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Alison Scott: her switching journal, weblog, and stuff.
Only two common words in English come from Icelandic Interestingly, I discovered this from both the coffee table books I read this weekend while staying with my parents. The first, Iceland: The Warm Country of the North, by Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson and Torfi H. Tulinius, is a book of lovely pictures along with a little supportive text. It has the feel of the sort of book you buy at the airport when leaving your holiday destination, to remind you of how nice it all was. Just the thing to read instead of getting out of bed this morning. The second book, lying around on the coffee table only because my parents would never dream of keeping books in the loo, was Schott's Original Miscellany, one of those books that pops up for the Christmas market and is suddenly found in bathrooms all across the land. An almanac for the internet age, this concentrates not on what you may need to know -- because everyone can now look those things up in a trice -- on stuff you'd never particularly realised was important. Everything's jumbled up, but it's a short book with no index, so it doesn't really matter. I didn't notice any facts that were clearly wrong, but plenty that were a bit dubious. For example, the list of notable Belgians included the Flemish painters (who we disqualify on the grounds that they predate Belgium), and a load of people we'd never heard of (who we disqualify on the grounds that they're insufficiently famous). And I work just off the Strand, so am skeptical of Schott's claim that it's properly known as just 'Strand'. All very well to tell you that a millihelen is the amount of beauty that will launch a ship, but the really interesting measurement is the milliantihelen -- a face that would sink a ship. [depressing aside: I just googled on that, and it seems I've used it online twice before, and nobody else has at all ever. As against many thousands of references for millihelen. So perhaps I'm the only person who thinks it's funny.] Worse are the Bowdlerisms (and Schott tells you the origin of that and many other words inspired by people). I have never, personally, seen the Internet abbreviation "RTBM", and the list of rhyming slang omits "Berkshire Hunt". But Schott makes no claims to be exhaustive or authoritative, and there is plenty that's entertaining here. Far more than it's possible to lists, really. A list of famous horses, including Bucephalus, Rosinante, Silver, Trigger and Shadowfax. The recommended driving route from Lands End to John O'Groats. The list of London Thames crossings. Washing symbols, iceberg sizes, the plimsoll line, and, of course, a list of words which English has appropriated from each of many other languages, including geyser and saga. I'd recommend this book, but you were probably given it for Christmas. Though if you're American, you can improve your stock at dinner parties by snapping up the UK version before US publication in July.
Truly Grateful The turkey came from the local butcher. This is the sausage shop on Hoe Street, no longer called Postons. It was a Norfolk Black, 14 lbs. Some people say sniffily that the Norfolk Black has a low meat to bone ratio, even by the standards of properly grown meat. These people have not seen the amount of turkey in my fridge. I didn't cook it in foil, but I put a double layer of buttered muslin over the breast. This was easy (melt a pack of butter, put scrunched up muslin square in pan, spread over bird) and gives you a sense of deep connection with the 19th century that will never be provided by aluminium foil. I had planned to put it in the oven at 9:30, but my senses were confounded by being woken repeatedly through the blackest part of the night by my daughter, delighted by the various treats provided by Father Christmas. The last time, I realised with a start that it was 8:30, and dashed to get the bird cooking as soon as possible; which turned out to be 45 minutes earlier than the plan. And so every other timing clicked forward, one after the other like dominoes, and we ended up sitting down to lunch at 1:15 instead of 2. The meal is heavily constrained; Christmas morning is not a good moment to apply the doctrine of free will. With only six people for lunch, I thought I could get away with a minimalist version. I like turkey; I'm sure other birds are fine too, but somehow less festive. Roast potatoes; Nigella Lawson's recipe, with a tablespoon of semolina shaken into the potatoes after par-boiling and before roasting. Sprouts, for sure. They should be small, and fresh, and you need do nothing to them apart from boiling, steaming or (in this case) microwaving them for long enough that they're not hard but not so long that they're soft. I glazed the tiny carrots. Bacon-wrapped chipolatas aren't optional round our house. Stuffing; I like to buy the ready-made sausagemeat stuffing you get in the posher supermarkets (this one was apricot & almond), and cook it in a lump separately from the turkey. And the three traditional sauces; cranberry sauce, bread sauce, and gravy made from a mixture of pan juices and giblet stock. The recipe suggested I reserve the liver to chop, fry and blend in at the last minute. I quickly identified the heart (it's small, and, well, heart-shaped) and the gizzard (it's the one with rocks in). But which of these internal lumps of turkey is the kidneys and which is the liver? I gave up and boiled the lot of them. And it was delicious. So now I have a very large plate of sliced breast, and a smaller plate of sliced dark meat. Three freezer bags, each containing about the right amount of smaller chunks for one risotto. Two frozen pots of gravy, and two of the remaining giblet stock. And a stockpot completely full of skin, bones and tiny scrapings of meat, ready for boiling.
Catch it before we get the C&DIssue 25 of Plokta is now online, including the cover, my parody map of Middle Plokta (this link is to a version big enough to read all the place names except one).
I know my limitations, and have never made any serious attempt to write poetry. So I was pleased to discover that Commander Taco provides a deep wellspring of bad poetry on topics of your choosing. Here's what it was inspired to write on reading my son's birth report (via Uffish Thoughts): We Can Reproduce it
if you can Reproduce
it was forced to my baby go
to have got
the pain, relief, in a long
evening I knew that desperately
wanted a baby at the baby
And then flat baby. in my blood
test had brought
work. because got a
couple of the horrifying things seem
to keep them as
a result
of a hearty lunch
Or possibly in
favour
of HTML before breakfast. Friday
morning Spiros was a good
to see me.
It gives you hanging around, feeling I resorted
to get up, on his
baby
had showed I that Jonathan
might go back to arrive.
Just back from the Pig's Ear Beer Festival. I paid a flying visit today because the t-shirt design is brilliant (the same as the poster on the website) and they've normally sold out of shirts by Saturday -- the day they have a creche. I did take the opportunity to sample a small amount of beer, including at least one specially brewed for the festival (Wolf Brewery's Spice Pigs).
Not that I normally post quizzes, but there's a nice one for beard festishists here. (via Sneerpout). But the really big news is that Marianne has two wobbly teeth! We further explored her belief system. "You've got wobbly teeth! That's great!""Yes, Mummy; I'm really really excited!""Why?""Because if I put my tooth under my pillow the tooth fairy will come and take it away!""Really?""Oh, yes.""And does she leave you anything in exchange?" Marianne looked confused at that point. "I can't remember."
The house was disorderly for breakfast*, what with the four of us, three couples who stayed overnight, and three other people who came round.[*a meal eaten at about noon after a shockingly late night.] We introduced the assembled masses to the dancing game, nursed our various hangovers, and I began to discover that Dr Plokta has learnt more about Mac OS X in the last 48 hours than I have in the last nine months. "You ought to be using iPhoto", he said, and, you know, he's right. The screensaver on this machine is now an album called "nice family photos". Of course, as soon as I did that I began to hanker after the coffee table books, which aren't available in the UK.
"I've had a bit of an accident," said Dr Plokta as he opened a shiny new laptop case. Gosh, it's a nice laptop. Could do with a laptop, really. "It's the