Wild rice pancakes

Amanda wanted this...

4 T butter
1 shallot or a good handful of green onions, minced
1 c flour
1 T baking powder
1/2 t salt
3 eggs
1 c milk
2+ cups of cooked wild rice

Cook the wild rice; I made quite a bit and I'm not sure how much went into the batter. Start with at least a cup of dry rice.

Melt the butter and gently saute the onion until it's tender but not discolored.

Mix the dry ingredients. Mix the wet ingredients, including the butter and onion. Combine the wet and the dry, and then add as much rice as you like to the batter. Procede as usual for pancakes.

Roman water wings

In the category of weird stuff that feels like it ought to be an anachronism but isn't, Columella suggests using dried gourds to support children who are learning to swim. Roman water wings; good grief.

Zombie apocalypse

Thank god for insomnia and that wretched conference abstract I had to finish. Academia may not prepare you to deal with the undead, but it might just guarantee that you’re awake when they break through the front door. If I survive this, I’ll never live anywhere with plate glass again.

I’m sitting on the roof now—predictably enough, without either food or shotguns. I’ve got the laptop, though. Stupid thing to grab in a panic. I can hear car alarms going off for blocks, and something’s on fire up north.

Zombies. It’s just so ridiculous, but there they are—shuffling around in the yard, gaping at me. Three, so far. I think one of them used to be my neighbor. I can hear some inside, too, but they don't have the coordination to climb out the bathroom window. I don’t think they could get up the roof even if they did; it’s pretty steep. How long does it take a dead body to fall apart in summer? Will they decompose first, or will I die of thirst up here on the hot roof? Will I get desperate enough to do something stupid? Or will I be stupid enough to wait until I’m desperate? With zombies, all choices are bad ones.

The best possibility: help will arrive. Canonically, this is unlikely. But I’m still hoping this thing is local. The power is still on in most places that I can see from up here. Hurrah for my neighbor’s wireless network. I’m looking at news sites, blogs, anything I can find. A lot of pages won’t load. They’re in Chicago, too, and definitely Madison. Is it only this part of the country? Or are they just trying to keep people calm? I can’t find anything for the east coast at all.

Oh. Gunshots. And screaming.

Help.

Blue moon tonight

The second full moon in the month--i.e., a blue moon--is tonight.

Cat on roof

There's an absolutely lovely, fluffy brown cat sitting on the flat roof of the neighbor's garage, looking faintly offended. I wonder how it got up there? There are enough trees around that it must have climbed up somehow, but I wonder why.

If it's still there in a few hours, I suppose I'll have to go looking for a neighbor with a ladder.

It's days like this when I need a camera.

Trance and hiatus

I'm contemplating moving this blog over to livejournal, which, together with a bout of profound unsociability, is why I haven't been posting. I'd be contemplating this faster if I didn't find livejournal irritating. Anyway, I'll probably do that fairly soon.

In the meantime, I'll merely note that some songs take quite well to being remixed as trance. Toto's Africa, for example, is liquid awesome on the latest DJ Doboy mix that I've been listening to. Really, anything from the 80's is a natural candidate. Others are pleasant surprises. I would not have imagined hippie anthems, heavy on the acoustic, to be natural candidates, but If you're going to San Francisco was on the same mix and was actually really good.

Other songs... not so much. American Pie kinda crashes and burns as trance.

Evin, you recently told me that there's a trance version of pretty much anything you can think of, and I'd imagine that's doubly true of 80's classics. You wouldn't happen to know of a trance version of Land Down Under, would you? Because that song is on the same cd as Africa in my 80's compilations, and now it's stuck. in. my. head.

Also. Narbonic. Why have I not been reading this comic before now?

Big Butter Jesus

Because I told Amanda I would. Hats off to Shannon, who, when I mentioned "the big Jesus statue we saw on I-75", immediately posted a link to this.

Big Butter Jesus

ETA: Oh, gracious. I wonder if the church gets this a lot.

The Teutoberg Forest; a replay. With tanks.

Dear CAMWS,

I have gone on a journey. Please do not look for me.

-Britta

All the flowers came out this week just in time to be killed off by the bitter cold; everywhere, there are gardens full of crumpled tulips and hyacinths. All the daffodills have faceplanted into their beds. It's been flurrying for days, and it just started snowing fairly hard, and I can see the dry snow building up in whorls on roofs and streets and in the cracks of the sidewalk. Brrr. I unsealed all the windows when we had the nice weather last week, so the house is drafty and cold; I'm staying in my study with tea and the space heater going.

