I impress me
I just made Roasted Garlic and Goats’ Cheese Flan! Yay me! Why did I do it in the middle of the day? Because it’s the holidays, and I wanted to experiment, and when better to experiment than on a rainy Friday in the holidays, with Torchwood that J downloaded for me because I think I stuffed up the VCR? No better time!
It was really, really easy… and very tasty… I can foresee dinner parties with this as the entree, and me getting an awful lot of kudos for it. And I won’t be saying then that it was easy…. Now, perhaps, to attempt and conquer pannacotta…
Ray
We got the movie Ray for Christmas, and we finally sat down to watch it on Sunday night. I loved it. Jamie Foxx is fantastic – I understand that Ray Charles approved him, before he died, which is cool. (It was weird to hear him sing a Ray Charles song and realise that it was the bit that he, Jamie Foxx, sang in a Kanye West song that I know I should dislike and… just… cant’t.) Most of the other actors were also really good – and it wasn’t half weird to realise that the dude who didn’t look all that old and actually had hair was, indeed, Toby (or Richard Schiff (West Wing) if you want to be pedantic).
It was a lot like Walk the Line, which I guess is unsurprising: they were two of the biggest stars of the latter half of the 20th century, and they both had drug habits that they managed to kick. The difference being that Charles’ wife stuck by him, and vice versa, whereas of course the big thing in Walk the Line is the love affair with June Carter. J thought they spent an awful lot of time on the heroin issue, and then it just ends – fft. I don’t think it spend too long on the drugs, although it was a significant portion of the movie – I think it jut reflects the reality of the situation – but, again like Walk the Line – it does end abruptly, too abruptly for me. Having seen him be a bastard to his family and lots of other people, I would have liked to see him in middle and later life: did he make it up to his family, or did he continue womanising? (He had 12 children, apparently, so….) I was left feeling like he was a great singer, and not that great a person, and I’m not sure how that’s how the director and producer wanted it. I did like, though, that it showed how the drug habit affected those around him, and how people reacted, rather than solely looking at its effect on him.
The other thing that I appreciated about this film was how they did the flashbacks. I thought it was very clever – and a lot more interesting than having a whole section on his childhood would have been.
Absolutely recommended if you like his music!
Tagged!
Tagged by GJ
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it’s too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).
6. Tag five people.
From Shakespearean Negotiations, by Stephen Greenblatt for which AB will be so proud of me:
“The storm in the play seems to several characters to be of more than natural intensity, and Lear above all tries desperately to make it mean something (as a symbol of his daughters’ ingratitude, a punishment for evil, a sign from the gods of the impending universal judgment), but the thunder refuses to speak. When Albany calls Goneril a “devil” and a “fiend” (4.2.59, 66), we know that he is not identifying her as a supernatural bring – it is impossible, in this play, to witness the eruption of the denizens of hell into the human world – just as we know that Albany’s prayer for “visible spirits” to be sent down by the heavens “to tame these vild offenses” (4.2.46-7) will be unanswered.”
You’ll notice that’s not a full 4-7 sentences, but I thought it was enough – and it’s the end of the sentence, too.
Hatshepsut
They found her mummy! – well, they think so, and it’s not so much found it as identified it…
Hatshepsut is so cool. Her iconography is fascinating, false beard and all (although, despite how incredulous the narrator of that vid sounds, male pharaohs did the false beard thing too… and I have never actually heard someone say Thutmose. I’ve only heard Tutmosis…). I think actually one thing that makes her so interesting is the fact that her descendents tried so damned hard to erase her from history. Humans are contrary like that; tell me something I don’t want to know about and dammit, I do!
I also like that Zahi Hawass sometimes seems to be a bit of a rock star in Egypt. Not everyone likes the way he does his job, but darn he is a good front man for archaeology in Egypt.
Doctor Who
I am very excited about the new Dr Who season. Having gone out last night, I taped, and only just remembered to watch it. Squee!
As a friend of mine said, one of the nice things about this episode (and the Christmas ep, too) is that they allow the Doctor to grieve for Rose, which makes him more… approachable, if not more human. Not that I’m a really great connoisseur, but I don’t remember any particular sadness at the departure of previous companions. I think this is the function and result of having a younger and, frankly, sexier doctor: if he was completely and utterly callous (rather than just the short-term callous we all know and love), then he wouldn’t really be very much fun at all.
So the new girl looks good, although I am a little dubious at shoving the sexual tension right in your face from the get-go – and is it just me, or are they making the Doctor more come-hither as well? This first episode was quite enjoyable… especially “Look! I even brought a straw!” with which to suck your blood.
