Month: March 2007

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Squash! (part two)

A few weeks ago, The Wife made this for dinner:

A number of people have asked for the recipe, so here it is:

1. Obtain squash.
2. Stuff as pictured.
3. Cook.
4. Serve.

Easy as that!

OK, but seriously, here’s the recipe as described by The Wife. She got the main idea from a magazine she checked out of the library; it said to microwave the whole works after stuffing, but she went with cooking it in the oven.

INGREDIENTS:

2 medium acorn squash
1 pound bulk spicy pork sausage
.5 cup chopped onion
1. egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 cup fresh baby spinach, finely chopped
1.5 cups soft bread crumbs
.5 cup dried cranberries

Cut the squash in half and remove the pulp and seeds; feed pulp and seeds to your enemies or your children. Season the squash with salt, pepper, and freshly squeezed orangutan blood (this ingredient is highly optional, as well as morally questionable), place the squash face-down in a baking dish, and roast at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. (Roasting at 375 degrees Kelvin will yield questionable results.) Roast for 30 minutes.

While roasting the squash, prepare the stuffing. First recite the following prayer to Obosidor, Etruscan God of Food:

O great Obosidor, slay my enemies
and decorate my doorstep with their
entrails!

(Strange prayer to offer a God of Food, but that’s what the recipe says.)

Then crumble the sausage in a large skillet along with the onion and cook until the meat is no longer pink. (Here the recipe says to drain the fat. I always omit this instruction in recipes, which partly explains the waistline you see in the photos of me in the sidebar. Do according to your want.)

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, beat the egg and milk. (They had it coming, the lowlifes….) Stir in the spinach, bread crumbs, cranberries, and finally the sausage-and-onion mixture. Sprinkle with a liberal helping of moondust. (It won’t taste right without it.)

After the squash are finished roasting, turn them upward and stuff. (Use a spoon for this, as the squash will be friggin’ hot.) Return to the oven and continue to roast at 375 for twenty minutes or so.

Remove from oven before eating. (Trust me on this, folks.)

This goes well with a nice Chianti. Omit the fava beans.

At least, that’s how The Wife said she made it. I didn’t quite find all of that believable, but, you know….

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Movies….

I’ve seen this quiz a few times in the last couple of days. It’s straightforward enough:

1. Name a movie that you have seen more than 10 times.

Casablanca.

2. Name a movie that you’ve seen multiple times in the theater.

When The Wife and I were first dating, we saw Aladdin together four times.

3. Name an actor that would make you more inclined to see a movie.

Hmmmmm. Not really sure, anymore. Harrison Ford used to be gold, but then he stopped picking good movies to do. Liam Neeson, maybe.

4. Name an actor that would make you less likely to see a movie.

Adam Sandler (although he was quite good in Spanglish, where my dislike of the film had nothing to do with him).

5. Name a movie that you can and do quote from.

I’m always good for a Star Wars quote or two. (Big surprise.) And Wayne’s World; for years, my standard reply to anyone telling me that they have something for me is, “If it’s a severed head I’m gonna be very upset.”

6. Name a movie musical that you know all of the lyrics to all of the songs.

Singin’ in the Rain.

7. Name a movie that you have been known to sing along with.

My Fair Lady.

8. Name a movie that you would recommend everyone see.

Princess Mononoke.

9. Name a movie that you own.

Just one? Odd question, so I’ll name the first DVD I see. [glances at shelf] I own Ben Hur.

10. Name an actor that launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops.

Morgan Freeman. (Maybe not quite in the same vein as what the question is getting at, but who watched The Electric Company and saw in that guy Red from The Shawshank Redemption?)

11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in? If so, what?

Dammit, every year The Wife and I agree that we’re going to take The Daughter to the drive-in, and we never do. Anyway, my family went to Star Trek III at the drive-in.

12. Ever made out in a movie?

People do that at movies? You can do that at home! Why pay to see a movie and then make out?

Seriously, no, I’ve never done this. Hand-holding, sure, but that’s it. I’m watching the movie.

(When we saw Titanic, the couple in front of us starting necking during the friggin’ previews. They barely came up for air the whole movie. God, they were annoying.)

13. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Oh, God, too many to name. Portrait of Jennie, I suppose. A friend tells me this is the most romantic movie ever.

14. Ever walked out of a movie?

No. But I’ve shut off movies I rented before.

15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater.

Dances with Wolves. First time I saw that, I started when the soldiers shot Two-Socks. I’m not that bad with it anymore, but I still cry when Wind In His Hair climbs the promontory just to shout his farewell to his friend.

16. Popcorn?

I can’t see a movie without popcorn. I happily munched my way through a medium popcorn during the first half hour of Schindler’s List. (But I did not make out during Schindler’s List!)

17. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)?

Fairly rarely anymore. I love going to the movies, but the price of doing so has reached the point where it’s now a special occasion. Alas.

18. What’s the last movie you saw in the theater?

Casino Royale.

19. What’s your favorite/preferred genre of movie?

Anything that entertains me, really. I just like movies.

20. What’s the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?

Snow White. My mother tells me that it scared the living shit out of me, and having seen it in recent years, I can see why. There’s some grim stuff in that movie.

21. What movie do you wish you had never seen?

Highlander. Never has the gulf between the expectations I had based on the gushing by my friends and my actual experience of watching the movie been so wide.

22. What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?

Not sure what we mean by “weird” here…but I seem to be pretty weird in my steadfast admiration for The Phantom Menace.

23. What is the scariest movie you’ve seen?

The Silence of the Lambs.

24. What is the funniest movie you’ve seen?

Ask me this question tomorrow and I’ll say Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But you’re asking today, so I’m saying A Fish Called Wanda.

Your turn.

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Sequential Art

I’ve been reading some comics and graphic novels lately, and I have more to go over the next few weeks. Here’s what I’ve read:

:: Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross.

I liked this quite a bit, but I wanted to like it more. The conceit here is an encapsulation of the first few decades of the Marvel Comics universe, starting with the debut of the Human Torch and ending shortly after the death of Gwen Stacy. The tale is told, however, from the viewpoint of a normal person witnessing all this: news photographer Phil Sheldon, who documents the adventures and battles of all the superheroes who would fill out the Marvel universe.

The best thing about this work is the art. Alex Ross’s paintings are often stunning, and it turns out (via a series of appendices) that he includes a lot of visual in-jokes along the way. The images are cinematic in the things they focus upon, how the characters move, and in how the action plays out.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Marvel series without a nice-sized helping of angst, and we get that a lot here. Sheldon’s feelings about the sudden oncoming of superpowered beings tracks the general feeling that the Marvel Universe always posited, right down to the hatred and mistrust of mutants, and — well, frankly, a little of that goes a long way. Our narrator, Phil Sheldon, stews constantly over the public treatment the heroes receive from the public, so much so that about halfway through the four-episode set I was thinking, “OK, we get it. People suck even in the presence of superheroes.”

But the panoramic view of a large segment of the Marvel history is often amazing in a way that I, as a comics fan, often failed to notice when buying my titles each month. I enjoy the attempt to portray just what the effect on the populace would be — not just that heroes exist, but also because superheroes have enemies who like to destroy large whacks of large cities at a time.

As noted, I loved the artwork. (Gwen Stacy, as pictured here, is utterly beautiful.) I just wish the story had invested itself more in the sense of wonder than in the constant Marvel angst.

:: The Death of Superman.

Somehow, when this massive stunt by DC in 1991 (or thereabouts) took place, I never read it. Now I have.

And it sucked.

There’s a way to kill a major comic book character, and there’s a way not to do it. The right way is to make their death dramatically important. Superman’s…wasn’t.

The story? While Superman is going about his daily business, a horrible being named Doomsday bursts free from…somewhere, and makes his way to Metropolis, destroying everything he touches on his way. The tale ends with a fistfight between Superman and Doomsday, at the end of which both characters are dead.

Then there’s a follow-up storyline called World Without a Superman which fares a bit better; there’s some sense of real emotion there that was absent in the whole Death storyline. All the Metropolis stuff is still fairly dull, though; the only really interesting stuff is to be found in the reactions of Jonathan and Martha Kent to the passing of their adoptive son.