I have CAMWS next week, so I'm trying to hack my paper out of the raw tangle of ideas, research, and Cool Stuff that I've built up for it. You can't actually get much into 15 minutes, which is simultaneously frustrating and reassuring.

I've promised myself I can clean the house when it's done.

On the off chance that someone who reads this thing hasn't seen it

The much-linked-to It's Raining Men 300 trailer. This has been much admired around these parts.

Run, little people!

Other cool flash-based web stuff: the UN/ISDR's Stop Disasters! simulation game. Select one of several disaster types, get a map full of tiny houses and people, a budget and a rough timeframe, and try to implement enough preventative measures that not everything is destroyed when your brush fire, hurricane, or earthquake hits. In the tsunami scenario, for example, you might choose to plant mangroves and palm trees along the coast to act as a breakwater, implement community education programs, and raise buildings on stilts.

It's intended to be educational, so they give you a fair amount of condensed information as you go; and there's a lot of emphasis in the game on educational measures and response planning.

I'm particularly fond of the ominous heartbeat sounds which get closer and closer as disaster looms. If only aliens were a possible disaster, a la Sim City.

Wikisky; or, I can see it! I can see the cosmos

Wikisky may well be the coolest amateur astronomy resource on the web. The interface is a bit like Mapquest for the sky: you can plug in your location and find the stars visible over your house at the moment, and you can zoom in and out and drag the map around to center on different objects. There are toggleable constellation and longitude/latitude lines. Hovering over any star will bring up basic data on it, and you can click through to more detailed information. You can also search for specific objects (Mom, I called up the constellation in the picture just for you). And you can click through, in many places, from the digital map to actual photos from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Grad office, fount of classical pastiche

Today I was in the office, taking off my boots, when Richard wandered by and asked,
"Who was that Roman you were talking about the other day? Something wolf?"
"Rutilius Lupus?"
"Yeah, him. Sounds like he ought to be in a choose-your-own-adventure."

I love Richard.
And he was indeed thinking of the Lone Wolf books. I may have to write a choose-your-own-adventure just for him.

In other exciting office procrastination news, Cassie has gotten me started on a Roman version of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, which I may post if I get it done and illustrated.

Happy geek

Ok, I'm just going to be over here making happy little wibbly noises for a while. Don't mind me.

Incoherant shriek of pleasure

Tokyopop is translating the six published Twelve Kingdoms novels. Oh, thank god; now I don't have to learn Japanese just yet.

I suspect I'm not going to like them as much as the anime, and I think the series is also uncompleted; but at least we'll be stranded farther into the story than we were with the anime. And maybe by the time we get to book 6 Fuyumi Ono will have written another one.

Goodness knows, it's a story built for leisurely reading and frequent reference to a glossary, not for galloping subtitles.

Shortpacked

In other news, people who are my brother should go read Shortpacked, which I think people who are my brother would get a kick out of, especially the Transformer, G.I. Joe and Batman (who rarely says anything more than "I'm Batman") jokes. Also ninjas, Katamari, Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, Ranma, My Little Ponies...) The overarching continuity involves a bunch of people working in a toy store, but the pure gag strips are frequent and funny.

Evin, the main character at one point thinks that the image of Roadblock on a poster in his room is staring at him when he tries to sleep. Go read this.

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria

You should all go read The New Adventures of Queen Victoria. It's a clip art webcomic involving the modern rule of Queen Victoria, and it's thoroughly absurd. Characters include the Queen, her son Edward, her servant Maurice, Elizabeth I ("Liz!"), the Virgin Mary, and occasional appearances by people like Teddy Roosevelt, various Victorian poets (any webcomic that references Gerard Manley Hopkins earns my vote right there) and, as of today, Cromwell, who has taken over the strip via computer virus.

I haven't read back through the archives yet, but plotlines are short, ridiculous, and include things like making war on other strips nominated for awards, an ill-fated attempt at product placements, and a "Victorian Idol" show. It's pretty much the exact opposite of everything I usually like, but it's charmingly silly.

"Admit it, mum. You got lost in the basement."
"We did not. The French stole the stairs."

Peep peep peep

Also, I have truly mindblowing amounts of Easter candy since Kathryn and I went to Meijers today.

Unusual embroidery

The CRAFT Magazine blog is generally full of weird goodness. I've just run across an item they had a while back about Subversive Cross Stitch ("33 designs for your surly side"), a book of patterns. You can see some of the designs up on the author's site. It's had to articulate just what is so delightful about the cross stiched motto "Irony is not dead" surrounded by cross stitched bunnies and ducks and hearts, except that it's clearly for those like myself who cringe away a bit from people who act as though any flat and reasonably permeable surface should receive floss embellishment. Actually, I think my favorite is the beautifully framed sampler, with bunnies, and birds holding garlands overhead, which just says "Whatever".

