onomatoblog

This was a rare treat when I was a kid; to the extent that we had ice cream at all, it was from the store. In fact, I didn’t even think of it as ice cream then, but as cake (as it’s round and eaten in wedges.) In mom’s recipe collection, it’s listed as “frozen creme fraiche cake.” I know she first made it for a joined 40th birthday party she had with a friend, which was before I was born, and it was only made at very special occasions. In fact, I think the last time I had it was when I made it myself, for the reception after my dad’s funeral in 2006. It is, nevetheless, the most delicious thing ever, even though a stupid pesky illness is preventing me from having lemony things (I suppose I could have a little but, but me and creme fraiche cake has never been about moderation.)

(note: this recipe contains raw eggs. Since as far as I know, salmonella prevention is much better in Sweden than in the US, I would use caution in my choice of eggs.)

You will need:
A springform pan
Some sort of cracker-crushing implement; I use a mortal and pestle, but anything goes
1 biggish bowl
2 mediumish bowls
a standmixer or handheld mixer
a zester
some sort of citrus juicing equipment
a freezer with flat space available
aluminum foil

Ingredients:
2 eggs (whites and yokes will be separated)
1 1/2 dl (0.63 cups) whipping cream
1 dl (0.42 cups) sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar or if you’re nowhere near a Scand store, 1/2 tsp powdered sugar and 1/2 tsp real vanilla extract
1 lemon
2dl (0.84 cups) creme fraiche
4 crackers (preferably McVities Digestive, but graham crackers work fine too)

Here’s how we do it:
Separate eggs and yokes; the yokes go in the big bowl, the whites go in a (very clean!) medium.
Whip the whites in the first medium bowl until they are very hard, you should be able to turn the bowl upside down without them moving. Then whip the cream in the third bowl.

Zest and juice the lemon. On low, or with a spoon, mix the yokes with sugar, vanilla, the zest and juice, and creme fraiche. Fold the eggwhites and cream into the yoke and sugar mix. Mix well, but gently.

Crush all four crackers, and spread half of the crumbs evenly  in the bottom of the pan. Pour the batter over, then sprinkle the remaining crumbs on top. Cover with foil and freeze for at least four hours, perhaps letting it that for a few minutes prior to serving (I prefer it frozen solid, but there you go.)

OM NOM NOM

Every now and then, obviously more often around the time of a release of a new part of the Harry Potter franchise, articles will pop up comparing Rowling’s series to other, earlier works. Sometimes this is in relation to other authors trying to sue her for some of her significant fortune, sometimes it’s an effort to get people (kids?) to keep reading,  and sometimes, well, it fills space, doesn’t it? And it’s about Harry Potter, a topic that doesn’t quite seem to go stale (I mean, look, I am blogging about it.) Io9 featured a list a few weeks ago, neatly dismissing most claims as simply products of the same mythological and literary context, but in my opinion, one important item , which seems obvious to me, is always missing: Mio, My Son.

Mio, My Son (Mio min Mio) was released in Sweden in 1954 (in English a few years later ) and was written by Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002), in the US probably most known for her book about Pippi Longstockings. In Sweden she is probably the most well-beloved children’s author there is, and among her other famous works are the stories about the children of Noisy Village, Emil, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, and The Brothers Lionheart.  Mio, My Son a story about a young boy without a family who finds that he has a special heritage and learns to overcome evil –

– but let’s face it, that’s more than 90% of kids’ fantasy lit. The thing about Mio is the many exact parallels it shares with especially the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Mio in the book is first known as Bo (Bosse) Vilhelm Olsson, the adopted son of a couple of Stockholm in the fifties. Now, he refers to his adopted parents as “aunt” and “uncle”, and they make it perfectly clear that they’re not fond of him at all – they would have preferred a clean and well-behaved girl, not a playful boy who tracks in dirt and makes noise. Bo is envious of his friend who have a kind family. His own mother died giving birth to him, and his father is unknown (the aunt is dismissive of the father, saying he was probably “some tramp”.)  As it turns out, the father is in fact alive, the king of Faraway Land, and in the first chapters of the book he finally finds his son, his Mio, with the help of a greengrocer and a somewhat clumsy genie. Mio gets to meet his father, he gets to live in a castle, own a horse and build model airplanes with his dad after dinner, like he always longed to.

