A seething mass of turgid drama.

Cow-orker: "(Client) tends to out-wit himself."
Me: "He's half right."

I have fallen into the bad habit of saying "arright" instead of "all right". Since I personally mildly dislike the dialect practice of slurring phonemes (e.g. Estuary "th-fronting" - "I fink of free fings") I am trying to re-train my mouth out of it.

Habits are hard to break, especially when they are lazily easier.

This week's Resolution Recipe: Eggses Rockefeller.
"The name refers to both the richness of the dish and its money-green color; at the time, the Rockefellers were among America's wealthiest families."
( Read more... )

This week's Resolution Recipe: Wild Rice and Mushroom Salad.
( Read more... )
Side note: I knew that the English term "rocket" came from French roquette. I was curious and now know that the French word was borrowed from the standard Italian word ruchetta, derived from the original Latin eruca. "Arugula" is a loan word from a "non-standard Italian dialect" (popularized in English in the '60s by NY Times cookbook author Craig Claiborne). That makes "rocket" and "arugula" cognates. The more you know!

Resolution Recipes are going on hiatus for a couple weeks.

We watched a PBS show last night that had the amateur historian who co-discovered Richard III's grave. She's clearly a committed Ricardian, and this show was her showing primary source evidence to a lawyer for him to judge her belief that the revolts against Henry VII were in fact led by escaped Princes from the Tower, and not by frauds Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

(I lean somewhat Ricardian myself, if only out of contrariness against the dominant Tudor propaganda. But... it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that Richard had the princes killed - he had the most to benefit.)

The thing that annoyed me about the show was that the lawyer consulted experts to judge if the documents were plausibly real. He judged that they were. (And one was incredibly cool - a document in Dutch archives with an attached royal seal for Richard, the younger prince. Wow.) And thus the show determined that her story was plausibly true.

I would agree that the documents are plausibly not forgeries. But that doesn't mean that the young men in question were actually the princes; the show completely ignored any hint that people behind the rebellions had anything to gain if either had gained the English throne. Just because a document from the court of Maximilian shows that he gave money to "Richard IV" doesn't mean that the person was actually Richard! It means that Maximilian used that reason, and he clearly would have benefited with supporting an English king taking his throne.

Or the argument that Perkin Warbeck charged with treason means that he was truly Richard, because Warbeck was supposedly Dutch, and treason only applies to English subjects. That's cheap legalistic linguistics. He was charged with treason because he led a revolt against the Crown.

Then there's the line they used in the opening teaser: "This has the potential to change history." No it bloody does not. Time travel has the potential to change history. Her story has the potential to change our stories and interpretation, but history is going to stay unchanged, thank you very much.

Chalk this show down to propaganda. Agitprop bugs the hell out of me, even if I am sympathetic to its views.

I've been listening to a 2022 BBC podcast production of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. It is not an audiobook, but a direct adaptation to podcast/radio. Unlike the film which shall not be named (whose only positive point was giving the author Hollywood money) this is incredibly faithful to the book. The episodes are short (about 20 minutes each) and I'm enjoying it.

However: the most recent episode I listened to apparently brought up another awry* issue.
The main character reads a book to teach him magic - called the "Book of Gramarye". The podcast reads it as "grammar-ee", which makes total sense. But as a young child reading this book, I internalized it as "gra-MAR-yee" and that will never leave my head.

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*As a young child getting most of my vocabulary from reading, I thought the word was pronounced "aw-ree" and didn't find out differently until high school. "a-RYE" still sounds wrong to me.

I had an active remembered dream night. Early this morning, I was in a play rehearsal (I was prompting from my script). One of my lines had me sneer at someone's disfavored cooking method. The actual line, with sneer, was "Smurdling." That being the term for the cooking method.

1) Why did I come up with this precise nonsense term and spelling? 2) Why did it stick through waking? Brain, you're weird.

This week's bonus seasonal Resolution Recipe: Strawberry Rhubarb Butter.
"Jams are made by crushing fruit with sugar. Jams are usually thick and sweet. Fruit butter utilizes the pulp of the fruit, cooked with sugar into a thick spreadable mixture, but less sweet than jams."
( Thank you for clearing that up. )

To the people responsible for labeling a "Ceaser Salad":

Stop it.

Dear cafe next door: "Artisan" is not an adjective. "Artisanal" is. If you are advertising "Artisan sandwiches", they should contain real artisans.