The Cog embroidery, also found via CRAFT some time ago, is just damn cool. I need to find an excuse to embroider cogs on something. Ooh. Maybe I should do a cog skirt.

Cross stitch for total computer geeks.

Red Wolf

Roman names are frequently strange, and from time to time sound like a 15 year old's first attempt at writing fantasy. I've just run accross Rutilius Lupus, whose name ought to mean something along the lines of "Red Wolf".[1] Then there's Rutilius Rufus, which is something like "Reddish Red".


[1]Evin: I can't shake the feeling that he ought to be in a choose-your-own-adventure.

Red Wolf, you are pursued by three centurions and their Xaphhixxian, a poisonous lizard-like guard animal. You easily outdistance the men, but you hear the xaphhixxian's claws on the cobbles, steadily gaining on you. Ahead of you is the forum; tiny side-streets branch off on either hand.

If you want to run into the forum, turn to 346.
If you want to run down the side street, turn to 72.
If you want to turn and fight, turn to 9.
If you have the Crystal Fasces, turn to 65.
If you possess the skill of Oratory, turn to 33.

Excellent and unusual chai recipe

This one has some unusual touches. The ground almonds(!) give it a pleasantly silty texture, and I haven't seen any other chai recipes that include saffron.

2 1/2 c water
2 1/2 c milk
a pinch of powdered cinnamon
4 whole green cardamom pods
3 cloves
a pinch of saffron
2 T almonds
2 t green tea
1/3 c sugar

Boil the water, add the cinnamon, cardamom and cloves and simmer them together for about 5 minutes. Take the pot off the heat, add the tea and saffron and let it steep for 3 minutes. Add the milk and reheat. Powder or grind the almonds and add them and the sugar to the mixture. Give it a few minutes to let the almonds flavor the tea, and drink. This makes about 4 servings.

Unrelated but amusing facts

If you have to pick a food to be allergic to, I suppose the world's most radioactive food isn't a bad choice.

Plerumque nubila, fors carnis frustorum

I've just discovered that Weather Underground will display the weather in Latin. That's just cute.

Conference

Wow. Our conference went well--we had a bunch of interesting and nice speakers, everyone got here ok, and the talks went well. We had (thanks to the fabulous Kathryn) spare rooms and rides for everyone who wanted them and the food (thanks to the fabulous Amanda) was great. Our moderators moderated with grace and aplomb. I hosted a really nice German student who took the bus over from Indiana. Our keynote speaker wins the Badly Behaved Guest award, but we already knew he was a doofus. And there were two ASCSA people at the conference, one of them giving a talk and the other one just visiting (aka spying on us for Cincinnati). It was good to see them.

My cold came back with a vengence, and I didn't sleep at all Thursday night--not ideal timing for our Fri/Sat event. I'd mostly lost my voice by Friday afternoon, so I was glad to get my brief speaking bit out of the way and let everyone else talk for the rest of the weekend. The good part is that the cold medicine I bought has been knocking me out thoroughly enough to reset my internal clock to some sort of normal schedule. Hooray! I ought to take cough syrup every night.[1]

I've spent most of the last three days reading and napping in bed. It's bitter out and snowing fiercely, so I'm just as happy to stay in and catch up on fun reading. I finally got to Diana Wynne Jones' latest, The Pinhoe Egg.

Two people left the conference saying they wanted to try to start one of their own back at their home universities, so I'm going to send along my notes on the process when I finish writing them up.


[1] Though I've reached the point at which I have to stand there staring at the cup for a minute or two before working myself up to actually drinking the stuff. Ugh. It's the most clearly non-organic ingestible I've ever run across.

Hosting

OK. Hosting someone again. Resume cleaning.

ETA: Someone different.

Flaky guest

Ok, the person I was supposed to be hosting found a friend to stay with. On the one hand: I don't have to finish cleaning the house. On the other hand: Hey! I already cleaned most of the house for you.

Also: back to anxiety dreams about waking up Saturday morning.

Note to every last person I encountered today and many I did not

Jesus Christ, are you people annoying.

Conference clothing

I went out today and bought clothes for the upcoming conferences that I'm either arranging or going to; I found two nice suits, in a much less painful process than I was expecting. Shoes are another matter; I think I'm stuck with my brown ones for our conference, since I don't have time to go out again before Friday.

