mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Mark Bittman, the food columnist for the New York Times, has discovered the glories of cruise ships. I'll wait right here while you go get a drink.  

Are you back? The great thing about cruises is that, if you're the food columnist for a major newspaper, you can travel for free! Mr. Bittman recommends the experience wholeheartedly.

Nevertheless, my first journey took some gearing up to, because cruising is so easy to put down. I was like that: too sophisticated to consider it.
If there's one promising start to a New York Times lifestyle article, it's the writer explaining that he is far, far too New York to consider this exotic and foreign -- but not in the sophisticated, world-traveller way -- experience.  Within a few sentences, we know, the finest in upper-middle-class condescension will be on tap.
 
Many of the common complaints about cruise ships ring true: The best of the entertainment is boring. Most of the food is mediocre, and it’s usually about as opposite of “local” as you can find... The excursions are rushed, timid, overpriced. Many of the ports have nothing in them worth seeing. The companionship is limited. (The best cruise joke I know: “This cruise has the oldest passengers I’ve ever seen. And most of them brought their parents.”) There are the risks of illness, although my experience is that the industry has become germophobic and ships seem safer than most workplaces, contagion-wise. Then there’s the issue of safety, although there’s not much to worry about. You might hit rough seas, and even become seasick.
Sign me up, baby.   "I am a professional food writer, but I've decided mediocre food isn't all that bad."
 
Some other things I have found: In general, the prices are not unreasonable, especially since they’re often discounted.
"But so much of it!"

The service is usually excellent, especially compared with hotels and restaurants on land, at least most of the places I frequent.
 
"I, Mark Bittman, need to get out more."
 
The food is as abundant as you’ve heard, generally better than that in most hotels; furthermore, after a few days, you can probably strike a deal with a friendly cook to customize it as you like.
"...if you're the food columnist for the New York Times."

There’s also an odd level of equality: Everyone spends time in the public spaces, and those are shared, although there are no doubt exclusive lounges for the highest-paying passengers. Much of the food, too, is the same for everyone.
"It may be mediocre, but I am comforted by the knowledge that nobody else is getting anything better."

But there are two other factors that make cruising not only unusual but uniquely satisfying, at least to me. ... It is simply that the “floating hotel” means that your vacation is structured like this: You get onboard; you unpack; you never change rooms again; and yet you go different places. Effortlessly. ... it’s an incomparable luxury to put your suitcase under the bed and not think of it for days or, if you’re lucky, weeks. To keep your toothbrush parked in the same place; to not search for your cellphone charger among your belongings; to leave your magazines in a stack; to recover from jet lag once, at most — all while actually traveling — this feels inconceivable.
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of vacationing in a short-term apartment or house.  I bet you could  discover this while reading any travel essay in the New York Times in the history of mankind.   Protip: Search for "Tuscany".  

At the beginning of those seven days, we — I was traveling with my wife — were cautious. Seven days at sea? With these people? And yet, these days were fantastic.  [it. mine]
No comment.

These are hours spent staring at passing islands or shorelines, wildlife, the sky and sea.  
Fair point.  

These are hours spent not doing these things: reading, catching up on long-term projects, binge-watching shows that everyone else watched two years ago.  
What, you didn't bring any books or DVDs?   (Leaving aside the concept that reading is a chore.)

Time slows, warps. One sits inside looking out, the banality of the ship framing the sublime nature of the landscape. Often, the ship’s roll is soothing, as if you were placed in the hand of a walking giant. The sound of the ocean is constant; the salt air breezes through every opening. The “culture” is so middle-America (even on non-American cruise ships, it seems), and demands so little that you can actually think. What a change.  
[it. very very much mine]

And then you go eat dinner.
"Which, as I may have mentioned, is substandard."

I always thought Mark Bittman's cooking column was substandard, but that's just me.  Perhaps it's because I am (although living in California) middle-American.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
I'm trying to stretch my brain with a small piece of tech writing. This essay is aimed at people who aren't programmers, but understand "if it's a tree chop it down" and "if you get lost, go to the lost and found." If you feel like nerding out (and no blame if you don't), let me know if this helps you understand what went wrong with Apple phones, tablets, and computers. All notes (marked with asterisks) are for coders. If you're a coder, feel free to let me know when my deliberate oversimplifications are severely distorting the logic of the explanation.

Notes for geeks

I will be delighted to do a full geekout on the terrible, terrible coding practice revealed here in a thread in the comments.
 
