“That’s what ghosts are! People hiding under a bee wearing a hat! Not the bee wearing a hat, the people.”

Because Andy Miller has asked for it, and I’m quite proud of this concoction, here is a recipe for our new food of the month: Vegetarian Kedgeree.

This isn’t the traditional Madhur Jaffrey, pre-colonial dish. This is the colonial English breakfast with the fish swapped out. Healthy, tasty, and great for leftovers.

Curry paste:
1 tsp whole cumin seeds
1 tsp whole black onion seeds
1 tsp whole mustard seeds
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp turmeric
1″ fresh, peeled ginger root
2 – 4 cloves garlic
1 tsp ready-chopped smoked chipotle chilli in oil (I get mine in Morrisons)

2 blocks firm smoked tofu (I use a really nice, very solid variety with herbs and sunflower seeds)
4 – 6 eggs (optional for vegans)
1 large onion
3 cups (not mugs!) Brown basmati rice
Two mugs of frozen peas, thawed in boiling water.

Put eggs on to hard boil. Put the rice onto cook (we use a rice cooker). While they are going toast the seeds and put in a mortar and pestle. Grind. Finely chop the garlic and grate the ginger. Put the toasted spices, the garam masala, the turmeric, the chilli, ginger and garlic in the mortar and pestle with the ground seeds. Pound and grind to a paste, adding a little vegetable oil if necessary.

Finely chop the onion. Chop the tofu into dice.

Once the eggs have boiled (about ten minutes), take them off the heat, crack the shells and cover with cold water. Peel and chop into dice.

Once the rice has cooked, strain (if not using a rice cooker) and keep in the pot with a lid so it stays warm. Put the paste in some hot oil in a large, heavy bottomed pan and cook for about a minute. Add the onions and sweat in the paste. Drain the peas. Add the peas and the tofu and stir until well mixed with the onions and paste. Add the rice and mix thoroughly. Add salt (or soy sauce) and pepper to taste. Fold the chopped egg into the mixture and serve immediately.

Serves 4 – 6. Or possibly two hungry cyclists for dinner plus leftovers for lunch.

Die Hard 4.0

I know. I’m late. But every so often I like to come out with a brief review of a film that we happened to watch the night before on DVD because there was nothing on the telly.

Bruce “action man in a vest” Willis’s post-hair, terrorist-fighting, survival caper is the sort of switch-your-brain-off and enjoy movie that I need once in a while. Either I ODed on throat sweets yesterday or the fever had come back, but with a deleriously willing suspension of disbelief I was along for the ride and enjoying every wisecracking second, including Silent Bob as the basement dwelling Ãœber-nerd, Warlock. Yarly. Not as good as the third one in terms of character interaction, but it has its moments.

Up until the oven ready gas. That kind of threw me back into engineering mode for a few minutes, as I scoffed at the preposterousness of having lit gas flooding through the supply pipes, not to mention the logistical and practical impossibility of being able to re-route all gas lines across the eastern seaboard to feed into a single power plant in West Virginia. Using a laptop. Unfortunately the truck vs STOVL fighter jet celebrity death match happened shortly after that, so I hadn’t settled back into going with the flow when the F-53 pilot unleashed his missiles on a busy highway. I can’t see anyone blithely accepting that sort of collateral damage in any circumstances.

However, the epic fail of plausibility kicked my brain back into idle, and I could enjoy watching McClane chasing down the bad guys with a catalogue of injuries that should have included every bone in his body being shattered (not to mention a number of internal organs — the liver behaves as a non-Newtonian fluid if you hit it hard enough, and I’m guessing McClane’s was hit more than hard enough), killing them all, and then showing just how much of a hardman he is by sitting in the back of the ambulance as if he’d done no more than bloodied his nose while his young sidekick was off his face on morphine to deal with a couple of flesh wounds.

