Whatta Fiasco

More Tsui Hark, which means it’s going to be just a little odd. Here’s some Chinese folk tale run through a mangle to emerge as a twisted and garish tale. There are the sisters who are snakes learning to be human women. Are they good or evil? There’s the crazed monk who can’t decide, and the distractable scholar who gets distracted. And it all ends in flood and destruction, but along the way we get scary monkey women, and snake women with frog tongues. It’s not my favorite Tsui Hark (I’d rather watch Dragon Inn or A better Tomorrow again), but it has its charms.

Last week was good overall. I solved a few sticky problems at work, unexpectedly made some people happy, and set up something else that should make even more people happy in a few weeks. Fencing went well right up until Friday night’s practice when my stomach decided that it hated the world. I could suck it up and do a little footwork, but as soon I stopped moving, I felt like I was going to hurl. So pleasant. After half an hour or so of walking around hoping it ould get better, I packed up my stuff and went home. All was better by Saturday morning and I’m still not sure what brought that on.

Saturday morning I got up earlier than expected and remembered that the Farmers’ Market was going on. And it wasn’t even eleven yet! I wasn’t earlier enough to get a decent selection of anything other than meat (lots of buffalo/bison), baby onions, garlic, honey, or flowers. I bought a fresh loaf of Italian cheese bread (still sweating in the bag) from some nice young women from Melvern, Kansas. And I grabbed a couple of heads of gorgeous red garlic. Maybe next weekend I can get over there earlier in the morning and find some actual vegetables. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the garlic. It would bea bit of a shame to waste that color by roasting it, but I may have to try it anyhow.

Then it was off to the family reunion. It was good to see folks again and look at more pictures. Then it was off to parts south of Emporia to set up a tent before it got dark and before I missed a wonderful dinner and talking to more friends, old and new. The stars were impressive enough that I wanted a telescoping roof on my tent. The next morning I sat outside with a book and a cup of freshly roasted coffee and learned that a cowbird sounds like burbling water. I also discovered that hummingbirds engaged in a standoff right over your head sound a lot like a big horsefly.

This morning I came in to work to discover that one of my clustered web servers thought it was 1969. I couldn’t find anyone to admit what caused it, but we eventually jumped through the right hoops to get it all fixed with minimal impact. What’s a Monday morning without something breaking?

Life is pretty good.

Rudy Rucker has been on my list of authors to try for a few months now, and then I nearly bought a second hand copy from my local used book store. (Got a Geoff Ryman instead.) So when I spotted it in the library, I snagged it. Eh. Imagine putting Stanislaw Lem, Ivan Stang, and Olaf Stapledon in a food processor and pulsing a few times. In theory it might sound intriguing, but the reality leaves something to be desired. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its moments of imagination and amusement, but the small amount of proselytizing was off-putting. If it had been better integrated into the story I could have dealt with it. But it wasn’t. Ah well.

The politics in this one is less bludgeoned than in previous books (see Cosmonaut Keep for the full effect), but it’s still there along with a memorable cast and some dizzying scene shifts. I preferred Learning the World, but this is still a good read.

For extra credit, count up ho much Scottish science fiction I’ve been reading lately. What are they putting in the water over there?

Pixar strikes again with a feel good, morally uplifting message movie for all to enjoy without ever quite falling into CareBear territory. Don’t go looking for a pro-environmental message though (’twould spoil the fun) but attention to detail is rewarded. And the Pixar team keeps improving technically. One of these days I’d enjoy sitting down and watching the Pixar films in order, just to see the progress unfold. It makes the previews shown of the imitators look like the cheap knock-offs they are.

At Friday night’s practice, I started the evening feeling completely off. I wasn’t moving well, I wasn’t thinking well. I was just off balance and not all there. Then one of my club mates came up and gave me a simple piece of advice that worked brilliantly against a tall fencer who’d been beating up on me the past few weeks. It worked so well it felt like magic, and it was just a teeny tiny faint eight, take six. No strength. No feats of athleticism. Just timing and distance, and my opponent provided most of the distance. Very pretty. Mind you, it’s something I’ve used before, but it had fallen out of my bag of tricks for some reason. It’s back in there again.

Last night’s practice started off much better. I got a good lesson (when is it appropriate to bend the arm in an attack) and then jumped into fencing our best female epeeist. Lots and lots of double touches and a couple of nice single lights on my side, including one happy-making six-seven bind. Then it was time to face the very tall right hander, to discover that my game in the past few weeks has become one of almost all arm touches, primarily to the top of the arm. That’s a low percentage game when you’re facing someone nine inches taller than you with proportionally longer arms. Time for patience, foot work, and direction changes. Then I went home, iced the foot, took some ibuprofen, and got some sleep. And the feet are doing pretty well today. I may just survive fencing three events in four days.