Over the weekend, Apple released/leaked admitted to+ a truly disastrous bug that means that secured site (sites with HTTPS in the URL) transmitted data even if they were given an incorrect password. Because of this bug, Websites can successfully lie to browsers in secure conversations. In particular, third parties can insert themselves into conversations between a site and a browser, and can successfully pretend to be either party in the conversation.  Here's a high-level description of how it happened.
length  )
 
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Music: Is reminiscent of Game of Thrones theme, but somehow seafaring.
Second-rate Jack Sparrow imitation*: Shows up.


* You’d think Johnny Depp had that one covered, as of Pirates of the Caribbean III.



Meanwhile, back at the palace:
Milady: I want a vacation.
Richelieu. Assassins don’t get vacations. But you’ll note that we do provide excellent dental. (flashes 20th-century teeth.)
Milady: What about the retirement plan?
Richelieu: Don’t make me laugh; it displaces my mustache unattractively.
Milady: Damn.
Richelieu: Oh, go ahead, take a break, you’ve earned it. But remember that I yanked you from the gutters of Paris and made you my creature.
Milady: Why can’t you be the guttersnipe this time, and I’ll be the Naughty Aristocrat?
Richelieu: My roleplay, my rules.

Back to the tavern.
Musketeers: Sneak into tavern. Sneakily.
Bar fight: Starts.
Musketeers: Arrest Second-rate Jack Sparrow Imitation (henceforward SrJSI).
Lady: Shows up to attack SrJSI.
Me: Oh, my GOD, that’s a Western schoolmarm outfit, kill me now, I can’t live on this planet any more.
Me: Reminds self that she promised not to mention the costumes again even though if one more corset shows up as outerwear I may hit somebody with my copy of Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d.

Lady: is SrJSI’s wife.
SrJSI: Allow me one last conjugal visit with my hottie.
D’Artagnan: How stupid do you think we are?
Me: Such a good question.
Musketeers: Allow one last conjugal visit with his hottie.
SrJSI and wife: Feign conjugal visit noises. At length.

Plot: Musketeers ingeniously outwit SrJSI and Wife and carry SrJSI off to Paris in a cart. Porthos exposits about his tragic slave-being childhood. They are ambushed by Merchant. Porthos is shot. Merchant exposits about SrJSI’s failure to honor business contracts.

Musketeer: “We’re being followed by two men wearing black leather.”
Husband: Unlike everyone else in this show????

Porthos: Moans.
Aramis: Wow, Porthos is wounded!
Athos: Righty-ho, off to Paris.
Aramis: But Porthos --
Athos: Paris.
Aramis: Porthos will dieeeee! We can’t go!
Athos: We will go to Paris. Put him in the cart!
Aramis: But the cart will kill him!
Athos: Oh, all right. We’ll put him in the cart for a few miles to this place I know.
Porthos: A FEW MILES? Okay, I’ll just partly die then, shall I?
Aramis: You couldn’t mention that place a few sentences back?
Athos: …

Location: is the little country place of Athos, Comte de la Fère.
Musketeers: Who’s the Comte de la Fère?
Athos: Me.


B Plot: Athos flashes back to his marriage to Milady, during which he hangs her. As one does. In the present, Milady spares his life, as one does. Even though this is all canon, the execution is painfully bad. You need to know that there were forget-me-nots. Otherwise let us never mention this again. If only the show would follow suit.


Returning to the A plot…
Everybody: Is hanging around the dining room of Chez Fère.
SrJSI: Has Sekret Plan to make money through shipping. Shipping stuff. To the Antilles. Hmm. He’s eeevil, so...

Yes, because this is the episode from McObviousVille, he’s eeevil and a slaver. Porthos, being the thickest brick in the fortification, doesn’t notice SrJSI’s references to hanging out on the porch of his plantation sipping a julep and watching the work get done. What does he need, a diagram?

Porthos: sees a diagram.


That diagram? Every American schoolkid sees it at some point. It’s from the British slave trade and dates to 1788.


Lady: rescues SRJSI, covering four Musketeers with a single pistol. Fires a shot into the ground, rides away.
Me: (real-time) THAT’S A SINGLE-SHOT WEAPON, YOU MORONS! GRAB A GUN!
Musketeers, on ground: Draw swords.
Me: Headdesk. To be precise, headbed.
Lady with SrJSI on horse: gets shot. By somebody else, who rides off.
SrJSI: is sad.
SrJSI: is made to dig grave in the middle of a field. In unconsecrated ground. Because it isn’t as if every man jack of them is a Catholic or anything. Aramis mutters something that, whatever else it might be, is definitely not a Catholic prayer. I think he also crosses himself wrong, but somebody else will have to Catholic-pick.

