Mahayana Buddhists.

(Just got back from a holiday in Vietnam, Cambodia & Bangkok where I was reminded of the differences.)

Carol Kimball, re: Little House books and the Suck Fairy: it depends on how you come to them. I still get a great deal of pleasure out of them, despite realizing now how flawed and frequently desperate their lives were, and despite some cringeworthy moments of racism. I've tended to come back to them as a History of Material Culture text, so I'm looking at the food (I also own the Little House Cookbook and have used it almost as much as Lobscouse and Spotted Dog) and the sewing and all of the pre-industrial manufacturing that the Wilders were still doing on their farm in Malone. Because I've cooked on open hearths and woodstoves and made hand-sewn garments and woven fabric on a loom, there's a lot of depth and richness in the descriptions of everyday things there for me.

I no longer envy Laura's life the way that I did when I was little, though. Nor do I feel deprived, as I did then, that New England doesn't usually get the sort of winter that hit the Great Plains in the 1880s. I didn't understand the difference in local climates then, and I was certain it was a sign of degenerate modern times that we weren't getting snow up to the windows -- the Blizzard of '78 seemed much more in line with what SHE got for weather, and I was awfully pleased with it at the time.

I can also read them now and be intensely grateful for modern medicine. Measles, scarlet fever, malaria, diphtheria...very glad to have done without those!

Xopher @ 337

True, that. I was really responding to "but whatever it is, it doesn't have chicken." But I do see where that could cause problems for vegetarians, yes.

Xopher @ 337

True, that. I was really responding to "but whatever it is, it doesn't have chicken." But I do see where that could cause problems for vegetarians, yes.

The first "too close to call" pair I spotted were Slovenia, and Slovak.

I'll leave the Quebecois/Parisian question to Serge.

I am pretty solidly of the opinion that if I invite you to my house and give you food, it is my responsibility to make sure I'm giving you something you can actually eat. Whether your food requirements are based on health, religion, ethics, is not my business.

This is very important to me, since I am very much a member of the "You Are In My House So I Must Feed You" group. I would consider myself utterly out of bounds if I knowingly served a guest something they have told me they can't eat.

I have an odd dietary requirement of my own: I'm allergic to pork. While it's not life threatening, it is vastly unpleasant, and I have been sent to the hospital for it in the past. Kosher food is definitely my friend.

Recently, someone was talking about how they've been making this great pasta sauce recipe, with ground beef, ground veal, ground pork... and I said something like, "wow, it's to bad I won't be able to try it, it sounds tasty. I'm allergic to pork".

She replied (and tone is important here, because hers was utterly smug and self-important, as was the expression on her face): "Well, I'll just give you some anyway and you'll never know.

And my filter melted.

I'm reasonably certain I said more swear words to her in the following minute than I've used in 10 years. You and I will both figure it out when I collapse on your kitchen floor, you ignorant bitch was the first sentence, and it went on from there.

Once I finally wound down, and stopped to catch my breath, do you know what she said? "Oh, well. I didn't know that you meant you were, like, really allergic."

WT actual F?

I walked away, having no further spoons. I don't think my reaction was right; I've been having a rough year or so and I'm about out of cutlery most days, so I know I just spewed ALLTHESTRESSEVER at her. I will have to apologise the next time I see her.

Still, what is with that mindset? That incredible sense of privilege and entitlement that 'I am allowed to override your stated preferences whenever I want to, because, I want to'.

I don't get it.

I am pretty solidly of the opinion that if I invite you to my house and give you food, it is my responsibility to make sure I'm giving you something you can actually eat. Whether your food requirements are based on health, religion, ethics, is not my business.

This is very important to me, since I am very much a member of the "You Are In My House So I Must Feed You" group. I would consider myself utterly out of bounds if I knowingly served a guest something they have told me they can't eat.

I have an odd dietary requirement of my own: I'm allergic to pork. While it's not life threatening, it is vastly unpleasant, and I have been sent to the hospital for it in the past. Kosher food is definitely my friend.

Recently, someone was talking about how they've been making this great pasta sauce recipe, with ground beef, ground veal, ground pork... and I said something like, "wow, it's to bad I won't be able to try it, it sounds tasty. I'm allergic to pork".

She replied (and tone is important here, because hers was utterly smug and self-important, as was the expression on her face): "Well, I'll just give you some anyway and you'll never know.

And my filter melted.

I'm reasonably certain I said more swear words to her in the following minute than I've used in 10 years. You and I will both figure it out when I collapse on your kitchen floor, you ignorant bitch was the first sentence, and it went on from there.

Once I finally wound down, and stopped to catch my breath, do you know what she said? "Oh, well. I didn't know that you meant you were, like, really allergic."

WT actual F?

I walked away, having no further spoons. I don't think my reaction was right; I've been having a rough year or so and I'm about out of cutlery most days, so I know I just spewed ALLTHESTRESSEVER at her. I will have to apologise the next time I see her.

Still, what is with that mindset? That incredible sense of privilege and entitlement that 'I am allowed to override your stated preferences whenever I want to, because, I want to'.

I don't get it.

Oops.

The first time I tried to post that I got

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Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@nielsenhayden.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

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Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Didn't see it on page reload, so tried again, and, oh, there it is!

::sigh::

Re the asshole and the chicken stock: He's ignoring people's wishes.

He's saying their ethical systems are inferior to his desire to be a lazy cook. Would he say, "I only used a little bit of shrimp shells in the tomato soup, so it's not a big deal that you are an Observant Jew? Would he tell a Muslim, "it was only fried in lard, it's not like fed you a pig's flesh,"? Would he say to a Hindu, "never mind that I used marrow to finish the sauce; it was tasty, right,"?

All of those would be stone-cold asshole moves.

If a person is a vegetarian (or tells me they are gluten free; or they, "don't do avocado", or whatever it is, I, as a good host (and decent person) accommodate them; or tell them I can't. Because it doesn't matter what my personal prejudices are (and I have some... I don't do avocados, abhor cooked spinach and will make a technicolor display on the tablecloth if you put mango in my food), those are are the things your guests (to whom one has an obligation) have told you are anathema to them.

Because they are guests. I don't take hospitality to the level of the Norse, or the Ancient Irish, or Noah, but guest are guest, and I, as the person extending hospitality believe it that anything they ask which isn't beyond some level of reasonable (ok, that's not quite true. I'm serious about hospitality, I will go to moderately unreasonable lengths to be certain I can provide why my guests want, but I have a lot of atavistic throwbacks in my nature).

This guy... he doesn't know what hospitality means. I shan't be his guest, and were I to discover I had been hosted by him, I should shake the dust from my sandals when I left.

I'm actually feeling really close to the bone on the asshole with the chicken stock.

1: My fiancée keeps kosher. 2: She has allergies, and, at present, a really restrictive food regimen. 3: We are having a wedding.

Catering, Oh My God! We are blessed in that we have a very good caterer, who has practice with allergies, doesn't care that this is not only a mixed marriage, but a non-traditional one (it's a poly-relationship, and there are actually two different ceremonies being conducted: everyone we've talked to about it has been splendid), but even with that we've had to talk the caterer around because when the list of her allergies, and the allergies of our guests were presented to them they plotzed (because they thought we wanted them to make sure everything was edible by everybody. Once we managed to make it plain that what we wanted was that no one had to go without being able to eat at least some of every sort of thing (appetizers, main course, sides, etc.: so that even if limited they'd not be watching everyone else eat [between Jewish and my Irish/Czech attitudes to food, and my partners sensitivity to people who don't get to eat, this is not going to be allowed at our wedding]) it was looking touch and go for about half an hour on the last conference call.

So I might be a touch more cranky on this than otherwise... but Jesus Christ he's an arrogant shithead.

re: the Little House books
Thanks, Rikibeth (357). I've also sewn clothes, split logs, chopped kindling, cooked on a woodstove, etc. though the looms I've woven on would charitably be categorized as toys. I used to hunt through the grass for nails that jumped free from my dad's carpentering (just like L.I.W.!), though it was less to straighten and reuse them than minimize the tetanus hazard from stepping on them. I'm in strong agreement with your philosophy.

In the late 50s someone had written up the Kansas site fifty miles out from Independence*, mentioning that "the original well is still on the property". It generated a reviewer's snark: "What did they think happened to it? That it was pulled, chopped up, and sold for postholes?" ...although even as a little kid I knew that the Ingalls' hand-dug well would not be good for postholes.

Typing this has brought the realization that you can't recycle sod into new buildings, either.

I'm joyously confabulating plum thickets with Bugs (Daffy?) wandering through with Portable Holes.

* Was that Malone? Or Plum Creek? Wild plum grows along every tiny rivulet, generating confusion across the great plains over whether the local Plum Creek was her Plum Creek.

Terry @ 365

I helped a friend cater a largish wedding reception full of dietary conflicts like these.

We hit up a party store and color-coded the serving dishes. Much less tedious than labels, which tend to get dislodged.

Catching up after having been on the road for several days...

dotless i, #197: I have always thought of "hot chocolate" as being what you get when you make it with hot water; using hot milk makes it "cocoa". I will drink either, but have a preference for the former.

Clifton, #262: That sounds a lot like how I feel about vegetarian food in general. Trying to fake the meat in a recipe never tastes right; I'd rather have something that's straightforwardly vegetarian. Although a couple of experiences at vegetarian restaurants have suggested that fully-vegetarian menus use a different spice set than I would choose in making the same dishes.

Clifton, #289: IME, when elderly cats who have never been fond of lap-sitting start becoming lap-cats, you've got somewhere between 1 and 2 years to go with them. Just as a heads-up.

P J Evans, #303: If it has any chicken in it at all, one should not serve it to vegetarians. And if it doesn't have any chicken at all, it's fraudulently labeled.

estelendur, #312: I've wondered that myself. My parents were both emphatically IO, while I am equally emphatically NC; my tentative hypothesis is that it's because we lived 10 hours away from anyone on either side of the family when I was growing up, and one strand of the web wasn't strong enough to ensnare me.

Lila, #320: Deciding that your guests aren't competent to choose for themselves what they will consume is not the act of a friend.

QFT. Furthermore, it's transitive; if I found out that one of my friends had done that to another of my friends, the former would be ejected from my circle of friends at escape velocity. That is just so skeezy on so many levels.

