There will Never be a Better Time

It seems like I haven't made cupcakes in a very very long time.  And since I'm meant to be writing my second assignment for my Masters paper right now, as we speak, what better time to make cupcakes?  These little beauties are vanilla with vanilla-maple frosting.  For some reason (maybe I over-mixed them?) they turned out a little tough, but when you've got a noseful of frosting, who really cares?  They came out kind of pretty too.  See?

Polka-dots - good for the soul.

I was just meant to go in to drop off the Hellblazer and the Love and Rockets that I'd borrowed from the public library (which, sad to say were slightly overdue... heh heh), but you've got to walk past the science fiction and fantasy section to get to the comics at my public library.  Uh oh.  What did I see out of the corner of my eye but Perdido Street Station, by the inimitable China Mieville.  It was too good an opportunity to miss - I have read Un lun dun and Iron Council already, and really enjoyed them both.  I think because Perdido is such a weighty looking tome, I always get put off getting started on it, but the holidays will be coming up soon, so I figured the universe was trying to tell me something.  I really love the world building in it so far, and Mr. Mieville doesn't shy away from the big words, which I really like.  Expand that word power!  I'll let you know how I get on with it. Just as an extra treat, here is an interview with China Mieville conducted just after Un Lun Dun came out.  He's ridiculously cool and super talented.

Oh, and here is a link to one of the blog things that I follow, Cakehead Loves Evil - shes' running a thing called Cupcake Tuesday, and truly, the submissions blew my mind.  I can't even believe that I'm showing you this link, because they make my attempts look like shit.  Though, she says huffily, I bet those cupcakes don't taste very good.  *sniff*

Mama!  I need to borrow your opposable thumbs!

Well, that's enough pretending that I'm doing work.  I'd better actually go and do some - I'm trying to get into it again, really I am, but I think that I lost my mojo for this course during the holidays, because I'm kind of struggling to get back into it.  I'm sure it's around here somewhere...

Date with the Night

Does squishy do it for you?  It doesn't do it for me.  I'm a crunchy girl - I like my toast crispy, my peanut butter chunky and anything fried to be verging on the charcoal.  Mmmm... charcoal.  Texture is such a massive thing to me, I almost can't eat things when the texture is off.  That's not to say that all my food is crunchy; I like to eat soft things, slurpy things... it's just squishy that I have a problem with.

Which is why my unholy love affair with the humble date loaf is so fundamentally strange.  Of course, the version that I make (the Edmonds version) has walnuts in it, so it does have that kind of contrast-y texture.  I really dig that contrast-y texture.  I've even done a bit of an experiment where I substitute about half a cup of the flour for a half cup of cocoa, but I made a mental note not to do that again, because it made it kind of dry and weird.  Not brutally unpleasant, but just not really great.

Dates and walnuts - the gin and tonic of the baking world, that's how well they go together.

So that's all the baking that I've been doing.  It's nice to have a project though, so I've been madly looking up Lego cakes for the Lad's birthday in June.  He's going to be an *ahem* significant number, as I've already mentioned, so I'm going to practice my fondant icing skills so I can be all "Man, this is super easy! I should have been a baker... or something." when it comes time to do the actual Lego cake.  Just a recommendation though, if you are a beginner cake decorator (like myself), for the love of Great Grandma's Spatula don't look up on the internet "Lego cakes", because you will be so disenheartened (is that even a word?  Whatever) by the professional efforts of professionals that you will really start to question your sanity in volunteering to make a cake in the first place.

In other news, your humble writer here has just had her 29th birthday.  The Lad made a big fuss of me, and my parents even came to town specifically to take me shoe shopping and out for lunch, which was all totally lovely.  I didn't do any baking for my birthday, because quite frankly library school is really sapping my strength when it comes to the domestic arts.  I bought myself a vinyl edition of Queens of the Stone Age's Rated X (the tenth anniversary of Rated R), and also managed to find the Distillers' self titled album and Fight Like Apes' Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion. 