Musketeers: ride sullenly off to Paris.
Porthos: Man is born free!
And everywhere he is in chains. Hellooo to Rousseau, 1762. Or, in general, to the French Enlightenment, which kicks into gear about 50 years after the Musketeers.

Musketeers: Reach Paris, hand off SrJSI to Richelieu.
Richelieu: You have totally foutu my plans and betrayed the King.
SrJSI: But I have a Plan!
Richelieu: Demonstrate this as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

Nice line, but… as you will recall, he’s eeeeeevil.

Place: Hall outside Cardinal’s Den of Plotting.
Musketeers: Interrogate SrJSI about recent events. The speed of their uptake makes Porthos look like Spinoza by comparison.

Yup. Richelieu funds slave expedition. Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac, noted collector of books and great works of art, the guy who built the Palais-Cardinal and then left it to the King, is so hurting for cash that he’d invest in a speculative (all sea ventures were speculative in this era) venture with a SrJSI who was known for betraying his investors. Richelieu would totally prioritize ducats over the interests of the King, because it’s not as if he’s the guy who in the previous two episodes has emphasized that nothing matters to him but the welfare of France.

Irrelevant, because eeeeevil.

Constance Bonacieux: Is wearing corset as outerwear.
Milady: Shows up at Constance Bonacieux’s house. Makes vague threats. Leaves in a sinister fashion.
Constance: Gosh, I hope she doesn’t come back.
d’Artagnan: pulls shirt on. Slowly.
Dialogue: Happens.
Me: I’m sorry, did you two say something?

The Musketeers are all depressed, then they go down to the harbor and rescue SrJSI from his angry investors because it’s their duty to the King and that’s just how they roll, and -- surprise twist! -- deliver him to a Spanish ship to languish in durance vile forever.

Because they’re eeeee Oh, wait, they’re the heroes, it’s perfectly okay.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
You should know that I am an embarrassing swashbuckler fangirl. I will watch anything with Musketeers in it, with the exception of the recent steampunk thing, which was a breach too far. I have the 1954 TV series with Roger Delgado as Athos, and it is damn good. Take the rest of this review in that light.

THE MUSKETEERS is on a KNIGHT's TALE level of period faithfulness* **, which, okay, take it on its own terms. Much worse, it's on an ON STRANGER TIDES*** level of source-material faithfulness. Instead of the magnificent three-way duel that sets the action rolling in Dumas, MUSKETEERS has d'Artagnan's father murdered while on his way to tell the King that the new taxes are unfair to the peasants. D'Artagnan vows to avenge his father's death and heads on to Paris.

Some random highlights (spoilers):
spoilers )
I'll let Opus in a 1980s BLOOM COUNTY speak for me. "George Phblat's new film, 'Benji Saves the Universe,' has brought the word 'BAD' to new levels of badness. Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything. This film just oozed rottenness from every bad scene...Simply bad beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness." Then Opus pauses and adds, "Well maybe not that bad, but Lord, it wasn't good."

Yeah. Lord, it wasn't good. I will be watching every single episode, because swords. It's a cast-iron kink. also Capaldi looks quite nice in black leather

* I adore A KNIGHT'S TALE, and here is my gage to prove it.
** I'm not mentioning the costumes. There's a reason for that.
*** Fabulous book by Tim Powers. Read it.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Amazon thought I would like this and offered it to me cheap; I accepted. Worst $.99 of my life.
discussions of suicide, sexual assault )
Don't buy it. Don't pirate it. Don't admit it exists.

I think I'll go watch the Lussekatter dough rise now.

On Making

Nov. 18th, 2013 09:43 am
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
If you have that sort of mind, making things is ridiculous fun. Taking a few ordinary materials and some post-industrial tools that you have bought at substantial expense and manipulating them into a useful object is entertaining, and when you're done you have a table, or a circuit, or a dress. You can get items customized to your own tastes without having to pay a fortune... as long as you don't cost in your own labor.