Secondary thought: At root, that's a consent issue. I don't think I'd want to date this guy either; who knows what else he's got consent problems about?

dotless i, #339: Oh, yes. Someone falling, thru a long set of circumstances all of which make perfect in-story sense, into a situation in which for ritual reasons they MUST eat something they would normally avoid. And Ursula does a lovely job of delineating the issues, the reasons why Digger can't just say no, and the unpleasant sequelae.

Lin, #350: I remember having lunch at a friend's house when I was about 8, and having a glass of milk put in front of me because kids are expected to drink milk because it's healthy. I don't have a physical problem with milk, but I seriously hate the taste of it. My solution was to chug the glass (so that I didn't have to deal with the taste more than once) and then request water.

Cheryl, #361: Your reaction was exactly right. Do not guilt yourself into thinking you owe her an apology -- after all, she just casually said that she'd have no problem with poisoning you! SHE owes YOU an apology. And by rubbing her nose in it like that, you may have saved someone else's life in the future, by making her aware that "I'm allergic to X" is NOT THE SAME THING as "I don't like X".

Linking this back to the chicken-stock asshole, I have known someone who was allergic to any kind of poultry. As in anaphylactic-shock, hospital-NOW allergic. What's going to happen the first time someone with a poultry allergy sits down to one of this creep's dinners?

Lee, the chicken-stock asshole is gay and has a partner, so you wouldn't have to worry about dating him.

Yes, a gay man who doesn't understand that people have a basic right to decide what they will and won't do with their own bodies. SMH.

Cheryl, you've pointed out another kind of asshole in the mix: the person who says "I'm allergic to X" when they mean "I don't like X." I think this probably usually begins as a convenient lie to avoid eating X among people like our CSA; where it becomes dangerous is when people start openly using it as a shorthand for dislikes and preferences, which undermines its literal (and I mean literally literal, goddam it) use by people whose lives may actually depend on it.

So your friend was being a jerk, but there were also TONS of other jerks who helped set up that situation.

I've used the term 'semiotic undermining' for this kind of thing. It almost got me killed once; a certain intersection on my commute had no light, and everyone turned left at it. Because everyone did, it became the default, so no one signaled. So one day I was crossing the street and was nearly run down by someone who was NOT turning left!

Oddly enough the least blame for that, IMO, goes to the person who nearly ran me down, who had a right to rely on the real default of not signalling non-turns. I get some blame (as does the sauce maker in your story) for buying into the false bad default, but to my mind the greatest share of blame goes to the people who undermined the semiotics of not signalling. And they weren't even present when the problem arose, which is what makes semiotic undermining so insidious.

At what point does what used to be meat stop being meat? I put (with her permission--I wasn't sure it was okay) meat into my vegetarian landlady's compost. At some point, it stopped being meat. Can that happen from other forms of processing?

I'm sorry if I sounded less-than-respectful of other people's dietary requirements and choices earlier. As a very picky eater, I have no room to criticize others, especially since my pickiness is mostly a matter of taste and not need.

But man! Some of the hippies I've cooked for. It wasn't making multiple batches of food to feed everyone*. That was okay. It was having them stand over me and criticize me as I cooked their food because I was also cooking food they didn't approve of.

*I'm not a very skilled cook. I just have several simple, large-serving dishes I've learned to make. They're pretty good.

Does anyone know whether Cheesecake Factory is reliably good about food issues?

I was at one with someone who has some food restrictions. They had someone in a suit discuss what she could and couldn't eat, and they got the meal right.

I get the impression Cheesecake Factory has tight centralized controls, so this might be policy rather than good sense at the individual restaurant.

Open thready: Ran into the comment policy at another blog and thought you'd appreciate it.

I can't tell if it's convergent evolution or smart people learning from each other, but many of the places I like to hang out have similar comment policies.

John, not a composter, but I read up on it a while back, and one thing they stressed was never to put meat in the compost. Not sure why, though it strikes me that attracting scavenger-predators is probably not a good thing.

Lee Hayes had his ashes plowed into his vegetable garden. As Judy Harrow put it, "it would take either a very conscious or a very UNconscious person to eat those vegetables." I would eat vegetables grown in that compost, but I would also eat vegetables from Hayes' garden.

You did sound disrespectful before, but I accept your apology, and boy do those "hippies" sound like jerks. They're the kind of people who at one point had me saying things like "I'm a vegetarian, but not an asshole," to forestall defensive reactions by people who'd only run into the asshole variety.

I think that the processing* by another living thing might be the key with compost et cetera. Someone on a no-grains-or-carbs diet, whether voluntary paleo or involuntary due to other health issues, can still eat beef because the cow has taken all the grain and grass and processed it. We don't generally consider the urine fertilizing the garden when it comes from carnivores; the meat they've eaten has been processed into nitrogenous waste, then the plants further process it. What it becomes is different from what it was-- compost is not food, beef is not grass. With a limited number of atoms available, the line has to be somewhere, and that's where I think it makes sense.

*I think that what I mean by 'process' is 'transform'. Processing is treating a thing to make it another version of that thing-- carrots to mashed roast carrots, duck to duck fat. Transformation is turning a thing into another thing entirely, like newspaper clippings to dirt or pizza into breastmilk and eventually into baby poop.

Re: food preferences and assholery. I'm reminded of a situation many, many years ago when one of my older sisters brought home a boyfriend for Thanksgiving. My mother, whatever her other faults, being a consummate hostess, she asked said boyfriend what kind of turkey stuffing was traditional in his family. (Our own stuffing is a highly-problematic-to-non-family-members egg and sage stuffing. Or sage and egg stuffing. It's got enough sage in it that it's green. And enoght egg that it's glutinous.) He named something mildly unusual, like oyster stuffing. (I don't recall the exact request). My mother, in those pre-internet days, ran all over creation trying to find a good recipe and did her best to create it. After the meal, she asked boyfriend if it matched his family's stuffing. Boyfriend replied, "I dunno; I've never had it but I heard of it and it sounded good."

That's assholery, too.

Open threadiness: a piece I'm editing referred to "the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Tom Friedman". The mind recoils in horror at the prospect.

Is "Little House on the Prairie Dog" an appropriate way to mash up two of the subthreads?

Serge @ 377: I don't know, but it's a hell of a different path for The Wizard of Oz to take.

Lee (368): I have always thought of "hot chocolate" as being what you get when you make it with hot water; using hot milk makes it "cocoa".

Whereas I also thought of 'hot chocolate' and cocoa' as exact synonyms.

John A Arkansawyer #370, Xopher Halftongue #373:

I dimly recall that some moderate extra measures are needed to compost meat, including but not limited to fencing out animals.

In regards to the jerk who thinks that putting chicken stock into everything and ignoring the wishes of his guests makes him a Superior Cook...

I am fortunate enough to have a friend who really likes high end restaurants, so I have been to a number with him. We've taken large groups out to some of our city's most highly regarded dining establishments, and the single thing that I can point to that separates the Very Good from the Utterly Amazing is the willingness and ability of the establishment to cater to and allow for all of the allergies present as well as providing food that each member of the party is interested in eating.

The list of allergies (actual allergies, some life-threatening and all with unpleasant side effects for even trace amounts) in my circle includes lemons, fish, legumes, pork, tree nuts, peanuts, mussels, and gluten. When we call ahead and inform the place of our requirements, they are always accommodating, and we have never had any issues with the food that we've gotten. We're going out again this Saturday, and when we spoke to the restaurant, they were delighted both with the fact that we alerted them early and because it would "give the chef at least a small challenge" in fixing the meal.

It's okay to not be a good cook, and to be uncertain how to handle someone who has allergies. What's not okay is thinking that your unwillingness to be accommodating somehow makes your skills and knowledge superior.

john, who is incognito and definitely not at work @ #140: Yes! I think Saga is the only comic book I'm buying right now. So many great touches: Lying Cat, the vine traps you can break by sharing a secret, the super subtle message inside a possibly very banal novel... And sometimes the art gets really gross, but it earns it, most of the time. The Stalk should look the way the Stalk looks.

Lee: Local cat Einstein is 16 already, and his brother Newton died of cancer last year. If he only gets one or two more years, he'll still have had a good run, and I'll be happy if we can make all of them maximized-petting years. He's a really sweet cat and has always loved petting, just wouldn't get in or stay in laps. He still won't, except for this special morning period. (Leaning sideways to reach the keyboard now without disturbing him here...)

I was talking with some folks at Foolscap and mentioned the Carl Brandon Society, the Outer Alliance, and Broad Universe as examples of organizations working on diversity in speculative fiction & fandom. I mentioned them as folks whom conrunners might invite to host a reading or party.

I couldn't help but think that I'm missing an organization or two, or maybe more. Which groups should I add to this list?

I have a friend who says he's allergic to alcohol because it's something most people understand immediately. What's really going on is that he lacks the enzyme for breaking down alcohol into something that the human body can deal with. Even the little bit of alcohol in barbecue sauce will send him to the hospital. Mr. Chicken-stock Asshole would find out rather quickly that "what you don't know is in the food won't hurt you" can kill people if one of his guests had that level of allergy.

I had to feed a group of people on a couple of hours notice. The dietary restrictions included onion allergy, low cholesterol diet, low calorie diet (not the same person as the cholesterol person), and diabetes. The onion allergy was not so severe as to require separate cooking utensils/pan, so I did stir fry with chicken marinated in two different sauces, and a whole lot of shredded and diced veggies, Mongolian barbecue style. It was so well received, I had to chase the line-up for seconds out of the kitchen until I got to eat.

AKICIML, how does one do wok-based cooking on an electric stove?

So I wasn't able to work (work being an eBay store) for about three weeks, because kidney infection and sick. I am now functional, for certain values of "functional."

And, of course, my cheap ink jet printer is kaput. Three weeks without use was enough to dry out the print head, and I can't get it working again. I've managed to get an older printer working well enough to print postage labels, but it's a temporary fix because the older printer has its own issues. (Issues related to cats sitting on it and breaking the paper tray ... sigh.)

The breadth of knowledge on Making Light never ceases to amaze me. Anyone got a good recommendation for an inexpensive laser printer? Monochrome is fine, it needs to be able to handle sticky labels without choking and average-size cats sitting on it without breaking, and cheap cartridges are a bonus. Otherwise, I'm not fussy.