Maceo is also doing good: well actually, he's a pain in the arse. I have all these scabby scratches on my hands to prove it, but I really just wanted an excuse to post this cute-ass picture of him.  This is the look he gets right before he tries to claw your face off.  He's going in for his de-manning on Tuesday, so maybe that will settle him down a bit, but I really have my doubts.  Boy is a crazypants.  Speaking of pants, I saw a good interview by Ellen DeGeneres of Tina Fey a few days ago, and have subsequently ordered her book, Bossypants.  Dunno if it will be any good, but the interview was really funny (though Ellen did make it patently obvious she'd never done improv before... yikes), and they're both really charming women.  Though Lord knows when I'll get time to read it, because it's taken me about three weeks to get half way through the first trade book of Fables: Who Killed Rose Red?  Probably doesn't help that I'm reading about three other books at the same time though. 

Lil' Librarian

Ye Gods... it sometimes helps to go through your RSS reader, if only to find out what new dreck the interwebs has turned up.  When I came back to the internet after the break, I had over fifty completely useless (but mostly very interesting) things to read about. 

Including, the Little Librarian kit, which had been nominated by Disney as one of the best toys of 2010.  Which REALLY makes me wonder how crap the toys of 2010 were.  Not that I think libraries or teaching your kids the "important skills of organizing, sharing, borrowing and returning" are crap, of course not.  Still, there seems to be a major disconnect between the contents of the kit and what actual kids actually like.  Plus, I don't know about you, but when was the last time you saw a check card in the back of a book?  Not that long ago for me, but I'm usually ripping them out of the backs of books, because I don't know of a single library that still uses them. 

Anyway, just a little random to bring joy to your day!

Invasion of the Killer Brains

Wouldn't that be a great title for a B-movie?  Maybe it already is... but anyway, I'm trying to retrain my brain.  Hard ask with a brain such as mine, but if I'm going to be studying again next year, it's good to get used to reading in an academic type format again... goodbye, sweet novels, I knew you well.

So, that having been said, I'm reading some pretty interesting stuff at the moment.  I mean, it doesn't all have to be stuffy toff reading!  Okay, so I am reading Karl Marx's Theory of History: a defence by G.A. Cohen... maybe not everyone's idea of exciting bedtime reading, but still... makes quite the change from Sookie Stackhouse, that's for sure.  And Fight the Power by Chuck D from Public Enemy (they are touring out to lil' ol' EnnZed next year, and I've always meant to read this book... every time I check it into the library, I try to get it out, but it always has a hold on it.  Not this time though).  Also I've just started Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Theory by Patricia Melzer.  Which is super interesting, though it's mostly about SF-type films rather than books.  I'm not fussy though.

Digressing back to SF-esque writing now, despite Ray Bradbury scaring the pants off me when I was a kid (I didn't sleep properly for nearly a month after reading Something Wicked This Way Comes), I still love him.  And I love him even more after reading this article, which was published in the New York Times in June 2009. There has been a lot of kerfuffle in the library community about closures and restrictions and price increases and stuff.  It would be real easy for me to go, 'Aww, that's just the States'... but the fact is that the recession has affected the whole world, which creeps me out no end, you know, how it really is becoming like the economic version of Chaos Theory, where a butterfly flaps it's wings in the Amazon and Wall Street crumbles.  I know it's a lot more complex than that, but it just seems that way to me.

Scary Shit... Look out for the Dust Witch!!

Whoa.

Frickin' heck, I've got so many plans at the moment, I'm like... a plan monster, or something.  It's the first proper-nice day of the spring season today, and with remarkable good planning, I'm not at work... nice to be doing something right.  Mum and Dad are down in Wellington tomorrow, so it will be sweet to see them (and sweet to have all the frickin' cleaning out of the way... *sigh* I know they don't care, but I do it anyway), and we're going to the World of Wearable Arts show on Sunday, which I'm so looking forward to it's not even funny.  Plus I'm trying to write my letter for library school next year, which is into something like it's eighth draft... and so I'm ignoring it for a little while, just to get my mojo back on it.

Oh yeah, the baby shower!  Damn, it was so good, I am King Organised, nothing was a total failure (read that as: nothing failed so badly that I couldn't fix it), the new Mama was completely surprised (muahaha), and I've had several really nice emails from guests saying how much they enjoyed themselves... sweet!  It was actually surprising easy, in the end of it - I think that the most stressful bit was having a bunch of people that I didn't really know very well coming over to my house.  You just never know what you'll be inviting through the front door.  Still, we didn't have any chronic undressers or kleptomaniacs (yes, I have been rereading 'Choke' by Chuck Palahniuk - how did you guess?)  All the baking was an unmitigated success too - no reports of food poisoning, which is just fab.

