Wishing you much joy and laughter in 2013. Love, Julia
Monthly Archives: December 2012
My husband broke my Cylon toaster
and then he complained about it and said he never liked it anyway because it ejects the toast up into the air and you have to stand nearby, prepared to catch it. (I can actually catch it on my plate. He catches it with his hands.)
Ejecting Toast in a Cylon fashion.
But it’s my Cylon toaster…. Waaaaaaaa!
So last night I fixed it. I hot glued the handle back on, much to my husband’s dismay and disgust and discouraging words - “That’ll never hold…”
So far so good. Now that I’ve made some lemon curd I must have Cylon toast upon which to spread it.
Homemade Lemon Curd
A Most Worthy Kickstarter Project.
The Mine Kafon by Massoud Hassani~
Take a look: The Mine Kafon Kickstarter Project.
I don’t know if I can contribute in British pounds or Euros, but this project is the only Kickstarter project I’ve ever considered contributing to.
Clint Eastwood
His performance at the Republican Convention notwithstanding - I refuse to hold a grudge in light of his talent and his immense body of work - Clint Eastwood is the best anti-hero in film.
The only other actor I can think of who routinely played the hero/anti-hero was Humphrey Bogart. Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon… but Eastwood plays a far more hardened anti-hero than Bogart ever did.
John Wayne walked a thin line in The Searchers, and he played a sloppy drunk in True Grit, but John Wayne was the icon, John Wayne, and his iconic status as a hero was hard to escape. I preferred Jeff Bridges in the remake. What a perfect anti-hero, U.S. Marshall Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn. Bridges played the character straight up, right out of the pages of the novella by Charles Portis.
True Grit
On Christmas Day I watched High Plains Drifter, a movie Mr. Eastwood both directed and starred in. The unnamed protagonist is merciless, vicious. And the film is brutal. But it’s also unforgettable.
High Plains Drifter
Here’s some of the plot~
A stranger on horseback rides into the mining town of Lago. Three gun-toting men follow him into the saloon, taunting him. When they follow him to the barbershop, he kills all three of them. Impressed with this performance, a dwarf named Mordecai befriends the Stranger. An attractive woman named Callie Travers bumps into him in the street and insults and badgers him. When she slaps him, he drags her into the livery stable and rapes her. Next, he rents a room at the hotel. That night, he dreams about a man being brutally whipped. It is revealed later that Marshal Jim Duncan was whipped to death by gunfighters Stacey Bridges, Dan Carlin, and Cole Carlin while the people of Lago looked on. Only Sarah Belding, wife of hotelier Lewis Belding, made any attempt to rescue him.
You can read the rest here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Plains_Drifter
Not many actors would take the risks Eastwood has taken in his long career.
All hail the anti-hero. He makes any story more interesting.
The Fried Chicken Dissonance.
Fried Chicken.
I took issue with a book recently. I was trying my best, my level-headed best, to get through a slow historical romance. I slogged along, waiting, hoping, praying for a little action. Not as in sex action, but simply movement. Forward movement. As in a story moving forward rather than running in place with repetitive and boring descriptions of characters (primary, secondary, tertiary, and even nonentities) and settings.
What did I get instead? Tossed out of the story by a pic-a-nik basket filled with fried chicken. Actually the fried chicken was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Yogi and Boo-boo.
I’m a foodie. I know fried chicken.
Although fricasse was used as a method of cooking throughout Europe, fried chicken was not, as a rule, eaten in England in the early 19th Century. In fact, fried chicken was not common in England until the late 20th Century. The English preferred their chickens boiled or baked. It was the Scots who fried chicken in fat and brought that technique with them to the Colonies. In addition, West African cuisine also featured chicken dredged in herbs and spices and fried in palm oil. Thus the culinary traditions of West Africa met the culinary traditions of Scotland - unfortunately via the slave trade in the American South. Ergo… Southern Fried Chicken.
However, I seriously doubt fried chicken would have been found in the pic-a-nik baskets of early 19th Century English nobility. While feasting outdoors, especially during hunts, has been common in Great Britain since medieval times, picnics, as such, didn’t really become popular until Victorian times, i.e., in the 1860′s, when feasting out of doors began to be described as picnicking. (Although the word picnic had been used in France a hundred years earlier to describe what we think of as a potluck.)
Medieval Feast.
Therefore, a picnic basket filled with fried chicken in the early years of the 19th Century stopped me dead in my tracks and the book became an instant DNF. Sorry. It’s really important for historical authors to get their facts right, at least for me.
I would experience the same dissonance if I were reading an historical set in ancient Greece and ran across ~ “Hey, man, wanna head over to the drive-in and grab a burger?”
Check this out: Hungry History.
And this: Virginia Fried Chicken.