Suggestions? :-)

(And seriously. Cat-proofing should be part of the design process of any gadget. Because, cats.)

Lee@368: I have always thought of "hot chocolate" as being what you get when you make it with hot water; using hot milk makes it "cocoa".

I wonder if that's a regional difference. A quick search on the web finds people who make the distinction, but in the opposite direction to yours. Growing up, though, I only encountered the term "hot chocolate", and there was usually milk involved, whether fresh or dry. My own preference is currently for the milk-based drink, preferably with a chunk of this chocolate, which is where the stick blender comes in handy.

(Actually, my real preference is for the Spanish-style thick-enough-to-hold-your-spoon-upright chocolate, but that's not what I usually make.)

Xopher Halftongue@369: I get what you're saying about people using "allergy" to mean "dislike" (although I don't see that happen much myself; more often I see "allergy" in place of "strong food sensitivity that isn't technically an allergy"), but I don't think that removes much blame from Cheryl's acquaintance in this case. However weak a meaning she was giving to "allergy", there's still the assertion that she'd intentionally deprive Cheryl of consent.

Regarding restaurants handling food restrictions: some time back I was trying to arrange a nice dinner out with someone who was very sensitive to garlic, and I called a few restaurants I liked to see if they'd be able to handle it. I really appreciated the one (generally excellent) restaurant where I called, they thought for half a second, and then simply said, "No, I'm sorry, it really won't work. There's maybe one appetizer and some desserts." The waiter at the restaurant we wound up at, on the other hand, made things complicated, due to either excessive confidence in or excessive terror of the kitchen: we went through three rounds of ordering and having him come back to apologize. When he finally did what we'd asked at the beginning and actually asked the kitchen what could be made, though, the chef sent him back with a copy of the menu fully annotated with exactly what would have to be altered in each dish, which was perfect for us.

cygnet @386, we bought a Canon MF4890dw last summer and so far are pleased with it, but I haven't tried to print on labels. Nor am I sure about cats, but I don't think the output paper tray is large enough to appeal to them. (We had to construct an output block of cardboard because otherwise pages ended up on the floor.)

I think people will like Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge. The author went from punk activism to being in charge of cheese at a big cooperative, and writes about cheese, the cheese industry, selling cheese, learning about cheese, and walking the line between appreciating quality and getting pretentious.

What brought the book to mind was the bit upthread about overcritical hippies. He mentions the problem of people who've never done farming setting moral standards that don't make sense for the food they eat.

Lin Daniel @385, they sell flat-bottomed woks with saucepan handles for use on electric stoves. Put the pan directly on the burner and proceed as usual.

Sumana @384: one group that's working at the next level up to push diversity is Clarion West. The six instructors for the individual weeks are chosen with an eye to making sure that they represent ethnic, sexual, gender and other diversities. And by training the next generation of writers: they're pushing the writers into consideration of diversity as they write.

There will be an interesting article at some point in about 20 years about how the different workshops and writers' groups in SF/F affected the genre in the early 21st Century. Clarion West produces a different kind of writer from (say) Viable Paradise; and each one seems to be generating a group of people who spend a lot of time talking with each other. In the same way that the Futurians had a major influence on Golden Age SF, I think the workshops will have a set of influences on this period. It's probably too soon to tell what those influences will be.

Cheryl @361: I don't think my reaction was right.

Oh, I dunno. For my money, looks like you got it exactly right. I might have added, "Here, let me slip you a tasty little something liberally salted with, say, serum of ipecac, and I'll just stand over here out of range while you 'enjoy' it 'and you'll never know'. Sound good?"

I will have to apologise the next time I see her.

I have to say, you are far more generous than I would ever be. That would be the end of any relationship I would have with that person, ever, with extreme prejudice.

I got nailed twice by friends unknowingly feeding me flax seed. If anybody ever did that to me intentionally, presuming they "knew better," I would find myself thinking seriously about bringing them up on charges of aggravated assault. (I'm assuming that's the category deliberate poisoning would fall into?)

As a counterpoint to the assholic shithead thread, I'd like to make a recommendation: A friend and I went to Boulder's Dushanbe Teahouse. This friend has, like, every food sensitivity there is: gluten & lactose, for a start. Then there's his allergies to fungus and onions, and...oh I forget what-all. Anyway, the waitress brought out a photocopied sheet with a grid on it—of food sensitivities. Playing allergy bingo, they were actually able to assemble a menu around his needs, and delivered unto him a tasty meal he could actually eat. It was amazing to watch. (And, (although I think this was a different trip), they brought out a tin of fish food at my request, because the goldfish in the pool next to our table were begging at me piteously. They hadn't been fed for years. (They said.) It was fun to drop in a tiny crumb of (the appropriate) food, and watch it get pounced on voraciously.)

Terry Karney @365: no one had to go without being able to eat at least some of every sort of thing (appetizers, main course, sides, etc.:

I wonder if anyone has gotten around to programming the app for this, correlating guests/food sensitivities/recipe ingredients/dinner course.... It's an obvious niche market.

Carol Kimball @366: a reviewer's snark: "What did they think happened to it? That it was pulled, chopped up, and sold for postholes?"

Oh, ghods. ::pounds desk, stifling giggles:: Effing perfect!

Lee @368: IME, when elderly cats who have never been fond of lap-sitting start becoming lap-cats, you've got somewhere between 1 and 2 years to go with them. Just as a heads-up.

This is also true of guinea pigs, where "years" is "weeks." Also ferrets. The one time my friend's ferret Fagan begged to sit in my lap and sleep turned out to be about two weeks before he passed away.

Secondary thought: At root, that's a consent issue. I don't think I'd want to date this guy either; who knows what else he's got consent problems about?

YES. That's what's been chewing at the back of my brain about this. Thank you for articulating it.

Nancy Lebovitz @371: I get the impression Cheesecake Factory has tight centralized controls

Being a large corporation, I imagine they have wholesale-rate paranoia about legal liability.

Xopher Halftongue @373: not a composter, but I read up on it a while back, and one thing they stressed was never to put meat in the compost. Not sure why, though it strikes me that attracting scavenger-predators is probably not a good thing.

The scavenger-predator thing is part of it, but my understanding is that back-yard composting doesn't get hot enough to cook out any pathogens. Industrial-grade composting (such as Boulder County's facility) does. I gather it's a matter of surface-to-volume ratio.

Lin Daniel @385: "what you don't know is in the food won't hurt you"

My mother had a parable she was fond of for this context. Little farm wife opens the urn of butter she'd churned up yesterday, finds a mouse dead in it. "Hm," she thinks. Picks out the mouse, packs it up, takes it off to the General Store. Storekeep, accepts the butter she's selling him. "What he doesn't know won't hurt him," she reassures herself. Storekeep, suspicious when she asks to buy a pound of the butter he has in stock, smiles agreeably, goes in the back, takes the butter she's sold him out of the package she brought it in, puts it in ones of his store packages. Brings it out, hands it over to her. She goes away happy. He thinks, with a smile, "What she doesn't know won't hurt her."

@ Cygnet:

My last two laser printers were Samsung. One was $150, the other maybe $90. They worked/ work great.

(The first one had a problem with the sheet intake grabber thing; after five years it eventually got too smooth to reliably grab. After buying the new one I found an online guide to turning the grabber thing around, exposing a fresh surface. I gave the printer to a co-worker's son, who is still using it.)

@368 Lee & 392 Jacque

Well... I'm not sure how to phrase this.

I don't think I was wrong to be upset, or even angry. I do think that the shrieking, swearing rant was not OK, and that's what the apology will be for (while still being clear that what she said was wrong wrong wrong).

She's a relative that I don't see very often; she's only about 21, so I have hope that she can gain more knowledge as she ages. "Shrieking rant" is not a good teaching method.

Some guy name John McWhorter, an associate professor at Columbia University, claims the comma is dead, and says he cannot see the point of the Oxford Comma.

Slate is rather more thoughtful on the issues and considers whether low-comma texting, tweeting, and such are going to overwhelm more serious writing.

Newspapers in other parts of the world have picked up on this, and have apparently misunderstood the academic significance of McWhorter's job title.

In the meantime I shall dedicate this post to my parents, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Sir Terry Pratchett.

Re: wok cooking on electric stoves.

One of my dreams is to one day re-do the kitchen & get gas burners. I think the only way to get proper wok hei is to cook with gas.

In the meantime, I do wok-style cooking using slightly deeper & heavier flat-bottom frypans. The deeper frypan allows more vigorous stirring without food falling out. A heavier frypan (more metal) allows it to retain heat better (wait until the pan is nice & hot before commencing cooking). I always cook with heating turned to maximum, so don't use non-stick frypans else the non-stick coating burns off. Not an ideal solution but it gets the job done.

I've tried:
- a portable electric induction wok but the induction gave uneven heating.

- a wok stand so you can place a normal wok on a flat electric stove surface. But it loses too much heating because of the gap.

- electric woks, but they are too slow to heat resulting in more of a stew than a fry.

Inspired by Cygnet: I'm overdue for getting a new computer -- my current one has both a damaged case and an obsolete graphics system (just fell out of the manufacturer's support list, and Linux's). I'd like to be able to dual-boot Windows & Linux, do the usual web and media things (plus, ideally, TV capture), and run Minecraft at much better speeds (currently I think the graphics card and/or sound system are the limiting factors). I do want a desktop rather than a laptop, and I already have a nice monitor. I don't need screaming power, just not at the very back of the tech curve.

What can I expect to have to pay for something suitable? And what manufacturers are reputable these days? I remember getting a Micron system back in the day (check off the boxes for various options) and liking it, but at a quick glance they don't seem to be selling systems anymore, just parts.

Lin @ 385: My Chinese teacher in high school was also a gourmet Chinese cook, and he said that traditional American cast iron frying pans made the best wok for cooking on American stoves. I think the key for the right results in a Chinese wok-style stir fry is a pan which can bring small bits of food in contact with a very very hot surface while they're rapidly stirred. The traditional way to do that is the thin bowl-shaped steel wok over a very direct high flame under the bottom, but another way to do it is a thicker pan which holds heat well, brought to a high even temperature.