The catch is that, until you've spent years practicing the necessary skills and learning which materials suppliers have quality goods, the object you produce won't be as good as the ones created by either an industrial business or a custom maker. There are decades and centuries and in some cases millennia of expertise lying dormant in any created object. Much of the time, your sloppily welded, rough-sawn, lumpy-seamed object is good enough, and you can have fun looking at it and saying "I made it!" Somebody who works in the craft/industry you're emulating will look at the same object and see a macaroni drawing hung on the refrigerator.

I first noticed this when I worked in a company full of very, very bright engineers. Far too many of them were confident, by virtue of that brightness, that they could do anybody else's job. They knew more about kitchen logistics, or ingredient buying, or repairing sprinklers, or cleaning than the professionals -- because of the mathematical or mechanical (mostly) intelligence that had gotten them through the top schools. The truth is that anybody else's job looks easy until you watch them do it. I am always astonished when (with permission) I sit on the floor and watch what the electrician, the plumber, the carpenter are doing to my house. You need to know a lot of stuff about how a house is made to walk into any particular house and sort out its mechanical systems. Plumbing is like surgery -- knowing where the pipes are in a platonic object isn't the same as having your hands deep in the guts of a particular object.

Take me. I've been sewing for over forty years, off and on. Note the "off and on". I sew when I feel like it, when I have the spare time, when I'm not doing the job in which I have professional expertise. When I go to a class with serious costumers, I am always, always the last person to finish any step in the process. My finished garment or object is clumsier than those produced by the everyday seamstresses (sters), because I don't have the hundreds or thousands of hours of practice that they do. Their objects, in turn, seldom approach the highest standards reached by people hundreds of years ago who did nothing but hand-sew all day, every day. Very, very few can handspin a thread fine enough to match the Shetland or Orenburg spinners. Indeed, not that many can handspin a thread fine enough to weave. You cannot get linen approaching the finest quality produced in the 1600s, either handmade or machine-made. People who work in living history museums, when interviewed, always marvel at the skills they are imitating.

Another example of this is backyard farming. Animal shelters are starting to have a problem with abandoned urban chickens (note useful debunking). Why? Because eggs can contain either hens or roosters, and roosters are useful only as food. Straight-run hatchery chicks are less expensive than sexed chickens*, and backyard chicks have no guarantees at all. Finally, the maximum lifespan of a layer is years longer than the useful egg-producing period. Farmers solve this problem by killing unwanted chickens for the stewpot (historic) or fertilizer (modern). Many -- not all -- backyard farmers don't want to slaughter birds themselves, so off to the shelter they go. (I am very, very skeptical of the article's using Marin shelters to minimize this; Marin is its own little planet.)

Anybody keeping backyard goats quickly discovers that male goats are nasty creatures that not only stink but can cause your does' milk to be inedible. Again, the historical answer is roast kid or goat curry. This takes goatkeeping from the pleasantly pastoral to the ineluctably bloody. I haven't even touched on the thousands of nasty diseases chickens, goats, and pigs are not so much heir to as enthusiastic boarding-houses for. Similarly, free-range backyard eggs taste fabulous, but the downside is fighting predators that can't get into a closed battery house. Animal husbandry is a matter of both skill and luck, and no matter what scale you practice it on, there's a lot of unexpected death.

I love heirloom tomatoes. The hybrids don't, in general -- Early Girl is fabulous -- have as deep a flavor as the open-pollinated plants. Propaganda notwithstanding, the heirlooms in my garden are much more disease-prone than the VFNT** F1 hybrids.

Crafts are awesome. Making things is awesome. Growing things is awesome. But if creating something at home makes you undervalue the expertise and skill of people who do it on a commercial scale, you're doing it wrong.

* Yes, chicken sexing is a real skill, and an esoteric one. You try looking at a new-hatched chick's ass and figuring out which kind of cloaca it has.

** Huh. It isn't VFNT, any more; the toughest hybrids are now VFFNTA, which means resistant to verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, nematodes, tobacco mosaic virus, and alternaria leaf spot. How many beginning gardeners know to look for those letters?

This entry was originally posted at http://mme-hardy.dreamwidth.org/259510.html, with comment count unavailable comments. Feel free to comment there or here.

On Making

Nov. 18th, 2013 09:43 am
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
If you have that sort of mind, making things is ridiculous fun. Taking a few ordinary materials and some post-industrial tools that you have bought at substantial expense and manipulating them into a useful object is entertaining, and when you're done you have a table, or a circuit, or a dress. You can get items customized to your own tastes without having to pay a fortune... as long as you don't cost in your own labor.

