Culture Blogging – August

It’s September already? Yeesh.

Read:

Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville – I wanted to love it, but I’m afraid it was just a little too whimsical and self-consciously clever for my taste.

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi – I do love a creative battle scene. You know what I think I like most about this universe? The flawed government; there’s a lot of grey going on here.

The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer – I’ve never read any Heyer before. I enjoyed this one.

Watched:

Psych, seasons one and two – Such a good show. I find it amusing that they leave a lot of the actors’ mistakes in the final cut; they talk like real people. For a show that often metas about language and grammar, I can’t help but think they do it on purpose.

Stargate: The Ark of Truth

Say Anything

Culture Blogging – June and July

Two slow, slow months. I have gotten lots of writing done, though.

June

Read:

The Opposite of Life, by Narrelle M. Harris — Fun for the Melbourne setting and the one vampire character, but otherwise unimpressive.

Buffy Season Eight, volume two

Watched:

Proof – The latest in The Mathematician’s list of Movies with One-Word Mathematical Titles. It’s a wonderful film. I’m going to read the play as soon as I can find it.

July

Read:

Your Call is Important to Us (The Truth about Bullshit), by Laura Penny

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett

Watched:

Twitch City – Yet another hilarious Canadian show

The Sweet Hereafter

Zodiac

Battlestar Galactica season three

Cabbage, Butter, and Dill

My heritage involves four cabbage-loving cultures. I love the stuff. This is what I made tonight:

I blanched a quarter head of sliced cabbage, then drained it and dumped it back in the pot with a minced clove of garlic, a tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, the juice of 1/4 lemon, a teaspoon of dill, and black pepper. I stirred that around on a low flame for a few minutes until the garlic was cooked enough and the butter made a nice sauce.

It was yummy with rice and fake chicken, and was the perfect amount for two of us.

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Random Rec: The New York City Ballet Workout

The New York City Ballet Workout

I’m trying to find a workout program I like. I had one back when I lived in Princeton earlier this decade, a kickbox aerobics show* broadcast at an ungodly hour of the morning, but that I actually managed to get up for. It was a lot of fun, and challenging enough without being too complicated (my learning curve for aerobics-type workouts is way too steep). Also, I tend to find the endless repetition a mite boring.

So I’ve been testing out workout DVDs of various kinds – enough to know that yoga and pilates do not interest me at all, or at least the few videos I’ve tried out. The New York City Ballet video, on the other hand, sounded interesting. I’m always up for a workout that teaches me something; that’s why I take tap dancing once a week. And hey, it’s got to be a good all-over workout, right?

It is. Oh my god is it ever. I’ve never seen one that specifically targets the upper back before, which is one of my major problems. This program hits everything several times (even my neck felt worked) even the arms without using weights of any kind. The majority of the arm work is done by holding them steady (at shoulder level or higher for many) while doing other things with your legs. For example, sit-ups are graduated: hands behind the head, come up a little, pause; sweep arms around, come up a little farther, pause; do more arms, come up farther, pause; relax. It’s fun.

In fact, you don’t need any equipment at all – most of the exercises are even done barefoot, which I love. If only I had a nice, springy wood floor to do them on like the demonstrators have. One of the exercises involves having your nose to the floor for a while. A mat seems necessary for that one if you have carpet. I don’t enjoy sneezing.

I’d heard that this workout is hard to follow if you don’t have a ballet vocabulary, and it is to a certain point. The warm-up is fairly complicated and fast, and it’s a little hard to keep up without practice. However, the workout itself teaches you all the necessary vocabulary, positions, and movements you need for the warm-up, so the whole thing is self-correcting. The demonstrators do get ahead of the narrator at times, switching legs long before he tells you to, but once you learn where the issues are they aren’t a problem anymore.

The workout itself is tough. On the other hand, it’s slow and steady, so it’s not hard on my asthma. It’s for people who are already fit and pretty flexible, or at least who aren’t easily discouraged by the inability to copy the exact position demonstrated. But if you’re one of those people? It’s fantastic. There are twelve separate exercises which you can mix and match if you (like me) can’t handle a whole seventy minutes yet. There are also specialized workouts for various sports, like football and skiing.

The eye-candy (two women, two men) doesn’t hurt either. And hey, even their thighs jiggle when they jump.