Cygnet @ 386: Since I'm the Printer Whisperer in the lab here, my advice for cheap to buy, cheap to run monochrome printers is a laser printer from Brother. The Amazing Girlfriend and I own one that cost $90 or so, does automatic duplexing and has a built-in wifi connection, so it only needs power to sit on our home network. We got it for printing scientific papers, since the 24" banner printer isn't exactly the right tool for that. If you don't need duplexing, you can often find it and its cousins for $70 or so. We go through one $40 toner cartridge a year or so, although there are lots of very cheap ($10-15) generics out there if you want to go that route.

Dave Harmon @397: It's always better to get a new computer next month than this. Always. Computer technology is advancing at a pace that next month today's choice will be cheaper, and today's price will get you a noticeably better machine.

But blindly following that will mean you never get a computer, since next month is always a month away.

That said, compared to the machine you currently have, even the lowest entry level machines available today would meet your needs. Looking at the online store I just bought a 17.3" laptop with 8GB ram and a 1TB hard drive for $650, I found many low-end desktop machines for under $300. Going up to $400 or $500 yields nicer machines, but not necessarily by much. Brands I trust include HP, Acer, Lenovo, Gateway, although for desktop machines I usually build/upgrade my own, rather than buying pre-built.

I do have some concern, though, about your "nice monitor". If you are that obsolete in your graphics system, it may be that you are also obsolete in your monitor. Does it support DVI? HDMI? VGA? You will need to double-check that your machine will output that form.

One complication that shouldn't affect your purchase, but something to keep in mind: Since you bought your last machine, the industry has started the process of switching to EFI or uEFI for booting instead of BIOS. Booting with EFI is a requirement for Win8 and Win8.1, but it isn't as easy to get Linux to boot under it. I've been trying for days to get my new laptop to dual boot properly -- the system will handle both EFI and BIOS booting, but Windows won't work if booted BIOS and Linux can't see the EFI stuff if booted BIOS, and I can't convince the EFI bootloader to see my Linux system. Be prepared for a fight with the system if you can't find someone to configure it for you.

Mary Aileen, #379: I can deal with the "synonyms" view more readily than I can the occasionally-encountered usage that's the exact reverse of mine. But if someone is using the terms synonymously, I do want to know which style of preparation they consider the default.

Clifton, #383: Yeah, our Grey Mouser is like that. He's always been perfectly willing to have his head scritched by anyone for as long as they're willing to do it, and will try to grab your hand and pull it back when you move away. But until quite recently, he has not been a lap cat at all, and he's still uncertain about the protocols (as in, he'll jump in your lap and just stand there for as much as 5 minutes before finally settling in).

dotless I, #387: I'd buy regional, but I don't discount the possibility that it may be idiosyncratic. I can no longer remember whether I was taught the distinction or came up with it on my own. Oh, and I share your liking for the Spanish-style very-dark-chocolate-with-cinnamon-and-maybe-hot-pepper.

Nancy, #389: The bit that jumped out at me in the book's description was: Edgar bluffed his way into his cheese job knowing almost nothing

AIUI, this is actually a fairly common thing for men to do and get away with. Women tend not to apply for positions for which they actively lack the qualifications, and even if they do, are much more likely to be turned down for said lack.

Which has nothing to do with how good the book is, but I believe in pointing out the water to the fish when appropriate. :-)

Dave B., #395: At root, this is a design flaw on the standard smartphone keyboard. The number of times I need to use a comma (which requires going to a second screen) vs. the number of times I want to type ".com" (which is available as a 1-key option on the main screen) suggests very strongly that these two keys should have been swapped. But I am stubborn, and refuse to let technological annoyances interfere with my writing style.

Also, I do not believe that "what people do in a character-limited medium such as Twitter" is a good metric for "how one should write everything under all circumstances".

Dave H., #397: Do you have a Goodwill computer store near you? If so, it's worth expanding your inquiry to cover things that are 1 or 2 steps behind the Hottest New Tech, and checking to see if someone who insists on top-of-the-line equipment has gotten rid of one of those. We tend to run behind the tech curve, and someone else's boat anchor has often been our upgrade for a lot less money than we'd have spent on new stuff.

I saw the chicken-stock article posted on FB some months back, read it, had steam come out of my ears for about five minutes, started to compose a lengthy, righteous, ragey blast in response -- and then realized "Oh. I've just been successfully trolled."

Now, why Slate decided to give this guy a platform for trolling… actually, I do know. Pageviews. Ugh.

(For the record, when I cook for other people, I consider it only courteous to do my best to accommodate their stated dietary choices, restrictions, and preferences. If I'm unable or unwilling to do so, I consider it only decent to tell them so, as long before the meal as possible, so that they can make decisions accordingly.)

#392 ::: Jacque

>>Nancy Lebovitz @371: I get the impression Cheesecake Factory has tight centralized controls

>Being a large corporation, I imagine they have wholesale-rate paranoia about legal liability.

They probably do, but just being at risk for legal punishment doesn't mean a corporation is meticulous about doing something well.

It's also conceivable that they want customers to have a good experience, not to mention that they might have a major executive (and/or their family) who has significant food sensitivities.

One of the problems with reward and punishment is that they make it too easy to ignore that people might have intrinsic motivations.

Re: Printers: I own a Brother monochrome printer as well, purchased when I was in a poetry-writing class that meant churning out pages and pages and pages of text to pass around pretty much every single week. While the ink cartridge is desperately in need of replacement at the moment--some years later--I've found a very reliable and cost-effective workhorse for home printing. Highly recommended.

Another concurring recommendation for Brother monochrome laser printers - our Brother laser printer/fax/scanner/copier is still plugging away after a number of years. I think it was only $80-$90 on a Costco special. It's been reading "Low Toner!" for a couple of months now, and while I really need to buy some more toner, it hasn't decided to just refuse to print until it's given a new toner cartridge, unlike some brands.

It balks on card stock which is too stiff, though, as we found at last year when my son was trying to make cards for a board game he was creating, so I'm not sure whether it's the best choice for label printing.

Cheryl, 'allergic to' is one term I hear very clearly. I'd have had a similar reaction. (I'm allergic to penicillin, as in anaphylaxis, so there's a whole lot of antibiotics I never use. Fortunately it doesn't prevent me from enjoying blue cheeses.)

I took a class with McWhorter a zillion years ago, at UC Berkeley. One of the most engaging lecturers I ever had. Dave Bell at #395, I think McWhorter's saying something more like "we could do without the Oxford comma and we would basically be okay; people would understand the meanings of these lists reasonably well" but he's saying it descriptively, not prescriptively.

Dave Harmon, I buy from ZaReason - everything's guaranteed to run Linux well, but you'd have to put Windows on there yourself. It might be useful mainly as a reference catalogue.

366
There's a 'Little House' museum about 15 miles from Independence. It's not far from the airport, a couple of miles off US75.

Tom Whitmore, I'm glad that Clarion West workshops include attention to diversity in teacher selection. It is good to be aware of Clarion West and of relevant publishing venues (e.g., Expanded Horizons, Diverse Energies) as part of the whole ecology. But I'm trying to compile a list of groups more like Broad Universe, for whom diversity is the agenda.

@LittleHouse: Huh. WRT Ma hating Indians. I don't remember any of that. ('Course, this was on the order of fifty years ago, now.) But what I do remember was that those books were read to us by a student teacher—who was Native American.

Nancy @403:

There was an article a couple of years ago in the New Yorker entitled Inside The Cheesecake Factory about our health-care system (comparing and contrasting how hospitals work and how The Cheesecake Factory works). It touches on some of these issues, and made me want to go to a Cheesecake Factory sometime.

The Cheesecake Factory does have tight central controls, with screens in the kitchen showing the ingredients, recipes, and times for every order going through the kitchen, including any special requests. This, and their predictive software, allow them to set, and meet, a national goal of less than 2.5% food waste. So they maintain very tight controls.

Although it wasn't mentioned, I would expect allergies would be easily managed by their system, as long as they know about them.

I suspect your experience @371 is standard in that case, not a one-off from that location.

385
Use a frying pan - woks aren't designed for electric burners.

The recipes on this page are guaranteed to revolt, and likely endanger, everybody:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ariannarebolini/truly-upsetting-vintage-recipes

One of the recipes has the teaser line "If you want to be happy when company comes." It is a hollowed-out log of bologna, with a core of mashed peas in gelatin.

I'm trying to think of what kind of host would take delight in serving this. Maybe one who hates company? Or, since the accompanying illustration shows the hosts welcoming a couple in uniform at their door, German collaborators?

Some of the other items could be the result of contest to depict, in food form, what the flesh-and-blood portion of a Dalek looks like.

I'll second the Brother laser printers. We've got a 2240HD, usb only, but serving stuff is what linux boxes are for. It's decently supported out of the box on OSX/Ubuntu. Not sure about win*. 20+ pages a minute, though duplex slows that down a bunch, maybe to 7 or so. Toner isn't that expensive, and does last quite a long while. I think we're at something like 2 cents a page.

Newegg tends to have deals on it every so often -- if you're paying more than $100 it's going to go on sale a day after you buy.

My husband is anaphylactically allergic to fish (by which I mean "does it have a vertebral column and finlike limbs and live in water -- and no fur"; all the fish-shaped swimmy vertebrates are verboten, including sharks and rays, but mollusks and crustaceans are fine) and nuts (by which I mean almost every single thing that has the syllable 'nut' in its name in English -- all the tree nuts, all the Australian stuff like macadamias that aren't related but grow on trees, plus things like peanuts and pine nuts that are botanically no relation at all).

This is actually, despite its severity and breadth, not that bad of an allergy set to work around in restaurants. We avoid Thai/Vietnamese/Filipino unless we know the kitchen, because fish sauce and peanut oil are pretty ubiquitous in the cuisines. Sushi actually works well, because the amount of anal-retentiveness good sushi chefs have about knife cleanliness means that even if he's given a vegetarian roll made right after a salmon maki he doesn't react. The problem with sushi is the stuff that gets rolled in fish eggs, and occasional unwillingness by serving staff to present the non-fish rolls on a plate separate from the coated-in-fish-eggs rolls (which leads to transfer of allergen). In general, restaurants are pretty good about the server being asked at ordering whether thing A or Thing B has whatever in it (and if so, is it leave-offable); if not, there's usually a completely unproblematic option to order, though he does have to be careful with places that do deep-fried battered fish in any description, because the oil can set him off if he gets a deep-fried something-else, like fries.

