For here is another blog, named after Mississippi towns.
There's only a movie review there at present, but I had fun with that. A blogroll and whatnot should follow on tomorrow. Now, my computer craves power and I crave bed.

This blog is going on indefinite hiatus.
I adore you all and will continue to comment upon things as before.
I want to start another blog, and when that's ready I'll post it here.

In 1987, Time Warp, a German company, released a game for Amiga and Commodore 64 called The Great Giana Sisters. The name alone must have been enough to set a warm bloom in the heart of Nintendo's lawyers, to say nothing of the box art.



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I took the Massachusetts bar, my first one. I post this warily, as doing so publicly may require me to acknowledge subsequently that I failed the fuck out of it. If so, then, I would apparently be in good company, considering all the purposeful dual-career people the age of my parents who were there for the second time. I am currently about to go to a hotel in Chelsea, where I'll stay for a few days as I check out the area. Stories of horrible things happening in Chelsea are solicited, although I can't find any. I wish I could hose about forever on the free internet, but alas it is not to be. I may get to post later, though.

Request for information, quite unrelated: I might decide to get myself something, and currently I'm fascinated with this creepy bastard. Where's the best place to start with the Silent Hill games? And what are they like -- a turn-based RPG, a shooter, what? If they're anything like Myst, I may have to pass, because just wandering around in a mysterious world got me nowhere.

Life involves studying. Oh God, the studying.

I received a box of cookies in ryenna's big cookie swap, and they are just outstanding -- lemon pecan dainties, Earl Grey cookies (teacakes indeed!), and lemon cranberry biscotti. I've sent mine out; I made double-chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, from a Cook's Illustrated recipe. I got to use Penzeys cocoa. They're a little chewy and messy, but basically it is chocolate flavor that punches you in the mouth and never stops hitting, because it loves you, because you love it, because it is the chocolate.

I have medical issues, one of which may eventually involve a tiny camera. God, I hope not. I'm going to the doctor to make sure about that today. The other is my back pain, an injury incurred by . . . sitting. Seriously. Fuck you, lower back. How infuriating is that? It's not the first time I've done this -- I did it back when I was writing my undergrad thesis, but it was a different pain and went away quickly when not sat upon. I'm thinking there's nothing I can do about this just now, because it would involve not sitting, and I have to do a huge amount of that in order to study, fly and other such things.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. I enjoyed it, but frankly, even with five years of Latin and three of Greek, I had to read the annotations provided by a college course online. It's practically the Ulysses of historical mystery in that respect -- insanely but deliciously erudite.

A couple of Ruth Rendell mystery novels. Of course they were good -- what do you expect?

The Citadel by A.G. Cronin. Shut up, The Citadel by A.G. Cronin. No one likes you. You're a boring autobiographical novel of being a doctor in rural Wales in the early 20th century and you're way too pleased with your protagonist. I only picked you up because I felt sorry for you sitting there in the pile of old books, with the mildew stains on your pages.

Murther and Walking Spirits, Robertson Davies. I can't recommend it enough. The book opens with the murder of the narrator by his wife's lover, a film critic. Rather at a loss for what to do, the humiliated ghost follows the murderer to his job -- that is, to a film festival. But while the living watch arthouse movies, the narrator finds himself watching the histories of his ancestors, in revolutionary America, in Canada, in Wales. It's beautiful, hilarious, and quite patriotically Canadian too.

Shadow and Claw, Gene Wolfe, the first two volumes of the Book of the New Sun. I'd been looking to read these for a while; for such acclaimed books, they were hard to find. I can see why. The Book of the New Sun is very like the Gormenghast trilogy, in its Gothic gloom, medieval ritual, and cerebral world-construction seemingly ex nihilo, but Wolfe is less immediately engaging than Peake. Unlike Peake's Gormenghast, however, there is a true, coherent world built here, and I had to finish the book no matter how confused I became. Wolfe's dialogue is improbable, the narrative maddeningly dreamlike, and the female characters badly drawn and tiresome, but I'll be checking out the next two books in the series, because I simply have to know more about Urth. It's not the kind of far-future SF that tries to stun you with a Statue of Liberty half-submerged in sand. Urth has changed fundamentally, and I must read more about it. I particularly want to know if and how he'll address the fact that when our Sun dies -- and the dying Sun is the keystone of the books -- it won't fade into a cinder until it's expanded into a massive, blazingly hot red giant that will someday consume the planet.

The Great Outdoor Fight. No, it's not a book or in a book, not yet. But I'm following it hard enough. GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT, people.

This sounds like the punchline to an awful joke, but it's really rather breathtaking. Did you know that major graphic artists in Poland produced posters for theatrical releases well into the 1980s? And not just European art films, but all the imports from Hollywood? Some of these posters are better than the movies.