It appears to have been my day to get lucky with sales; both suits were originally $280, and I got them for, well, a whole lot less than that. I'm in good shape for upcoming stuff I need formal clothing for. Also: $175 velvet jacket for ten dollars. Go me.

It's so cold here that ther house keeps crackling; the windows and doors make creaky popping sorts of noises from time to time.

Nnng

Not. sleeping. sucks.

Logically, I know that drinking tea hot enough to sterilize my tonsils will not actually help me feel better. But it does have a certain appeal right now.

Abstract

This abstract would be easier if I could rememer whether the poster said they wanted a paragraph, or a page. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow when I'm in the office.

Brrrrr

It's -3° out. That garbage is not getting taken out tonight.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to cobble together an abstract for an academic conference on collections. Something about Varro and agricultural tourism, but as always, I'm having trouble getting beyond "Look at this nifty stuff I can point out."

The "And now I'm going to tell you something really cool" theory of narrative works better for novels than academic papers, which require, you know, conclusions and theses. And stuff. Though it's better than the "And now I'm going to tell you something really boring" approach that some presenters appear to take. Useful-but-boring is certainly a necessary category of academic endeavor--we need things like app crits and books on Athenian prosopography--but it's best relegated to printed matter. If people are going to be trapped in a room listening to you, you'd better have something interesting to say.

Actually, similarities between structuring a novel and dissertation have been occurring to me recently. My dissertation appears to lack a clear narrative arc, and has too many subplots.

Maybe I need to introdce a romantic interest. Or explosions.

Bleh

It's 6° out, I'm sick, and I'm very much afraid that I'm going to have to host one of the conference speakers. Which I was hoping not to need to do, but fine; although inflicting my rather far-from-campus and germ-ridden apartment on someone when it's 6° out seems unfair.

Also, I have to go to the dentist tomorrow. Bleh.

Off to wait for Kathryn to get back from church so I can confer about the hosting situation.

Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more...

I enjoy a lot of webcomics, but it's a form with particularly visible amateur content and a certain premium on weirdness. At its best, this can work out very well. Megatokyo has a beautifully odd logic at times (I'm particularly fond of the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division). Or Digger, the story of a lost wombat engineer (which has really lovely black and white pen and ink illustrations).

At it's worst, it's like watching someone straining too hard to be funny. There are a lot of comics that want to impress you with how weird! random! they are and generally involve ninjas, video game clip art, college students, or all of the above.

Weird is really hard to force. Random college freshmen with pink hair, goth lesbian roommates and aliens in their attics are not weird. That's striving to be indy or literary, sensibilities which are not inherently weird. The nonsequential adventures of video game sprites in modern Cleveland is not weird. That's random. Unpredictability is not inherently weird. That strip with the pen and ink on collage backgrounds, with the guy with bird feet and liberal use of the infinite canvass? That's surreal, which is a different ballgame. Surreal can be pretty weird, but it's really hard to do well (and really hard, I suspect, to tell when you've nailed it and when you haven't).

It's the amateur part of the equation. Most of the people producing webcomics at this point aren't professionals; most of them are people trying their hand at the medium in their spare time. Try any medium, and you've got a lot of cliches to get out of your system before you're producing really good work. (And in this particular endeavor, you have both writing and drawing to improve at.) Fair enough--I love that it's become easy for anyone who feels like it to put their first story up on the web. The problem with it here is the high community value often placed on weird. Cliche is the anti-weird, so it's an aesthetic that doesn't work well in a lot of amateur work.

A truly weird story can be powerfully coherent, internally logical and wholly alien. It has rules of its own that you don't know about. Faux-weird, wannabe-weird is the class clown. True weird is straight man in a different universe.

I started thinking about the parameters of strangeness after stumbling onto Antique White House, which has to be one of the most seductively bizarre things I've ever read. It's... well. It's set in an alternate universe in which JFK rules the United Territories of America from a white house set in an idyllic pastoral landscape with the help of his companion animal spirits.[1] In what I've read so far, the plot involves the theft of some of his royal regalia by another country, Saxetia, clearly meant to be an analogue of a very rural Nazi Germany.[2]

And... it works. It's really a very good story which makes me want to keep reading. But it works partly because it's played absolutely straight. The author isn't trying to convince me of how weird she is. Believe me, she doesn't have to.


[1]And his four wives and two husbands. One of whom has a tail.

[2]One of the few tethers this has to the reality I grew up in is that the author has, I think, read the same Tintin books that I have. There's a faint resemblance to King Ottakar's Scepter in the premise of the first arc.

