I just got back from Hereditary. No spoilers, but I found this movie very enjoyable in the classic horror sense of things. There are a couple scenes involving a cell phone, but they don't need to be there, and the rest of the movie could have been done anytime in the last forty or fifty years. That's a compliment, if you enjoy films like The Exorcist and The Omen, you may enjoy this film. There are no wisecracking evil menaces, no terrified teenagers in swimsuits or underwear, and no gratuitous jump scares, just a pure supernatural evil and a family's attempt to deal with it. On the critical side, there was one scene that I think may have had a set-dressing mistake, and I wasn't a fan of casting 68-year old Gabriel Byrne as the father of a thirteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old (when my father was my age [forty-seven] I had already been honorably discharged from the Marines and would have graduated college if I'd taken that path). It's not a complaint about how he plays the role, it's just Hollywood's typical pattern of letting leading men play roles well into their, ahem, late middle age that should really be going to younger men. Toni Collette, on the other hand, is 46, which fits the character better and is fucking outstanding in this role. Kudos to the rest of the casting decisions as well, the younger actors and actresses look like, well, average teenage kids. The "beautiful girl" love interest is pretty attractive, but doesn't come across as having fallen off a Maybelline package or anything. So anyway, if you like the old style of horror, I'd recommend this film. If boobs and splatter and jump-scares that were only the cat are more your thing, I won't judge, but you'll probably be bored to death.
Waiting in line this morning and a man in his fifties brazenly cut straight in front of me and a dozen other passengers to secure the best seat on the bus for himself and I find a spot sit down open the virtual paper on my phone and see an opinion piece demanding sensory friendly showings of movies and plays for people with autism and that Belgian law allows euthanasia of people with autism and that a middle-class white woman is complaining that someone laughed at her child’s name which is Abcde and the president’s lawyer has pled guilty to more counts of lying to Congress about working with the Russians and 737s will crash because of a safety feature that can’t be overridden and I wonder at what point where when why all my feigned progressivism is going to be seen as the embarrassing relics of a bygone age don’t mind him it was a different time back then yes but why is he yelling at that empty chair mom?
Seriously though, the stuffing gets made in the oven a day or so before. It's not safe to stuff a turkey that's going in the smoker, and I can't do it the same day because the genius who wired my apartment building put all the outlets on the same breaker, so running the oven and smoker at the same time results in a blackout. So stuffing in the oven, turkey in the brine, my favorite is an apple juice/bourbon mix with some garlic, cloves, nutmeg, stuff like that. Stuffing is pretty simple, toast, Italian sausage, onions, carrots, apples, sage, marjoram maybe, gummi bears, whatever. Turkey gets rinsed, dried, and buttered. Take the butter and mix it with sage (definitely) and whatever other aromatics take your fancy. Butter the outside, and peel back the skin from the meat around the rear cavity and neck and cram as much butter as you can into the gap. Doesn't matter if it's chunky and lumpy, it'll melt soon enough and recongeal in your arteries after dinner. Quarter an onion, an apple, and some carrots and celery and stuff them into the cavity and neck area. This stuff is going in the trash later, but it'll flavor the meat and most importantly the gravy. For the gravy, get a disposable aluminum pan. The turkey is going on the highest rack in the smoker, the gravy pan goes on the lowest. Put a couple sticks of butter, smash a couple cloves of garlic, slice an onion, apple, some celery, and a bit of carrot and put them in the pan. Add a quarter bottle of bourbon, or enough to lightly cover the bottom of the pan. As the turkey smokes, its juices will drip into the gravy pan, which will also be picking up the smoke from inside the smoker. The butter will melt into the bourbon and cook the fruit and veg (it stays in the whole time, several hours). Don't forget to make your mashed potatoes during this time. It's easy, wash, cube, and boil some potatoes. When you boil them, put one clove of peeled garlic per potato into the same pot that you're cooking the spuds in, or to taste. Boil them for 12-14 minutes or until a fork smashes a cube easily. Drain the potatoes and get them into a bowl or stand mixer quickly, and add a bunch of butter. How much? Dunno, whatever you think is right, plus 20%. Put some parmesan cheese in too, it's good stuff. Mix the hot potatoes until the butter has melted, and then add cream. Whole cream, it'll coat the butter in your arteries to promote smooth lipid flow. Add the cream sparingly, if you put too much in and your spuds go runny, you can salvage things by adding instant mashed potato powder. Once the consistency is right, taste things and start adding salt and pepper until they taste right. Cover with Saran Wrap and move on. My smoker only goes to 275, which isn't hot enough to crisp the skin on the turkey, so when you're about ten degrees short of your goal, move the turkey to the oven at 350. At this point, pull the gravy pan and dump everything into the food processor and pulse it to chop up the veg. A traditionalist would be making a roux of flour and oil at this point. I prefer to add two or three packs of turkey or chicken gravy powder and stir. When the turkey comes out of the oven, wrap it in foil and put the stuffing into the microwave to heat up. Check to make sure the potatoes are still warm as well, and adjust as necessary. After about half an hour, the turkey will be ready to eat. Scoop the vegetables that you stuffed into the cavity and discard them, there's a slight chance that they may not have reached a safe temperature, so their job is done. Cranberry sauce comes from a can, and pies from a bakery. If your guests want side dishes, let them figure it out.
Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen Topsy John Henry Parr Joy Miller Rachel Corrie Walter Scott Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes Ahmed Bouchikhi Freddie Gray Darwin Lee Judge Otto Frederick Warmbier Neda Agha-Soltan Cameron Todd Willingham Alan Turing Renee Shin-Yi Chen Clarabelle Lansing Mary Ward Ye Meng Yuan Shannon Michelle Wilsey Brian Douglas Wells Elisa Lam Steven Parent *the Book is neither comprehensive nor completed
So a week or two ago I turned off my angry political FB account for a while because I realized the world was gonna go to hell whether or not I kept track of the details. Kept my "friends who are decent people, senior citizen family members, etc" account open though, and now my only feed is filled with glurge like this: View attachment 22994 Which is fine until you realize that with about 7500 generations of "humans" and common ancestry with chimps and baboons, if you go back far enough there's almost certainly a rapist or seventy back there saying "Who gives a shit what she wants, boy, continue the line!" and an equal number of bruised and battered victims staring into the future with empty eyes, seeing that birthmark, that crooked index finger, that smile that twisted his face as he grunted and panted atop her inside her before leaving her lying in the dirt, in her own blood, to deal with the consequences of his actions for the rest of her life... "Be still."
“Delta 3, status check.” “Delta 3, we're fi—n” “Delta 3, did you say you were fine, or you were fighting?” “Delta 3?” “WE'RE FIGHTING, WE'RE FIGHTING!” “Delta 3 10-4—“ BEEEEEEEEP “Delta 2, Delta 20, signal three code three, 742 Evergreen Terrace.” “Delta 20 10-4” “Delta 2 10-4” “Channel 9 North units hold all non-emergency traffic, Delta 3 is out with a blue 94 Chevy two-door, 10-28 foxtrot tango sierra one three six nine break” “Plate comes back to a [REDACTED] out of [REDACTED], Delta 3, status check.” “Zebra 5, one in custody” “Zebra 5, channel is closed, where are you?” “Zebra 5, I'm out with Delta 3, one in custody.” “Zebra Supervisor to dispatch, I sent 5 to help.” “Zebra Supervisor... yeah, thanks, umm, Delta 2, Delta 20, take a slowdown, looks like things are under control.” “Delta 20, 10-4” “Delta 2, 10-4” “Channel 9 North units, feel free to resume normal traffic. Dispatch out.”
I don't believe you. I don't ask you to believe me. But I'll do my best to treat you as you wish to be treated, even if I think you're full of shit, so long as that shit isn't spilling over into my life and messing with my day, and in doing so, I hope I'll have kept my shit out of your day.
My alarm wakes me from dreams of Weimar street fighting, but these take place no on old sped-up black and white newsreels but the vivid colors and shaky cellphone cams of YouTube, police hovercraft spilling their skirts to blast protester and counter-protester alike down the street, thugs in makeshift riot gear tapping their shields to an internal rhythm before exploding against their opposite numbers their opponents their enemies them a man using the American flag as a spear a club bashing some cowering wretch into the pavement and I've been awake seven minutes now and it's Thursday again just Thursday but I don't want to check the news, not just yet. Post.
I just put youtube's "80s classic alternative" mix on while I do some paperwork, and I can feel the Aquanet in my hair and taste the cheap black lipstick and smell the clove cigarettes and see the blacklight and smell the sweet chemical smell of the fog machine and feel the laces of my boots crushing my jeans into my legs and... and this song was ten years on from that time but that's what it's about in the end and now it's thirty years gone. Young Iain, dancing in that juice bar in Chicago, was closer to Woodstock than he is to me today.
In our faith, we keep what we kill" -The Lord Marshal, The Chronicles of Riddick This post has nothing to do with what we kill. When Mrs. A's mother died, we had a funeral. The guest of honor's only sibling, her brother, was of course present, and... ...and when they wheeled the coffin from its place at the head of the chapel for us to place the grave goods... ...the flowers... ...the candy... ...and the flowers... ...her favorite hat and scarf... ...and the flowers... ...the doll she'd cuddled in the hospital when she was still present enough to cuddle... ...and the flowers, the endless flowers... ...and all the sundries that would accompany her to the afterlife, or at least the crematorium, her brother let out a sob, no other word for it, a heart-wrending, heart-wrenching sob of pure agony and turned away from the body of his sister, honored and missed and adored by so many people in that great funeral hall with its yards and yards of flowers and chairs and mourners and he turned away and wept and... No One Went to him No one comforted him. In our faith.... In their faith... In their faith, the polite thing, the correct thing, the right thing was to leave him and his moment of weakness unnoticed. Or so I assume. We don't discuss such things. And a year and a half later, the widower, Mrs. A's father... May not be doing well.
