INT. NITA'S BEDROOM -- NIGHT
She's hidden by the tented-up blankets on her bed.
The dim light welling out from underneath would make
you think she's doing the reading-by-flashlight thing.
NITA (O.S.)
I don't get why some spells call
for these weird objects. The knotted
string you were using. Batteries.
Sugar cubes! Who needs this stuff
when you have the Speech?
( Read more... )Archaeologists have found the remains of an ancient settlement two miles from Stonehenge which seems to have been built specifically to celebrate the Winter Solstice... big time.
The new finds at Durrington Walls, two miles northeast of the stone circle, indicate that the entire region was a large religious complex where the early Britons gathered in midwinter for raucous feasts and solemn ceremonies before sending their deceased on a voyage to the afterlife.
...Durrington Walls "is either the richest site or the filthiest that we have ever found for this period," Pearson said. "It's absolutely stuffed full of trash or rubbish: broken pots, chips, flints, burned stones used for cooking and animal bones. Many were thrown away half eaten, a sign of conspicuous consumption. This is an enormous feasting assemblage. People were here to have a really good time."
Significantly, there was no evidence for the processing of grain or baking it and little evidence of crafts. "This was not a full-time, year-round community, but one for specialized activities."
Like partying!
Those of you who've been following the The Big Meow project will have noticed some changes at the site as we've changed hosting providers and brought up the new Drupal installation. Now that that's bedding in, I get to add some cool new stuff.
One new feature: research materials. I keep these on my home machine using Onfolio, which also makes it easy to publish stored material online. So here's a link to where my Big Meow research material can now be found online.
The page material will automatically update as I add new items (which happens every now and then), remove stuff (ditto) or reorganize things. For those who're interested in finding out right away when there's something new, here's a link to the page's XML / RSS feed.
While going through this material the other day, I did notice that some sources (particularly the New York Times items) hadn't stored correctly. I'll be seeing what I can do about this.
Meanwhile, there's a lot of cool stuff in there. My favorite at the moment: a recording of the original LAPD officer who made the phrase "Calling all cars" famous nationwide.
...I mean nostalgia in its original sense of something that causes you a slight yearning pain as you think about things past and lost.
No telling what brought on today's attack of it. I was writing, and got the urge for something crunchy and sweet, but light. And suddenly the memory broke surface: brown-edge wafers.
How many years has it been since I last sat down to decimate a box of Nabisco Brown Edge Wafers? I used to love those things intensely. Indeed, there is a place in The Worm Ouroboros where Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha, and poor Mivarsh Faz (I still feel bad about the crocodile) drop in on Queen Sophonisba the Fosterling of the Gods at her place inside the mountain Koshtra Belorn, and the Queen has them served dinner --
"Behold, ambrosia which the Gods do eat and nectar which they drink: on which meat and wine myself do feed, by the bounty of the blessed Gods. And the savour thereof wearieth not, and the glow thereof and the perfume thereof dieth not forever."
So they tasted of the ambrosia, that was white to look on and crisp to the tooth and sweet --
-- and when I was fourteen, or whenever it was I read this book for the first time, something in my brain sort of chucked out the "white" part, but kept all the rest of the description, and immediately flashed on what they must have been eating: Nabisco Brown Edge Wafers!
(Sigh: even then, such a food geek. And Queen Sophonisba could probably have used some vegetables in her diet as well, but that's not the issue. ...Still chuckling over the new cover on The Worm: they've got Tolkien blurbing Eddison. This is delicious, considering that Eddison blurbed Tolkien first, back when Tolkien was the new unknown writer and Eddison was hot...)
Anyway, in the course of the nostalgia attack, I went online and found, to my grief, that they're not made any more (see here for a rather depressing list of all-gone goodies. Jeez, if I'd known the box of Cheese Tid-Bits I ate in NY four or five years ago was the last one I was ever going to ingest...! Why didn't I buy a case when I had a chance! Argh. And as for the noble Oysterette, I've been mourning that loss for years already).
But no point crying over uncookie'd milk. So I made some Brown Edge Wafers. (The picture will come later. Peter went out to do some research and took the camera with him: the phone's camera is no good for this, and my Clie is up in the charger.)
...The recipe about halfway down this page works pretty well. However, I found I needed to beat a few tablespoons of milk into it to get the wafers to spread properly. Only after I was almost through baking did I find this page, which has a slightly different recipe that purports to be crisper. Must try that next time.
Notes for those of you who might try the first recipe:
(a) Sweet butter, not salt. UK users: Lurpak is best. Also: cake flour, not all-purpose or plain / "strong white".
(b) Cream the sugar and butter really well. Get obsessive about it...it pays off.
(c) Even if you're using a nonstick cookie / biscuit sheet, you must grease or spray it. Otherwise the little monsters will adhere, doing demure little backflips when you try to spatula them off. Frustrating.
(d) Letting them sit on the sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to the rack seems to help.
(e) Watch the timing. Eight minutes was about right for these in our little fan oven.
...Sigh: back to work.
(And now that I'm thinking of it, what were those cream wafers that the Lady Prezmyra was eating in chapter VII?...)
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