| apparently I will be upbeat if it kills me |
[Dec. 18th, 2009|10:00 am] |
Gawsh, still happy. The approaching holiday must be doing its thing. Today I am gladdened by:
- Rain! It's raining! gentle, soft, completely unseasonal summer rain which is making things misty and slightly cool, but not cold. Of course, this is further evidence of climate change and what have you, and we're all screwed, but I'm happily damp.
- Improv Everywhere. They're kind of the Non-Evil Twin of candid camera: do weird, wacky stuff that makes people unexpectedly and laterally happy.
- Chicken pot pie. I pretty much forgot to eat yesterday, besides the brownies, so wandered home and made chicken pot pie for supper. It's comfort food. Also, a really nice recipe with leeks and gammon in a creamy sauce flavoured with lemon and mustard. Happily unhealthy.
- Supernatural motel décor. I swear, those boys scour America for the most trippy, psychedelic, catastrophically ugly motel rooms imaginable by man or demon. The set designers must have a blast creating them. I'd do a list, but the mad fansites beat me to it. Some of them have truly awful themes - the orange/bullfighter one and the black and silver disco one crack me up. Happily.
- Last day at work! Despite the fact that I'm going to have to spend part of the next two weeks working on Orientation material, Holiday! holidayholidayholiday! Happy!
|
|
|
| on the not-quite-first day of Christmas the cosmic wossnames gave to me... |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|10:25 am] |
So, totally buggered at the moment, but in fact surprisingly upbeat despite all the orientation panic, student angst and what have you. An anti-rant-list is apparently called for. Today, the following things are making me happy:
- Holidays. Yesterday was a public holiday, for which I thank the saints fasting. I'm in that stage of mental shut-down which says that energy-wise I'm pretty much at the end of my tether - I did sweet bugger-all all day yesterday, it was luvverly. I have two weeks off from Friday, which is a half day owing to the staff party. I figure I'll just about survive, having carefully paced myself to this point.
- Chocolate brownies. For my birthday this year sven&tanya gave me this incredible book called Chocolate Chocolate, full of recipes which require untold and unlikely quantities of the eponymous ingredient, and which are uniformly and unashamedly decadent and bad for you. (Eighteen different chocolate brownie recipes! good grief!) As a result of this I've actually learned to make decent brownies, which has mostly been a matter of subtracting 50o from the temperature, fifteen minutes from the cooking time, and flinging into the recipe whatever the hell happens to occur to me in the way of extra chocolate, extra Lindt dark chocolate, extra cocoa, extra chocolate chips, extra vanilla, or extra random nuts or flavourings. The last batch was exceptionally edible, and I have three of them in a tin on my desk. The morning will be somewhat sugar-powered in addition to its usual Earl Grey fuel.
- Recession. Yes, really. No-one has any money, everyone is doing the "ooh let's not do big presents this year!" thing, the shops are comparatively empty, and consequently Christmas is not bringing out my inner homicidal misanthrope quite as much as it usually does.
- Supernatural. Season three is both darker and goofier (rabbit's-foot physical humour ftw), angsty!boys are angstier, but mostly I'm happy because last night's episode about fairy tale got the fairy tale bit absolutely right. Bonus accurate "Grimms' fairy tales were dark, twisty, violent and sexy" references from Sam, my current favourite geek in the whole wide world. Also, pleasingly perverse Christmas episode featuring caricatured 50s-style cheery suburban couples with a charnel house in the cellar.
- My mother. She's in town. Life is better.
- Cthulhoid wossnames. My Tor.com mailing list signup just gave me a totally unexpected early gift of the new Charlie Stross Laundry story, also with additional Cthulhoid Christmas perversion (the Filler of Stockings!). It'll go up on Tor.com next week, but if anyone really wants to read it earlier, mail me!
- First trailer for Iron Man 2. 'Nuff said.
Now I go to herd academics, hand-hold devastated students and wrangle orientation photocopying. I wave a chocolate brownie mystically at them all. |
|
|
| why is it our job to save everybody? |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|11:24 am] |
Exchanging emails with one of my orientation leaders for next year: his mail programme is rather entertainingly mangling my original message when it quotes it, ending up with beautifully nonsensical strings. This morning's read "2010 wounehowesour third -howile youyouhavelare good and havere trainedplanneOLyournehowesif I shoOLThabshowk you tyouhavelown", which I promise was reasonably coherent English when I sent it. The extent to which this is amusing me is probably indicative of how stressful this week has been. Seven or eight excluded students per day. There's a high-water-mark of trauma at about chest height in my office, and my Japanese Peace Lily is drooping. Sigh.
