Quaking Pudding

Today, as a last wild fling before I go back to school tomorrow, I made Quaking Pudding. I mixed it up according to the recipe given in Lobscouse and Spotted Dog. Here is a picture of the first slice cut from it.

After taking this photo, I cut into it with a fork and tried a bite. I am very sorry to report that it is just about as tasteless as tapioca. I tried sprinkling it with sugar, but that didn't help much. Jess's and my Spotted Dog was much tastier.

Alas!

:-(

My Apologies.

My sincere apologies to all. I have not updated this blog in a very long time...life is extremely crazy right now. I comfort myself with the thought that when I graduate it will all get better!

(Yes, I know this is untrue, but allow me my little delusions, ay? At least there will be no more papers to write and tests to take...only long, long, long, long workdays. Provided I can actually get a job with an English degree. Do you know, there are only several people, including me, who are graduating from my college this May with an English degree? Crazy. Well, anyway.)

So! I saw a funny poster the other day. It wasn't supposed to be funny though. It said, and I quote, "PLAY HACKEY!" Hackey? Is this some new sport I haven't heard about?

In other news, I have been improving my ice skating. I can now go really fast. Yay!

Ummm...what else? Let me think.

OK, how about a rant? That always seems to get the comments flowing.

I do not understand why the people I talk to (with the exception of the ones who comment here) can't seem to separate the issue of slavery from the South. I've been hearing a lot about this lately. Anytime I bring up the War Between the States and reveal that I am a Southern sympathiser, people react with scathing horror.

"How Could You?" they cry in emotional agony. "How could you be on the Southern side? You know, they did horrible things to the slaves. I don't understand how anybody could ever be on their side. You have to be prejudiced to be on the Southern side!"

What I don't understand is what prejudice these people have against actually cracking open a book on the subject. Well, all right, I will grant you that most of the books out there have a Northern/Union bias, because after all -- the winners of any conflict write the history books about the conflict. But there are books out there that can be had that will give you a more accurate picture of the WBTS.

And did you know only between 8 and 10 percent of the Southern population ever owned slaves (some sources say even less)? If I were a poor rural Southern farmer, I'd get tired of being told by snippy Northerners what a horrible person I was just because my neighbour down the road owned slaves on his big plantation. No wonder the Southern people rebelled against being told what to do. The North was doing exactly what it was accusing the South of doing -- judging an entire race of people by a few dimwits.

Now I'm not saying that Southerners were an entirely different race of people than Northerners, but the fact of the matter is that Northerners and Southerners came from different parts of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (mainly, anyway) and hated each other for hundreds of years before they ever set foot on American soil. There was bound to be a war, and it just so happened that slavery became the catalyst for the conflict.

Because the Southern agricultural economy and climate supported slavery, Southerners were the ones who were blamed for the whole mess. People tried to bring slaves up North, but the slaves died before they could accomplish much. Besides, the North didn't need slaves -- theirs was not an agrarian society. It was mostly industrial.

And one last parting shot before I sign off for now -- the slaves were all brought in via Northern ports. There was never one single slave brought in through a Southern port.

Ahem...OK, I'm done for right now. More later. I may continue this rant in a later post. Feel free to comment...hint, hint.

Forgetfulness...

Here I sit at the computer to blog. There's only one problem: I have forgotten what I was going to blog about! Yes, indeed, ladies and gentleman, yet again every blog topic has been whisked out of my head.

Oh...I take it back. I remember one thing I was going to blog about. A very ticklish thing it is, too. (Ticklish is one of my code words for funny). So here goes.

On the first Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts CD I bought, Gaslight, Russell Crowe wrote a song called David. It's all about how there are other Russell Crowes in the world and people kept asking him if he was any of them.

For instance, one was a 41-year-old snake trainer from Florida who was sent to prison for abusing his snake. There was also a 13-year-old ballroom dancer from Oz who was named Russell Crowe; someone came up to RC once on a plane, showed him a picture of the kid in the magazine, and asked if it was him. He said no.

(Author's note: Honestly, who could mistake RC for a 13-year-old? Sheesh!)

ANYWAY! This is all very funny on its own, but the thing that really made me laugh was that I picked up an old National Geographic from 1988 -- it was a bicentennial celebration of Australia -- and guess who was featured on one of the pages? An 11-year-old ballroom dancer named Russell Crowe! It must have been the same one; it had to be. Only that picture was taken two years before the other one.

Freaky, ay?

Speaking of names, I remember now one of the other subjects I was going to talk about. The other day I started thinking about some of the names I tried to make up when I was interested in writing Andromeda fanfiction. I'm still interested in writing it -- it's just that I don't know enough about the sci-fi genre to write intelligently about it.

(A/N: Andromeda is the only sci-fi show I've ever watched, other than when I was forced to sit through incomprehensibly boring episodes of Star Trek when on vacation with my parents. My father loved Star Trek for some reason, so at night when we'd all head back to the motel, he'd ferret out which cable channel was broadcasting it. Since we didn't and don't have cable, he was thrilled with the novelty of it all. "Oh, yeah," he'd say, "here we go. This is gonna be cool." My mother and I would exchange exasperated and bemused looks, then flop back on the bed and try to sleep or read while blocking out "They are heading straight for us, Captain! Shall I employ our automatic weapons tracker?")

Anyway. I digress. Andromeda was a pretty cool show, except I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on half the time. My father would sometimes watch it with me, and ask me things like, "What are they doing that for? What's the thing he's carrying? Who's she? Why does she have purple fur?"

I would always shrug. "Don't know."

"Why are you watching it if you don't know what's going on?"

"Ummm...because of all the pretty people!"