I started reading The Return of Superman, but I haven’t made a lot of progress and I’m not sure I care enough to finish it.

As much as I love comics, I have to admit that I may be losing my taste for superhero tales.

:: The Yellow Jar and Silk Tapestry (volumes one and two of Songs of our Ancestors), by Patrick Atangan.

Now here is some beautiful work. These two very small books — I read them both, taking my time on the words and savoring the art in their 96 total pages, in about ninety minutes — each tell a couple of short folk tales. The Yellow Jar is from the Japanese tradition, while Silk Tapestry‘s stories come from China. (There’s a third book, Tree of Love, which tells tales from India that I haven’t read yet.)

I don’t really want to say anything about these more than that. It’s just that after all the heavy superhero stuff where the Fate of the Earth/Universe/Multiverse hangs in the balance, turning back to lovingly illustrated folk tales is a pleasure not unlike a bit of lemon sorbet after a heavy meal.

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Yeah, I’ll have a Screaming Viking!

Back when I was soliciting space opera reading suggestions*, a reader e-mailed me (or maybe he commented, I can’t recall) about a book called Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. I saw a few copies on eBay, but never acquired one.

Now, I see that I won’t have to. Viva Project Gutenberg!

OK, all you geniuses, what’s a good gizmo on which to read e-books?

(via)

* Not that I’ve stopped soliciting space opera reading suggestions, folks. Feel free to keep those coming!

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“I’ll be right here”

Over at AICN they’ve started running a series of articles that are apparently a tribute to 1982, which Harry Knowles bills as the “best genre year ever”. Now, I’m not sure about that, but it’s a personal thing — Knowles was twelve, which as we all know actually is the true Golden Age of science fiction. Anyhow, the first article he runs is about that year’s megablockbuster film ET: the Extra-Terrestrial.

Here’s something about E.T., and only a few, few other movies… it gets childhood intrinsically, so completely RIGHT. High praise indeed for Melissa Mathison’s script, which has the cadence and the smart-assery that is inherent in every kid. Childhood is messy and joyful, dangerous and crude. Everything is truly an adventure, and nothing is certain. The kids cuss, like I certainly did. They ride their bikes recklessly, just one skid or sharp turn away from slamming into the pavement and serious injury. There is a sense of danger every day. And when you’re a kid, you LOVE it. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like waking up a summer’s day and having no idea what the day will bring. Spielberg nailed that.

Yeah, I still blubber like a baby at that damn movie. Sometimes I blubber just thinking about it. The moment that always gets me started is when ET goes into defib, and they get out the paddles to try to shock his heart back into beating. The doctor puts the paddles on ET’s chest, yells “Clear”, hits the button; ET’s body convulses as the voltage pours through him; and about twenty feet away, little Gertie (Drew Barrymore) recoils with fear, and then starts to cry.

Uh, I’m gonna go check something out in the corner…don’t mind me….

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Sentential Links #89

Let’s get right to it, shall we? (More political ones than usual.)

:: Outside of Berkeley, you’d have to swing several hundred dead cats before you’d be likely to come across an actual socialist.

:: Obviously, I’d forgotten the Conservative Rule of Decency which is that calling, explicitly or implicitly, for one’s political rivals to be killed and/or imprisoned is fine, but using naughty language is not. Coulter, by unleashing the other F-Bomb, joined me in forgetting this rule and wound up being punished.

:: Terry Nitpicker notes (in a post that deserves to be read and re-read and handed down through the generations as a priceless family heirloom) that George W. Bush has now dressed up as 2/3rds of the Village People, putting him only a Red Indian or, um, some sorta horse show traffic cop away from tying James K. Polk’s 1847 record of five Village People impersonated while in office.

:: “What is this ‘incivility’?” you may be asking. ‘Incivility’ is using a naughty word. Now, you might think that you could simply excise the naughty word and be done with it, but no, that’s not how civility works. (Yes, two to the same blog. I couldn’t decide which to use.)

:: All your fictional universes are belong to Holmes. He’s in ur c0ntinuity, c00pting your can0n. Give in. Resistance is futile.

:: And now the literary journal Canadian literary chapbook Tickled by Thunder has published my short story “TKO.” (Congrats!)