Resolution
Having gone to a very interesting seminar this afternoon, given by Stephen Knight, about Myrddin/Merlin – which I will blog about maybe tomorrow, when I feel more human – I have renewed my determination to read more academic books. I was good at this for a few years out of uni, but I have got slack recently – unsurprisingly – and while my brain hasn’t quite turned to moosh (I hope), it’s getting a bit sluggish. So I aiming to read, realistically, maybe 10 academic books a year. Some of those will be popular-ish histories, because I do so love them; some will be more academic, I hope – I plan to re-read many of my uni course readers, at least the history ones that are relevant to school and the English ones that I am interested in; I also made good inroads on this resolution by beginning Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, this evening: it’s been on my shelf for a few years now, and I have never got past the intro. It has the best opening line ever – way better than Pride and Prejudice: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” And some of my 10 will also, I have vowed, include education books. Just recently I have realised that I don’t put quite the effort and love into my vocation as perhaps I ought. I am undertaking some steps throughs school to improve that, but realise that I need to spend some external time on it too, sad as that might be.
Anyway. Expect, at random intervals, posts about these academic texts. And feel free to ignore them at will.
I love Led Zeppelin
I don’t think I’ve said that enough recently.
I love Led Zeppelin.
I am doing some prep (yes, for the second last day of school… sad, eh?), so I’ve put my DVD of “Unledded” on – Robert Plant and Jimmy Page doing a concert about ten years ago for MTV. Page is so, so incredible – I love the triple-handled guitar, it’s so unnecessary! – and Plant is a glorious front man. He has a voice I just love listening to – in his newer incarnation, too, with the Strange Sensations. And their songs! – so listenable. Unlike, for example, early Beatles, which is just crap; and modern pop, or even rock, which so often sounds just the same, one song after the other. Kashmir is on a completely different planet, for example, from Rain Song.
Who, me? Biased? Pft.
Corridor of Champions
I share a staffroom with about 20 people. Basically, a cube farm, but with less room than the average battery hen. I have a desk, on which I can just fit both my elbows (when I move everything off said desk), and a four-drawer filing cabinet. When I first looked at that filing cabinet, I thought: “ha! how can they think I will ever fill that up? I’m not going to be here that long!” to which I now say: “ha! young and naive me!”
But that’s not the story.
I am in a lane/corridor/section of eight – four to one side, four to the other, backing on to each other. Back your chair out too fast and you’re likely to collide with someone. In our corridor there are five English teachers, three history teachers, one geographer, one psych teacher, one science teacher, and one art teacher.* Someone at some stage called us the Corridor of Champions, and it stuck (with blu tack and a lot of hard work from us). We decided that, since reports are over and the end (of the semester) is nigh, we should have lunch together. So we did. Got a couple of little tables, turned the chairs around, massively over-catered… it was so much fun! And people were so jealous, which was at least part of the point, of course. We even had silly hats. It will now be a termly thing, we think.
It made today – a five-out-of-six-lesson-on day, with additional yard duty to make sure kids don’t get run over – bearable.
*Doesn’t add up to eight, does it? I’m both English and history, so figure it out from there….
Podcast
You know how some people can listen to their recorded voice, and they have no problem with it?
Well, that’s not me.
Nonetheless, I bring you My First Podcast. The first part is Cassiphone interviewing Marianne, which is interesting; the second part is Cassiphone and I having a yarn about Troy, which I have previously raved about here. I have listened to, oh, about 10 seconds of it. I am sniffling a lot – had a nasty cold – and I think I sound dreadful. If you think I sound like I do in real life, don’t bother telling me! Because I don’t want to know that. Still, it is very exciting to have this podcast up – a first for ASif!, and quite possibly going to become a semi-regular feature. And if GJ gets Skype too, the world had better start trembling!
Troy
Not the movie, not a person, but a collection of short stories by Simon Brown. Despite the fact that I had been warned to the contrary, I rather did expect that all of the stories would be genuinely and obviously connected to the Greek myths. This was not the case. All of the stories were quite good, but I admit that the stories that were very definitely set in the Trojan context were my favourite. I won’t go into it in too much detail now, because there’s another project coming up that I will reveal more about soon… but I have to share my joy over one story.
“The Masque of Agamemnon” had me crowing with joy from the first paragraph to the last sentence. It is just so clever, so beautiful, so enjoyable… I can’t really explain it. I tried to explain it to J, but since he doesn’t know the stories very well it didn’t make all that much sense to him. But just the title – so clever! (Although damned by Schliemann.) And the ending – brilliant! And the merging of scifi with the stories – ! My incoherence shows, I hope, my inchoate appreciation rather than a Sunday night brain.
It also reminded me that I have Dan Simmons’ Olympos stil looking at me accusingly, unread… but I haven’t read Ilium in ages, and I have to before I read this one, and it is still loaned out to someone.
The cover of Troy is lovely too.
*sigh*
This was one very, very good purchase from NatCon. And it’s one of the copies with signatures from Simon Brown, Sean Williams (co-wrote “Masque”), and (!) Garth Nix, who wrote the Introduction (on which I have mixed feelings, but I think I like it).
Randomly Yours, Alex 