August 31, 2009
We all know how the intertubes work, right? You pop over to your Facebook page, where someone has posted a link. You follow the link, and one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, Orson Scott Card is a homophobe of epic, insane proportions.
I can’t say why this surprises me. It’s not as if I’ve ever read anything Card has ever written, with the possible exception of some how-to article or other in Writer’s Digest, back when I actually read Writer’s Digest. It’s not as if one of my idols has disappointed me. And yet, I keep thinking, “no, really, that Orson Scott Card?”
Perhaps I have been laboring under the misconception that a writer of science fiction would know something about science–that is to say, would be more rational than this.
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That B&N gift card I got for my birthday is almost spent. I got a little impulsive last night and bought five–count ‘em, five!–books, four of which were in hardcover. I love books in hardcover, and it’s a rare treat to be able to buy a pile of them all at once without a shred of guilt.
Two of the newest five are debut novels by authors I’ve never heard of. Their book jackets did a bang-up job at being book jackets; that is to say, at attracting my attention and getting the book into my hand. I thought I might take a look at the various covers, then, in this special Birthday Edition of Under the Covers.
I’ll start with a cover that I’ve already written about: the cover of Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, Brooklyn.
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August 30, 2009
Apparel, toys, television networks, classic animated entertainment, and–what else?–eggs.
 
A shiny nickel to anyone who can propose a plausible line of thinking that led to this. I’m trying to imagine the meeting that included a discussion of this product: a long marble-topped table, businesswomen and -men in skirts and suits, pitchers of water and carafes of coffee on silver trays, PowerPoint presentations, and agenda topped by the word “eggs.” No matter how I play it out in my mind, the skirt- and suit-clad participants of this meeting end up doubled over in laughter, tears rolling down their cheeks.
August 27, 2009
Well, actually, I did bake a cake. A red velvet cake, as promised.
I used the Sara Moulton recipe, but if you’ve read any of my cooking posts, you will be entirely unsurprised to learn that I made one small adjustment. Instead of buttermilk, I used sour cream.
From now on, unless it makes no sense at all, I think I’m going to make that substitution. We always have sour cream in the fridge, but I never buy buttermilk unless a recipe requires it. And then, of course, because there’s apparently no such thing as a half-pint container of buttermilk, I have to buy at least twice as much as I need, and whatever’s left over sits in the fridge, flourishing with alien life until finally I throw it away.
But I digress.
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August 26, 2009
For some years now, I’ve thought that I should just skip the whole birthday thing. It stops being fun when you’re about 10, except that on your 21st birthday you get to drink too much–legally!–and make an ass of yourself.* After that, it’s just a cruel reminder that you’re getting older and not necessarily wiser, that you’ll likely never have abs like this guy, and that there’s more hair on your earlobes than on the top of your head.**
Whenever I mention my birthday-skipping scheme, however, Todd reminds me that it would preclude the possibility of gifts, and I invariably withdraw the suggestion. And with good reason, ’cause I usually get some kick-ass stuff.
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August 25, 2009
August 24, 2009
This, my friends, is why you must never turn your back on a Jack Russell terrier:
 
I left the room the other day, for maybe 15 minutes, and when I returned, that’s what had become of the holster for my iPhone. I can’t find a picture showing what it looked like originally, but it wasn’t entirely unlike this. Charlotte’s, erm, modifications didn’t improve its utility, let’s put it that way.
I suppose she was irritated because we’d left her at home alone–well, with only other dogs–for too long. But that doesn’t explain why she felt the need to eat my cell phone holster. She really is a terribly annoying brat sometimes.
Later, I popped out again to run to the grocery store, and she climbed up on the window sill to look after me…
… and the little shit is so adorable, I just had to forgive her.
This is, of course, why she’s a terribly annoying brat sometimes.
August 21, 2009
As I mentioned ever so briefly last night, I made another batch of snickerdoodles. This time, I made a full recipe, so I didn’t have to add, subtract, or divide fractions.
… Not that fractions were really the problem, after all. I think when I made the first batch, I put in a half-cup of flour thinking I was putting in a full cup. It was, in other words, an issue of cup size.
In any case, this time I went totally by the book.
Well, almost. We were totally out of the regular DiabetiSweet, so I used the brown. I was a little hesitant to roll the cookies in it before baking them, but the cinnamon crust on the outside really is an important element of the snickerdoodle experience, so I gave it a go. It worked really well.
But see for yourself:
 
They pretty much look like snickerdoodles this time, yes? No light shining through these, no siree.
Todd says he prefers these to the first batch. Personally, I’m on the fence. Maybe I’ll split future batches in two, with enough flour in one half and the other half all chewy and buttery and paper-thin in the middle.
Pat Conroy has a new book out. Don’t ask me how I know. It’s just an uncanny feeling that I have. It came over me as I walked into the B&N.
I didn’t get a close-up of the cover. It hardly seemed worth it. As you can see here, it looks an awful lot like this sort of thing, or this.
I read some reviews of the new Conroy novel and a description of one of the Benton Frank novels. If you covered the author names and titles, you’d probably think they were two books by the same author. Oh, and Return to Sullivans Island is listed on South of Broad‘s page under “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” So, yeah, I’d have to say they’re pretty solidly in the same genre–whatever that is. Weepfest? Is that a genre?
With all this teabagging and astroturfery and whatnot that’s been going on lately, I’ve been mulling over the idea of writing up a little something about projection in political discourse.
I’ve sideswiped the topic here and here, but I think it needs a little more scrutiny.
In a nutshell, I’m thinking that all the brouhaha–the raw and strident fear of tyranny and totalitarianism–reveals that there are a lot of people on the right whose shadows, in the Jungian sense, are very, very dark.
Way back in the ’90s, there was a ballot measure in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I was living at the time, that would have repealed the city’s gay rights ordinance. I–along with every other resident of St. Paul, I’m sure–received in the mail a photocopied screed setting forth some religious group’s objections to gay people having rights. We indoctrinate youth (unlike, say, people who send their toddlers to Sunday school). We choose to be gay (unlike, say, people who convert to evangelical Christianity, or who elect to keep going to church after they’ve left home and their parents can no longer compel them to attend). There were several others, and I should probably feel fortunate that I’m actually drawing a blank, because if I could remember them all they’d probably piss me off. The point is that everything on the list wasn’t actually true of gay people, but was absolutely true of the people who put together the flyer.
I was going to write about all of that in great detail, and do a lot of research about Jung and the shadow and so on. But then I discovered this clip from The Daily Show, and it says all the same stuff but it’s current and funny and so why not just watch it, hm?
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