The catch is that, until you've spent years practicing the necessary skills and learning which materials suppliers have quality goods, the object you produce won't be as good as the ones created by either an industrial business or a custom maker. There are decades and centuries and in some cases millennia of expertise lying dormant in any created object. Much of the time, your sloppily welded, rough-sawn, lumpy-seamed object is good enough, and you can have fun looking at it and saying "I made it!" Somebody who works in the craft/industry you're emulating will look at the same object and see a macaroni drawing hung on the refrigerator.

I first noticed this when I worked in a company full of very, very bright engineers. Far too many of them were confident, by virtue of that brightness, that they could do anybody else's job. They knew more about kitchen logistics, or ingredient buying, or repairing sprinklers, or cleaning than the professionals -- because of the mathematical or mechanical (mostly) intelligence that had gotten them through the top schools. The truth is that anybody else's job looks easy until you watch them do it. I am always astonished when (with permission) I sit on the floor and watch what the electrician, the plumber, the carpenter are doing to my house. You need to know a lot of stuff about how a house is made to walk into any particular house and sort out its mechanical systems. Plumbing is like surgery -- knowing where the pipes are in a platonic object isn't the same as having your hands deep in the guts of a particular object.

Take me. I've been sewing for over forty years, off and on. Note the "off and on". I sew when I feel like it, when I have the spare time, when I'm not doing the job in which I have professional expertise. When I go to a class with serious costumers, I am always, always the last person to finish any step in the process. My finished garment or object is clumsier than those produced by the everyday seamstresses (sters), because I don't have the hundreds or thousands of hours of practice that they do. Their objects, in turn, seldom approach the highest standards reached by people hundreds of years ago who did nothing but hand-sew all day, every day. People who work in living history museums, when interviewed, always marvel at the skills they are imitating. You cannot get linen approaching the finest quality produced in the 1600s, either handmade or machine-made. Very, very few can handspin a thread fine enough to match the Shetland or Orenburg spinners. Indeed, not that many can handspin a thread fine enough to weave.

Another example of this is backyard farming. Animal shelters are starting to have a problem with abandoned urban chickens (note useful debunking). Why? Because eggs can contain either hens or roosters, and roosters are useful only as food. Straight-run hatchery chicks are less expensive than sexed chickens*, and backyard chicks have no guarantees at all. Finally, the maximum lifespan of a layer is years longer than the useful egg-producing period. Farmers solve this problem by killing unwanted chickens for the stewpot (historic) or fertilizer (modern). Many -- not all -- backyard farmers don't want to slaughter birds themselves, so off to the shelter they go. (I am very, very skeptical of the article's using Marin shelters to minimize this; Marin is its own little planet.)

Anybody keeping backyard goats quickly discovers that male goats are nasty creatures that not only stink but can cause your does' milk to be inedible. Again, the historical answer is roast kid or goat curry. This takes goatkeeping from the pleasantly pastoral to the ineluctably bloody. I haven't even touched on the thousands of nasty diseases chickens, goats, and pigs are not so much heir to as enthusiastic boarding-houses for. Similarly, free-range backyard eggs taste fabulous, but the downside is fighting predators that can't get into a closed battery house. Animal husbandry is a matter of both skill and luck, and no matter what scale you practice it on, there's a lot of unexpected death.

I love heirloom tomatoes. The hybrids don't, in general -- Early Girl is fabulous -- have as deep a flavor as the open-pollinated plants. Propaganda notwithstanding, the heirlooms in my garden are much more disease-prone than the VFNT** F1 hybrids.

Crafts are awesome. Making things is awesome. Growing things is awesome. But if creating something at home makes you undervalue the expertise and skill of people who do it on a commercial scale, you're doing it wrong.

* Yes, chicken sexing is a real skill, and an esoteric one. You try looking at a new-hatched chick's ass and figuring out which kind of cloaca it has.

** Huh. It isn't VFNT, any more; the toughest hybrids are now VFFNTA, which means resistant to verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, nematodes, tobacco mosaic virus, and alternaria leaf spot. How many beginning gardeners know to look for those letters?

This entry was originally posted at http://mme-hardy.dreamwidth.org/259510.html, with comment count unavailable comments. Feel free to comment there or here.

On Making

Nov. 18th, 2013 09:43 am
mme_hardy: (angry)
If you have that sort of mind, making things is ridiculous fun. Taking a few ordinary materials and some post-industrial tools that you have bought at substantial expense and manipulating them into a useful object is entertaining, and when you're done you have a table, or a circuit, or a dress. You can get items customized to your own tastes without having to pay a fortune... as long as you don't cost in your own labor.

