Quirk of Language
Why are things that you wear on the bottom half of you plural? Pants, pantaloons, panties, bloomers, boxers, briefs, culottes, tights, jeans, shorts, slacks. For socks and sock-like things it makes sense because there are two individual objects, but a pair of pants? Is each pant leg a “pant?” Why don’t I call each sleeve of my shirt a “shirt” and the whole thing a “pair of shirts?”
Why is a loincloth, on the other hand, singular?
OOTS Kickstarter
What’s the word for the opposite of schadenfreude? ‘Cause I’m getting a heck of a vicarious thrill out of Rich Burlew’s sudden good fortune.
Order of the Stick Kickstarter page.
My relationship with the Order of the Stick goes back about three years. I was a junior in college and I’d just moved into Benton House, the science fiction and fantasy dorm for helpless geeks like me. Such a helpless geek, in fact, that I’d signed up to help take care of the house library of fantasy books.
Well, there was this funny looking book in the graphic novels section called Start of Darkness. If I remember right, I read it in one sitting. Holy moly, it wasn’t merely a comic, it was literature as well. It was a tragedy. The title is a pun on Heart of Darkness, guys! Then I devoured On the Origin of PCs (try saying it aloud). Then I moved on to the OOTS website and blasted through them through finals week.
Cannon Fodder owes so much to this comic. And Redcloak is awesome.
NY Times Article on Walkability
It’s encouraging to see some good news in the paper. It says here that communities are working to combat the suburban can’t-get-anywhere-without-a-car problem.
And the website they link to at the end has an article about the Twin Cities light rail on it.
Homemade Yogurt
Here’s a neat magic trick: put a spoonful of yogurt into a bowl of warm milk, let it sit around for a while, and the whole thing turns into yogurt. I tried it this weekend. Even though I work with microscopic organisms for a living, it still boggles my mind that this actually works. I can’t see the little Lactobaccili doing their thing in there, pumping out acid that coagulates the milk, so it looks like alchemy. Yogurt turns everything it touches into yogurt.
But anyway, you’re probably looking for the recipe.
This recipe comes from Lois Braun of the Hampden Park Co-op, and she explains it better than I could myself, so here’s a link to the detailed instructions. Here’s what you’re going to need:
- Some yogurt that says “live and active cultures” on the package.
- A quart of milk.
- A couple of empty yogurt tubs.
- A great big pot.
First, make sure that all your equipment is clean so you don’t contaminate your yogurt with bacteria you don’t want.
Heat the milk just to the point of boiling on the stove. Keep an eye on it because milk tends to burn easily. Meanwhile, fill your great big pot with room-temperature water from the tap. I used a jumbo crock pot that’s too big for cooking food in, and it worked well because it’s insulated.
The setup, part 1
Once the milk is boiling, pour it into the empty yogurt tubs. Stick the tubs into the pot full of water and stir them a bit to let the temperature equalize. The temperature of both the milk and the water bath should be just a bit hotter than body temperature, about 100º F. Drop a spoonful of yogurt into each tub and stir in. Then cap the tubs up, put the lid on the pot, and wrap it up in as many towels and blankets as you can.
The setup, part 2
Let it sit around for a few hours. I tried overnight, and that worked well.
When you open it up, you get – magic! – the whole thing has turned into yogurt. It has a delicate texture, because it doesn’t have any carageenan to thicken it up, and it is delicious. And you can put whatever goshdanged sweetener into it you want.
Staking Shadows by Rebekah L. Purdy
Check it out! One of my old writer friends got published! Staking Shadows is a paranormal romance in which Summer Sun McKellar is one of the few remaining humans after most people in the world have been transformed into soul-sucking … things. Summer’s taken it upon herself to re-kill as many of them as possible. But when one of the soul-suckers spares her, it gets complicated.
I read a couple draft chapters back in 2009, and if it’s still like the draft, this is not your plain ole vampire story. Way to go, Rebekah!
Hot and Sour Tofu
My boyfriend introduced me to hot and sour paste, and boy, have I been having fun with it. This is an incredibly easy recipe – it needs three ingredients.
- 1/3 of a block of firm tofu (or 1/2 block if you’re really hungry)
- dribble of vegetable oil
- 1/2 tsp hot and sour paste
Cut the tofu up into cubes, blot with a paper towel to get the excess moisture out. Cook in a frying pan with the oil on high heat until the edges of the cubes brown. You want a crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside sort of texture. Add the hot and sour paste and just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan, stir vigorously. As soon as most of the water has boiled away again, serve and enjoy. It’s best when it’s very, very hot.
Redcloak Awesomeness Alert
*MEEOOP* This is a Redcloak Awesomeness alert. The Redcloak Awesomeness Index has just reached Level Orange. Elevated levels of Redcloak Awesomeness are expected to continue well into next week. If you are not familiar with Order of the Stick, starting at the beginning is strongly recommended. You will be sucked in. Thank you, that is all. *MOOP*
Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer
I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the party on this one. The first Artemis Fowl book was published in 2001, when I was a bit older than the series’s target demographic, so it got past me until just now. But I’m still #12 on the library waitlist for Game of Thrones, so I thought I’d give it a try. And after reading it, I want to know why these books were marketed only to kids. The subtext here is brilliant.
Artemis Fowl is a millionaire, a criminal mastermind, and twelve years old. His dad has conveniently gone missing after an explosion on a Russian cargo ship and his mother has shut herself up in her room out of grief, so he can run around and do his moneymaking schemes without too much trouble. His accomplices are Butler and his sister Juliet, the butler and maid of the Fowl estate. And… and… the awesomeness of these characters… you simply have to read about them for yourself:
The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries. It had always been that way. Indeed, there were several linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated. The first record of this unusual arrangement was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.
At the age of ten, Butler children were sent to a private training center in Israel, where they were taught the specialized skills needed to guard the latest in the Fowl line. These skills included Cordon Bleu cooking, marksmanship, a customized blend of martial arts, emergency medicine, and information technology. If, at the end of their training, there was not a Fowl to guard, then the Butlers were eagerly snapped up as bodyguards for various royal personages, generally in Monaco or Saudi Arabia.
The whole book reads like this.
Artemis’s latest scheme is to kidnap an officer of LEPrecon, the fairy police, and hold her ransom for quite a lot of money. Of course, the situation devolves into a standoff in which Colfer has the chance to trot out heist movie tropes and play with them. There’s a fairy sergeant with a cigar in his mouth, a dwarven convict who’s sent to work in a plea-bargaining deal, and the smartass techie who walks the fairies through Fowl Manor via his headset. He’s a centaur. He loves carrots.
There are, unfortunately, parts of the book that induce giggles for the wrong reasons. Artemis has at his disposal the most cutting-edge of 2001 technology. Near the beginning of the book, he steals some data from a fairy in Saigon and then e-mails it to himself. One can only assume he was using a Hotmail account.
But seriously, just read it for the Butlers. Go read it.
Eigengrau
The other day, I was on Wikipedia trying to look up the name of those sparkles that happen when you sneeze too hard (which happen to be phosphenes, by the way). Then the magic of Wikipedia links happened, and check this out. Eigengrau. Also known as brain gray, it’s a shade of dark gray that the brain perceives when no light is entering the eyes. Your nerve cells still fire at a baseline level even when they’re receiving no input. Cool, huh?