On the way to work this morning, I was part of a crowd waiting to cross one of Osaka's main thoroughfares when a full-dress Harley rumbled politely by. The type with the hard saddlebags, dual BarcaLounger reclining seats, full climate control, and quite possibly autopilot for all I know. Not one of those loud, straight-pipe hairy biker machines, no, this had big mufflers on it that silenced all but the earthquake subsonics of the big V-Twin. And all the women at the crosswalk continued to look down at their smartphones, while every bearer of the sacred Y-chromosome, from the geriatric with two canes to the nattily-dressed 60 year old to the defeated middle-aged sararimen in their cheap polyester suits to the construction workers to the gaijin to the schoolboys paused in mid-clowning to the little boy holding his grandmother's hand to the baby in the sling, every one them, every. last. one's head tracked as that magnificent contraption of inefficient American iron, leather, and steel rolled its way down the Midosuji Boulevard.
During the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), the plunderers: Richard Tillinghast, Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering But... Will history remember as much about you in eight hundred years as it remembers of her?
I was just reading an opinion piece by the president of a certain university, commenting on what a school should do when its graduates achieve either fame or notoriety. The author said that when [FEMALE GRADUATE NAME REDACTED] first became a major figure in the news, many "alumnae" wrote to comment on the fact that the school had yet to comment on her newfound status. I'd never heard of the term. I know that "alumni" is plural and "alumnus" is singular, but what the fuck is an "alumnae"? Turns out "alumnus" and "alumni" are male, and the female variants are "alumna" and "alumnae." Fuck you, sez me. "Ooh, but it's Latin, you have to pluralize Latin words according to-" No, fuck you. "Alumna" isn't Latin, it dates to 1882 in the United fucking States of fucking America, and we speak English* here. Well, that and Spanish, Polish and/or Russian in certain neighborhoods in Chicago, and there's a substantial Hmong community in Minneapolis/St. Paul, plus a diverse set of Southeast Asians on the West Coast, as well- No, wait, where was I? Oh yeah, "Fuck you and your pluralization!" First, it's not a Latin word, it's an English construction from a Latin base, so it should be "alumnas," not "alumnae." And fuck your "alumnus/alumna" distinction too. It's 2018 and we are doing our best to get away from gender bias in the English language, aren't we? It's one thing if you want to hire a dominatrix to dress as a policewoman and handcuff you, because orientation isn't bias, but if it's the real deal it's a police officer who just pulled you over for 72 in a school zone and you're really fucked. Firefighter, not fireman. Flight attendant, not space waitress, amirite? Dat broad's an alumna of Penn State, but would you call her a graduateress of Yale law who works as a lawyeress at Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe? Don't fucking think so, do you? And I get it, "alumnus/alumni" means "adopted son(s)" in Latin, and that lawyeress was thinking "Who da fuq you callin' son, son?" but there are ways around this that are already in place. Alumn(us)(a)(i)(ae), what do they all have in common? Half the time we even call them "alums" and nobody bats an eye. This is 'Murica, talk *'Murican, dammit. LATE EDIT: I just realized I forgot the original point of my rant, which is that even if it is a Latin word, we ain't in Latinavia, so their customized plurals can go pound sand as well. I'm writing in English, does that oblige me to write 寿司 in 漢字? Nope, don't fucking think so either, Товарищ.
Mein host, whom I grew up with.... His parents made him wear orange to school on St. Patrick's Day. We don't live in a particularly Irish area of the US, of Chicagoland, but it was a tribal statement. I didn't know (Oh, hi there Steggy!) that Catholics were Christians when I was growing up. Of course, I have yet to see a Second [Methodist/Presbyterian/Baptist/] Church [of Christ], so what the Hell do I know about these things.... Anyway, he told me that his kids play with the Moroccan kids next door, and the Mexican kids across the street, and the kids down the block who have two mommies and no evident daddy, and that they are utterly unfazed by this. And my friend, my old friend, the first person I ever got in trouble with, when I was four, for trying to take all my Tonka trucks down the (dead end) street to his house without checking with Mom first... Do you know how long it takes two four-year olds to move a fleet of eight Tonkas half a block? We'd cleared the property line before being taken into custody. He's worn bracelets more times than he can count without taking off his shoes since, but that's irrelevant except not, since the other day he showed me his prescription card for something that he used to be an amateur enthusiast of, which now helps him with the nerve damage from the accident. Where was I? All of these things, all these things I support and agree with and vote for and yes, this is right, Every Last One of them trips my childhood mental triggers as WRONG WRONG DANGER WIL WHEATON WRONG OUTCAST LEPER UNCLEAN. The future belongs to the future, we many, we unhappy few, just need to step aside and let history move past...