Tagging e-mail

Tags seem to be the latest thing for blog posts, news stories, etc. I do wish there were a way to tag e-mail so that you could automatically sort responses as they come in- it would save me a lot of headaches and when I forget to copy e-mails regarding the conference into a separate inbox.

Connected!

I can finally get on the wireless network in the classics department! Oh, I am so happy I could just spit. I can actually get work done in the office. Library catalogue! JSTOR! E-mail! Music to work to! It was a good day.

Package

Thanks, Mom! The post office tried to deliver the first package today. (I wasn't here, so they didn't leave it-they're going to come back with it.)

Yay backup drives!

Tomato, cheese and onion tart

Tart dough

1 c flour
1/4 t salt
6 T cold butter
1/4 cup of cold water, or more as needed

Mix the flour and salt together, cut in the butter, and sprinkle cold water over and toss it with a fork until it hangs together. Gather the dough into a ball, press it into a 1/2 inch thick disc and wrap it in plastic. Refrigerate at least half an hour to chill it.

Filling
1/2 cup grated parmesan, plus a bit extra for sprinkling
1/2 cup shredded Gruyere (or another hard cheese; in a pinch, just use more parmesan)
1/2 medium red or white onion; I used red
1 large or two small tomatoes, about 6-8 oz worth
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil

1-2 T fresh herbs, optional but recommended. Use tarragon, marjoram, parsley, basil, etc., alone or in combination. I liked cilantro for this.

Heat the oven to 400 F, with a rack in the lower third.

Roll out the dough to a very thin (about 1/16 inch) disk, 14 inches across. Lay it on a baking sheet. It's all right if it hangs over the edge a bit at this point. If there's room, stick it back in the refrigerator or freezer until you need it.

Mix your two cheeses together. Slice the onion as thin as you can get it, and the tomato into fairly thin rounds. Spread half of the cheese mixture over the dough, leaving an inch or two uncovered all around the edge. Spread the onion over the cheese, add the tomato on top of that, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add the other half of the cheese mixture and drizzle olive oil over the top of the filling. Fold the dough at the edges up and over the filling. You'll have to pleat it here and there; don't worry, this isn't supposed to be elegant looking. Brush the exposed dough with oil and sprinkle a little parmesan on it.

Bake 35-40 minutes, until the crust is golden (check the bottom to make sure it's browned, too). Serve it warm, with the fresh herbs chopped and sprinkled on top. This reheats well in the oven.

Grad conference

Our keynote speaker for the conference is not a helpful man. We've been trying to get in touch--since December!--to set him up with plane tickets and a hotel room and find out if he needs av equipment, but no luck. He doesn't respond to repeated e-mails from two of us, he doesn't pick up his office phone, and he doesn't reply to messages left on it to call us back. We tried calling the Cornell classics department , and the secretaries there say that they've spotted him recently, so he's not--as we were worried he might be--off digging in Cyprus. In a fit of desperation, I just tried his home number, which doesn't appear to work.

It's kind of reassuring to know that you can be as flaky as a buttered biscuit and still be a respected classicist. On the other hand, I wish he'd get back to us.

Back

Sorry for the lack of blogging, but I've had trouble logging in ever since they switched to Blogger beta--I haven't been able to get on at all the last week.

Britta 1, refrigerator 0

Ha! I defrosted that sucker but good. Had to unbolt the freezer to do it, but I no longer have to knock chunks of ice off before I can open the door.

Really, it's the worst-designed fridge I've ever seen.

Home remedies

Dear Cato,
I know you like cabbage a whole lot, but it will not actually cure a dislocated limb. Sorry about that.

Love,
Britta

TAs eaten by grues

My love of the hour: a clever parody of Zork in which a TA explores a student's term paper.

Let It Rain-And then I was eaten by a grue

>n
You head north.

Introduction
A strange place, this. The decoration tends towards the chintzy, and pattered wallpaper on a vague-generalisations theme is everywhere you look. At the centre of the room, a Clumsy Restatement of the Essay Question holds pride of place.

>look for thesis statement
Okay, I'll humour you on this one. Where do you want to look for this 'thesis statement' of yours, in a first-year essay, in the dreaded Batch #3, written by a student whose previous two essays just scraped a pass?

>read TA contract
TA Contract, paragraph 5.2(b): "Any grumbling, weeping or tearing out of hair that is not actively homicidal in nature is considered par for the course, sucker."

>sigh
Indeed.

>look under lampshade
Which lampshade, the fake-satin lampshade of irrelevant biographical detail or the frilly velvet lampshade of waffle?

>look under frilly lampshade
You find a thesis statement clinging to the underside of the lampshade. It is very small and appears to be ashamed of itself.