* It was Canadian, I think, originally shown on ESPN, hosted by a man with two women as backup. The locations were outdoors, mostly in a field by a lake. I cannot remember what it was called and I would dearly love to find it again on DVD if it exists.

Culture Blogging – May

Read:

Y: The Last Man, Volumes 2-8

Dearly Devoted Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay – Still loving this series. I liked this book a whole lot more than season two of the TV show.

Magic’s Child, by Justine Larbalastier – Surprisingly easy to get into without having read the first two books in the series. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon – Readable, but I’m getting tired of these stories about middle-aged white men who fuck up royally and still get everything they want at the end. He’s a complete mess, but how messed up does his girlfriend have to be to marry him after all that? I find myself wondering if Chabon was taking the piss of all those other books.

Powers: Roleplay – I love the central conceit of this series.

Watched:

Art School Confidential – I kept having to remind myself that the main character is a parody as well, and that we’re supposed to be laughing at him, too.

Iron Man – GIANT ROBOTS. YES. It had its problems, but it also had Pepper Potts

More BSG season two

Dumplings – What an odd, interesting movie. It’s got a whole little subtextual abortion debate going on in it.

Eggplant and Lentil Stew

I’m an experimental cook, and sometimes things turn out pretty well. This was tonight’s dinner.

Eggplant and Lentil Stew

1 medium onion, chopped fine
1 small fennel bulb, chopped rough
1 medium eggplant, cubed
1 cup green lentils, rinsed
500 ml water or vegetable broth
1 medium clove garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1/8 tsp ground chillies
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cumin
salt and pepper
juice of one small lime

Caramelize onions in oil, add eggplant, fennel, and lentils. Stir.

Add water or broth, garlic, bay leaf, chillies, cinnamon, cumin, salt and pepper. If you don’t like a strong lime flavour, add the juice now. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes; you may need to add more water.

Finish with lime juice and serve over rice or with flatbread. Serves four people who eat like I do or two who eat like normal people.

Neil Gaiman is amphibious*

No really, he said so last night.

A friend got us tickets to the dinner/reading/signing in Melbourne, and it was by far the best reading I’ve ever been to.

The evening began with a very nice dinner. It was held in the upstairs room of a restaurant called Georges, which seems to be popular, considering that even the restaurant part was crowded on a Monday night. We started with free champagne** (possibly it was an open bar, but at the very least the champagne and beer and wine weren’t extra) and moved on to the two open bottles of wine on the table.

The dinner was half served and half family-style; salads and roast potatoes came in big bowls to share but we also got individual plates of the main. Everyone else got a stuffed chicken breast with veggies, but I’d requested a vegetarian meal and they actually asked if I wanted vegan or vegetarian meal before serving. Believe me, that’s rare and beyond-the-call-of-duty service. At times I’m lucky to get any edible food at all when a couple of hundred people are also being served.

Anyway, my cannelloni was quite good, even if it had been in the oven a bit too long. I spilled mediocre red wine all over The Mathematician while managing to get none on myself. I’m talented that way. Dessert was sticky toffee pudding (one of my favourites) with ice cream. I somehow got shorted coffee or tea with dessert, because they stopped serving when Neil went up to talk. Since there’s nothing more irritating than having wait staff bustling around when you’re trying to listen to a speaker, I didn’t mind too much.

He talked a little about the two books he’s promoting, but mostly he read from The Graveyard Book. Apparently we were the first he’d read it to. It’s a lot of fun and he’s such an engrossing reader. But I knew that; I bought American Gods based solely on his reading of it in Pasadena. It’s funny how his accent has changed, become more Americanized, since then.

The usual questions were asked and answered***.

Because the event was hosted by a bookstore and a newspaper, there were quite a few people there who had no idea who he was. One woman in my line of view looked startled when he started talking about a child being raised by ghosts in a graveyard. She kept glancing at the man next to her as if unsure how to react.

I didn’t have anything of his to sign (it’s all in Canada) but I stood in line with the others anyway, just to chat. The Most Comfortable High Heels Ever Made were still comfortable. I love these shoes. I keep meaning to post about them and the other Fluevogs I bought at Christmas. They are so very much worth the money.