Jumping the shark or crowning moment of awesome? McClane didn’t jump a shark. He jumped an F-53. After the pilot had ejected. While it was on fire.

What do you think?

“There’s a new DVD in the supermarket. Fat aikido boy leads squad of special ops soldiers. Hunting vampires.”

I have no immediate response.

“With a katana,” he adds, mercilessly.

“My mind is having approach that like a hard toffee. Somehow you have to warm it up before you can start chewing and even then you know you’re probably going to lose a filling.”

“And some teeth.”

Frood and I are not two peas in a pod by any stretch of the imagination. Come March we’ll have been together for 19 years, and the length of my life with him will finally have tipped the scale into being greater than the length of my life without him.

We have different personalities (he’s as laid back as they come, whereas I’m something of a control freak with a tendency to worry) and different interests (he likes reading, I’m an outdoors girl). He likes dressing up and going to busy concerts and I like dressing down and swimming in the sea. I have imaginary friends: sometimes I think he is an imaginary friend. Yet in almost twenty years we have never had a serious argument. We’ve never gone beyond disagreement.

We do have a few precious things in common, besides our sense of humour and penchant for the surreal. One of them is our favourite book, which is odd given that I have no taste for the trashy fantasy with which he covers the shelves. That book is Zelazny’s This Immortal, which I have just finished reading again. I have read this book so many times I couldn’t begin to enumerate them.

This, to me, is great speculative fiction. This is writing of a standard rarely matched, and never bested. While the post-war future setting is intrinsically required for the story, because such a thing could not happen otherwise (unlike a great many stories, in which the setting is no more than a fancy backdrop — I disagree with the premise that all stories should be familiar in some sense), it at no point interferes with or dominates the narrative.

The main character is richly and yet sparsely described. Like a sip of a fine Tokaj, there is great depth and complexity in a bare mouthful. The conflict in which he finds himself is not overplayed, another tendency I find in modern fiction: the conflict can be wound up for the sake of dramatic tension to such a degree that it descends into angst. Angst does not make art.

Zelazny kept this work short, concise and to the point. In doing so he produced a book of lyrical quality that is as brutally fascinating as the cobalt-bomb poisoned Earth he describes.

This, for me, is the gold standard. This is how I would like to be able to write.

Let’s see if we can get comments working again, shall we?

This promises to be easy, but I never believe such things. What I really want to do is shift off the blogger platform, because I was an early adopter and a pro-user and yet I didn’t get anything like the equivalent of the LJ permanent account or even due consideration for my use of SSIs — which, I hasten to add, was one of their suggestions in the first place!

Any recommendations should I decide to install something else?

So we’ll try this, and if it’s not easy it’ll have to wait until I’m better because I do not have sufficient functioning brain cells to do much more than swear at it.

I also re-read House of Leaves. This time I read only the bits directly concerned with the Navidson house on Ash Tree Lane and skipped the rest of it. Much better. Taken as a standalone it’s actually more thought-provoking and satisfying. I should observe, for those of you out there who thought nothing like this had been done before, that Alfred Bester had already used unconventional formatting to represent and reinforce narrative structure (as opposed to unconventional formatting put in to annoy the pants off the reader).

Returning to Once, briefly. Mr Herbert (or, indeed, Stewie and Quagmire). If you are going to incorporate current celebrities into your novels, it should serve some purpose. Presumably your intended purpose was an attempt to give the reader some cultural reference point and make him feel more connected to the story’s environment, as if your use of real places were not enough.

Sadly, how it actually read was: “OMFG I think Björk is so cool and crazy she must be like a fairy or something LOLOLOLOLOLZ!!!”

Not good. Not good at all.

This is the view from our window today:

As much as I want to go out and play in the sunshine, or get some training in, I spent most of last night coughing and I’m still producing gallons of phlegm that bears a passing resemblance to fluorescein mixed with cornstarch.