:: Some day, I hope to visit Apache Junction, particularly the new baseball, basketball and other sports and recreation park that was named for my brother and where his ashes were spread, and maybe I’ll get to meet one of the Brian Hosey Youth Award/Scholarship winners and let them know a little bit about the man the award is named after, my big brother, Brian. (A beautifully written tribute by Kevin.)

:: Paul was the third child and the last child. My father had made a great fuss about only having two children and the proper use of condoms, but when Paul came along three years or so after Mark (In those days one was supposed to leave a two-year gap between children), it was my mother who went back into the hospital for “repair work.” It was a tubal ligation. (And a haunting tribute.)

We’ll return next week.

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The New News

Updated Below

This post is a placeholder of sorts; I’ll update it later on after I’ve had a chance to peruse the Buffalo News‘s new website. Longtime readers know that I’ve long found the current incarnation of Buffalonews.com to be a joke, but they are apparently finally moving into 2007, with a page that updates more than once per day and including blogs and other cool stuff. They go live later this morning, and I won’t be able to look at it until later this afternoon after I get home from work.

Between now and then, feel free to use the Comments thread here to voice opinions of the new News site.

UPDATE: Or don’t use the comments here to say anything. Sheesh.

As for the News site: I like the initial look. I’m sure it will change a lot over the next few months as things are tweaked, but the overall visual look is orders of magnitude better than the old site. The old version crammed everything together toward the left of the browser window, with lots of empty space at the right; so much stuff was jammed together that navigation was difficult; and most annoyingly, the day’s content went up all at once, at 9:00 am every day. (Thus making pre-work online newspaper reading impossible in this town.)

Now, the new site has a much more elegant and open design. The actual organization is actually similar to the old site, but it’s more spread out, with the paper’s sections listed across the top of the page (just below the masthead), and with mouseover menus used as well. They do need to work on story formatting a bit, I see; take this article from yesterday’s edition on fiddler Natalie MacMaster. The article had a sidebar with MacMaster’s discography, but the sidebar isn’t mentioned in the story and it’s only linked in a fairly easy-to-overlook menu halfway down the page containing “More Entertainment Stories”. They need to work more on getting articles that are clearly meant to be taken together linked as such on the Website.

The blogs are interesting as well, although without exception they all need to evolve a bit. Writing on a blog is different from writing for a newspaper, and the initial entries of each blog exhibit “New Blogger Syndrome”, wherein new bloggers just kind of fumble about a bit in short form until they settle into their natural “blog voice”. (And yes, I went through that syndrome as well; you can go back to the first month or so of entries here and see for yourself, if you don’t believe me.) Lots of them seem to want their blog content to basically advertise their print content (either existing or forthcoming), and a few times they forget the formatting (in blogging, you really need to put a double-return between paragraphs). But that’s all “baby steps” kind of stuff. That they accept comments is a welcome sign; hopefully they’ll link others as well.

(By the way, one of the posts I read over there referred to a topic the writer will specifically “blog” about sometime soon, and that got me thinking about the verb “blog”. When I say that I “blog”, I use it as a general type of verb, a collective verb if you will, to refer to the general act of maintaining a blog or putting content on the blog or whatever. However, when I’m thinking of a specific topic or even formulate a specific post in my head, then I don’t think of “blogging” that topic, but rather posting about it. I wouldn’t say “I’ll blog about Pirates of the Caribbean later”, but rather, “I’ll post about Pirates later”. I’m not mentioning this as a complaint, mind you; it’s just a bit of grammatical fluff that suddenly lodged in my head.)

Anyhow, if any of my three Buffalo-based readers hail from the News, welcome to Blogistan!

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He giveth, and he getteth riddeth to make room for what he receiveth

It’s time to make room on the shelves floor next to the shelves for newer acquisitions (like these), so I’ll now be putting old books of mine up on eBay. There’s a link over there in the sidebar, in the section labeled “Support your humble narrator”. There will be more things appearing there over the next week as well; I’ve identified quite a few books to go as well as some music to which I rarely listen anymore.

Go forth and buy stuff for the person in your life whose tastes mirror mine!

(But not me. If you want to do that, just give me the money directly. There are links to do that as well, if that’s your thing.)

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