We went to Wildfire, a steakhouse run by Lettuce Entertain You, and had no issue about entree ordering, so didn't mention to the staff (he doesn't like coming off -- even in his own head -- as a Sally Albright). For dessert, there were several enticing options, but one of them was mentioned as having toasted almond or something sprinkled on top. When the server returned to take our order, John asked him if the underlying slice-of-whatever was nut-containing or if it was just the garnish. The server said he didn't know but he could check. John said yes, please check; if the dessert is non-nutty I'd like it but please leave off the nut garnish because I'm allergic.

The server blanched and took extensive notes on his order pad, quizzing every other diner present about whether we had any food issues or not. Dessert went well, but then the manager came to our table to apologize and to ask us strongly, should we ever dine again, to disclose any allergies/kosher/etc when the server came the first time, because they have chain-wide requirements: every time any diner with a food issue comes in they have to fill out paperwork listing all possible sensitivities and keep it on file for three weeks. I was floored by this (and by the, frankly, somewhat oppressive YOU DID A WRONG THING AND MADE ME BE A BAD EMPLOYEE vibe the manager was giving off), but apparently corporate wants to be able to hit the file cabinet about any late-onset food problems or something that might have been caused by momentary cross-contamination between two different plates served to the same table, or whatever.

It did make us wonder if we wanted to go back again, um, ever, although on one level I'm glad they're allergy-aware. They're just not very allergy-WELCOMING (or weren't, that night, to us in particular).

On the upscale end, Ming Tsai keeps a binder at the server's station listing all items on the menu (including specials), with all ingredients included, color-coded by allergy and noted as to whether it's leave-out-able or not. The staff are trained on the binder, but in any case where they're not certain they can instantly check without having to find a chef, etc, and the cooking staff are also trained on routinely doing the dishes without the various allergens so it doesn't feel 'odd' to them and they know just what to do or substitute.

Chef Tsai's son has gluten sensitivity. :-> Someday I'd like to be able to afford (and be near enough, of course) to eat in his restaurant, but his binders full of allergens are only one of many reasons why.

I rather enjoy Slate's contrarianism on the occasions (which, I grant you, are infrequent) when it's well-founded. They've printed a variety of articles on gluten. I find them fascinating. This article is one passed my smell test--and gives me a very good reason to chill out when I hear a claim to a food allergy that I find true but possibly exaggerated:

Ironically, the people who may benefit most from the current vogue are those who have been G-free all along. The proliferation of gluten-free products has made life for a full-blown celiac easier than it's ever been, and a greater awareness of gluten-related disorders has more celiac patients getting diagnosed than ever before. (There are still thought to be millions of undiagnosed cases in the United States.) Let's hope those gains aren't erased when the conventional wisdom shifts again and we leave this diet craze behind us.

John A Arkansawyer @ 378... With Mrs.Olson as the Wicked Witch?

Stefan, #413: First reaction: I've seen things every bit as disgusting as any of those items on the menu at upscale restaurants. Apparently what makes the difference in perception is the cost of the ingredients.

Further comments...
5. Frosted Ribbon Loaf: People eat bagels with lox and cream cheese, so there's nothing inherently yucky about this; I think it's just the form factor that's off-putting. Also, if I were making this, I'd savory up the cream cheese a bit with onion and/or garlic powder.

8. Atora Cup Steak Puddings: I think the icky factor here is that the cups are made of suet, which makes me wonder if they're as icky-seeming to our British friends as they are to Americans? But more importantly, before I noticed that it was suet, my brain parsed the molds as "mashed potatoes" -- and now I can see making individual shepherd's pies by lining muffin cups with mashed potatoes, adding a scoop of filling, and baking.

16. Ah yes, the Banana Candle which has been discussed here many times before. Made especially phallic in this incarnation by the drippy sploot running down the sides.

20. Igloo Meat Loaf: Even they admit that this one doesn't belong in the same class with the others; it's like my putative shepherd's-pie tarts turned upside down, is all. I notice that the recipe doesn't include instructions for how to get the mashed potatoes completely smooth and carve in the "snow block" lines, which would take a fairly steady hand. OTOH, it might also be interesting to carve actual "bricks" out of slices of raw potato and position them by hand over the meat before cooking.

Carol Kimball: Malone, NY was Almanzo's boyhood home. It's very close to the Canadian border. It would be about an eight-hour road trip for me, and I'm tempted.

"Plum Creek" mostly corresponds to Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

The "forty miles from Independence" site in Kansas (not actually forty, more like thirteen, according to the biography I've got) is the one from "Little House on the Prairie". Laura was younger when they were there than she's presented in the books.

And, reviewer snark aside, it's always possible that some later occupant could have chosen to fill in a previous well in favor of a newer one more conveniently sited, right?

Jacque #392, quoting Xopher Halftongue @373: not a composter, but I read up on it a while back, and one thing they stressed was never to put meat in the compost. Not sure why, though it strikes me that attracting scavenger-predators is probably not a good thing.

Jacque herself:
The scavenger-predator thing is part of it, but my understanding is that back-yard composting doesn't get hot enough to cook out any pathogens. Industrial-grade composting (such as Boulder County's facility) does. I gather it's a matter of surface-to-volume ratio.

Me: we have a local business, East Side Compost Peddlers, that comes round on bicycles every week or so and collects your compost. I would have said they were doing a large enough business, but they don't want any meat anything of any description. So either they're super-picky on theological reasons, or they're still just not large enough.

Benjamin Wolfe #399: Seconding the Brother printers. They're cheap enough that spouse and I each have one. We're each on our second one in six or eight years, but only because of Close Encounters of the Lightning Kind. (Killed the Ethernet card in one and the wireless card in the other. Totally separate occurrences.) (We now have a whole-house surge suppressor.)

#418: I would have no problem eating some of those. The igloo and the ribbon loaf in particular. Way off the chart fat-colorie wise, but not objectionable.

But sheesh, that shrimp-encrusted gelatin mold, and the bologna log with pea Jell-O inside. Oye.

Wok on electric stove: Thank you all for suggestions and ideas. I have a flat bottomed wok-like pan, but it has a nonstick surface and I don't like subjecting nonstick surfaces to high heat.

Clifton @398, I have cast iron pans. I will stir-fry with enthusiasm. Thank you.

Bologna log with pea jello:

I'm reminded of Peg Bracken's I Hate To Cook Book, wherein one chapter was
Luncheon For The Girls, or wait till you taste Maybelle's peanut butter aspic.

*shudders*

Jenny Islander @212: Really, the British Wizarding World was like one ingrown backwater small town spread over umpteen square miles.

That's exactly what it is. By my calculations, the total population of Wizarding Britain is probably less than 5000.

Lee @418 re: "beef suet cups"
The cups are mostly flour, mixed with fat as binder and some leavening, then shaped and baked. When lives consisted of a lot of hard labor, bodies craved fat, hence so many suet-based puddings. Lard is my preferred pie crust fat (I am an omnivore, believe animal fat is animal fat be it suet, lard or butter - though I don't go whole hog on it very often - and don't have cholesterol issues). Those puppies look more obscene than the "candles".

Rikibeth - thanks for the LH geography. Companion books such as Jane Duncan's Letter from Reachfar are da bomb. I have several for O'Brian such as the Lobscouse cookbook and will have to hunt up the LH one (saw a library? copy years ago). The only one extant for the Ingalls may be that "posthole" article.

Composting meat subthread:

You can compost animal products--it takes lots of sawduct or comparable carbon-heavy medium. The problem is that there is no way to keep it from stinking. (Composting is one of the officially approved ways of disposing of small-scale slaughtering waste when home-butchering chickens, and of dead chickens in commercial growing operations.)

Re: John McWhorter & Commas (Dave @ 295, Sumana @ 407)

I'd like to echo Sumana's point (although in my case I was a TA for McWhorter when he was at UC Berkeley, not a student of his). He specializes in linguistic studies of the up-to-the-minute vernacular and is very much a pragmatic descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. Saying that we could probably get by ok without commas most of the time is a bit different from saying we should do away with them entirely.

Stefan, #413: I'm with Lee #418, in fact I'd say the writer should be ticketed for unwarranted snark.

For starters, some of those dishes probably are still showing up at Southern potlucks, notably the jello salads. Those molds, loaves, and rolls are purely a matter of culinary fashion -- it's just giving things a shape instead of plopping stuff into a big bowl.

Also, the Bologna-Pea loaf is advertised as "low point-cost", which probably means WW2 rationing. I'm betting several of the other recipes are likewise responses to wartime shortages. And those suet cups just represent attitudes from before modern cardio-awareness, with older dietary patterns. ("Red meat isn't bad for you... fuzzy blue-green meat, that's bad for you." ;-) )

@SamChevre no. 417: Someone developed a way to compost dog feces at Alaskan dog yards, using sawdust from the woodpile as a carbon source--and putting the resultant mess inside a recycled fuel drum or piece of large pipe to contain the stench!

Carol Kimball (426): Companion books such as Jane Duncan's Letter from Reachfar are da bomb.

Ooooo, someone else who reads Jane Duncan! ::bounces with excitement::

Dave H., #429: In point of fact, those jello-and-cottage-cheese things are the only way that I find cottage cheese at all edible. I wonder if "low point cost" might have been early Weight Watchers? But rationing is probably the answer. Also, a high-fat diet isn't bad for your heart/arteries unless you're also eating heavy on the carbs. There's research to demonstrate that, but you'll never see it in diet books.

Jenny @ 430: The outhouses near campsites in Volcano National Park where I was backpacking last summer are now replaced with composting toilets; you dump a scoop of sawdust down them when you're done. They were completely free of the usual outhouse cesspit stench; it was a pleasure to use them. Since they're built as a tower above what must be a tank of some kind, you also get a nice breeze and a fabulous view as a bonus.

The bologna / pea-jello horror was almost certainly a wartime dish. Look at the little illustration; the proud hosts are welcoming two service people into their home.

Two service people who will, presumably, go back to the barracks swearing never to think harshly of S.O.S. again.

Thank you all for the information on composting meat.

