Believe it or not, this guy isn’t Scots – he’s Australian. He made it to the finals of Australia’s Got Talent in 2010 and has since been taking his flaming bagpipes act to events around the world.
https://youtu.be/2EHgPTThwDI
Toasted Crickets
So I’ve been on a hard sci-fi kick lately. And I’ve heard people suggest in a few places that insect protein might make a good meat substitute for people in the future. Curious, I wanted to try them out.
I used this website as a guide: www.insectsarefood.com. It’s a great resource that’s full of reasons people should try eating bugs, recipes, and advice. I wasn’t ready to try eating something that wriggles, but I was okay with eating something that hops, so I went with the crickets. Insects Are Food says that crickets from the pet store are safe to eat.
They were a lot more expensive that I expected. That’s two bucks’ worth of crickets right there. Here’s another view:
I’m guessing cost wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you raised the crickets yourself, though.
First, stick the crickets in the freezer for a few hours to kill them. This also preserves them. Once they’re dead, they’re like seafood and don’t keep well.
Bring a pot of water to a boil and boil the crickets for two minutes. Drain.
Sprinkle the crickets on a baking pan. The IAF recipe said to cook them plain, but I added a touch of olive oil.
Toast them in the oven on low heat (250º F) for about an hour. Make sure to check on them!
Here’s what you get:
They taste like toasted sunflower seeds. And since toasted sunflower seeds are cheaper, easier to find, and don’t require special prep, I was kind of disappointed with the experiment. But hey, insects ARE food. They turned out perfectly edible.
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
A surprisingly okay book, given its awesome premise.
The year is 1914. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie causes the great powers of Europe to lurch towards war. The Central Powers wield clankers, gigantic walking war machines and the Allies use beasites, genetically engineered creatures that have been turned into weapons. AWESOME.
Westerfeld takes those elements and weaves a pretty conventional story with them. Deryn Sharp a plucky girl (conveniently an orphan) disguises herself as a boy to join the British Air Service. Aleksander Hapsburg (conveniently made into an orphan at the start of the book) flees assassins who want to finish the job. Their fates entwine, they put aside their national and technological differences, they become friends. Add a lady scientist and a couple faithful family retainers, and all the story needs to complete the cliché picture is a smart-talking chimney sweep.
But it’s an all right book. The writing is solid. Alek starts out as a brat, but he mellows out over the course of the story. I like how Westerfeld takes the language barrier these two characters would have had and uses it as part of the plot. And the genetically-engineered gasbag creatures that the British use as war machines? They call them Huxleys. That’s brilliant.
But it could’ve been so much more. For one thing, there’s no good reason for the clanker-wielding and beastie-wielding people to hate each other. The two technologies line up on the sides that real life countries did in WWI – even though they would have had to develop the technologies decades before a war that nobody saw coming. I would have loved to see the technologies line up along Catholic/Protestant lines. Or manipulation of the beasties equated with social Darwinism and the rest of the world’s horrified reaction to it.
Characters cussing with “Clart!” and “Barking spiders!” gets old pretty fast. And there’s a war on and nobody besides main characters’ parents ever gets killed.
I still recommend it. Most steampunk works shy away from WWI. This book explores the boundaries of what’s possible with the genre.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin
The Dispossessed is the reason Ursula K. LeGuin became the first person ever to write a book that won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, twice. (Her first twofer was for The Left Hand of Darkness.) She earned it.
The book is circular on a lot of levels. The story deals with a binary system of planets, Urras and Anarres, that orbit the star Tau Ceti. The inhabitants of each planet see the other planet as the moon. Urras is a lush water planet with a capitalist society and a state-socialist society locked in a cold war with each other. (Sound familiar? The book was published in 1974.) Anarres is a desert world inhabited by the descendants of colonists who exiled themselves on the planet to found an anarcho-syndicalist utopia.
I didn’t know anarcho-syndicalism existed until I started reading. It’s sort of like rule by a federation of trade unions. Sort of, but not exactly. The examination of these three societies makes the book a morality play on an epic scale, which shouldn’t work, but it does.