The catch is that, until you've spent years practicing the necessary skills and learning which materials suppliers have quality goods, the object you produce won't be as good as the ones created by either an industrial business or a custom maker. There are decades and centuries and in some cases millennia of expertise lying dormant in any created object. Much of the time, your sloppily welded, rough-sawn, lumpy-seamed object is good enough, and you can have fun looking at it and saying "I made it!" Somebody who works in the craft/industry you're emulating will look at the same object and see a macaroni drawing hung on the refrigerator.

I first noticed this when I worked in a company full of very, very bright engineers. Far too many of them were confident, by virtue of that brightness, that they could do anybody else's job. They knew more about kitchen logistics, or ingredient buying, or repairing sprinklers, or cleaning than the professionals -- because of the mathematical or mechanical (mostly) intelligence that had gotten them through the top schools. The truth is that anybody else's job looks easy until you watch them do it. I am always astonished when (with permission) I sit on the floor and watch what the electrician, the plumber, the carpenter are doing to my house. You need to know a lot of stuff about how a house is made to walk into any particular house and sort out its mechanical systems. Plumbing is like surgery -- knowing where the pipes are in a platonic object isn't the same as having your hands deep in the guts of a particular object.

Take me. I've been sewing for over forty years, off and on. Note the "off and on". I sew when I feel like it, when I have the spare time, when I'm not doing the job in which I have professional expertise. When I go to a class with serious costumers, I am always, always the last person to finish any step in the process. My finished garment or object is clumsier than those produced by the everyday seamstresses (sters), because I don't have the hundreds or thousands of hours of practice that they do. Their objects, in turn, seldom approach the highest standards reached by people hundreds of years ago who did nothing but hand-sew all day, every day. Very, very few can handspin a thread fine enough to match the Shetland or Orenburg spinners. Indeed, not that many can handspin a thread fine enough to weave. You cannot get linen approaching the finest quality produced in the 1600s, either handmade or machine-made. People who work in living history museums, when interviewed, always marvel at the skills they are imitating.

Another example of this is backyard farming. Animal shelters are starting to have a problem with abandoned urban chickens (note useful debunking). Why? Because eggs can contain either hens or roosters, and roosters are useful only as food. Straight-run hatchery chicks are less expensive than sexed chickens*, and backyard chicks have no guarantees at all. Finally, the maximum lifespan of a layer is years longer than the useful egg-producing period. Farmers solve this problem by killing unwanted chickens for the stewpot (historic) or fertilizer (modern). Many -- not all -- backyard farmers don't want to slaughter birds themselves, so off to the shelter they go. (I am very, very skeptical of the article's using Marin shelters to minimize this; Marin is its own little planet.)

Anybody keeping backyard goats quickly discovers that male goats are nasty creatures that not only stink but can cause your does' milk to be inedible. Again, the historical answer is roast kid or goat curry. This takes goatkeeping from the pleasantly pastoral to the ineluctably bloody. Free-range backyard eggs taste fabulous, but the downside is fighting predators that can't get into a closed battery house. I haven't even touched on the thousands of nasty diseases chickens, goats, and pigs are not so much heir to as enthusiastic boarding-houses for. Animal husbandry is a matter of both skill and luck, and no matter what scale you practice it on, there's a lot of unexpected death.

I love heirloom tomatoes. The hybrids don't, in general -- Early Girl is fabulous -- have as deep a flavor as the open-pollinated plants. Propaganda notwithstanding, the heirlooms in my garden are much more disease-prone than the VFNT** F1 hybrids.

Crafts are awesome. Making things is awesome. Growing things is awesome. But if creating something at home makes you undervalue the expertise and skill of people who do it on a commercial scale, you're doing it wrong.

* Yes, chicken sexing is a real skill, and an esoteric one. You try looking at a new-hatched chick's ass and figuring out which kind of cloaca it has.