I'm surprised my landlady didn't know that! Or maybe she just realized I didn't use much and threw away even less. I can't bear to waste meat. It's bad enough the little animals die for us without us wasting the product.

Mary Aileen @ 163: That's it! (I knew my web-fu was nothing to speak of, but I'm croggled somebody found it so quickly from a misdescription.)

Xopher @ 250: I recall a science-column answer on where the Great Plains came from; there isn't enough rain to support forests. IIRC, much of the Brazilian "entrepreneurial" destruction of rain forest is producing pasture, but that's not something we can control.

Jenny Islander @ 266: there's a big difference between raising cattle for local food and raising them so people a thousand miles away can have all the Big Macs they want.

Iniquisitive @ 310: by my experience, the mean diopter of bifocals/progessives is not reliably satisfactory for computer glasses; I suffered with this effect until I got an ophthalmologist who would actually measure what I needed at a computer distance, in addition to reading and pseudo-infinite distances. The difference isn't huge, but it's enough to be a problem.

Carol Kimball @ 366: IMO the snark was unjustified; did the snarker know for certain what weathering would or wouldn't do to a well in that environment? Traces of low-tech settlement can vanish quickly under the right (wrong?) circumstances.

Nancy L @ 371 (and followups): I've read of another chain (Bertucci's?) that got in serious trouble because the individual waitron didn't realize/parse/... that pesto would trigger a fatal nut allergy. I wouldn't assume any \particular/ big food chain would have been careful enough before the resulting court case, especially since it might have required treating the waitstaff like people -- instead of interchangeable parts, as I understand some chains commonly do. After the court case, maybe. Or maybe Cheesecake Factory decided that using \all/ the effects of close process management actually made economic sense?

Clifton @ 398 (re cast-iron pan for wokkery): wasn't there a link here ~recently reporting that cast iron really wasn't that good at distributing heat evenly?

Chris @ 425: I'm not sure I believe just 5000 Potterverse wizards in the UK; were >>90% of the people at the major quidditch match (that began #4) non-UK? (IIRC, it was a huge stadium even in the book.) IME, people can be small-minded even in a large population; Rowling reflects this in Temporary Vacancy, and may have been thinking of it when she made some of her characters so purblind.

The discussion on meat-like vegan flavor didn't bring up "umami", aka the fifth taste. I recall this being a news spurt about a decade ago, and thought it was found to be a form of savor associated with meat but findable in non-meat products/processing. Was there any research on effective vegan ways to do this, or am I misrecollecting the term or its utility?

Congratulations to Terry -- and is there interest in a Fluorospheric get-together at Boskone? I'll be entangled in setup until well into Friday and have no idea what in the neighborhood is reasonable AND tasty AND suitable for people's constraints; maybe Saturday before dinner time for liquids and optional nibbles at the lobby bar?

I'll be at Boskone and would be interested in a Fluorospheran meet-up. However, I am having dinner with my niece on Saturday evening. However, however, a pre-dinner meetup at the lobby bar could work.

HLN: My husband was warned in December that he was likely to be losing his job. This was confirmed in early January, with him on the job until the end of January with a not-unreasonable severance package. As it turns out, he is starting a new job next week, for a little more money, about a quarter of the commute, and tasks that are much more up his alley than the previous one. (The last time he was job hunting, when a start-up went belly-up about 4 years ago, he was unemployed for 11 months and took the just-vacated position, which has never been a great fit, so this is a vast improvement.)

In related news, as I was posting flyers about the Singing Valentines for sale through my women's barbershop chorus, he suggested he should send a quartet to his old office to sing, "Roses are red, Violets are blue, I'm better off without you."

CHip 436: Well, we could stop the conversion of rainforest into pastureland, but not without a war.

Mushrooms are umami, and so is seaweed (though I hate seaweed). I believe MSG is an umami enhancer.

I like my nieces take on those odd food offerings:

"Eeewww. Those don't look appetizing at all! Just very creative and ambitious haha."

It is true: They ARE creative and ambitious. A hell of a lot of work that shouldn't be discounted, even if the end result looks Cthulhuish.

Speaking of felines and laps, there must have been something strange in the air today -- all of the cats not only wandered by to sit and cuddle, they actually stayed within arms reach all day (they normally retreat to some point that's Not Visible to the OTHER CATS!)

Chiming in on the restaurants being responsible about food allergies: due to my mother's intolerance for onion (causes nasty unwanted effects like bleeding), we have always discussed this with waitrons. Recently, at a Maggiano's restaurant (a chain serving Italian food), we were very pleasantly surprised when the waiter brought a chef to the table to discuss her food options. Nothing second-hand; all up front and detailed so he wouldn't accidentally contaminate her food. It was a very positive experience.

I just want to say thank you for the vegetarian recipe discussion. I want to shift to a more plant based diet for health reasons, and now I have some places to start!

I kind of feel like I'm chucking too many comments in here, but I wanted to add one more...

I *so* wish we could have had a place for my mother like the "Dementia village" abi highlighted. She still would not have been entirely happy there, what with wishing to be back in her own house, but I think she would have been vastly happier than she was in the couple facilities where she spent her last few years. She was far from being able to function on her own; she couldn't have lived as she thought she wanted to; but she needn't have been as miserable as she was, and could have lived with so much more dignity in the setting that article describes.

Carol Kimball: I also own a travel guidebook to the various Little House sites. If I planned to visit any of them, I'd have to check for updated information - I believe it came out in the 1990s - but, at the time of publication, it appeared that everywhere that she had lived (and Almanzo's boyhood home) had some sort of acknowledgement of the fact.

The suet cup puddings: suet is the classic fat for raised/freestanding pie crusts. Lobscouse and Spotted Dog has detailed instructions on making a hot water paste to form the freestanding "coffins"; hot water paste was often considered only semi-edible, because it was very tough. Tender, flaky piecrusts used cold water and lard, and weren't sturdy enough to be baked outside a dish, and certainly not sturdy enough to withstand having hot stock or gravy poured in through a hole in the top. The Atora recipe uses suet, cold water, and a form-retaining dish, so it's pretty clearly a compromise crust; in fact, it's a fairly traditional steak-and-kidney pudding where they're emphasizing the benefits of making multiple small units instead of one giant one.

My household went vegetarian before I had a good chance to experiment with freestanding suet crust. I *did* make a traditional suet-based Christmas boiled pudding once, prior to that, and it was FANTASTIC. The article-writer is clearly counting on readers being grossed out by the very mention of suet, and associating "pudding" only with milk custard.

I've given some thought to trying a freestanding crust based on vegetable shortening, but my experiments with shortening-based jam roly-poly haven't been entirely satisfactory, and I'm reluctant to put in the effort if it's going to be doomed from the start. I know Crisco isn't going to be suitable, because it was designed from the start to mimic the properties of lard, both for pie crust and deep frying. What I ought to do is look up the melting point of suet as opposed to lard, and see if pure palm oil (my Spectrum Organic solid shortening) is comparable. I can already tell empirically that palm oil is stiffer at room temperature than Crisco, just as suet is stiffer than lard, so it might have a chance.

A little bit ago:

Cell phone: RING!

Me: "Hello? . . . Hello?"

Young woman: "Hey, did you hear the good news?"

Me: "Huh?"

Young woman: "I'm pregnant!"

Me: "Uh . . . who is calling?"

Young woman: "Don't you see the Caller ID?"

Me: "It says 'Withheld.' Could I ask who you are trying to reach?"

Young woman: "Grandpa."

Me: "Sorry, you've reached the wrong number. This is xxx-xxxx."

CLICK!

Could this have been the beginning of some kind of scam? A variant of the "I'm in jail in Canada!" call to a grandparent?

Mushrooms and umami -- ISTR that shiitake mushrooms are particularly strong in umami. That in addition to MSG enhancing it.

I have been preparing steamed vegetables in great batches once a week. Carrots, onions, canned yams, and a quadruple handful of spinach. I mix them with olive oil and minced garlic, then parcel them into cottage cheese containers and microwave them.

One thing I need to learn how to do is prepare my own yams to dump in the steamer. Part way boil them? Bake them?

436
Mushrooms work for umami; tomato paste also will help. Or so I understand.

CHip @436: Cast iron is a funny beast. It can do well, some people swear by it, but it's way more trouble than it's worth for me. In fact, my cast iron fry pan would probably be the first pan to go in a kitchen pruning.

Compared to aluminum, for a given volume, cast iron stores half as much heat, (by weight, it's different, it stores 1.5x the heat of aluminum, but there's no way that you're going to have pans of equal weight). I'm seeing my Al/Stainless Clad pans are about 1/2 the thickness of the cast iron, so they have roughly the same heat capacity.

The kicker is that cast iron conducts heat 4x slower. (~55 W/MK vs 200W/MK for Al). I think in reading that, there's an additional factor of 2 because of the thickness, though the stainless cladding will affect that somewhat.

Personally, I find that cast iron is slow to heat, and slow to change heat. There's a hole in the center of the pan where it's just not as hot due to the center of the electrical burner. You've got to start it hot, so you risk scorching, but if you manage to crash the temperature, it takes a long time to bring it back up. It's kind of like a big truck that way. they get really annoyed if you kill their momentum. And then they're not as non-stick as non-stick, and not as easy to clean as stainless.

I've got a large cast iron fry pan that I wanted to use as a main, everyday sort of pan. I tried to make it work for years, and I'm done with it. It's not seasoned well enough to do eggs, and even if it was, I wouldn't be able to do the cheffy-flip with them. It's reactive, so tomatoes are out. And it just doesn't do fried rice well. Heck, it didn't even deep fry tofu cubes well. So, I've got a good non-stick egg pan that does eggs only. (well, two, a 10 and a 12", but I could live with one.). I've got a large non-stick saute (square sided) that makes wonderful fried rice in big enough batches to feed the family. And a 12" Al/stainless fry that's the workhorse for everything else.

I use cast iron. But for very specific tasks. One, oven roasting since I do not want to put the non-stick in there at 350F or above. And it cleans up easier than a sheet pan. Also for broiling. Two, cornbread. And three, enameled cast iron Dutch oven for stews and soups.

Re meat in compost: The decay cycle is different. Most people don't actually have a composting pile, so much as a very slow leaf-mold generator. Adding meat to that will interupt the cycle.