… and then things get shifty. It turns out the evil Sir Kato has been kidnapping children, that there is a prophecy that only Mio can defeat him, and Mio and his friend – who knows more about Faraway Land than Mio does and frequently have to explain how things work to him. Using among other items an invisibility cloak, Mio sets about his task… I am not going to give you more details, because the book is absolutely amazing and you should all read it if you haven’t already. I will go as far as saying that it’s far superior to any HP, but also a very different sort of book, But let’s go over the similarities and see if they’re strong (sort of unique) or weak (very common)

- Orphaned boy (weak)
- Lives with “aunt” and “uncle” who mistreats him. (strong)
- Finds out his true heritage and parentage (weak)
- Best friend who knows the world and history and navigates it for him (strong)
- A friend’s sibling is in danger (strong)
- Evil overlord actually has fake-noble title (weak)
- The uttering of Evil overlord’s very name inspires fear and danger as well has having actual conseqences (medium)
- Prophecy of Doom turns out to be about our protagonist (weak)
- Chief tool is invisibility cloak (strong)
- Evil overlord has significant feature that separates him from true humanity, both physically and emotionally (medium?)

Now, 5 1/2 isn’t a ton, but that’s a lot more than some of the books I’ve seen listed share with HP. And I am not claiming Rowling ripped off anything, but it’s fairly obvious that she’s been inspired by it. So there.

(as an interesting footnote, a movie was made in the eighties in which a very young, very adorable Christian Bale played Mio’s friend Jum-Jum and Christopher Lee played Sir Kato.)

Please note: this is a translation repost of an entry from my Swedish blog. If the feel of the text seems somewhat off, it’s because I didn’t originally write it in English. Oh, and it’s from back in August, when the ad was just released.)

I wrote about racism against the roma a few weeks ago. About deportations, about molotov cocktails used against three-year-olds, about prejudice accepted by society. Today there’s more material in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, but I don’t have the energy to read it, don’t have the strength to cry while at work.

But I hadn’t thought of ONE thing the roma are good enough for in Western society: exotification, preferably with hypersexual characteristics. “Gyspy” comes to mean passionate, alien, wild, beautiful… basically your standard Wednesday afternoon orientalism. Sweeping skirts, dark hair and firelight are used as signifiers of Otherness and Availability (which in itself a part of the same phenomenon that narrates African-American women in a sexualized manner, an extension of their previous position as sexual pray within the legalizing context of slavery.) You get it. You’d think we’ve got further than that in 2010, but culture fucks you right back in your place. The makeup brand Illamasqua released their fall collection The Art of Darkness in September, and one of the looks is called “Queen of the Gypsies.”

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WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. This is what the official image looks like, if you don’t have the energy or inclination, I can inform you that is  a somewhat dark-skinned woman with long black hair and silver highlights. She is wearing a red bikiniesque top and a semitransparent red and blue skirt. She’s also wearing golden earrings, many golden necklaces and at least one anklet. Her upper arm is sporting either a tattoo or a tight bracelet. The only light in the picture seems to come from a candelabra behind her. The look is marketed with the following text: “No one can resist the Queen of the Gypsyies. This alluring temptress, famed for her seductive veiled dancing, knows how to use her art to get what she wants…”

I can’t, a the moment of writing, think of any way I could be more disgusted by this. Exotification is gross enough on its own, any woman of color could tell you that, but imagine  the above text being about a nationality, say, Japanese women. It wouldn’t be any better, but there had been a number of organizations, Japanese and non-Japanese, who has put their foot down, but some pressure on Illamasqua, made sure this was talked about. Right now, there’s just silence. The particular exposed situation of the roma population makes this campaign a little bit more cowardly, a little stupider, a little bit more disgusting.

(on a sidenote, the werewolf-styled ad also trivializes rape. Nice one, Illamasqua. I’m on a lifetime boycot, btw.)

1. People who stop at red lights right over the zebra crossing
2. Sinks that collect water and make the front of my shirt all wet
3. People who walk slowly
4. Antivaxxers
5. Baristas who don’t mix properly
6. Small dogs
7. Conspiracy theorists who try to sound sane (the craaazy ones I just feel sorry for)
8. Creationists
9. People who use checks
10. Websites that log me out all the time without warning.
11. People who look for plotholes in movies on purpose just to have something to whine about
12. Gossip magazines/websites
13. Store/restaurant clerks who are uppity about one’s selection/questions
14. Truck drivers
15. People who can’t differentiate between other people’s sexual preferences and their personal easthetic
16. Ie6
17. Ie7
18. Flash
19. People who use the word “scroll” to signify everything that moves on a website.
20. Graphic designers who design for web without understanding what it entails.
21. That in 2010, we still haven’t invented a contact lens that won’t make my eyes dry when I work at a computer.
22. Turn right on red
23. American guys’ jeans. I mean, really?
24. American home decoration aesthetics
25. American food culture
26. Pop-polsci books with colon:ed titles
27. Trucker hats
28. Pixie haircuts
29. Leather couches.
30. Unmoderated online forums
32. The crashiness of photoshop cs5
33. The nonexistent line system at Portage Bay Cafe in Ballard
34. People who use embarrassing euphemisms for genitalia
35. The Duck Tour tourists
36. People who think that having a penis excuses them from basic personal hygiene
37. Spiritual quotes
38. Real motivational posters (the fake kind is hilarious.)
39: New Age, and the kind of store I need to enter if I want to buy incense.
40. Any kind of art with any kind of depiction of a sunset.
41. Bedskirts.
42. People who complain about people who complain about the weather.
43, People who helpfully try to solve other people’s sexual/relationship problems by suggesting they change preferences.
44. People who refer to their spouse as their second (or third, for fourth…) child. DIVORCE OR MURDER THEM THEN DUMBASS.
45. Proponents of CBT
46. LCHF
47. People with mild cases of ev-psych. The real nutjobs have my everlasting hatred.
48. Peeling oranges.
49. Papyrus
50. Baby clothes in *ages* instead of centilong. Because all 3-m-o are the same size, yo.