** Huh. It isn't VFNT, any more; the toughest hybrids are now VFFNTA, which means resistant to verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, nematodes, tobacco mosaic virus, and alternaria leaf spot. How many beginning gardeners know to look for those letters?
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Doug Phillips, the head of one of the foremost Christian-patriarchy groups, Vision Forums, has just resigned after having had something that was almost, but not quite, like an affair.  That's not why I've called you here today.   It's this bit of his resignation letter that put a little extra starch in my amice:
  I am most sensitive to the fact that my actions have dishonored the living God and been shameful to the name of Jesus Christ, my only hope and Savior.
No.   That is not the way it works.   For all I know, the baby Jesus is indeed throwing His pacifier out of the manger, but it's not from shame.   You can't shame God.   You can't dishonor God.   God may be sorry for you, God may be embarrassed for you, God will probably forgive you.   But -- Problem of Evil notwithstanding -- your sins don't make God look bad.  That very sentence is a sign that you've gone way too far down the road of identifying God with yourself.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Here's a Fashionista interview with the costume designer. tl;dr: They ARE prom dresses.

Which current labels are your go-tos for working into the costuming?
I knew from the beginning that I’d have an easy time weaving in contemporary accessories. It’s funny how tiaras and hair pieces are everywhere right now, and it’s incredibly helpful. We’ve also used quite a bit of Free People for the girls’ everyday looks. They have such a strong and cohesive story with their bohemian romantic look, it’s really worked in our favor. On the pilot we used an incredible Basil Soda gown and we’ve continued using a couple gowns of theirs on Mary. I’ve rented a couple McQueen gowns as well. We shop quite a bit of vintage here in Toronto, but I’m also constantly scouring the web. Net-a-Porter, The Outnet, and BHLDN are my go-tos.

...  how did you update looks from the Elizabethan era for a teen drama?
From the beginning the creators, the director, and the studio said they wanted to incorporate a contemporary feel in the costumes. The vision was there even before I signed on; I just helped execute it. But knowing the network and the show’s demographic I felt it made complete sense. I also wanted each look to have a nod to the proper period costume, whether it was achieved through a similar shape or detailed embroidery. The girls almost always wear a corset unless there’s just no need. They love how it helps with their posture. [it. mine]

Wait, corsets—did you use authentic ones?...
...We usually decide for every new look they wear if we need the corset or not. We’ve also been making embroidered and jeweled corsets to be worn on camera as day looks and formal looks for the girls.

From here forward I won't be snarking the female leads' clothes because there is absolutely no point.  Modern, meant to be modern, nothing to see here, moving along.

edit:  From p. 3 of the interview.
I think it will be quite obvious to our viewers that we’re not out to replicate historical costumes. We’ve created our own distinct look and I think viewers will respond to it positively. I’m hoping it’s an inspiration for our female viewers to creatively add to their wardrobe. It’s such a do-it-yourself kind of look. We’re constantly taking vintage pieces and dying them, altering them, beading them—all to make them our own. That’s what it’s about. It’s not for everyone though. If you’re hoping for hip rolls and men in tights it’s not your show.
Fair enough.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Anything in quotation marks is actual dialogue. I rewound this, er, tripe so this recap would be accurate for you and you and you.

I am not Cleolinda, nor was meant to be )

Summary: I'll probably be there, but I'll be ashamed of myself the whole time.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
Spies of Warsaw is about a Frenchman spying in Warsaw in 1937. I got stuck in the first Alan Furst book awhile back -- should give it a retry -- but I could have sworn I remembered its being about a Polish spy. (Edit: My mistake; I'm thinking of a different Furst novel.) Ah, well. SoW, although gloriously photographed in Poland, isn't about living in Poland, or about Poles. It's about David Tennant being a moderately glamorous spy.

Which is the problem. David Tennant, take him for all in all, looks like an Angry Bird. He has three basic expressions: watchful, scowling, and a charming cheeky grin. He can produce variations on all of these on demand. However, he he can't do suave or diplomatic to save his life, which is a limitation when playing a character who is a French military officer under cover as a diplomat. Tennant glowers through diplomatic events in a way that would get him recalled to Paris post-haste. He has nothing resembling a military bearing; he slouches, carries one shoulder slightly higher than the other, and rolls from foot to foot when he walks. A character refers to him as carrying himself "as if he had a stick up his arse", a line that should have been cut immediately after casting. (If you want to see what a military bearing looks like, take a peek at Basil Rathbone or David Niven.)

But what about the plot, Mrs. H? It's a very, very conventional spy plot. Glamorous French aristocrat and WWI veteran is in Warsaw before WWII, sees what is coming -- he drops a hint about the Germans invading through trees and is brushed off with a reference to the Maginot Line -- but is hamstrung by unsympathetic superiors. (A total waste of Burn Gorman, alas.) He runs agents -- for once, an accurate portrayal in a glamor-spy role -- who wind up dead or betrayed. He has a doomed romance with a White Russian refugee who is living with a Russian socialist journalist. He sneaks through the streets of Warsaw.