Like this one. Weekend at Bernie's suddenly changes from a dumb comedy to a horrible dream, one in which you must impersonate a dead man by holding his eyeballs aloft on your fingers.

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My favorite holiday candy -- it'd be my favorite candy any time if you could get it -- is chocolate peppermint bark. In case you haven't had this stuff, it's a layer of white chocolate atop a layer of dark mint chocolate, topped with crushed peppermint candy. What I wanted was a chocolate peppermint bark cake.



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I've just been studying and studying is all. Nothing is wrong, although I feel . . . well, humbled lately, and thus less like someone who requires eljay entries. But this is merely me.

My tiny excitement is getting ready to bake my birthday cake on Friday. Hell yes, I bake my birthday cake. Usually I make a box cake, because, frankly, nothing says birthday to me like Duncan Hines Yellow. This year, though, I want to make something special, maybe invite some people over for a drink, and so I'm researching what I want to make. In reading old recipes for cakes, you can watch the tastes change, and this is the kind of thing I love.

Until roughly the early twentieth century, when the Western world wanted sweets, it wanted fruits, nuts and spices -- fresh, candied, baked, slivered, ground, macerated, glazed or in some combination thereof. Honey or distilled liquors were the preferred sweeteners before sugar became increasingly easy to lay hands on in Elizabethan times -- although, of course, it remained expensive. All of these were ingredients that could be collected, preserved, and saved almost indefinitely, until a holiday came along. Neighbors could pool scant resources for a special occasion, as with the layers of an Appalachian wedding cake. Natural flavors were enriched by the act of preservation and steeping, necessary as it was, which led to a tradition of ingredients that require days or weeks of preparation -- German friendship cake (brought to America by the Amish), the medieval French pain d'epice. American tastes stayed the same until this century, although enriched by new nuts like pistachios and pecans, and new dried ingredients like coconut. You can tell it from recipes that our grandparents loved as children -- Lady Baltimore cake, jam cake, Lane cake.

Today, the prestige dessert is not what your family plans to make for a special occasion, but the top seller in the fanciest local restaurant (which is itself a huge cultural change from a century ago, but leave aside). And that dessert is generally called something like Chocolate Sin or Death by Chocolate or Burial in a Hastily Dug Shallow Chocolate Grave. It usually features a dense chocolate cake or flourless torte, layered with chilled chocolate mousse or draped in rich ganache. The next most popular dessert will be a cheesecake, and key lime pie is gaining pretty quickly on these. High-quality, perishable exotic ingredients, specialized equipment, skill and above all time are required to create confections like these. And if there's one thing we're all short of -- speaking of which, I have to go --

Please enjoy what may be the worst Christmas song ever written. (via)

So for Christmas this year I have been endeavoring to bake cookies for presents as much as possible. I've used a Cook's Illustrated recipe for chocolate butter cookies to make cutout cookies with an extra twist, and they're excellent, especially the batch I made with Penzeys' cocoa. But the cookies began to look a little sad and lonesome to me as the dough ran out, and I thought that in one particular case I needed something more to go with. And if there's one sweet as Christmassy as cutout cookies, it's hard candy. I got ahold of some corn syrup and a thermometer and set to making stained glass candy. My granddad loves hard Christmas candy, and my favorite flavor of it is anise, so I made violet candy with anise flavoring. One huge, boiling, bubbling mess later, I had blue food coloring ground into my cuticles, red splashed across my shoe, and a panful of solid sweetness that glittered like amethyst. I tapped it into pieces with the blunt end of a knife, and the stuff was very tasty indeed.

What I failed to realize, however, was that there was another reason it was called glass candy. The edges are sharp as broken bottles. When I started making a little gift bag, the candy poked through the plastic. I had another piece today, trying to decide how dangerous the candy was. Now I have a cut in my mouth, inside my cheek next to my molars, just in time for Christmas dinner. This is not to mention the way the candy solders your teeth together if you chew it up. I believe Christmas is a time for quiet reflection, but I would hate to force it on anybody. So I can't be giving this away. My gifts are skimpier than I hoped today . . . plus, I still can't get the food coloring out of my cuticles. Hope nobody much notices.

Antique Fashion. This merchant of antique clothing, much of it with provenance and in wearable condition, keeps a gorgeous catalog of items she has and has already sold. These all seem to be so lustrous and colorful compared to the sad, faded pieces you often find in museums.

