is a blog by Brendan
The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.
In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.
Okay, so the season break lasted a little longer than we meant it to. But we’re buffered up, geared down, spitshined and BACK!
Sequel to Stephen’s: a gentleman by the name of Gabriel had the clever idea of taking all the words in the Proserpina stories, minus her name, and doing up an eerily well-informed wordle.
The other day I ripped off a 2007 Lyttle Lytton winner and wrote Rooney, a vision of the latter days of a movie which I always thought held sinister undertones. After I posted it, I realized that the premise really could probably stand further explanation, and I was not wrong! First Peter wrote Cameron Frye, and then William followed up with Rooney again:
Rooney is on the run.
It had started as a careful stroll by the river to dump the rifle: then a quiet ride home to find some people in ‘Save Ferris’ shirts quietly breaking into his house as he pulled up.
But Rooney was nothing if not prepared. Six months later and they’re still looking for the ‘Man who killed Chicago’. Meanwhile, Rooney’s shaved his moustache, pays in cash, and has a California Driver’s License that proclaims him to be
“Edward Rooney?”
He turns, halfway to his car, to find Sloane Peterson with a ‘Save Ferris’ lapel pin. And a gun.
Sometimes I really am tempted to turn on WordPress comments on Anacrusis, but come on, the LJ community is already so much fun!
When I first heard that Cory Doctorow had published a book called Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I thought, aha! I get that reference! It points to a list of archetypal story plots that I have seen on the Internet. How clever.
Now I actually need to find that list again and it appears to have been Googlebombed out of existence, thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Doctorow. Even with his surname eliminated from the search results, my google kwon do is failing me. Does anybody remember what I’m talking about?
Ian and I are a bit obsessed with Brian Cox, and I was very happy to notice that the AV Club had done a Random Roles bit with him (an excellent interview schema, which takes the annoying bolded reporter-voice almost entirely out of it and just leaves the meat of the subject rambling about cool stuff). I was not disappointed. You might say I was reappointed. I mean, read this stunningly clear and concise evaluation of American film versus British theatre, prompted by a little question about his career arc post-Rob Roy:
“If you grow up in these islands—especially where I grew up in these islands—the theatre is very powerful, very potent. It’s a part of our heritage. Our culture is really a theatrical culture, not a cinematic culture. Feudal societies don’t create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don’t fall into ‘Everybody in their place and who’s who,’ and all that. But the theatre’s full of that. Especially in Shakespeare. So in a way, it behooves you as a British actor to try and master the classics and become a classical player. I got caught up in it. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I was too late.
“You see, the free cinema, the cinema of Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay… That all ended by the time I came along. So I went to work in the Royal Court, because they weren’t going to be making any more of those movies.”
Whoa, I guess they figured out the Antikythera Mechanism?
I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”
If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.
The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.
I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”
I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)
The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.
I know I said I wasn’t going to tell you every time we updated the podcast–I reserve that for spamming Facebook and Twitter–but seriously, you gotta listen to episode ten. One of the not-so-secret purposes behind the inception of the Hour of Knowledge was to help Stephen build a demo reel for his voice acting career, and this week’s show is a glorious vocal achievement. Even after engineering the audio (which means listening to every show, in chunks, about six hundred times), I still can’t make it through his half-improvised monologue without cracking up.
And Mom, this one doesn’t have any cusses!