And you've seen it all before. Which is a pity. As I mentioned, the cinematography is superb, and I'd love to see a Furst dramatization that covers the despair and sense of abandonment of the Polish military. Failing that, I would like to see a mid-20th-century drama in which THE STARS WEAR HATS IN THE GODDAMNED STREET. Ahem. Sorry about that. I have Issues. While we're on the subject, I don't think Tennant's uniform is properly tailored; his epaulettes roll toward the front of his shoulders.

Nobody in the French hierarchy makes the least attempt at French body language or indeed at matching one another's British accents. It's a drama about British spies who happen to be wearing French uniforms and dropping the occasional reference to France. As per usual, the German officers have a military bearing and are speaking German with subtitles.

What we have here is a bad case of imaginary toads in real gardens.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
...which may just have been building for some time.

Migraine is not ... a headache.
Depression is not ... the blues.
Autism is not ... bad social skills.
Hyperemesis gravidarum is not ... morning sickness.

If you have, or know somebody who has, any of the problems on the right, this tells you nothing about coping with the problems on the left.
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html may well be the finest restaurant review I've ever read.

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?
mme_hardy: White rose (Default)
This is a thoroughly shoddy and snobbish book. These quotations from the introduction will give you a sense of it:
  • Garden history has been abducted by the art historians. This book is an attempt to get it back for the social historian. Too much garden history has been concerned with when gardens were made, what they looked like, who made them and how they changed. More interesting by far is what the makers expected from the gardens, and how they and their successors evaluated their investment in gardening and the return it brought them.
  • There is more to social history than drawing attention to the great gulf which divides the rich from the poor and then whingeing about it. This book is concerned with the middle and upper classes ... They are more interesting because others aspire to be like them.
  • Why do hundreds of middle-class Englishwomen have a white garden and a potager and a collection of old-fashioned roses? Because these features are smart -- or may have been smart about ten years ago -- not because their owners think they are beautiful or useful, but because they make them feel good -- better than the neighbours. Gardens are symbols of social and economic status.
  • The arbiters of garden taste and the innovators of garden fashion are the well-to-do and the creative craftsmen, nurserymen and designers who supply them. The poor are often portrayed as conservative because they have tastes and values which were more fashionable a generation or so earlier.
  • It has been claimed that an interest in gardening cuts across all classes and creates points of contact between people with social differences. [long quotation from Alfred Austin] In practice, one finds that such people have rather different tastes from one's own; it is fashion which binds people together and divides them from others. [it. mine]
I think "snobbish" has adequately been demonstrated. But what about the book? It's not social history at all. It's a series of anecdotes about the wealthy owners of estates, and their professional gardeners. The citations are almost entirely to other people's books, most of them biographies; the few journal citations are to Horticulture, the Journal of Garden History, and the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. There are no citations to other social historians that I could spot. There are 9 pages of index for a 258-page text, the majority to person's names.

The problem with snobbishness is that, although it makes a history of gardening easier to write, it doesn't acknowledge the osmosis that goes on between social classes. Throughout history, the upper classes often ape lower-class fashions, suitably embellished and refined.  When the upper-classes go self-consciously rustic, they respond not only to the idea of the lower-class garden but to the gardens themselves.   See, for instance, last decade's fad for the "cottage garden", and for the plants that were favored in those gardens in an imagined pre-industrial age.

When gardening, the middle and lower classes work on a different scale; they aren't imitating grand estates because they haven't got the space. As a result, the choices, both in plants and in planting, made by small-scale gardeners are very different from the choices made on the grand scale, and respond to different constraints. A small-scale gardener can lovingly tend a single plant, and focus on it, in a way that only the very wealthiest can afford to pay gardeners to do.    There's a long history of home gardeners carrying forward and improving individual varieties of plants -- for instance, this book entirely ignores the Lancashire mill-hands' preeminence in auriculas and the Paisley weavers' laced pinks.*      During the periodic upper-class crazes for "old-fashioned plants", the plants become available because they have been preserved and cherished in the gardens (and cemeteries!) of the poor and middle classes.  

If you see this book second-hand, it may be worth buying (at a sufficiently low price) for the excellent color plates. Otherwise, you can do better.

* The first citation I found for this was from The Bedside Book of the Garden by D.G. Hessayon , which looks like a much more interesting book.

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