On the upside, the chocolate biscuit supply is holding out, and tomorrow is a public holiday, which I have resolved to spend watching movies, making nucato with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wolverine_nun and finishing up the Season 2 finale of Supernatural. The one with the djinn last night was slightly heartbreaking. Angsty boys! boys with angst! I keep threatening to make that correspondence chart matching Supernatural episodes with the ones they've ripped off from X-Files, in this case "Amor Fati" from Season 6. There are apparently no new plots in the world.
My adorable Hobbit is apparently an adorable psycho killer, he brought in a loudly-meeping baby bird yesterday and refused to give it up, responding to all attempts with a deeply worrying Harley Davidson growl from his manly ex-tomcat chest. Fortunately he killed it fairly quickly. The high winds over the weekend have apparently brought baby birds down from nests all over, there was another one on campus yesterday, which the university's feral cat population have presumably dealt with posthaste. There's bloody well nothing you can do for baby birds: can't put them back, can't rescue them without traumatising them beyond recovery, they're pretty much doomed to die, which, as Pterry notes, "is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds." Again with the sigh. I think I'll have a chocolate biscuit now. |
|
|
| Earth go boom. Happy. |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|05:17 pm] |
Deary me, clearly an official Week From Hell, haven't posted since, gawsh, Tuesday. Sorry, internets. Inadequate brain/time representation in the State of Me. Four more days and I'm on leave for two weeks. If I keep the chocolate biscuit supply constant, it's conceivable I may escape before I actually slaughter a student.
In keeping with the current theme of Brain? What Brain?, this morning we (jo&stv + self) took ourselves off to see 2012, on the grounds that if you're going to watch California crumble, tilt and slide into the sea, it may as well be on the big screen. Before anyone feels the need to pillory my taste in film, let me hasten to add we fully expected it to be loud, stupid, clichéd, cheesy and dire, and I'm happy to say it delivered exactly what it says on the box. It was also, in a heady, shitballs-retarded sort of way, and probably as a direct result of our cheerfully low expectations, bloody good fun. The cast was a bit patchy - am I alone in finding John Cusack increasingly unappealing? he seems to be creeping inexorably into Nicholas Cage territory, although mercifully without the wig malfunctions. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt were watchable, though, and I recognised with glee a slightly heartstring-tugging turn from Blu Mankuma, who's horribly familiar most recently from Supernatural as a nice-but-doomed doctor, and way back when in X-Files. Also, bonus Insane!Woody Harrelson, although that might actually be a tautology.
This thing has not much in the way of plot, just enough to vaguely point all the special effects in an approximate direction as they stagger along like drunken juggernauts. I thus feel absolutely no compunction in spoilering it all to hell, it won't affect your enjoyment of the movie one iota since the clichés broadcast their inevitable upshot VERY LOUDLY from the word go, and in any event all the really cool catastrophe sequences are in the trailer. In terms of clichés it has 'em all: separated couple with Cute Kids, check, and Inevitable Reconciliation. Nice Guy new boyfriend, check (doomed, obviously). Hairs-Breadth Last-Minute Escapes, some self-sacrificing, check. Doomed Extraneous Ethnic Characters, check (old black dudes, Russian mobster's moll, Russian mobster, nice Indian physicist and family, Wise/Wizened Gnomic Tibetan Monk). Really Bad Science, check (lots of neutrinos! start acting as a wave! new particle invented!). "My God" count, only 2, but "This is impossible!" probably four or five, I lost count. Entirely spurious moral message tacked on in defiance of logic, consistency or justice, check. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, check.
California go boom. White House go boom (gets an aircraft carrier dropped on it, which I can only assume is an entirely unintended ironic commentary on the Bush regime). Yellowstone Park go boom. Hawaii go boom. Tokyo go boom under crashing tsunami waves. The Cape ends up, in a move which caused the entire movie house to collapse giggling, as the New Hope for all the giant space-agey arks, since apparently the Drakensberg are the new highest point in the world. (All the fancy tech for keeping track of things signally fails to go boom, fortunately for the film's overall comprehensibility. But they still can't pronounce "Drakensberg"). Overall blood, none at all bar scratches, scrapes, one lost leg and a dead moose. Kids and small dogs entirely unharmed, save the little Indian boy, who was a chess-playing geek and presumably doesn't count.
Overall cheese factor: those little highly-processed soft cheese triangles in the individual wrappers. Not much flavour, very packaged, curiously more-ish despite being fundamentally disgusting and leaving you with a thin film of plastic on your tongue.
Somewhere in my future is an extended meditation on exactly why it is that disaster movies make me so incalculably happy. I can't work out if it's my primitive sense of justice, my inbuilt belief in the ultimate insignificance of humanity despite its delusions to the contrary, or if I'm just a nasty, vindictive sort of person, but Earth go boom, I'm happy.