Not only that but Frood is out until half ten tonight, and it’s not like I can go visiting (I can’t walk very far without feeling faint) or have anyone round (I’m contagious). So it’s just me and my nerms (those are ninja germs, for the uninitiated).

Bah.

It is my habit when trapped at home by nerms to read books. I don’t get much of a chance otherwise. My brain keeps finding other things to do. So far I’ve read James Herbert’s Once and I’ve re-read The Prestige.

James Herbert could be argued to occupy the same position in British horror literature (can I use that word?) as Stephen King does in American, at least in terms of popularity. The problem with Herbert is, to my mind, that he has always tended more towards slasher-fic than true horror. Oh, and the porn. Dear gods. The porn. I mean, I liked him when I was a teenager and still thought that Iron Maiden’s Eddie was just the coolest thing ever, but as I grew older I came to realise that a chainsaw-wielding maniac and some explicit passages about blow jobs do not a horrifying story make.

Once declared itself to be a fairy story, of sorts. I don’t know how it came to be on my shelf, but I knew I hadn’t read it, so I thought what the hell.

I swear that thing was ghost-written. Spelling mistakes. Grammar mistakes. Punctuation mistakes. Quotation marks missing in the strangest places. It fair put me off, I can tell you. But, all that aside, I’m sure that the explicit sex in Herbert’s earlier work wasn’t so, well, gratuitous. I don’t need 4 pages of our hero watching an undine masturbate. Really. Nor do I need almost an entire chapter describing how TEH EEEEBIL WITCH (called a Wicca in this, which I’m sure will delight all the Gardnerians in the audience) conducts lesbian drug rape on the physiotherapist. Including fisting.

No, no, and no. And, lest we forget, the entire plot resolves around the Messiah trope, played absolutely straight and by the numbers. Right down to being loved by the birds and bees, and dear gods, he’s a carpenter! If that weren’t enough, it’s explicitly stated that he is just like Jesus.

Better have a bucket handy.

The prose is shoddy, the story tedious, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings risible. To put it simply, this is one of those books that acts as discouragement to the aspiring writer, because you realise that the only way you’ll ever be a bestselling author is to produce absolute dreck.

And the same thing goes for Priest’s work. Prize winning, this was. Turned into a movie. With Hugh Jackman!

The grammatical structure is sound, and at least I don’t feel like it was written by Stewie from Family Guy with occasional help from Quagmire, as I did with Once. But still. I fail to understand what purpose the modern sections served, apart from to leave the reader with either a sequel hook or the possibility of the protagonist being still alive out there somewhere. None of the main characters provoked any sympathy. Their actions went beyond mere character flaws into a degree of obsession over something these days David Blaine does for free and for which trouble he has burgers thrown at him. The science was absurd, and the entire plot hinged on a MacGuffin that simply could not work. Can we all spell conservation of mass, boys and girls? Handwaving it away as all matter is energy and vice versa fails to take into account Einstein’s famous equation. I doubt Tesla, brilliant as he was, would have been quite so blasé about it.

I couldn’t enjoy it as a story of conflict between two obsessives, because Priest didn’t ever explore why their accounts of their lives varied so much. Besides, I didn’t care about them. I couldn’t enjoy it as a story about illusion versus genuine magic, because the magic was dressed up as pseudo-science and it annoyed me. I couldn’t enjoy it as a story about obsession and the lengths people will go to in order to cover up their secrets because the secondary characters in the story were given too little credit and too little depth. The efforts expended to keep the secrets and maintain the obsessions didn’t have the necessary concomitant feeling of the suffering of those who should be intimate.

And yet this is another bestseller and this one has won awards.

Today I’m going back to Bester and Zelazny. I’m ill. I need something good to read.

Sorry. Currently listening to the final track on Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn. Trying to provoke some childhood memories.

Don’t ask.

It’s not working in any case. I really need some late 70s/early 80s proto-ambient. Or Roxy Music. Or Neil Diamond.

Anyway. A space came up for the prematurely-filled Tranent today, which I assume means that the big softies looked at the snow outside and realised how damn cold it’s likely to be at the end of March.

Me, I know how cold it can be. It snowed last year. My tri suit froze to my legs on the bike section. I didn’t warm up until the second lap of the run.

So I’ve got my entry in, and for East Fife too. Now I have to decide on a standard distance event for this year. Can’t be Gullane, because we’re on holiday, and also because I’m definitely doing Haddington this year (the run leg is really nice), which is only the week after. The Selkirk standard is on 10th May, which would be tempting if it weren’t a pool swim and not actually very far away in training time — I’ve heard really good things about the Borders series (particularly post-race noms). Can’t help but think that 1500m gets boring in the pool.

That leaves Galway (!) and Strathclyde, which clash. Typical. And they’re only the week after Loch Lomond, which is highly inconsiderate.

Might have to go for Selkirk after all, pool swim or not.

Much as I’d like to do an event outside the UK, I suspect finances and practicality will make Strathclyde the goer this year. Bah.

I’d have quite liked to do more than one standard this year. I still have designs on the Aberfeldy middle distance at some point. Alas and alack the season in Scotland is brutally short and they pack ’em all in during our short summer, so unless I trained my endurance peak to perfection, I suspect I’d end up with near-fatal levels of wipeout.

My profound thanks to mbftwit for attempting to cheer me up with this particular piece of lunacy.

It has been a long while since I spent any time boggling my brain cells with the crazier side of teh intarwebs, mainly because life’s too short to spend motorboating over the egregious fallacies and plain idiocy that underpin the majority of the contenders. They’re simply not special enough for the entertainment value to be worth the concomitant urge to find a bottle of bleeprin (presumably homoepathic potencies would have the greatest effect).

But this one is special. Let me demonstrate.

Without Financial Support, I May Shut Down.

CATASTROPIC WARNING –
Obama must resign to save his people from his catastrophe. SUN power will not allow any Black Skin power to rule over its Light Domain.

Have you got that? Sure? Keep going.

Hell cometh to the dumb, ignorant, educated stupid “Worshippers of ONE”, for Creation is of OPPOSITES.
Born Cubed I defy God of ONE, for I have a Yes and No mentality necessary for cubed intelligence – no Clyclopic educator can allow.

If I am reading this correctly, and dear gods help me if I am because it’s already too late for me, our Cloud Cuckoo Lander here, bless his little cotton socks, seems to think that the bipolar paradigm contains some sort of power function whereby 2³=8 and there are 8 corners on a cube and…

Oh never mind.

Not sure what “clyclopic” means… Here we go. It’s a case of random spelling made clear further down. Not content with racial abuse he’s casting aspersions about the monocular. Well. I suppose that’s me told.

My handy Chambers says that “cly” means “to steal”. “Clyfaker” means pickpocket.

There’s also “clyster”, which is “a liquid injected into the rectum”. That sounds about right.

I wouldn’t read any further than that. It’s David Icke meets BNP levels of pseudo-newage racial bile and histrionics.

Humans are evil bastards to claim that a god is all-powerful when it is impossible for a male queer god to give birth to a baby or breast-feed it – a power that only a Mother posseses. Humans are Evil bastards to claim that a god is all knowing – when the queer bastard is too stupid to comprehend that 4 simultaneous corner 24 hour days and 4 Earth rotations occur within a single 24 hour rotation of CubedEarth. It is impossible for an academic deified Queer ONE god to give birth to, or breast-feed a Baby.

Homophobic, too. And in need of a bit of a lie down.

This post was brought to you today by the insane ramblings of “Dr. Gene Ray, Cubic and King of Genius.”

Edited to add: I should really stop looking, but this made me splort:

You are stupid and evil about the Earth’s top and bottom, front and
back and it’s 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.

See, I had soft-boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast. Cuboid eggs would make for unhappy hens.