The main character is Shevek, an Anarresti physicist who travels to Urras after the planets have been isolated from each other for 170 years. In alternating chapters the book tells of Shevek’s adventures on Urras and his backstory on Anarres that led to his decision to make the trip. At the end of the book, Shevek returns to Anarres at the same time that he decides to leave Anarres for Urras. Circular.
Often, LeGuin would meet my objections to how Anarresti society would work just after I thought of them.
Me: How does a hermit society like Anarres do physics?
LeGuin: Yes, that’s the problem.
Me: But this isn’t really an anarchy! The government’s just very small and decentralized.
LeGuin: Yes, and it’s getting bigger.
I have some other issues with the text that LeGuin didn’t address. Why don’t Anarresti people work themselves sick, for instance? There’s always too much work to do just to survive in the planet’s harsh climate. Anarresti are taught from childhood that work is the noblest thing a person can do with their time. But it says in the text that they have a six-hour workday. Maybe they don’t take weekends.
Since there’s no central court of justice, rapists and murderers have to face the wrath of their neighbors. Regardless of how comfortable you are with vigilante justice, what if the community is wrong about who did it? What if they are really, truly convinced they have the culprit, and he didn’t do it?
I also don’t think it was entirely sporting of LeGuin to make the capitalist society the worst capitalist society that could possibly exist. A-io is only a few steps away from being a medieval feudal society with spaceships.
But all these are quibbles. The descriptions of place are gorgeous, and this book will make you think. Hard. And that’s the best kind of science fiction.
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Minor spoilers.
A work that gets a lot of hype, especially in the graphic novel community. Is Watchmen the greatest graphic novel ever written? I dunno. But it is damn good. Good enough that you could have a healthy discussion of it in an English Literature class.
Watchmen is set in an alternate universe where, like in our world, superhero comics hit the newsstands around the time of WWII. But then in their world people take it upon themselves to actually do masked crime fighting and the fictional heroes fade away. None of these masked heroes has superpowers (except for one of them), they have all too human failings, and they may have wound up doing more harm than good.
Watchmen was published as a serial in 1986-87 and as such captures the very essence of Cold War paranoia. It’s strange to think that a couple of years before I was born, people were walking around thinking that they could be vaporized at any moment. The moment when I most felt like an alien reading about another planet was during a phone call. One of the characters has to button the call off because calling California is so expensive.
Gosh, it’s clever. I recommend reading it over twice so you catch all the sight gags. The Indian restaurant where some of the characters meet is the Gunga Diner. A retired heroine is hanging out at the Nepenthe Gardens. One of the masked heroes names himself Ozymandias and fails to see the problem with that.
You’ll also want to see the ending. There’s a subversion of the villain’s monologue of epic proportions.
I have a couple of quibbles with the text. Dr. Manhattan regains interest in life on earth because every person born on earth is a statistical impossibility. They’re not. Once life gets started, it makes damn sure it keeps going. I also don’t buy the plot to make him leave Earth in the first place by convincing him he’s giving people cancer. All anybody had to do was hold a Geiger counter up to him and they’d see he’s not radioactive.
On the whole, though, it’s delicious with literary references, shocking, and will never really let you think about superheroes the same way again.
Russian Black Bread
I tried this out over the long weekend. It’s delicious and has a tender texture (which is a problem I’ve had in the past with whole grain breads). The flavor is robust, so you’ll want to pair it with a topping that can hold up to it. No strawberries and cream here. So far I’ve tried it with sharp cheddar cheese and peanut butter, both to great success. I think it would make a fantastic Reuben.
The recipe is adapted from Allrecipes.
- 1 1/2 cups water
- 2 tablespoons molasses (Original recipe calls for corn syrup. I highly recommend the flavor of the molasses.)
- 2 teaspoons (1 packet) baking yeast
- 1 cup rye flour
- 2 1/2 cups bread flour (I used whole wheat.)
- 2 tablespoons cider vinegar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon brown sugar
- 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon instant coffee
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 tablespoon caraway seed and 1/4 teaspoon fennel seed (I left these out. Depends on whether you like the flavor of caraway and fennel.)
Warm 1/2 cup of the water to about the temperature of a bath. Add the yeast and molasses and set aside.
