oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-15 07:16 pm
Entry tags:

Culinary

Last week's bread held out very well.

There was even enough left over to make frittata with chopped red bell pepper for Friday night supper.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown toasted pinenut, with strong brown flour.

Today's lunch: partridge breasts lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, panfried in butter with a little olive oil, deglazed with a splash or so of white wine, served with kasha, baby sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil and splashed with elderflower vinegar, and asparagus steamed and tossed in melted butter + lime juice.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-15 01:11 pm

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] twistedchick!
oursin: Books stacked on shelves, piled up on floor, rocking chair in foreground (books)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-14 05:28 pm
Entry tags:

Where would I even begin?

(And didn't we have something similar, like, maybe 20 years ago on LiveJournal?)

Thing going round on bluesky recently-

'Ten authors you've read five books by'.

*Looks around just one room and its bookshelves*

Me: Maybe I could break this down into groups, I dunno, perhaps?

Thrillers? Sff? Litfic? (might break this down further into Obscure Victorian/Edwardian Novelists, Middlebrow Women Writers of the 20s/30s, the 60s Generation???) Bloke writers for whom I have a weakness? Beloved childhood faves?

And then I think, nah, this is too much effort.

I was a bit took aback by suggestions that people might be curating their 10 to look Cool or SRS or at least, not given to ingesting The Wrong Sort of Book, perish the thort.

pegkerr: (Default)
pegkerr ([personal profile] pegkerr) wrote2025-06-13 12:55 pm

2025 52 Card Project: Week 23: Capitol

This past week's Year of Adventure outing was a visit to the Minneapolis State Capitol to view the renovations that were finished in 2019.

Peg at Capitol


I went with a friend of mine, and we had planned to take the tour when the legislative session was over, but as they had not been able to finish a budget, the House and Senate were in special session. We listened for an hour to the debate in the House about the GOP proposal to strip immigrants of the ability to access Minnesotacare, the state's health care. Then, we took the tour. I'm ashamed to say it, but I had never visited the Capitol before. I was rather stunned by the beauty of the place. There was a display of battlefield flags from the Civil War in the rotunda. There were also a series of huge paintings of various battles during the Civil War in the Governor's Reception Room (a beautifully ornate room, modeled after a room in Venice).

This placard particularly struck me, given the events in Los Angeles:
EMPIRES PLACE THEIR RELIANCE UPON SWORD AND CANNON: REPUBLICS PUT THEIR TRUST IN THE CITIZENS' RESPECT FOR LAW. IF LAW BE NOT SACRED, A FREE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT ENDURE --IRELAND.


Free Government


This collage is pulled from some of the beautiful elements of architecture we saw during the tour.

One of the representatives I was listening to on Monday was just assassinated. I am beyond pissed. I am heading out the door to join today’s protests. I wasn’t going to go because of some family stuff going on, but I am so livid.

Capitol

23 Capitol

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-13 04:54 pm

Various & misc

Don't think I've previously either come across this or posted it, but who knows: Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex: 'Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital'.

***

Something else suitable for Pride Month: Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love (review):

provides an original and stirring account of a non-commodifying queer love between two women and nonhuman nature—a love that was the defining relationship of Carson’s life and yet has been downplayed in heteronormative tellings of her story. So, too, is Maxwell’s work a convincing argument for this queer love’s formative role in the writing of Silent Spring, as well as an empowering message about how embracing queer feelings might function as a catalyst for “political and personal power” in contemporary environmental politics.

***

I think I have some copies of The Pioneer journal associated with this club, but they are somewhere in the maelstrom (I am gearing up to Doing Something About this, having acquired intelligence of a body that will collect books for charity): The Pioneer Club (1892-1939): A ladies' club at the forefront of late Victorian social reform, which suffered a long, slow decline in the early 20th century.

***

Peter McLagan (1823-1900): Scotland’s first Black MP:

[S]ources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent.... McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860)... enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara.

