November 2007 Archives

two links, one of them by me

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I’ve got a new comics roundup over at the New York Times Book Review—reviews of Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography, A Dangerous Woman, Exit Wounds, I Killed Adolf Hitler and Fox Bunny Funny.

About half an hour ago, I was reading this exegesis of Rob Liefeld’s 40 worst drawings, and Lisa came down to tell me she didn’t think she’d ever heard me laugh that hard.

This week’s haul from the farmer’s market included some sorrel and something identified both as komatsuma and as “mountain spinach,” which appear to be two different plants; not sure which it was. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t eaten any of the three of them before (and still haven’t eaten one). The latter green went into a stir-fry Lisa made a couple of days ago, where it seemed… green-like. (One kind of “mountain spinach,” according to the Oxford Companion to Food, is also known as orach, and is traditionally cooked with sorrel; wish I’d known that earlier!)

The sorrel went into a soup I made last night with some toor dal, carrots, onions and veggie broth—I cut it into ribbons and threw it in at the last minute, since it cooks very quickly. It has a tangy, lemony flavor that went well with the bean soup.

machines hassling the many

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My review of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is up over at Salon. (Site pass required.)

Thanksgiving this year was very low-key—just a couple of houseguests—but I did augment the usual-suspects dishes (the stuffing and green-bean casserole were brought by the fabulous Christina) with a very tasty plantain-and-greens stir-fry from my newest cookbook acquisition, Yamuna Devi’s Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. Tonight I augmented the leftovers with a similarly successful curried cabbage recipe from the same book.

Very pleased to see a kind review of Reading Comics in the new issue of Print magazine—by Annie Nocenti, no less! (Comics readers may remember her as Ann Nocenti, who wrote Daredevil and Kid Eternity, among others.)

I have managed to entirely avoid leaving the house today. Oh, Scrabulous, you’ll be my downfall yet.

So when Sterling was very little, Lisa went to Gymboree with him, and they have all sorts of songs there, most of which are public-domain songs rewritten with Gymboree-specific lyrics. The one that made me laugh and wince at the same time was:

Swing low… sweet baby-o… havin’ fun at Gymboree…

Nowadays we take Sterling to Music Together. Which is great, and he really enjoys it, and our teacher is fabulous. Sterling always asks to hear the CD of the current Music Together term’s songs in the car. Except the latest one includes an adaptation of Child ballad #26, “The Three Ravens.” The first verse is basically identical to the traditional version. Then the second verse starts “There were three squirrels sat on a tree…” Then “three kitty-cats,” and finally “three children sat on a tree/They were as happy as happy might be.”

That is really, really not how that song goes.

(There’s a variant of it, “Twa Corbies,” which was covered as a hard-rock riff thingie back in 1995 by Yona-Kit, the band that consisted of Brise-Glace with K.K. Null; here is the eMusic page for their album.)

I’ve got a piece about I’m Not There up over at nextbook.org.

Latest word is that the old RSS is broken but the new RSS is working. Weird. Still tinkering with it.

Lacunae seems to be a little less broken now—archives work, index template is back to the one I prefer (and the pretty picture of Portland is on archive pages), etc.—although if you’re having problems with the RSS, etc., please let me know. The sidebar had to be salvaged from a several-year-old version; I’ll be cleaning it up soonish.

I got interviewed by Joel Turnipseed over at kottke.org on Halloween. That was a while ago, wasn’t it?

There was a nice review of Reading Comics in the Irish Times, although it now seems to be available only to subscribers.

More stuff coming soon, if things are as unbroken as I hope.