Mix all the other ingredients except the butter together in a bowl. Just stir ’em together.
Check that the yeast molasses mixture is bubbly. Mix it into the dough. Move the dough from the bowl to a cutting board and knead until you get bored of kneading it. (The Allrecipes recipe called for 10 minutes kneading. Not going to happen.)
Soften the butter (carefully!) in the microwave and knead it into the dough. Knead for a few more minutes. Then move the dough to a fresh, greased bowl, cover with a towel, and set in a warm place for about an hour.
The dough should have expanded in volume. Punch it down, roll it into a ball, and put it in a greased loaf pan. Let it rise for another half hour.
Bake at 400ºF for about 25 minutes. When done, the underside of the bread should sound hollow when you tap it.
Enjoy!
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
I decided to read this book in honor of the late and great Terry Pratchett. I’d read it described on TvTropes as one of his best books. How I felt about it? It’s good, but Going Postal is still my favorite.
Sam Vimes is chasing a cop-killer named Carcer across the rooftops of the High Energy Magic Building when a lightning strike sends them both thirty years back in time to the bad old days of Ankh-Morpork. Vimes has to figure out how to get home and keep Carcer from dooming history.
The book is unevenly good. The beginning didn’t do much for me, and it won’t make sense for people who haven’t read the other books about the Watch anyway. It picks up when the actual time travel happens. The Ankh-Morpork of Vimes’s youth is in much worse shape than it is in the present day – it drives home how much Vetinari has accomplished during his time in power. It helps to be familiar with Les Miserables to get the full enjoyment of the book.
And then there’s the scene where Vimes and the younger version of himself find Findthee Swing’s special basement. That scene blew me away. Very little is actually described. It’s a master example of leaving details out to make a story more scary.
We’re also treated to a view of Reg Shoe in life. And we get to witness his finest moment, the one at which he becomes a zombie. But then the action moves away from him. Inquiring minds want to know what his first few days as a zombie were like. Did he freak out? (I would.) How did he figure out how to keep himself from rotting? I like to imagine some kind undertaker took him under wing and explained the facts of undeath.
Night Watch manages to be both dark and funny. It’s just as worth reading as all of Terry Pratchett’s stuff.
Shrove Tuesday Buns
I’ve gotten interested in Scandinavian baking ever since making that lemon almond streamliner cake a couple months ago. Scandinavian desserts are filled with almond paste, fruit, and whipped cream – how could you go wrong? I ran across this particular recipe while I was browsing at a bookstore. The book would have been something like $25, so I went home and looked up a recipe on the Internet.
Shrove Tuesday is the last day before the beginning of Lent. Lots of European societies would use up all the sugar and fat in the house before beginning their Lenten fasting (it’s the same thing as Fat Tuesday). These buns are appropriately rich and over the top. And they’re delicious.
This recipe is an adaptation of the recipes found here and here.
The Buns
- 1 packet dry yeast
- 1/4 cup water
- 2/3 cup heavy cream
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
- 3 cups flour (I used 2 cups all-purpose and 1 cup whole wheat. You can also use 3 1/4 cups all-purpose.)
The filling
- 6 oz (one tube) almond paste
- A few tablespoons of cream. Thin it with milk.
Mix the water and the cream and microwave it until it’s slightly warm. Add the yeast and set aside.
Mix together the flour, sugar, salt, and cardamom in a large bowl. Beat the eggs slightly, then add the eggs. Check that your yeast/cream mixture is bubbling, then mix it in.
The mixture will make a sticky dough. Knead it for about 5 minutes. Then roll it into a ball, cover it with a kitchen towel, and leave it in a warm place for about an hour.
(I used xylitol instead of sugar in this recipe, and at this point I discovered that yeast doesn’t like xylitol very much. I came back to my dough to find it had risen an anemic amount. I added a pinch of baking powder and the buns turned out fine.) Anyway, if you weren’t like me and used regular sugar in your recipe, you should find that your dough has doubled in volume. Punch it down and roll it into 10 balls. Put the doughballs on a greased baking sheet. Cover with a towel and put them back in that warm place for another hour.
