I didn’t figure out what she was doing till like three-quarters of the way in.
Wow!
From The Lies of Locke Lamora by Mister Scott Lynch:
Conté moved adroitly to fill this request, first selecting a tall crystal wine flute, into which he poured two fingers of purest Camorri ginger oil, the color of scorched cinnamon. To this he added a sizable splash of milky pear brandy, followed by a transparent heavy liquor called ajento, which was actually a cooking wine flavored with radishes. When this cocktail was mixed, Conté wrapped a wet towel around the fingers of his left hand and reached for a covered brazier smoldering to the side of the liquor cabinet. He withdrew a slender metal rod, glowing orange-red at the top, and plunged it into the cocktail; there was an audible hiss and a small puff of spicy steam. Once the rod was stanched, Conté stirred the drink briskly and precisely three times, then presented it to Locke on a thin silver plate.
It will be mine. Yes: I will make and have myself a ginger scald. After the success of Sausages a la Camorr, there is no way to avoid making the cocktail concoction that immediately made my mouth water when I read the description. There are a couple hurdles to overcome, of course.
Firstly, ginger oil is relatively expensive, ringing in at about twenty bucks an ounce. My reading of the above indicates that a ginger scald probably uses two ounces, and forty bucks for a cocktail is a little steep. Of course, I could make my own ginger oil — if I had an alembic, a run-of-the-mill piece of equipment that any good alchemist would have. However, as I am not a good alchemist, I will have to jury-rig an alembic using a light fixture.
Luckily, pear brandy is relatively easy to come by. What isn’t easy is ajento, primarily because it is a fictional liquor. Therefore I will just have to make my own. It’s a cooking wine flavored with radishes? Pah, that’s easy. I’ve got a jug of chablis infusing radishes as I type. It should be ready in a few days…
If I’m feeling especially puckish, I’ll video it for the amusement of the internets, but I am really looking forward to giving this a try!
This is what I want: an RSS Reader that aggregates content into the format of a forum. Each post is its own topic, and the reader keeps track of comments such that when a post gets new comments, it gets bumped up the list and lights up. If I’ve read all the comments, the post gets greyed out and slowly sinks under the posts getting comments. As the user, I obviously choose which blogs are aggregated in ‘my’ forum, and which blogs go in which categories (although a really slick version would sort based on post flags and categories using rules I set up).
Maybe I’m just not using my own feed reader (NetNewsWire) correctly, but while I get to read the initial post of the hundred-plus blogs I follow, I only see the comments that are already there when I read the post. I don’t have any good way to keep track of comments and participate in the resulting discussions. This I would like to fix.
Has somebody done this already, or is there some way to jigger an existing feed reader to do this?
One, each person is worthwhile,
Two, be kind in all you do,
Three, we help each other learn,
Four, and search for what is true,
Five, all people have a say,
Six, work for a peaceful world,
Seven, the web of life’s the way,
That will bring us back to me and U.U.!
Sang this in church this morning!
We’re reading The Lies of Locke Lamora here at the Robern House (well — Meg is rereading, I am reading), and when Meg came across the description of the Gentlemen Bastards cooking up some “sausages and pears sautéed in olive oil” she was consumed with a desire to try it out. This is what we came up with, and it is OMG TASTY.
3 bosc pears, sliced long
1 brown onion, julienned
4 sausages (we used some chicken-and-apple sausages)
1 tsp cardamom (or three seeds ground up in a mortar & pestle)
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
1 T agave nectar
olive oil
Heat olive oil to hotness. Throw in pears, onions, sausages. Sautée on high heat until onions are transparent. Throw in the rest of the ingredients and kill heat to almost nothing and simmer — the longer the better.
The success of this dish means I will now have to try to make a ginger scald…
While browsing an art book at Barnes&Noble, I came across this awesome image, and happily was able to find it online as well. I have trouble articulating how much I love this image: it’s powerful and succinct and humorous all at once. It may be, in fact, my new favorite argument, since words have failed on this issue so many times.
Dear Prudence,
This is what “beauty” was supposed to be back when you were born. I’m hoping, as you read this now some years hence, things have changed. I suspect, though, that less will have changed than I would hope. With any luck your mother and I will have shown you time and again that there are a thousand kinds of beauty in the world, and most of them — the best kinds — don’t need all this to qualify.
You will always be my beautiful daughter, and I don’t ever want you to lose sight of that.
— Dad
So today, President Obama made a statement about military commissions for detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan. You can, and should, read it here. It is three paragraphs long; it will take you five minutes to make yourself an educated citizen.
So let’s summarize, shall we? Paragraph One: Military commissions are lawful and effective instruments of justice when done right, and I invite you to check my record because I’ve always said this. Paragraph Two: We have some suspended but still pending military commissions in progress, and we’re going to get back to them but we’re going to do it right this time. Paragraph Three: Did I mention we’re going to do it right this time?
Let’s also note what isn’t mentioned in the statement: Guantanamo Bay. It doesn’t appear at all. He does not say, anywhere, that the military commissions will happen there. It might be because he’s dodging the whole issue of a facility that bears the collective revulsion of the world, and he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s using it from us. Or it might be because Guantanamo Bay is completely irrelevant to the subject of doing military commissions right, which was his point. Now, given that Guantanamo Bay is closing this year and Obama has a magnificent track record on not dodging issues, I lean towards the latter. But if you’d prefer to live in a conspiracy theory, by all means — believe that he’s lying to you. Probably because the Illuminati told him to do it.
So anyway, the nation’s news organizations got the same statement as you read above (because you did bother to read it, right?). They could have run this headline:
Obama Will Do Military Commissions Right
Or they could have gone with this:
Obama Revives Bush-Era Military Tribunals at Guantanamo
Guess which one they all picked?
The fact of the matter is that the news media isn’t biased towards liberals or conservatives, it’s biased towards getting your attention. Sadly, it’s perfectly happy to abandon the truth and imply as much as it possibly can as long as it makes you pay attention to them. So they will imply that Obama has lied to you, that he has gone back on his word, that he is just as bad as his predecessor, that he is a hypocrite, that he has no appreciation for the revulsion that we all have for Guantanamo Bay, and so on and so forth, unto infinity, as long as it wins your eyeballs.
The really pathetic thing is that so many people do pay attention, relying on news outlets to take the President’s statements, published on the internet and totally available to anybody who bothers to read it, and “translate” them to make them understandable to plebes like them. Come on — was there anything in that statement that you couldn’t understand? Do you really need somebody else to tell you what that means, especially when they’re going to throw in tons of implications with little-to-no bearing on reality, just so you’ll pay attention to them instead of the other news outlet, which is doing the exact same thing?
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