Now I go forth to assist the Evil Landlord in his fixed, Germanicly stubborn purpose of braaing despite a merry south-easter. If I'm off the 'net for a while, it's because a low-flying tree branch has clocked me and laid me out. |
|
|
| theorising cake |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|11:19 pm] |
OK, upfront, I don't do kitsch. Or chintz, or pretty-pretty, or pastel, or girly, or practically anything to which can be applied the adjective "bridal" 1. All and any of the above are productive of aversion and departure or, if forced on me in an enclosed space with no exits, flinching, sneers and, in extreme cases, simulated retching. I also can't claim to possess much in the way of manual dexterity or artistic ability which, coupled with the patience of a hyperactive stoat, means I have no interest whatsoever in cake-decorating, marzipan sculpture, needlepoint, papercraft or macrame. (The knitting thing is a complete aberration and I still stoutly maintain that I only do it because I'm occasionally abducted by aliens).
Given this, it's a bit odd that I have an addiction to cake blogs. There is no student melt-down so torrid that it cannot be soothed by the application of a cup of Earl Grey and twenty minutes with Cakelava, or the CakeWrecks Sunday Sweets. This is, frankly, weird. I don't go for these elaborate occasions, I got all that out of my system with the SCA. I don't want to get married. I don't even eat a lot of cake. But I love looking at them. Mature analytic reflection suggests this might be about the following:
- Sheer craft. Ye gods, these people do some beautiful work: not only the meticulous detailed production of these sculptures, but the frequent artistry of their conception. I have a particular addiction to the kind of modernist, minimalist cake that seems to be currently fashionable, all square angles and solid colours with understated detail, not fussy or chintzy at all. Also, the crazy non-Euclidian angles ones amuse me no end.
- Sheer illusion. This is food pretending to be something else. I love that. I wouldn't wear ruffles if you paid me, but a cake can wear them in sugar and make me simply happy. It's photo-real leaves or flowers or beetles or baseballs, aping the real in the medium of food. Basically they're modern-day subtleties, the equivalent of a medieval cockatrice or gingerbread castle: a trickery, a happy game of let's-pretend. (This one's from JustCake).
- Sheer profligate impermanence. I think this is the deal-clincher, the thing which for me differentiates cake sculpture from twee porcelain knick-knacks, about which I will set with a baseball bat given half a chance. After all these days and hours of loving, painstaking, polished craftsmanship, someone will dig a knife into these creations and demolish them utterly, and that's the whole point. They're all the more attractive because they're transient, because their beauty and craft are real, concrete and fleeting, lovingly crafted for a moment of splendid, celebratory recognition and then inevitable destruction. Tasty destruction.
I like cake blogs, because cake decorating is about food and splendid craft in one happy package, which I will contemplate with pleasure as long as no-one actually expects me to make the bloody things. Spectator sport. Gosh, wow. You go. I'll just watch, and marvel contentedly that such excessive and unnecessary excellence exists in its own fleeting and self-sufficient pocket of time.
1 I might, for example, have a sneaking attraction to the phrase "bridal massacre", or possibly "bridal zombies".
|
|
|
| there’s nothing to explain, in every life a little rain |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|11:18 am] |
Another of those misty Cape Town mornings in which the peninsula has clearly woken up, rolled over in bed, thought "bugger all these seasonal expectations, anyway", and huddled itself down into a comforting shroud of gentle rain, soft skies and a drifting sea fog forming a separate layer below the clouds, like a sheet under a duvet. Come to sunny Cape Town! Bring umbrella.
My image clusters this morning suggest that actually I'd also rather be back in bed. Fair comment. I'm a bit fragile because Sid the Sinus Headache is trying to make a comeback, which I'm ruthlessly undermining from within via a cynical media campaign, using my tabloid agents Lots of Vitamins and Stv's High-Chilli-Quotient Thai curry. The gin/chardonnay combination which accompanied the Thai food last night may also be contributing its mite to the rather-be-in-bed stakes, admittedly. Other than that, of course, the weather is making me predictably happy, and the Monday billboards were particularly entertaining:
TIGER NOW 6 OVER PAR
Poor Tiger's indiscretions are inevitably doomed to give rise to more, and more horrible, bad golfing puns than one would have believed humanly possible. There's a sort of unctuous schadenfreude in it, too - his media image is so much Nice Young Man that the tabloids seem to be deriving a compensatory pleasure in shredding him.
RONALDO REMOVES SHIRT!
I love the complete inconsequentiality of this. Undoubtedly there's an actual incident behind it, but it simply begs to be ramified into a whole string of similar incidents: OBAMA HAS CUP OF COFFEE! BRAD PITT CLEANS TEETH! PARIS HILTON WEARS PANTS!
And, finally, memorably,
GUBAI DUBAI!
Alas Dubai, someone popped your bubble, which was frankly always an absurdly overblown and self-indulgent bubble, anyway. Gubai indeed. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
determinedly upbeat
tired, angsted out
contemplative