Philosophical question of the evening: Neil Gaiman hosting The Muppet Show — Must See or Pure Awesome?

_______

* Because of how his books are good for both kids and adults, see? Yeah, I get the feeling he hadn’t had much of a chance to rest and get his brain together before then. He was generous enough to offer to ask the questions as well as give the answers during the Q&A.

** More probably sparkling wine. I’ve picked up a champagne habit here — it’s very popular in Melbourne and you see people drinking it casually in bars. One restaurant gives it away to women on certain nights. I’ve mostly disliked champagne/sparkling wine, but the stuff they drink here is dry, not like the sweet, flavourless stuff you get in North America when you get free champagne.

*** Rant begins: Seriously, they need to start handing out lists of questions that have been asked and answered a million times already. Please, come up with something original! Who knows what kind of great questions the other five people with their hands up had and you wasted that time on something that an ounce of thought (or a trip to his blog) should have told you was overdone. I’m not sure I could be as gracious in his position.

Media Consumed – April

This was a bad month for reading. I had a nasty cold for a couple of weeks, and when I’m sick I can’t concentrate enough to do anything but follow random web links (which is fun in its own way) and watch DVDs of TV shows I’ve seen a dozen times.

Read:

Rick Mercer Report, The Book, by Rick Mercer – Of all the things that make me miss Canada, discussion of Canadian politics makes me miss it the most.

Buffy, Season Eight, Volume One – I am eagerly awaiting the next volume.

The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland – This book is a spiral. At its lowest point it’s a novel within a novel within a diary that every once in a while pops out to another framework of letters. It’s almost pathologically meta, but it’s worth the effort to not toss it away in amused disgust. Bits of it are depressing and bits of it are amusing. Bits you think are going to be uplifting turn out to be the depressing bits, and bits you think are going to be depressing turn out to be funny. The ending is truly funny, releasing all that built up tension. I still say Coupland is going insane from the weight of his reputation (cf. his cameo in jPod) but it’s still working for him for the moment.

Watched:

Battlestar Galactica Season Two – For various reasons, including the unrelenting darkness of the series and an unfortunate period of short attention span, I didn’t watch most of this season when it was first broadcast. The bits I’m watching for the second time are holding up well to re-viewing.

Three episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist – Am I supposed to hate Edward? Because I do.

Lit Soup Contest

Jenny Rappaport over at Lit Soup is having a contest that involves writing an opening paragraph using these five words: flabbergasted, kerfuffle, lenticular, whit, wimple

What I posted:

Tess was still talking. “…and then there was this giant kerfuffle over this lenticular lens he wanted you to view his art through so the two of them started fighting, right, and Andrew got all fla-,” she stopped and tried again, “fels-,” she stopped again.

“Flabbergasted?” I offered.

“What? No, flustered,” Tess said, as if I should have known that from context or something. “Anyway, because Simone doesn’t have a whit of sense, she started ranting about how the whole thing was going to look like a wimple through that lens, and….”

I tuned her out, devoting my attention to my danish.

What I wrote first and discarded as too long:

Simone considered making an origami something out of her guidebook. She didn’t know anything about origami, but this art gallery trip was destined to take forever anyway, so she’d have time to figure it out. She scratched her calf with the toe of her other foot and failed to follow the rest of her class into the next room.

“Now this piece is meant to be viewed through a lenticular…,” the guide’s voice faded away as she moved through the archway.

“Hey.”

Simone jerked, startled, cracking her head into Tess’s, which had just appeared over her left shoulder. “Fuck you,” she whispered, rubbing her temple.

Tess, as usual, ignored Simone’s tone. “Did you hear about the kerfuffle over Jason’s MySpace page?”

“Where Andrew got all fla- fels-,” she stopped trying to find the right word and just waved her hand vaguely.

“Flabbergasted?”

“What? No. Flabbergasted?”

Tess shrugged. “It’s a word.”

“And I care about this how much?”

“Not a whit.”

Simone just stared at Tess for a moment. Tess shrugged, because she knew how much that annoyed Simone, and went into the next room, where the rest of the class were taking turns peeking through some kind of metal thing.

Tess stopped and let Simone catch up. “Why does it look like wimple?”

“What, did you eat a dictionary or something?”

I’m awfully fond of that second one.