Set your oven to 400º F. Bake buns for 10 minutes at 400º and let them cool. They’ll look like this:
Once they’re cool, slice the tops off the buns as if you’re making lids. Scoop out the insides of the buns with a spoon. Set the crumbs aside in a bowl. You’ll get something reminiscent of those San Francisco sourdough bowls:
Chunk up the tube of almond paste into the bowl of bread crumbs. Mash them up together, gradually adding milk and cream, until the texture is, well, gloppy. But not so wet that it’ll soak through the buns. Use a spoon to fill the buns up to the brim with the filling.
You probably bought the heavy cream in a half pint, right? Good. Beat the remaining cream with a mixer until it forms stiff peaks. Spoon the whipped cream on top of the filled buns. Perch the lid on top of the mound of cream.
Enjoy.
Happy Birthday, Herbert
This is my betta fish, Herbert.
I bought Herbert from a pet store in the fall of 2011. He’s been a good companion fish ever since, swimming around in his aquarium and adding a touch of something alive to my apartment.
He is also a really old fish.
I’ve had a hard time finding definitive information on betta fish lifespan. Various sources on the Internet disagree with each other, but most say that a betta should live two to three years in captivity. Herbert was already an adult fish when I bought him, so he should about four by now. I’ve gotten to the point where I get up in the morning and check if my fish is alive. This fish just won’t die.
So congratulations, Herbert, and many happy returns.
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
I’ve read reviews of His Majesty’s Dragon that describe it as a what-if book. That is, “What if the Napoleonic Wars were fought with dragons?” It does that, but while it’s at it it inadvertently addresses what I think is a much more interesting question: “What if air power had been an important part of European warfare 110 years early?”
The book starts out in a Horatio Hornblower universe and a genre shift creeps up on the reader gradually. William Laurence, British naval captain, captures a French ship with a dragon’s egg on board. Unfortunately, the egg’s about to hatch. Somebody on board must harness the dragon or they risk letting it go feral. The dragon chooses Laurence for a rider and he’s thrust into the Royal Air Corps.
You’ll either love the prose or hate it. The book is deliberately written in the style of novels from the early 1800’s, with long, flowery sentences that’ll leave you wondering where the verb went. I happened to like it. The book is not as stodgy as it sounds (Novik keeps the plot moving along at a modern pace). I was impressed with the technical skill it too for a modern-day American woman to bring us so thoroughly into the head of 1800’s British sea captain, complete with prejudices of the era, and we can still like him.
The plot isn’t remarkable. Laurence and his dragon Temeraire find their way around the Air Corps and eventually get accepted by their new comrades after a climactic battle against Napoleon’s forces. It’s a thin excuse for a guided tour of an R.A.F. with dragons. Novik has thought military strategy with dragons through. You’ll be treated to demonstrations of how air forces assist naval forces, how the government feeds an army of gigantic carnivores, midair safety (carabiners are a big deal), and 3-D midair maneuvers. Read it as alternate history porn and you’ll have a fine old time.
If Novik was going to be really realistic, both England and France would breed the smallest, lightest dragons possible, bomb the other sides’ civilians in the middle of the night, then run like hell. But then the dragons would be sentient airplanes and that wouldn’t be as much fun.
The most annoying moments of the book come when Novik injects twenty-first century sensibilities into the story. Some breeds of dragons will only accept female riders, so women are required to serve in the Air Corps. Laurence has to get over his prejudices and accept his female colleagues. It’s a bit much. Some of the exposition says that women riders have been around since the time of Elizabeth I, so shouldn’t the English people have culturally adapted by then? Perhaps by developing a tradition of shield maidens, like the Vikings did. I would rather have seen female aviators with a defined role in society or seen the book gone for total historical accuracy. As it is, the book is trying to have it both ways and it feels like cheating.
Also, Temeraire the dragon is too damned special. Not only is he the only Chinese dragon in the West, he’s a Celestial, the most special of the Chinese breeds, and he keeps coming up with new abilities that confound his trainers. At the big battle scene at the end he pulls a new superpower out of his ass that saves the day.
On the other hand, it didn’t bother me at all that these behemoths couldn’t possibly fly. It’s magic! Whatever. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be going for the sequels.