If you have a working pile (the sort which steams, and can get to temps which cause cumbustion of dry matter on the surface, adding meat in that part of the cycle isn't a big deal.

Cygnet: I'd use a disffusing plate (to even out the localised heat from the ring) and probably get a cast iron wok (which Lodge makes, with a flat-bottom, and an actual hemispheric interior). The carbon steel one's are crap, and aluminum is too prone to heat dumping, which means (even with it's greater ability to store heat, per unit of mass, the ability to keep it hot as you move foods through, some of which have high moisture content, and so suck up a lot of heat) it's harder to maintain temperature; which is exacerbated by the inability of electric stoves to quickly change the rate of heat they deliver.

eric: Re Aluminum and heat (I used to be a machinist, and have spent the past few years selling kitchen wares). Aluminum's heat capacitance/release is variable, depending on the alloy. It's also both soft (even in the hard alloys, such as the 7000 series, which is at the lower end of heat retention), so that it feels unpleasant when using metal implements.

The steel on the inside and outside of the pans is crappy at heat retention, and between the steel and the aluminum is usually a layer of something else to help with the bonding between the two.

So while your pan may be half the thickness of a your cast iron the actual aluminum is probably not as much as you've estimated (in the thicker pans at my work, with the largest slab of aluminum there is still as much as 1/5th the total thickness in non-aluminum materials).

I have a variety of pans, and still prefer my cast iron (both plain and enameled), but I use a gas burner, and so I have a lot more control of my heat supply; esp. as I can use a diffusing plate if I need to make sure I don't have a hot ring right over the flames.

Seasoning is one of those things some people are better at than others and another place where an electric heating element works against cast iron.

Stefan, #446: And this would be why I don't answer calls with no number attached. :-)

I also frequently don't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize unless I'm expecting a call. If it's anything I need to hear about, they'll leave a message -- and if I look up the mystery number and the first Google hit is 800-notes.com, that number goes straight into the block list.

Oh. My.

This is 'What does the fox say' in Old English and I dearly want to call it "Hwæt sæġþ sē Siax" (with apologies for my inability to write the language, although I can kinda struggle through reading it).

Thanks, Ingvar. Parheliated, because awesome.

Sumana Harihareswara #407: ZaReason: Hmm. Their middle-of-the-road looks promising, but yeah, if I want Windows I need to add it on -- and from what I recall, that means replacing the original Linux with Windows first, then reclaiming some of the disk for Linux.

On the other hand, a casual look suggests that nowadays Windows itself is selling for under $100 -- If so that's great, but this is a fraction of what I remember. Am I being confused by upgrade prices or something?

I use a cast-iron frying pan as my go-to cooking vessel, for everything including acidic foods. (I'm prone to anemia, and having a little iron leach into my food is a feature, not a bug.)

But the thing it is absolutely BEST at is making cornbread. Put pan, with butter, in cold oven and let it stay there as the pre-heat cycle begins, till the butter is thoroughly melted. Swirl butter around till it coats the bottom and halfway up the sides. Pour in batter, return to oven, cook as per recipe directions. The crust is PERFECT.

CHip @436 and Mary Aileen: I'll also be at Boskone. Saturday, I expect to have dinner some time between 18:00 and 20:00; does that match up with the proposed gathering?

I'm not willing to try cast iron because the special treatment is too much for me. In related news, while trying to clean slash season her cast-iron pan, my roommate started a grease fire. It turns out both our ways of putting out grease fires are wrong, according to the internet; they are not left out of the lists but specifically mentioned as things not to do (I was taught 'damp towel, not dripping' and she was taught 'smother with flour').

Cast iron is one of those topics where I am wary of assholes; I had a friend once refuse to give me her cornbread recipe because I admitted I didn't have a cast-iron skillet to cook it in. I wasn't raised with it and having one single item in the kitchen that cannot be treated like any of the rest is too much trouble for me.

It's going to be a few years before I buy more than a single replacement pot, anyway. No reason to get too me-blamey for not having the right things.

Umami: the best reference I know is Barbara's series on Tigers and Strawberries. (The site is poorly indexed, so I'm linking the search to get the umami series.)

RE:Boskone--I can't attend the convention, but if there's a Gathering of Light I would try my best to attend.

iamnothing (458): I'm meeting my niece for dinner at 7:00 (errr, 19:00), but I don't know where yet. So I'm free before that, but only until I have to leave to get wherever-it-is by 7:00.

Friday evening would actually be better for me for a Boskone meetup, but it sounds like CHip may not be available.

(My previous post attempt had a server error; let's see if this one shakes it loose.)

Diatryma #459: It turns out both our ways of putting out grease fires are wrong, according to the internet; they are not left out of the lists but specifically mentioned as things not to do (I was taught 'damp towel, not dripping' and she was taught 'smother with flour').

Ouch. Congratulations on surviving those attempts! For those who haven't been there: Both of those tactics do indeed sound like "now you have two problems". The damp towel seems insufficient, and if so it would wick the grease (town's biggest candle), with some hot steam for a bonus. While a cloud of flour is scary flammable in it's own right....

Diatryma @ #459:

I have a non-stick pan (a Jonelle, I think) that has the same care-for instructions as I learned for cast-iron (that is "don't use detergent; if you do, you need to re-oil the pan" and "once washed, leave on cooling ring to dry quicker; failing that, use a towel to get mostly dry, then paper until dry").

But, I think my liking for cast-iron is solely down to having grown up with cast-iron frying pans. I like the heft and weight of them. I like their aesthetics. I am used to them. That does not make them the right choice for anyone else.

Flour on a fire is a VERY BAD idea - it could potentially explode. Baking soda is what I've always heard as the go-to for a grease fire - you need a lot of it, though.

I understand that experience would make you wary of cast-iron; for others who may be considering them, though, I've found the "special care" is far less than required for, say, Teflon. The major effort is seasoning, and you can now buy pre-seasoned pans; they'd only ever need to be reseasoned if someone seriously abuses them (like attacking them with soap or scrubbers in an attempt to clean them.)

Diatryma @ #459:

My only frying pan is a cast iron one. For what it's worth, I don't treat it that specially: I cook on it, using a metal spatula and moderate quantities of fat, and I avoid soaking it or leaving it wet. That's it. Detergent is fine, but usually not necessary -- right now the pan is smooth enough that eggs don't stick, which is smooth enough for me.

Is it better than alternatives? Maybe not, but I enjoy having a thing that I could bash an orc with. A sword would work for that too, but you can't cook pancakes on a sword. The pan appeals to my inner hobbit.

lorax @465: There's a couple of schools about when a pan is "seasoned".

One school is that a seasoned pan is nearly non-stick when cooking, and that getting a properly seasoned pan required building up many, many layers of polymerized oil on the surface, either from deliberate seasoning cycles or just by using it for cooking stuff in hot oil repeatedly. A pan that has been regularly used for years or decades develops the seasoning over time, and it only gets better.

Another school is that the pan is seasoned when has enough polymerized oil to not rust. This doesn't take much, and provides one of the major benefits of seasoning for cast iron.

Guess which school the "pre-seasoned" pans follow?

One trick I've heard of, but haven't tried, for getting the classic non-stick seasoning cast iron pans of old are know for is to take your pan to a machine shop and have them mill the interior surface smooth and flat. Of course, this removes any existing seasoning, so you have to redo it. Old cast iron was milled smooth, modern is left textured from the sand casting. It apparently makes a difference, and makes the old pans sought after.

On the seasoning of cast iron pans, I found this link interesting but haven't had occasion to use it yet (apologies if someone posted it here originally; I can't remember where/when I found it).

lorax, #465: Now I'm boggling at the idea that non-stick cookware needs a lot of special care. Buy a couple of cheap plastic utensils so as not to scratch the coating; our non-stick pans go thru the dishwasher with everything else. If you don't have a dishwasher, you'd also need to buy a plastic scrubbie. And they last... not forever, but we've got pans that are a couple of decades old and still going strong.

My partner notes that if you're going to cook meat in a cast-iron skillet, you need to have a dedicated one for the purpose, or everything else you cook in it is going to taste of meat. For some people, this might be a feature. :-)

Cast iron pan?
Is that a new Olympic competition?
("I trust that pan as fast as I can cast it.")
Or the boycott of a new Olympic competition?
("Pan the casting of irons!")

FWIW, here are a busy mother's rules for keeping a set of vintage cast-iron pans going:

1. Don't use over high heat. Medium-high is the limit. If you need to boil something, go get the copper-bottomed skillet or the soup pot.

2. Wipe out with a damp paper towel after cooking (and pouring off any usable bacon fat). If there are sticky bits, pour in a glass of water and let it sit until you can get to it.

3. Use the same plastic spatula you used to move the food around to scrape out the sticky bits when you have time.

4. Then scrub the pan with a scrubby sponge or other not-very-rough item and a drop of detergent. Or use a handful of salt, whichever is cheaper. Note: If there weren't any sticky bits, you don't have to wash it out at all.

5. The easiest way to dry it, because cast-iron pans turn towels black, is to put it on a burner or in an oven that you just used and turned off. If you have a lot of paper towels you can use them.

6. Then you can re-season it if you think it needs it. Pour in just a teaspoon of canola oil for a regular-sized skillet, wipe it all around with a paper towel (don't forget the handle), and leave on/in very low heat to dry.

I understand that Lodge's pre-seasoned cast-iron is very good.
If you want to re-season old cast iron, it involves a bottle of flaxseed oil and several cycles of oiling and heating, according to the one cookbook I have that explains how to get that good polymerized-oil finish. You can find it here, by the person who developed it.

My late mother-in-law had a complete set of Le Creuset pans, baking dishes and a stewpot suitable for an infantry regiment. Seasoned? They were veterans, a sort of Old Guard Grognards of cookware.

I have noticed an improvement in my cooking since we inherited them. The only drawback is that they are a little heavy for our admittedly somewhat flimsy cabinets.

Dave Harmon @ 456: Windows has historically had a habit of overwriting the system boot loader with its own, rendering other operating systems unbootable until a more compliant loader was reinstalled. It doesn't generally require reinstalling the other OS completely, provided it's off in its own partition.

If you know from the beginning that you're going to go dual-boot and have Linux installed first, I'd just get two separate hard drives, install one OS to each, and set up Grub to chainload Windows when required. If the Linux hard drive is disconnected while installing Windows, the Windows boot loader can't stomp on it.