I'm digressing again. My point here, if I can ever get to it, is that I started making up what I considered to be sci-fi names. I made up a character called India Mackenzie and determined that she would marry Telemachus Rhade, an established Andromeda character.

I now see that that was a ridiculous idea and that it would never have gone anywhere, but bear with me. I was young and stupid. Come to think of it...I'm still young and most would say still stupid. No comments from the peanut gallery please.

Some of the names I made up were pretty cool-sounding, I thought. I made a list of the children India and Rhade would have...

First was Xalar Southerland Rhade.
Then twin girls, Kyrie Ellemerie and Kaeori Secessia.
Then they'd adopt a girl named Mackenzie Skersan.
Then another boy, Corelion Vademas.
Then...hmm, let's see. I think the next one was Carami Vanora.
Then Taemiron Davvid...
Then Gawain Telemachus...
Then Tarlii Maliryn...

Was that all of them? I think I'm missing someone. Oh well, maybe not. In any case, the other day I had the bright idea to search for the names on the Internet, just to see if anybody else had come up with them.

What I found was interesting. Apparently the only really original names I made up were Taemiron and Ellemerie. The rest...

Of course, Gawain, Telemachus, Davvid, Mackenzie, Vanora, Kyrie, Secessia, and Southerland already existed as names or words. I merely borrowed them.

Maliryn was entered on a number of websites as a misspelling of Marilyn.

Corelion and Vademas were Spanish words meaning...well, I don't know what they meant.

Skersan was a word used in some language similar to Italian.

Carami was Sanskrit. It means something close to "I will wander" or "I may wander."

Tarlii was another foreign-language word...I have no idea what language though. If anybody wants to look it up and help me out with an idea, please feel free.

And here's the real humdinger, folks: Xalar, by inventing which I thought I was being terribly, terribly original, turns out to be the registered and copyrighted name of a FISH PRODUCER! Yes, indeed. I guess I am not so original after all. I swear I made up the name in class after listening to my astronomy professor lecture about parallax. I had never heard of Xalar, the producer of Fine Marine Products, until I, on a whim, looked the name up on the mighty Internet.

*sigh*

I am destined to reinvent the wheel.

"Karakter"

No, I have not suddenly lost the ability to spell. Karakter is a Dutch film by Mike van Diem that we were required to watch in our film studies class on Wednesday.

I can just hear my commenters now..."Oh, the poor thing has to sit in class every Wednesday night watching movies? How awful! What a horrible class that must be!"

Well, last week's wonderful Dersu Uzala would have made me agree with the satiric comment above. However, Karakter is another matter altogether. One of the most depressing things I've ever seen! Now, don't get me wrong, Dersu Uzala was a little depressing, too -- but that was because I liked Dersu and I didn't want to see anything bad happen to him, as it unfortunately did. Karakter was depressing simply because it was depressing, not to mention that I didn't want to see hide nor hair of the characters (except for maybe one) ever again in my whole entire life!

I'm not going to waste your time and mine giving you a detailed synopsis, partly because I don't want to talk about it. Just take my word for it -- you *do not* want to see it. If you already have seen it, you have my heartfelt sympathy. Please sign yourself up for therapy.

So! Anyway! On to cooler things. On Tuesday we had an exciting Hemingway class. Well, I was excited, anyway. I doubt I moved many of my classmates to a similar interest. The professor was impressed, though.

We were reading Hemingway's A Way You'll Never Be. In that story, the narrator, who is assumed to be Hemingway's famous Nick Adams, has apparently been wounded in the first World War. We know it is a head wound (and not a knee wound as some researchers seem to assume) because Nick's friend Major Paravicini says that it "should have been trepanned." (As faithful readers of my blog and Clair's will know, I am very excited about trepanning, or trephining.)

The resident MD of the class spoke up and told the class about trepanning (which I was prepared to do if he hadn't). I then raised my hand and waved it about wildly. Dr Harley called on me. I blurted out, "Nick has a wound to the right temporal lobe!" Dr Harley looked a little bewildered, so I continued, "Nick's talking a lot in this story -- he can't stop himself. He's talking on and on about grasshoppers. Damage to the right temporal lobe of the brain will cause a loss of inhibition of talking and recall of non-verbal material, like grasshoppers and fishing and all that! So you see, it must be some kind of right temporal lobe thing."

"Well, *that* is *fascinating,*" Dr Harley proclaimed, eyes glowing (he is a self-confessed Hemingway aficionado). "I would very much like a copy of your notes, if I may!"

Pleased, I grinned and agreed. I was glad that my news had been taken so well. Normally Dr Harley has an answer for everything Hemingway. We are talking about a man who went to the library and rummaged through old papers and microfiche until he located an old copy of the Saturday Evening Post from the exact week he deduced to be the time frame for Hemingway's Crossing the Mississippi. So he figured out exactly which Saturday Evening Post Nick was reading and what he would have found interesting -- baseball and the like. Then he photocopied it and went through and highlighted every reference to World War I. It was very interesting. He passed a copy of it around in class; I was thrilled to see a short story by Louis Joseph Vance, an author with whom I am familiar. He wrote such enjoyable novels as Terence O'Rourke: Gentleman Adventurer and The Pool of Flame. I loved those books when I was young, and I love them still.

But I digress. Actually, there was something else I was going to discuss...but I can't remember it now. I'll think of it later.

OH! I remember now! I was going to say CONGRATULATIONS to Russell Crowe and his wife Dani -- they're expecting again! And congrats to Charlie, 'cause he's gonna be a big brother! All right, all together now for the Royal Navy Cheer: HIP HIP HUZZAH! HIP HIP HUZZAH! HIP HIP HUZZAH!!!! I'm so happy for them. A baby is a wonderful blessing.

That's all for now!