Where Station Agent shows humanity in the context of difference, Rabbit-Proof Fence shows inhumanity. It only seems worse that the evil comes out of sincere intentions. It’s an age old story of what happens when invaders decide that the indigenous people they wish to displace aren’t really human. The plot has some wobbles caused by telescoping it into this format, but the story is well told without getting maudlin. Kenneth Branagh does an excellent bureaucratic villain, but it’s the rest of the cast that shines.

‘Indigenous’, ‘Indigent’, ‘Indignity’, ‘Indigestion’: An interesting set of words.

A new Iain Banks novel? This wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. It starts out promisingly with interesting characters in tense situations. We meet the BadGuy ™ doing bad guy stuff. And then things sort of wander around in a way that keeps you hoping that this will all tie together in some interesting way. At about a hundred pages from the end I began to have hope that this would be the book he managed to tack a strong ending onto. The BadGuy™ gets his comeuppance, we’re handed a couple of plot twists, and it’s done. Too many characters left dangling like so many squid on the mantelpiece. The case of Mr. Evil-n-Nasty is especially egregious. A lovingly crafted torture scene that promotes the plot/theme of a book? Fine. But when it only serves as bona fides (so to speak) for a character whose only role is to die because he’s evil? Not so much. Doubly so when there’s a much more nuanced BadGuy™ already written into the actual plot, if only the author would spend some time with him. Ah well.

I knew I should have bought new tires this past weekend, but I was having too much fun, including the live music and good company. The one tire has had a slow leak in it for about two weeks, but it was a very slow leak indeed so I wasn’t too worried about it. Most of the way into work this morning, flubba-flubba. What ever got stuck in there must have worked its way out. Donut tire time. I even picked up a roadside assistance vehicle tailing me until I left the interstate to make sure no one rear-ended me, or maybe it was just to make sure I didn’t create an actual accident and impede traffic. Anyhow, that will take me to a tire place this afternoon.

In the meantime, I packed my lunch today and I intend to eat it. It’s simple but tasty. It also has no name so far as I know. It’s a mostly Mediterranean concoction born of a trip to the local Mediterranean Market in a failed search for Greek yoghurt. Grr. No yoghurt, but they did have tubs of labneh, a soft yoghurt cheese. And then I grabbed a jar of mild ajvar, a sauce like side dish of roasted pepper, eggplant, and garlic. And they had some pomegranate molasses (a reduced, unsweetened, pomegranate juice) hiding way up on a high shelf and I’d been thinking about getting some of that for the past few months. A jar of plain roasted peppers managed to come home with me and I had some left over coconut rice that needed to be used up. It was basmati cooked absorption style with lite coconut milk and a black cardamom pod. I originally made it to serve with some seasoned shrimp (which was yummy) but the delicate flavors are pretty much wasted here. Let’s just call it left over rice.

Hmm. A name… Heck . I don’t know. How about:

Fiasco Paprikash

Ingredients:
Left over rice
Labneh (spreadable)
Ajvar

Optional garlic chili paste, assorted crunchy veggies, roasted pepper pieces, capers

Amounts are all to taste. I had about a cup of rice, a third of a cup of labneh, a third of a cup of ajvar, a teaspoon of pomegranate molasses and a half teaspoon of garlic chili paste.

Stir together rice, labneh, ajvar, pomegranate molasses and garlic chili paste to combine well and season to taste. Top with chopped assorted crunchy veggies (I had carrots and radishes), pieces of roasted pepper, and capers. You’re looking for some crunch and a little extra color. Serve and enjoy.

I bet it would be good seasoned with proper hot paprika too, instead of the garlic chili paste. It would make a quick and easy potluck side dish that’s almost healthy. If you like that slightly bitter roasted pepper taste, it’s very nice. And if you just mix the labneh and ajvar with seasoning to taste, it makes a great dip. It’s a nice alternative to guacamole. Mm. Ajvar would make an interesting alternative pizza sauce.

Things to be grateful for: Living in a place where it’s a short drive to get all sorts of wonderful things whenever the whim strikes. Amazing.

Wednesday before last I managed to slightly pull a muscle in my front leg during a lesson, one of the adductors. It made recovering from or just holding a lunge painful. It’s been slowly healing, and last Wednesday I thought I was good to go. But by the end of practice I was back in pain territory again. So I decided it was time to give the poor muscle a break. I skipped my Thursday gym session and Friday practice. Smart move. By Saturday afternoon things were feeling much better, so I did a light workout at the gym. At Monday night’s practice I was back to moving well, up and down the strip and working on the timing of my lunge again. And no I just have to get the whole package reassembled in time for Summer Nationals.