Whatta Fiasco

I picked this one because it’s a Sammo Hung production, but this one is all about the women. Yes, it’s a shoot ‘em up, blow shit up, crime film. It’s also a story about family tensions and loyalties, and strong women kicking ass. When the newly wed Mina gets a promotion that leaves her with a higher rank in the force than her policeman husband, it almost turns into a full-fledged feminist film. He just doesn’t care. He’s much more concerned with when they can have a child. So very close, but if we don’t have open misogyny (at least as I parse it from this side of the culturla divide), then it’s almost a given that there will be racism. In this case it’s the psychopathic Vietnamese terrorist. Oh well.

Akira Korosawa’s first film, an adaptation of a book about the birth of judo and the struggle to establish it in the face of the more popular jujitsu. If you’re looking for rocking martial arts action, this isn’t the film for you. Instead you’ll get a peek at what will become the Kurosawa style of film.

Charlie Stross does short stories and he does them well. It’s supposed to be a colleciton of examples of just how quickly near future speculative fiction can become dated, but I thought these stood up well. And it’s always interesting to see just how a story becomes dated, because it’s not always in the way you expect. Anyhow, fun stuff.

What’s not to like about privateering with Errol Flynn? And Flora Robson makes a dashing Queen Elizabeth. Really, her performance alone is worth the price of admission. Really. The broadsides battle with boarding sequence is quite the spectacle, but the final duel between Captain Thorpe and Lord Wolfingham is even better. It’s a lovely scene with fencing shadows.

If you don’t enjoy the slow stroll amongst the scenery with little peeks at the plot style of literature, you might not enjoy this one. (I generally do.) It felt like four hundred pages of watching a rubble slope being built pebble by pebble, until someone sets off the avalanche. And even that isn’t what it appears to be. I loved the strange and twisted house. I loved the tarot cards and odd layering of realities. But this was a book that begged me to put it down and get another cup of tea every ten or twenty pages. It was a pleasant enough journey, but it took such a long and leisurely time, that by the time the dust of the avalanche had cleared, I was no longer certain hat had just happened. It feels as if there’s some sort of meta-level message in that, but I’m not enchanted enough to start the whole book all over again in order to decode it.

This was a Christmas gift we’ve been watching at the rate of an episode or two a week. The Mandy Patinkin goodness was to be expected, but this goes much further. If my life were amenable to being scheduled around prime time television, I’d be sorely tempted to keep up with this series in real time. While I’m waiting for the second season to get released on DVD, I won’t have any trouble finding the time to watch the first season again.

The only real quibble I’ve had with the series (other than the bit about enough LSD to kill a child bit) was with the cliff-hanger season ender. Was there any point in the plot that did not require a major bout of the stupids from one of our BAU friends? And it seriously felt padded, as if the writers were now well accustomed to filling their standard slot and weren’t sure how to construct a two-parter without tossing in loads of slush. And I could swear some of the numbers didn’t add up. Here’s hoping all will be made clear and sensible in the opening of season two.

No, don’t tell me! Really.

A lively and enjoyable book. It’s also an excellent antidote for those who pace the floor at night, consumed with existential angst over the conundrum of quantum physics. Mind, it also introduces yet another scenario for the end of the world as we know it, but such is science. And such a lot of words about nothing at all! (Or is it?) Luckily Mr. Barro has written several other books, and I intend to sample some of them during the upcoming year.

It’s been a nice quiet weekend, starting with a disarming snow fall and a slow drive home Friday night. Saturday morning hubby took off early and I had the entire day to myself. It was quiet and good with retail and coffee therapy galore. I even had an idea for a knit hat so I stopped by the yarn store, picked up some alpaca, and knit the thing up. Now I need to rip it all out and try again after having learned a fe things along the way. No sweat.

I had thought about finally trying to make some Chinese steamed buns, but got to running around enough that I fell back on something simpler. Somewhere in my netwise ramblings I’d come across and snagged the recipe for an Indian dessert called srikund. And truly, it is as simple as can be. In essence, you strain yourself some yogurt to make yogurt cheese, then you flavor it with sugar, cardamom, and saffron. You can probably even cheat and buy labnah spread, but the hardest thing about straining the yogurt is having to wait.

The next hardest thing is getting the cardamom ground fine enough. You can buy pre-ground, very finely ground cardamom but I forgot to look for any at the market and had some green cardamom pods sitting around for making chai. If I had a mortar and pestle, that would have worked well, but mine have disappeared, so I made do just fine with a plate and a shot glass. The trick here is to get the seeds out of their pods and then get them ground very fine indeed. Larger doesn’t hurt the flavor, but it interferes with the texture of the dessert. You want smooth and creamy. Gritty bits just get in the way. The little pinch of saffron wants to be smashed up too, and then you add all that with some superfine sugar to taste. (Could you use table sugar? Yes, but it would help if your yogurt cheese still had enough liquid in it to dissolve the sugar to avoid grit.) Stir it all together thoroughly and then let it sit for as long as you can, or at least five hours. Then you’ll need to stir it once more before serving in order to get the leached out saffron goodness incorporated throughout.

If you used a stiff, strained yogurt, I bet it would make for a killer, no-bake cheesecake.

And then hubby came back home sick with a cold. No steamed buns tonight. Instead it’s a chicken soup that will reheat well tomorrow if he doesn’t feel like eating tonight.

I give up. It really is winter. After I got back from the gym tonight I had to go back outside to move some fencing gear between cars. It was cold enough I had trouble unlocking the Subaru, and by the time I got that taken care of my *ahem* gloveless fingers were veering sharply into the territory of painful. I was just going to dig my dirty clothes out of my (crunchy) fencing bag in the trunk to take them in to wash, but it hurt too much. I eventually managed to get the bag zipped back up and hauled the whole thing inside where I could warm up my hands. Ouch. Mind you, it was my own fault for not wearing gloves. (And why is it that as soon as no sane person would venture outside without a hat, there is none to be found? I think that means it’s time to knit some more hats.)

So yes, it’s winter. At least for a little while longer. This morning on the way to work, Mr. iPod tossed out Santana’s Primavera and it was like a warm and sultry promise. I can live with that. I had forgotten how nice that piece is.

Having George Guidall read this made it a pleasant bit of drive time experience, but it isn’t a book I would have enjoyed otherwise, unless I was stuck traveling with a limited selection of reading material. Medical thriller is not, in fact, my genre at all. There’s a weird mix of jargon and exposition that find a bit grating. The suspense stuff was not badly done. The romance arc was pretty ho-hum. The author climbing on the soapbox denouement was annoying. The emasculation of a promising female character after the comploetion of the romance arc was disappointing. But the reading performance was, as expected, quite satisfying.