I think that I'm most proud of my pistachio macaroons, because I'd never made them before, and I'm now cautiously optimistic that I've conquered my brain-block against egg white baking... but I'm gonna make a sponge or a pav or something before I get too excited on that front.  They were so good - I actually liked them better without the ganache in the middle, but that's just because I'm not really a sweet tooth kind of lady.  But there were also cupcakes (der, of course there were, I'm kind of bored of baking them to be honest, but now it's getting to be something that people expect), savoury junk (wee tomato and olive tart things, thyme and gruyere gougeres, just to be fancy), and a fantastic chocolate and raspberry cake that the fine lady helping me organise made... it was so awesome.  *drool*

Stay Frosted

We've established that I'm a big slacker in earlier blog posts, so we don't need to go into that territory again.  But, I'm soothing myself with the knowledge that it's winter at the moment, the dead season, so any creative endevour is bound to be fruitless.

That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.

Although I seem to have lost my baking mojo for the moment, I haven't lost my reading mojo.  Oh no.  The huge-ass Downtown City Mission Bookfair was last weekend, and I've only now surfaced from the giant pile of bargaintastic books that I bought.  Okay, yes, there are a lot of Stephen King's books in there, but I also managed to score a few awesome classics - Alexandre Dumas' Lady of the Camellias, which I'm really hoping is going to be better than ol' Gustauv Flaubert's Lady Bovary.  I know, I'm an uncultured swine, but damn that book was hard going.  I mean, I'm totally down with having a hated character, but when you kind of think that all of them could do with a good boff in the chops, then it makes life harder for the reader than it needs to be.  That's how Jane Austen's books make me feel too (well, I've only read two - Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, but that was enough).

So that was quite the digression.  Here's what I actually wanted to recommend you - Generation Kill by Evan Wright.  Alright, so you might have seen the mini-series that they made out of it, but I have to say that the series, as awesome as it is, pales into insignificance in the wake of the book.  Which is usually the case, but it's even more marked in this example, because Wright manages to convey much more of the sheer weight of his observations of the experiences of the Marines of First Recon than you get to experience through the series.  Just the swing from out-and-out terror to over-the-top exhuberance in the space of like, ten minutes is enough to make your eyes water.

Now, a little caveat here, I don't usually (read as: ever) go for war stuff.  I call the History Channel the Hitler Channel, because all they ever seem to show is stuff on the military history of World War II.  I'm not pro-war, and am barely neutral on military stuff in general.  It's not that I don't value the discipline that the military (whatever branch, I ain't discriminating here) can teach, or understand the need that governments (and the people they govern) feel for protection against a real or imagined outside force.  I can totally dig that.  I'm anti-war for two big reasons - firstly, the attack of civilian targets brings it into the arena of killing people who mostly do not have a shit-show of killing you back, and that offends my sense of fair-play (old fashioned, ain't I?  I know modern warfare, hell, warfare in general, doesn't work like that, but it's my blog, and this is just my opinion after all), and secondly the unholy expense of it.  Honestly people, governments (and I'm sticking all governments in the same pot here, totalitarian to the most enlightened forms of democracy) schlep a lot of dough into not just supporting military units 'on the ground' in actual terms of food, medical and bullets, but also the research and development money that goes into new weaponry and defense systems.  Hello?  Anyone notice the unemployment rate? No? What about the children living in poverty in your country?  Not that either, huh?  You were too busy pouring money and men into a war that you thought you'd better start before the other guy did.  I see.

Right, I'm off my high horse now.  Generation Kill hasn't changed my opinion of Operation Iraqi Freedom, or of war in general, but it has given me a teensy insight into the troops actually having to deal on a daily basis with trying to implement the frankly, mad schemes of the officers who planned that operation.  It made me laugh, which I wasn't expecting to do, and it made me cry only a little (sad tears, not angry ones - another unexpected.  Well, some angry ones).  Evan Wright makes you see the men of First Recon (or at least, the part that he rode with during the first months of conflict) as actual people, not just a unit carrying out an objective, and for all that he seems to come to believe that their efforts will fail, he genuinely seems to admire the men that he travels with.  He makes an interesting point which I'd like to share verbatim from the afterword because it's depressing as hell:

 "It's the American public for whom the Iraq War is often no more real than a video game.  Five years into this war, I am not always confident most Americans fully appreciate the caliber of the people fighting for them, the sacrifices they have made, and the sacrifices they continue to make.  After the Vietnam War ended, the onus of shame largely fell on the veterans.  This time around, if shame is to be had when the Iraq conflict ends - and all indications are that there will be plenty of it - the veterans are the last people in America to deserve it.  When it comes to apportioning shame my vote goes to the American people who sent them to war in a surge of emotion but quickly lost the will to either win it or end it." Generation Kill page 462

Now that I've cheered everybody up with that sentiment (which I happen to agree with), I think I'll get back to baking.  At least if I'm going to feel sick, I like it to be from a sugar overdose.  But in saying that, Generation Kill is a really excellent book, it's told in a very lively style without a hint of pretension or moralising (in either direction, which is awesomely refreshing).  But it's sad to think that Stephen King doesn't hold the lien on terror or horror - we create a good deal of the awful things in this world ourselves, and we make them for real.

Time to Say Goodbye

Oh, muffins... where have you been all my life?  I'm on a real muffin kick at the moment, if I'd known how flamin' simple they are, I'd have started makin' the darn things sooner.  Well, maybe.  We all know that I'm a woman who just loves to make life hard for herself.  But still.  The sentiment is there.

So the puppies that I've just made are cream cheese, smoked salmon and chive mini-muffins.  How hoity-toity can you get?  Yes, they are pretty ritzy, but honestly, someone who had mislaid some of their mental picnic could make these without much bother.  There are only two pitfalls with these muffins - they are a tad on the expensive side to make (though if you get the smoked salmon pieces, you know, the ripped up shready stuff, it's not too bad), and they are almost irresistable; but resist!  I implore you!  Take it from one who knows, all you will end up with is a burnt roof-of-the-mouth and a broken heart.  Well, maybe not that last one.

Um, in other news, Mark Lanegan is in town tonight, which I totally wish that I could go to, but being the Nana that I am, one thing per night is about my limit.  The muffins are coming with me to a farewell shindig for a work buddy of mine tonight.  In order to not cause too much kerfuffle for people, its one of those 'clear out your booze cabinet' type affairs - everyone brings the mysterious bottles that lurk in the back of the cabinet with a centimeter or so of liquid at the bottom and we make them into glorious cocktails.  At least, that is the idea.  Getting back to the original topic, if you don't know who Mark Lanegan is, you need to go to the Library (or the indie record store, or itunes if you must) and get the Screaming Trees album Dust.  It is an amazing album, and I'm sure that you'll love it.  What am I saying, I don't know if you'll love it, but it's always good to listen to some new shit once in a while.

Good Grief.

Oh no, the interwebs is out to get me!

Not only did my email and my Facebook get hacked into by some worthless fiend, but now I've discovered The Book Depository, which is surely the work of the Devil.  And since I firmly believe in the principle of 'share the wealth', I hereby notify you gentle reader of this awesome sites existence.  And if you knew already, then why the Hell didn't you share?  Huh?  HUH?

Phew, anyway... as I mentioned, some scum-suckin', mouth-breathin', butt-faced dog poo hacked into my practically antique Gmail account last week.  I have to say though, that I do have the ruliest friends who, as soon as they got my (very oddly grammered, if that is such a word) email, claiming that I was in London, stranded by the ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland texted me to say, dude, we know you're not in London.  Incidentally, did anyone else noticed that the news has given up trying to pronounce the name of that volcano?  I mean, I can understand why, it's quite the mouthful, but honestly news-readers, suck it up!  Even if it is just for a little comedic value!  But then, I had another text message from my buddy in Auckland saying that she was chattin' right that instant with the diddle on Facebook!  *sigh*  Yup... so needless to say, Facebook is off the menu.  My husband seems to be correct in his railings against the behemoth Facebook... not that I'll ever admit it to him!  (Actually, he just read that, so it's like I've admitted it... failure again!)

Okay, so onto happier things... I've just bought 'Bigfoot Cinderrrella', 'Curious George visits the Library' (of course!  What other Curious George book am I going to buy!?) and Robert Crumb's 'Kafka', which looks just delicious.  I can't wait until they arrive - but apparently they take about two weeks to get here from England, so I'm going to have to.  It's not something I'm very good at, the waiting, but I'll try to forget that I ordered them (now, that I can do), and then it will be a nice surprise.  I urge you all to pop along to the Book Depository , not only are they fairly ridiculously priced books, but they also ship free to New Zealand.  The price is right!

Happiness is a Hard Helmet

(heh)

That double entendre is actually in aid of something, you know.  I bought my roller derby pads and helmet today, so when my skates arrive from Sin City Skates, I'll be able to start practicing fully... so frickin' excited!  However, I'm going to the rink tomorrow for my first skate in about fifteen years... I was pretty crap at it then and I'm sure that I'll be pretty crap at it now.  But the good thing is that I'm already financially committed to the derby cause, so I'm more likely to give it a proper go now that I've literally invested in it.

That is all.  I'm just real excited about the whole thing... oh yeah, and I thought of a good derby name too, but since I seem to change my mind every fifteen minutes or so about that, I'll have to keep you posted on what I actually end up with.

By the way, I'm a few pages in to an amazing book (which is good, because I finished Eclipse last night... the less said the better, I've already ranted via email to poor Ngaio.  Needless to say, there was a lot of swearing and a threat to do a very nasty thing with Eclipse, if it wasn't a library book, of course).  The book is Hey, Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! The Romantic Movement, Rock & Roll, and the End of Civilisation as we know it .  So you can understand why I picked it up.  It's by an Australian dude called Craig Schuftan, who works for triple j on a show called 'The Culture Club', and so far, he's presenting some pretty amazing and interesting ideas.  But I'll have to get back to you on that one too, because I'm only on page eleven and without being too mean about it, it could all go to custard on page twelve.

Werewolf vs. Vampire. Who wins? No-one.

As some of you lucky enough to be within ranting range will no doubt be aware, I've been reading the Twilight series.  Yes, I am over the age of fourteen, but I am a girl, so at least I meet one of the requirements for reading them.  I also like vampires (although, obviously, I don't know any personally).  Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite... all good in my book.  However, I tend to like bad ass (or even better, uggo) vampires over pretty boy vampires, so Edward and his 'unutterably gorgeous' kin were fighting a losing battle right from the start.  Give me 'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht' over 'Interview with a Vampire' any day...

By the way, I know that I'm not really qualified to write this post just yet, since I'm only half way through 'Eclipse' (the second to last one, for those of you lucky enough to be living under a rock for the past three years).  I just feel compelled to post about something, and this was all I could think of.  Plus, I know it's kind of a contentious thing... people either LOVE Twilight, or hate its guts.  At the moment, I have to confess to being a bit torn.    As I'm getting through the story, I have this major sense of impatience with Edward and his 'family' - though mostly Edward.  I mean, you love her, bite her... and damn the consequences, right?  I know he's all worried about Bella's soul and what-not, but the worry seems... unfounded.  Plus, I have to admit to being fully 'Team Jacob', but that might be because I'm a cold frog and the idea of having a nice warm werewolf to snuggle up to is pretty appealing. 

Shake that (Library)Thing!

So, I've become a convert of LibraryThing.  This innocuous little Web 2.0 gadget is (for book-geeks such as myself) almost as bad as Facebook with the way it sucks up your time.  Let me give you a play-by-play.

First, you sign in.  Then you look at the pitiful amount of books that you have to your name, and the sheer gajillions that others have.  Your competitive instinct kicks in.  So you decide to add the books that you can remember off the top of your head, and since you're currently reading Christine by Stephen King (for lunchtime reading, I learnt the hard way, you don't read that shiz before you go to bed), you think to yourself, sweet, I'll add that.  Fifteen minutes goes by and you're still looking for the entry of Christine. You have searched for Christine, which brings up all the authors who have the first name Christine.  You search for Stephen King, and that brings up not only all of the books that Stephen King as we know and love him has written, but also the books by Stephen C. King (who writes books on management techniques) and Steven King.  Plus all the seemingly endless books that are about a King, the King James Bible, and everything else in the world except Christine.