When I was little, I always wanted a pair of roller skates like this that strapped to your shoes. That's how you rollerskated in song and story -- not with the heavy '80s boots, which I could barely master. I never got them, of course, and now I can see why. How sad is it that I can only look at these and see how many ways you could take a one-way trip to ass-bust city? Especially in the 1880s, before you had much in the way of pavement anywhere? A girl could strap them onto shoes with worn heels, or perhaps not strap them on quite tight enough, and then one of her feet could slip out of the shoe entirely, sending her straight to the ground. Plus, if she broke a leg, she'd probably have a limp for the rest of her life, and end up an old maid. You almost understand how strict parents could be about this sort of thing.

Here we have a full gentleman's bathing suit from the 1920s, made of highest-quality wool to aid in swift and convenient drowning.

Ladies don't breathe while riding sidesaddle.

I like this negligee. It's the sort of thing that the femme fatale would wear at home in a film noir, while scowling at the villain or the detective who's burst in to harass her.

Some authentic German folk blouses are also available, suitable for all of your yodeling or witch-burning needs.

I admire this coat, for the sheer nerve it would take to wear it. You would have to be built like an Edward Gorey drawing to carry this off without looking like a huge, bloated bat.

( When you think '50s, you think creepy line art )

( The Vermilion Riding Cloak )

( For our friends in foreign lands )

It is cold in here by the window, the kind of cold that makes me look forward to curling up in bed with Addie, the kind that suggests another hot rum toddy would go down nicely (although of course it's far too late). I suggest you try it; it's very nineteenth-century, and basically grog.

Listening to The Mikado today, I was struck by "Brightly dawns our wedding day." [mp3] If I ever get married, I think that would make a lovely processional. It would have to be better than your basic Wagner's Wedding March, which everyone knows and hates.

It also made me want to start practicing singing again, to fill up my lungs and exercise in order to go forth with "Danny Boy" or some Lied as I used to be able to. My mother used to say I sounded like Margaret Dumont when I took voice lessons, but she never liked that kind of music anyway.

It almost makes me want to subscribe.

On front page of CNN.com as of now: "Teacher's plea deal for sex with boy rejected" ("C'mon, let me hit it just once, then I promise I'll go to jail and not make any trouble.")

Maybe that's only funny to me. Personally, I tend to mis-see writing -- I wish there were a better turn of phrase for this. My eyes will glance briefly at a headline, sign or slogan, and my brain will supply words that aren't there.

Today, I glanced at a line of toys called FURY WORLD -- it appeared to say FURRY WORLD. (That could be a promising line of action figures, though.) Also, not long ago, I walked past a van from the Chimney Pro company. For one glorious second I thought it said Chicken Porn. What kind of music do you imagine it would play as it tootled merrily through the suburbs?

List seven songs or instrumental pieces (in no particular order) you've been obsessed with lately:

1. Oingo Boingo, "Dead Man's Party"
2. Cyndi Lauper, "Time After Time"
3. The Sam Bush Band in this live eight-minute 2001 jam where they did about six different reggae hits ("That good ol' bluegrass boy, Billy Bob Marley!")
4. Twink, "Hoppity Jones"
5. A .wmv of somebody beating the original Castlevania NES in 19 minutes . . . I can't see anything on the file for some reason, but I added it to my playlist because I like the music . . .
6. Young Fresh Fellows, "Why I Oughta"
7. Lemon Demon, "eBaum's World" (please get out of my head now, song, thank you)

If anyone owns a copy of Peter Bellamy's a cappella arrangements of Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads, or knows where to get such a thing cheap, could you get in touch? This isn't a disguised Christmas wish-listing, because I really don't think this is in print anymore, at least in the US. Amazon only lists rare and costly imports, and the audio files on his tribute site aren't working [spoken audio]. But I heard one on NPR a while ago, and I was blown away. I love me some Kipling, I really do, and what was meant to be sung more than his Ballads?

I was having a series of horrible fever dreams this morning when a great business concept occurred to me. It would be called the Save Yourself Hotel, and it would be marketed to people visiting their relatives over the holidays. Any hotel could market itself as one. An arriving guest would find in his room a nondescript Jansport-type backpack, one per customer. When the guests left to see their family for Thanksgiving or Christmas, they would take the backpacks along. Perhaps they would take a small bag of their own as well, if their relatives were the type to insist they stayed at the house and refused to hear of a hotel.

If the family situation became dreadful, airless or downright unbearable, the guest could step outside with the backpack, pleading the need for fresh air or a smoke. Then he would cry to any other suffering relatives, "Save yourselves!" -- at which point two handles and a huge propeller would sprout from the backpack. The helicopter unit would carry him up, up and away, over the ranch-style roofs, on a preprogrammed course to the hotel. The unit would also alert the FAA to his presence and the hotel to his imminent arrival. For a small extra fee, the guest could arrange in advance for a favorite drink to be ready and waiting for him.

I've got a similar but unrelated one that I just posted at found_objects.