badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

1st of May tomorrow - general strike and march

A 1st of May poster by Aly De Villiers. (Take a look at her other paintings - I especially like the "aurea" series based on the golden ratio.

I'll be blogging tomorrow but will try to otherwise follow the strike. Also, I will not carry ID on me... a tiny gesture.

surreal

Colbert does comedy at white house dinner -- >the video is here. (oh- wait: >full video.) Oh man. Thanks to the Acrobat for the link!

"Speaking truthiness to power"? .... "truthiness"? are those people channelling my absurd word-mungings?

Perhaps something will "happen" to Colbert but likely it's already happened to whoever scheduled him to be onstage. They know better than to throw anyone on jail (at least at first... wait a few years and we'll see) Instead dirty tactics will come to bear.

Another source: YouTube of the entire thing... very fast to download.

update: Thank You Stephen Colbert site, made because no one can figure out how to send him fan mail.

I'm so blown away I watched it all a second time. Colbert is a hero. I hope people have transcripts of that (ah - yes... excellent transcript here) and translate it into other languages... though it's hard to translate jokes. I think any translation of it would have to have a lot of annotation and explanation.

Linnets and Motorcycles

"Linnets and Valerians" was gratifying. l liked the way the magic things always happened in a rush of long sentences with a childish and amateurish feel, a sudden rush of imagination that made me think of the love scenes in "The Young Visiters". Romance-novelly! Pleasant! Like licking cake batter off the spoon.

I always wish in books like this that one of the girl characters might grow up and have a fabulous career or go to Oxford instead of babies, or in addition to, however much I like their characters...

I cried when Nan got her parlor with the books in the secret cupboard and she realized for the first time that she liked to be alone. As "oldest girl" characters go she's a good one, having to be a bit motherly, but she's imaginative, smart, perceptive, not always completely good....

How weird that when i was a kid I scoffed at people who cry at books. I scoffed and rolled my eyes at anything sentimental or pathetic. Instead I reacted with logical objections to everything... Now I can't even read Linnets and Valerians without sniffling every few pages. I wonder what Elizabeth Goudge's own childhood was like?

Did people really have teas like that and bags of penny candy and run around on moors and wear velvet snoods? *sigh* All completely imaginary although that's the "ordinary" part of their life. Somehow I don't think playing in the ditchwater to find tadpoles in Houston will ever measure up.

I should write something serious about the book... and about LeGuin's "Gifts" which Eliz. lent me. In a few years she will be reading and liking Mary Renault... I'll lay a bet. I remember lending her many e. nesbit books but I don't know if she actually read them (and I think she still has them... nudge nudge...).

I wonder if Moomin would sit still for The Wouldbegoods? Or another one? Or even Edward Eager? I couldn't persuade Eliz. ... stubborn little wretch....to read "Half Magic". We're almost done with The Mouse and the Motorcycle which is just the right speed and not TOO sexist (as, unfortunately, the Henry Huggins books are).

pussy licking tip #214

For cats, you sillies.

Licking the tip of one's tail must be done against a relatively flat surface, like a couch, to stabilize the tail tip. When one absentmindedly begins licking the couch then a person may start laughing. Freeze the person with a glare, then get up and walk away.

to be blogged properly later

with links. Make all HP fans read Nancy and Jessica Mitford's books. SO illuminating. I realized once I had read a little bit about Jessica's life that it was crucial to understanding the politics of Harry Potter. (Which... people drivel on about hermione and the house elves being dumb but it is CENTRAL... and the whole point... as well as the naughty weasely boys' political resistance. they might as well be 14 year old palestinian boys throwing rocks at tanks . the books have been setting up a very serious situation for a while now and I can see it coming!) Anyway I just finished The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. am blown away by them. Exactly what I love. Dance to the Music of Time pales next to this. or, well, i guess it's a different animal. I must read everything, everything, everything by the Mitfords and everyone near them!

I need to make a detailed cheat sheet of who everyone is based on. I did understand (as Iris pointed out in email ) that the part in the camps on the Spanish border was actually Jessica. (Before she told me.) And that the author Nancy is really more like Linda in RL than like Fanny the observer/narrator, who was based on someone else.

overblogging as usual, even with my network down

aaaaahhhhh... finally, we have net
Originally uploaded by Liz .

I just blogged over at Composite about the mystery techie dude from the library and also the scary hippietastic dude who shares his wisdom about cops and death with random high school kids - on my mommyblog. I also spouted off super randomly (written offline this morning in a giant spew of frustrated separation from the net and work) about crossing guards I have known. OMG so many blogs. I'm now in about 10 places at once!

My day kind of sucked because of the net problems at home and not getting very much real work done. And yet I was also kind of happy to be out of my rut, it was a sunny day, and I had a lot of random good conversations. We had bad-ass mama coffee hour. I often look forward to it all week. I made Mary Tsao come over to see my house and we got in a bit of a Blogher gossip session.

modem woes

the pilot's computer was working fine but my net was down as of this morning at 7am. it was not my airport... which my compu could see... and not my computer... and not my network settings... so I crawled into the closet and power cycled and reset the modem and router and started them up in the proper order. and then did this a couple more times at intervals. and then ... the Acrobat seemed to be the only one who knew who our cable co. is since he gets the bills. finally i got him on the phone and then the cable co. WHICH you can imagine the endless process of getting a human being who made me go t hrough all the steps. But he was useful in that i had not tried plugging my laptop directly into the cable modem (which worked.) So it is the router that is the problem... and the Pilot's computer had still been working (but now wasn't) because she has a fixed IP address and I don't. But THEN... oh, then. I figured i'd plug the Pilot's computer directly into the cable modem so that i could at least put her back to being online after the hours long thing where I had "broken her internet". And that didn't work and then i got the Acrobat on the phone and tried making it a non-fixed ip addres which also didn't work. Then he said, oh shit, actually take it offline because there is no firewall and viruses could be bombarding my computer.