~$100 is a fairly normal price at the moment for a full OEM[1] copy of Windows 7 Home Premium or 8.1 not-Pro--other versions, or non-OEM retail-in-box copies will run a bit more, and some retailers may sell for a bit less. I'd be leery of anything that was a lot less, though.

[1] If I recall correctly, the difference between an OEM and a full copy is that Microsoft doesn't provide phone support services for OEM copies, and you're not supposed to be able to transfer them to a new motherboard.

My attempts to set up a dual-boot laptop have failed, as several tries to install Linux failed to create an EFI-bootable Linux system, and a final attempt to try installing a different distribution succeeded, but only by wiping the Windows partitions from my drive without warning. I didn't have much on the Windows system except Steam and Civilizaton III.

I have acquired what my IT guy assures me is a perfectly legal copy of Windows 8.1 and I will try this again, starting from installing Windows first, so it's happy.

Last week I obtained from a dumpster a . . . Dutch oven? A camping model dutch oven, perhaps. A heavy iron pot with a wire handle and a heavy domed lid.

It is in good shape, but the top of the lid worries me. It isn't rusty, but it looks like it wants to.

Can a lid top be seasoned?

Stefan Jones @ #476:

Yes, heat it and oil it (in some order). Any oil works, but I would use a vegetable oil. You probably don't want the heat to be TOO high.

FWIW, it seems to work fairly well to season cast iron with butter or lard, as well. You're essentially looking at making complex hydrocarbon/iron coatings, so "fat" is the key, the specifics, meh.

In the past, I have had decent success using: butter, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil.

Untried: olive oil, lard, ...

Olive oil has a pretty low smoking point, so probably not ideal.

Stefan Jones @466: I had several calls like that in late November/early December. As my cellphone was in my purse in another room I got the voicemail:

"You'd better get to the hospital, Maude is in Room ___."

I have no one among my family and friends named Maude. About a week or so later, I turned my cellphone back on after seeing a film to find another voicemail, same phone number, only that one was about funeral arrangements for "Maude."

I'm still wondering if the person making the call ever found out they have the wrong number.

Lori Coulson @ 479... I blame King Stephen.

Because Ingvar M@454 earwormed me: What Does George Fox Say?

Parheliated!

Signal-boosting for some friends of mine. They are trapped in West Virginia, no job market, no assets, living in an unhealthy dump of a house because it's rent-free. They have friends and relatives in Washington state, and might be able to find jobs there. After liquidating everything they can, they are still short on funds to cover the move, so they're running a fundraiser, offering the only thing they have: handcrafted items.

I've known these folks for over 20 years, and they've had one piece of bad luck after another. They helped me thru the rough patch after my divorce. I've already made a contribution, and now I'm spreading the word. Getting out of the Toxic South could be just the break they need to become self-supporting again.

Stefan Jones @476--absolutely, and what Ingvar said.

I suspect the lid got less in-use seasoning than the pot itself did, which would be why it looks as if rust is not far from its thoughts.

Any higher-smoke point fat will do, depending on your personal preferences, and make sure to get the outside of the pot and both sides of the lid. You could scrub the lid down with some soapless steel wool before oiling, if you're seeing an actual pre-rust bloom.

Also, anyone who might like a different (but beautiful) take on cast iron should google "Iitala cast iron" and see what shows up. Or you could try "potjie"...

Rikibeth@445: My household went vegetarian before I had a good chance to experiment with freestanding suet crust.

I have seen "vegetable suet"—that is, vegetable fats chosen and prepared to be a good substitute for suet in baking—but only the UK or some more-recently-former colonies. Some British importers in the US carry it (here for example). I haven't attempted to make anything particularly sophisticated with it, but I was able to make a passable crust.

#476, Stefan Jones: Sure. Give it a good hearty scrub with soap and water to knock anything off that will come off, hit it with some oil, then put it in the oven for a while. (This is the only time I'll use soap on cast iron.)

Bare iron starts to rust remarkably fast. I bought some unseasoned cast iron a few years back and the initial seasoning instructions said to scrub the storage oil off with soap and water, then coat with food oil and bake. So, I set to scrubbing all 5 pieces with soap and water. By the time I'd finished scrubbing the third one, the first was starting to turn pink-orange with the beginnings of rust. Oops. Re-scrubbed those to knock the rust off, and oiled them immediately before I moved on to the last two.

For further improvement of the seasoning with time, oil it every time you wash it and before you put it away, then that oil will bake in every time you use it. I was also advised to stick a piece of paper towel between the lid and the body so it doesn't seal tightly - if there's any water left inside after drying it, you want that to be able to evaporate and escape.

#478, Lila: Well, that might be why I had to open all my windows when I seasoned my cast iron :)

Thanks for the feedback! I will clean the pot tonight. The how-to site linked to up above suggested flax seed oil, but I will try something cheaper first.

A demonstrator at Costco was showing off avacado oil the other week. Very high heat, as I understand. I don't fry much, but it might be an interesting oil to buy for that purpose. I want to try out fried artichoke hearts.

* * *

It is astonishing, what people throw away.

I can understand tossing the scratched-up non-stick cheap stuff, but I have found some wonderful, sturdy, cookware via dumpster diving through the years. Two examples:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/4519424303/in/set-72157626514833695

That small stock pot is what I steam my vegetables in. Stainless steel, flawless, easy to clean and handle. I have an almost-big-enough steamer for it. Also my go-to pot for pasta. I had to buy a lid at Goodwill.

The skillet there had some baked-on crap. I scrubbed it clean, polished it with rubbing compound, and boiled water in it to excise any cooties. I have an almost identical, larger model that came to me by the same route. They both have thick, thick bottoms with a copper tinge.

dotless i: thanks! I just found an article from a re-enactor cooking blog that explained my suet problem to me, and showed that I was on the right track with the melting point, it's not quite that simple:

http://savoringthepast.net/2013/01/21/suet-part-two-what-it-is-what-it-isnt-and-what-to-look-for/

Suet, as opposed to muscle fat, contains a higher level of a triglyceride known as glyceryl tristearate, otherwise known as stearin. The result is that suet has a higher melting point and congealing point than regular fat.

This little point of trivia is important in order to understand the old English recipes. Suet is grated or picked into small pieces as part of the process of preparing it for cooking. When mixed with other ingredients — let’s say the a batter for a traditional boiled pudding, the particles of suet retain their mass well into the cooking process. When the melting point of suet is finally reached, the surrounding batter has already begun to set. By the time full baking temperature is reached within the pudding, the suet has melted, leaving a void in the batter.

Consequently, the use of suet in such dishes as puddings, dumplings, and mince pie results in a spongy texture.

This is related to but emphatically not the same as the process that makes puff pastry flaky and puffy. In that instance, while you still have the "particles of fat coated with flour" structure, you're using butter, which is typically 20% water by weight. So the fat content melts, soaking into and tenderizing the gluten structure of the flour, but the water turns into steam, and the pressure of the steam forces the layers apart, and you get flakes. Small flakes if you've just made a pie crust to the texture of coarse crumbs before adding water to make it dough, long flat flakes if you've gone through the folding-and-turning process of puff pastries and other laminated doughs.

And here's the blog post again on why my jam roly-poly with vegetable shortening wasn't all I wanted it to be:

The problem is that while vegetable shortening’s melting point is relatively the same as suet, its congealing point is much lower. What that means is this: when we shot the video, we had to freeze the vegetable shortening in order to grate it. Then we had to keep it frozen until the very last second. But even then, the moment we added the grated vegetable shortening to the other ingredients, it lost its mass and acted like room-temperature butter, coating the other ingredients rather than retaining its particle shape. The final result was still a delicious pie, but it didn’t have the desired spongy texture that would have resulted from using suet.

At least I know it failed because SCIENCE!

Oops, italics fail. The first quote from the blog goes up to "spongy texture." The bit about laminated butter doughs is all mine!

@487 Stefan Jones

It is astonishing, what people throw away.

I hate throwing things away. While I don't dumpster dive myself, I don't see a problem with it. Around here, it's fairly normal to see furniture or other large items on a street corner or end of driveway with "Gratuit!" written on it, especially around July 1st (aka, Montreal Moving Day).

When I have stuff I no longer want, it gets offered first to my herd of cousins; if no one wants it, it goes to Entraide (unless it's obviously unusable/unrepairable).

Stefan @487: It should be noted that there are (at least) two different schools of thought regarding the oils for seasoning, and they are clashing in this thread, even in your reply @487.

A lot of people in this thread have been saying use a high smoke point oil or fat for seasoning, and to not heat it high enough to smoke.

On the other hand, a lot of people have been linking to the "science of seasoning cast iron" page, which recommends using flax oil -- a *very* low smoke-point oil -- and heating it until it smokes.

I don't think everyone realizes the contradiction between the advices.

Personally, I believe that, over time, all these methods will work, but some will work faster than others. The flax oil technique was developed to be a *fast* method, giving you a strong, durable, slick seasoning quickly.

The more traditional methods basically boil down to using what you cook with, and cook with the pan a lot. Various oiling and heating protocols simulate cooking a lot with the pan to accomplish the same task rapidly.

Curiously, based on the science presented in the flax article, one could use flax oil to season a pan *without heat*, if one is willing to wait. After all, it's the same polymerization reaction for oil paints and oil finishes for wood, and those don't require baking to cure. Oil finishes usually contain chemicals to speed up the process, but it's not necessary.

#488: Interesting stuff!

I really hope someone develops artery-scouring nanites soon, so I can use and eat more lovely "unhealthy" stuff and not worry about my Levels.

Rikibeth@488: Interesting, and makes sense. As I said, I haven't played that much with vegetable suet beyond an initial trial, so I don't know how well it really approximates the effect of suet in cooking. I do remember it coming pre-grated (with some starch to keep it from reconnecting), so the intention, at least, is to substitute for grated suet.

Tor Books making the Wall Street Journal - cool, but they're a business. But making the A-Head*? That's just awesome!

*That odd little feature story on the lower half of the front page, that's often the best part of the paper -- a lovely bit of jargon to know.

Lila @ #478:

There is that. Probably worth testing at some point, for science.

Buddha Buck @ #491: