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January 20, 2003
Staring into the Abyss
"When will we three meet again?" Oh, sometime in the summer. Maureen Kincaid Speller, Bridget Bradshaw and I had lunch and discussed the business of the League of Fan Funds. Now complete with bank account, we seem to be better at collecting money than disbursing it. Though not for long. Watch out for a website in a week or two; and it may well look quite a lot like this one.
After they'd left, I went into full-on Domestic Goddess mode, baking a proper birthday cake, biscuits, fairy cakes, and Cheesy Orange Pigs.
The birthday cake had no icing in accordance with Marianne's wishes; but was filled with whipped cream and strawberries and raspberries. Which was all a lot better for the adults; and the children no more eschewed it than normal for birthday cake.
Had a brief chat with Kim Huett, luckily Not-at-all-Singed of Canberra. A close call, though, with damage only a few streets away. Also chatted to Dr Plokta, whose brother is in Canberra, and who has a brand new blog, Ask Dr Plokta. The blog appears to be very, very geeky; his switching journal is very much more technical than mine, for example. He mentioned that Steve Davies has taken the plunge and bought a Powerbook; which means that the Plokta households are 3/4 Mac now. And he suggested that I should be mounting my Windows shares with SMB Browse, which works ever so much better than the Finder.
I've discovered another interesting feature of Marianne's globe; it shows the International Date Line. Which appears to be rather more complex than last I looked. I was inspired to set a small trivia question. Supposing you want to sail a great circle route past the IDL in such a way as to cross the line as often as possible. What route (roughly) would you choose, and how often would you cross the line?
And this afternoon came the onslaught. Along with Caroline Mullan and Max, we fought bravely against the legions of battle droids, but were hopelessly outnumbered. After we'd cleaned up the devastation, Steven and I sat down to watch Attack of the Six Year Olds. Or something like that.
Posted by Alison at January 20, 2003 12:56 AM
Comments
How does one make a C.O.P.?
Posted by: Damien Warman at January 20, 2003 01:56 AM
caption at the IDL site:
The location of the IDL in 1900.
Note the eastward excursion of the IDL at the latitude of Hawaii to accommodate the island[...] Byers.
Posted by: Damien Warman at January 20, 2003 02:23 AM
I must say I admire that example of cheesy orange pig you have on display there. It whispers 'eat me' so very enticingly that I'm tempted despite not being able to tell what it's composed of.
Posted by: Kim Huett at January 20, 2003 05:43 AM
from the "cooking with children" section of How to Eat by Nigella Lawson. Er, she calls them cheese stars, but what does she know? You mix together 50g self-raising flour, 100g grated cheese (whatever's to hand, but she suggests 80g red leicester and 20g parmesan), 25g soft butter and a pinch of cayenne. Mix it all together, knead it a bit and it comes up into a smooth dough. Which you roll out on a floured surface to about 2 1/2mm, and then cut out shapes with a pig cutter and bake for about 10 minutes at 200°C.
Cool on a rack; it makes about two dozen.
I think blue cheesy pigs with caraway and cumin seeds added would also be good, and am planning to experiment.
The pig cutter is one of a set of five children's cookie cutters from IKEA (the other four being moon, heart, star and flower).
Posted by: Alison Scott at January 20, 2003 09:39 AM
I'd be greatly tempted ot ask if anyone knows where I can get a pig with wings cookie cutter, but given the international flavor of the conversation it probably wouldn't do me any good.
I love the HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS which I bought while in the UK a year ago. (Only to return to the US to find it for sale here after I'd lugged the heavy thing all the way home.) The purchase of an electronic scale which measures in either pounds/ounces or grams takes care of any little conversion problems. For measurements anyhow.
What? Oh, the pigs with wings thing? Well we have a smallish collection of them due to where we got married and I thought it'd be fun to. What? Oh. Well, the original place we planned to get married called me back 2 weeks later--just as I was going out of town for 10 days--to inform me that they'd decided to no longer have weddings. Yikes! I'd wanted to stay out of San Francisco because of cost and parking issues, but the wedding was less than 6 months away and... So I went hunting. I was leaning favorably to the Mansion Hotel when I walked into the parlor. The ceiling was painted sky blue with puffy clouds and cherubs. No doubt you've seen such semi-trompe l'oeil scenes. Only the cherubs where pigs with wings. Since most of Jordin's friends figured he'd get married when pigs had wings.... And it was a lovely Victorian hotel too. Shame it's gone now.
Oh, um, am I off topic?
MKK
PS: It was a good thing we changed our wedding site too. Turned out we got married on the day of the Great Oakland Fire and the pevious place was just down the road from the Berkeley area of the devastation.
Posted by: Mary Kay at January 20, 2003 07:06 PM
Gosh, I was getting packed to move to my namesake island when I read further on the IDL webpage and saw that "By 1910 the non-existence of these islands had become firmly established and the date line was straightened out at that point."
There's story behind all that, I'm sure. And it was probably written by Thomas Pynchon.
Posted by: Randy Byers at January 20, 2003 07:36 PM
Just wanted to provide the current URL for Le Zombie 10: http://www.midamericon.org/tucker/lez10.htm There are now 47 issues of Le Zombia posted there.
Keith
Posted by: Anonymous at April 25, 2005 02:08 PM