In fact there is strong evidence as mentioned in that article that he was by no means the first Black MP. Issues of class and family connections clearly played a significant role up to the mid-C19th.

***

An ancient writing system confounding myths about Africa:

'How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'"
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot.
....
The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks - and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.

***

Artist's work to restore damaged shell grotto (I put this in a short story once.) (My own theory is that it was originally A Folly. Doing things with shells was as I recall quite A Thing in the C18th and Mrs Delany and her mate the Duchess of Portland had a rather less concealed shell grotto?)

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-13 10:01 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] arkessian and [personal profile] ironed_orchid!
oursin: A cloud of words from my LJ (word cloud)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-12 06:04 pm

Think the rot set in with spell-check, honestly

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

dewline: Exclamation: "OUCH!" (pain)
On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams ([personal profile] dewline) wrote2025-06-12 09:48 am

Bots and AO3

You might want to take a look at this warning:

https://verushka70.dreamwidth.org/121513.html
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-12 09:48 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] ase!
cofax7: then you counterattack (Bujold - Strategy)
cofax7 ([personal profile] cofax7) wrote2025-06-11 10:47 pm
Entry tags:

Time Bandits!

Well I watched the Apple+ show Time Bandits, and it was hella fun! I particularly liked Bittelig and Penelope. But now I'm sad because it's been cancelled.

I am desperately trying not to get stressed out about The Omnishambles, but it's kind of hard.

Be safe, y'all!
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-11 07:18 pm

Wednesday somehow agitated the feelings of a small dog in the park

What I read

Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation (2024) - rather slight, one for the completist, which I suppose I am.

Robert Rodi, Bitch Goddess (2014): 'told entirely through interviews, e-mails, fan magazine puff pieces, film reviews, shooting scripts, greeting cards, extortion notes, and court depositions', the story of the star of a lot of dire B-movies who has a later-life move into soap-stardom. I hadn't read this one before and it was a lot of campy fun.

TC Parker, Tradwife (2024) - another of those mystery/thrillers which riffs off true-crime style investigation - somebody here I think mentioned it? - I thought it went a few narrative twists too far though was pretty readable up till then.

On the go

Apart from those, still ticking on with Upton Sinclair, Wide Is The Gate (Lanny Budd, #4), boy I am glad that I am reading these in e-form, because they must be monstrous great bricks otherwise. In this one he actually ventures back to Germany, his marriage starts to crumble, he continues his delicate dance between all the various opposed interests in his life while managing to get support to the anti-Nazi/Fascist cause, Spain is now in the picture, and I have just seen a passing mention to Earl Russell being sent down for his Reno divorce (that wasn't quite the story, but one can quite imagine that was what gossip might have made of it 30 years down the line).

Up next

New Literary Review.

The three books for the essay review.

I think more Robert Rodi might be a nice change of pace from Lanny's ordeals.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-11 09:49 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] angevin and [personal profile] spaceoperadiva!
egret: egret in Harlem Meer (Default)
egret ([personal profile] egret) wrote2025-06-11 01:53 am

Recent reading

A Spoonful of Murder by J. M. Hall - A delightful cozy mystery about a group of retired school teachers in England who meet for coffee once a week and solve murders. In this one they are told that their also retired former principal died from an unfortunate dementia-related medication mistake, but they have their doubts! This is the first one in the series and I look forward to more. 

The Quest for Annie Moore by Megan Smolenyak - Smolenyak is a celebrity in genealogy-world. Her latest is a deep dive into the story of the first immigrant to land at Ellis Island. Smolenyak looked into the records supporting the life story of Annie Moore and discovered gaps and misidentifications. This book is the story of her years of extensive research to correctly identify this impoverished Irish immigrant and trace her life. (Spoiler: Moore spent the rest of her life on the Lower East Side in NYC.) I read it for the Virtual Genealogy Society online book club and I really enjoyed it. I think anyone interested in immigrant genealogy would enjoy it. But it really is about the adventure and thrill of tracking down elusive records, especially since much of the research was done before so much was digitized. So maybe not for the general reader. But the book club discussion was very lively and threatened to run over the time! 