Arrrgh.

In the meantime I labelled all the cables in the closet properly with tape and sharpie marker.

I left the pilot with Rook's laptop plugged into the cable modem so that at least now she has net.

But hours... hours wasted on this. I should have just gone to the library to work, but actually... need both internet AND the books on my desk so that I can be working.

i should maybe go to frys and buy a new router thingie but I figure let the Acrobat have a crack at fixing it somehow. He said on the phone "i'll be home at 6 and then i'll fix it" with supreme confidence. It would be lovely if so but of course the minor annoyance of having pounded on some problem for hours... necessary hours... and then someone else swooping down who goes oh, aha, it was all so simple.

I'll take that minor annoyance if i could just work on my thesis again. I wil have to beg tonight or tomorrow for my own plug to go directly into the cable modem and then I could work... while any problem is solved... miraculously... by a new router and/or the Genius of The Acrobat's great brain.

This is all to explain why I'm just a bit testy and moody today. Of course the crankier I get without having net, the more I want to let off steam by blogging totally random thoughts. Instead I'm at the library trying to straighten out my online and in-print references against the rest of the 200+ pages of the thesis.

I wish I were eating this right now

(Not this blog.)

SuperT asked me how to make the chicken cutlets that I brought to Woolfcamp. OMG someone asked me for a recipe from something I cooked that they ate several months ago. I'm in shock.

Get some extremely thin slabs of chicken. I mean really really thin. If I'm going to make this recipe I usually buy 2 pounds of chicken because it's a pain in the ass to make and you might as well make a lot of it. (You know, this is why my thesis grew to be so huge. If it's going to be painful it might as well be enormous and worth the pain. Can I digress or what? Also, can I relate everything to my thesis, even chicken cutlets?) Rinse them and pat them dry with a clean dishtowel. I don't really grok why, but my mom did and my grandma did and that's enough for me. Perhaps hygiene, perhaps making the egg stick better. Break some eggs into a bowl. Maybe 2 or 3. Have another big flat pan... I use a big glass casserole dish or a big rectangular plastic dish... and put a whole bunch of bread crumbs in there. I use the progresso "italian flavor" breadcrumbs, and I put fresh chopped parsley, oregano, and optionally basil and garlic into the breadcrumbs. If you don't have the fresh stuff or the garlic, it still comes out good. Heat up a jesusfuckload of olive oil in a big pan. Good olive oil. Get the big giant gallon things of it in metal cans from Italy. I get at least 2 pans going to speed up the process. Pound the chicken EVEN FLATTER with a mallet. Then dip it in the egg and into the bread crumbs. Really mash it around in the bread crumbs to make a lot of them stick, and flip the chicken over and mash it around again. Then fry it all up. I like them a little bit burned around the edges and very thin. You'll have to add a lot more olive oil during the frying. Just keep adding it between batches. Flip the chicken just one time, I don't care about that one physics experiment about cooking meat and flipping it constantly being more efficient (ROOK.) When you take the chicken out of the pan put them on a big plate or a pan lined with paper towels.

They're good hot but even better the next day or 2, cold from the fridge. You can also reheat them in a toaster oven. They make good sandwiches. Damn I wish I had a plateful of them right now.

recap:

- 2 lbs chicken breast sliced very thin
- 3 eggs
- 1 large or 2 small cans of progresso italian bread crumbs
- (optional) chopped fresh parsley and oregano
- (even more optional) chopped fresh basil and garlic or whole garlic cloves
- nice olive oil

1. pound the chicken even flatter
2. beat eggs in a big bowl
3. prepare a big flat pan of breadcrumbs
4. dip chicken pieces in eggs
5. mash eggy chicken pieces around in breadcrumbs
6. once you have enough of them ready, heat up olive oil medium hot and fry the chicken
7. Bring the chicken cutlets to me right now.... do not let minnie have the thinnest pieces because that bitch always tries to get the best ones.

yelling back and forth between rooms

*sounds of robin hood movie*

Me, looking up from thesis: Dude, are you loving on Errol Flynn in there?

Minnie: Hell yeah. Someone went a little crazy with a Bedazzler on his outfit.

I'm so glad she's here to pay attention to Moomin! I might get all the way through the second set of revisions tonight.

i love a cosmopolitan slut

clementina suárez, 1928
Originally uploaded by Liz .

I'm so in love with Clementina Suarez. Yes the poetry, but... read this story of her at a party,

... where Clementina found herself surrounded by a group of catty women who began baiting her, asking her how many men she had slept with. She replied that she didn't know the number, but she could assure them first of all that she had slept with all of their husbands. And she reminded them that they were all whores; the only difference between her and them was that they were provincial sluts, whereas she was international, and her tastes were more refined.

Apparently she was also a fierce revolutionary.

I need all of her books! I need her little magazine, "Mujer"!!!! But even her biographer could not find any copies of it. There were 6 issues in 1933 and 1934. Damn.