Dead Man's Grave by Neil Lancaster - First volume in a police procedural series set in Scotland. It started out really great with a blood-feud-based murder but sort of trailed off into gangster-related corruption in the police force. I don't know that I will continue with the series because I found the Scots accent very hard to follow in the audiobook. This is a personal failing -- I always find Scots accents hard to follow. I suppose I could read with my eyes but I don't care that much about police and their supposed nobility. 

Lies Bleeding by Ben Aaronovitch - This is the 6th Rivers of London book. I do really love these but might take a little break because spoiler )

Currently reading: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I want to like it but it's uphill. Maybe it will pick up. I wish I had not started reading her autiobiography and learned what a rightwing eugenicist she was because now I am biased against her. (Reading it as part of my Feminist Science Fiction open source anthology project.)
dewline: Virus Don't Care (coronavirus)
On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams ([personal profile] dewline) wrote2025-06-10 11:00 pm

About that US CDC Vaccine Committee Chaos?

Go read this if you want cues on how to respond and you live in the States:

https://flamingsword.dreamwidth.org/496875.html
dewline: "Truth is still real" (anti-fascism)
On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams ([personal profile] dewline) wrote2025-06-10 09:26 pm

Related to Events in Los Angeles and Elsewhere...

Amplifying this tonight, just in case it can get to someone who really needs to see it:

https://elainegrey.dreamwidth.org/990198.html
dewline: Exclamation: "Hear, Hear!" (celebration)
On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams ([personal profile] dewline) wrote2025-06-10 04:14 pm

Health: Dental Milestone Made Official

I mentioned privately last week that I'd been accepted for enrolment into the Canadian Dental Insurance Plan. The one that our federal government hired Sun Life to administer for everyone earning less than C$90K/year and not already covered by their employer or their province?

That one.

I finally got the card in the papermail from Sun Life today.

Orange and pink and white plastic.

It's just hitting me now that, after over three decades of paying out of pocket by instalments for my dental health basics - exams, fillings and repairs of same, that sort of thing - I no longer have to worry about that part of my life's financial juggling. It's already covered through my federal income tax from now on unless I land a sufficiently lucrative job with its own coverage.

Hoping it all works out.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-10 03:13 pm

This is one of my longstanding grouches and you are all probably used to it

My attention, as they say, was drawn to this: Why Have So Many Books by Women Been Lost to History?

The question itself is reasonable, I guess, but what is downright WEIRD is they actually namecheck Persephone Press's acts of rediscovery -

- and one of the first books in their own endeavour is one that PP did early on and being Persephone is STILL IN PRINT.

And one of the others has been repeatedly reprinted as a significant work including by Pandora Press.

Do we think there is a) not checking this sort of thing b) erasure of feminist publishing foremothers?

Okay I pointed out that even Virago were not actually digging up Entirely Forgotten Works (ahem ahem South Riding never out of print and paid for a lot of gels to get to Somerville).

However, this did lead me to look up certain rare faves of mine, and lo and behold, British Library Women Writers have actually just reprinted, all praise to them, GB Stern's The Woman in the Hall, 1939 and never republished. Yay. This to my mind is one of her top works.

Also remark here that Furrowed Middlebrow are bringing back works that have genuinely been hard to get hold of, like the non-Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons, and the early Margery Sharps, and so on. (Though Greyladies had already done Noel Streatfeild as Susan Scarlett.)

Confess I am waiting for the Big Publishing Rediscovery of EBC Jones. Would also not mind maybe some attention to Violet Hunt (unfortunately her life was perhaps so dramatic it has outshone her work? gosh the Wikipedia entry is a bit thin.)

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-10 10:06 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] uhhuhlex!