Now, to begin with, we should note that this entry contains plot spoilers for Inception. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read beyond this point.

So. Ariadne.

The first time I saw Inception (and yes, there have been several), I was a little disappointed. It occurred to me that apart from Cobb, any character of the team could have just as easily been female. And they weren’t. With the exception of Ariadne, it’s a boys’ club, and it wasn’t until I read Sister Magpie’s entry (link pending on approval from her) on fandom’s reaction to the movie and to Ariadne that I really begun to love her as a character. See, as magpie writes, Ariadne and Arthur may well have been gender-switched*, and had they been, their respective relationships to Cobb has been much more stereotypical.

Perhaps more important, Nolan could just as easily have made it an all-boys-club; it wouldn’t have been unusual for a summer action movie, and Nolan’s women tend to be more like Mal – ethereal, glamorous and dead – anyway. Ariadne didn’t have to be a woman, but she is, and I am happy she is, in her own resourceful, opinionated, intelligent, feeling way.

New Yorker columnist Emma Rosenblum pities Ellen Page for having to wear the “rags” that are Ariadne’s outfits, and I go “uhh, what, now?” I don’t know what Ms Rosenblum normally wears when running around in action dreams, but I was personally very relieved to see a female character in sensible clothing. Men’s glam clothes are pretty practical; they’re usually just more fitted, expensive versions of daily wear. But women’s dressed-up, the stuff Marion Cotillard’s Mal wears, is highly unpractical. Your fall in heels, you can’t run in dresses. I love that Ariadne wears pants she can run in, t-shirts and cardigans, and that she doesn’t need to flash her curves in every single scene. Rosenblum calls it asexual (although desexualized might be a better term), I call it realistic. It’s relieving to have a female lead who does shit instead of smooches her hero boyfriend, and who wears clothes she can accomplish things in. Speaking of desexualized, by the way, didn’t Arthur steal a kiss? And didn’t Ariadne seem to like it, in a darling, smug sort of way?

The real problem with Ariadne is that she is a kind of  audience surrogate; through her ignorance, we are given answers about what is going on. A lot of the time, her dialogue is pure exposition. Now, I admit to loving exposition like I love ice cream, but with a lesser actress, it would undoubtedly have become boring, or at least tiringly transparent after a while. Not with Page. She does a great job of making her lines sound authentic. I believe her, all the way through.

And look at her. Not only is Ariadne a star student at what appears to be a prestigious Paris school, she supposedly a better Architect and maze-maker than Cobb was, she immediately calls him on his shit in a way Arthur never has. She has skills and a fetching personality, and Arthur seems to like her from the start. She is the only person in the team to question the morality of inception, and when Cobb gives up, she’s the one who takes command and makes sure they all get out alive. It pretty much doesn’t get more kick-ass than that.

Footenote: Since our favourite coffee hangout spot, Mr Spot’s Chai House, closed, we’ve been trying to find another place in Ballard. I’ll be displaying our search here.

Now, we already kind of knew that this couldn’t be The Place – it’s too far away. Lucas wanted to try it anyway, though, as he’d heard good things about it, and he wanted to buy some beans. So off we went (by car) and lo, it was delicious (Lucas wanted an americano, so I actually bought my own coffee to take a sip off. It was great. It looked great, too. I wanted to finish my cup, but my body won’t allow that.)

Pros:
-Really good coffee, really good barista
- Makes white moccha
- Cozy (on the inside)
- Serves both pastries and foodier stuff, but…

Cons:
… none of the pastries seemed tasty, no cookies
- Too far away
- Sound sound volume was so low we felt we had to whisper and I went outside to take a phonecall.

Verdict:
If this had been in Ballard, it would be a clear winner, hands down. Now it will be more of an occasional place, if we’re in Fremont, or feel like a Really Long Walk, or just like driving over for good coffee.

Footenote: Since our favourite coffee hangout spot, Mr Spot’s Chai House, closed, we’ve been trying to find another place in Ballard. I’ll be displaying our search here.

Nervous Nellie’s sort of has location on its lists of cons; it’s closer to our house than the Chai House was, but further from downtown Ballard, so errands can’t be combined with coffee if we were to pick this place. Which we aren’t; according to Lucas, the coffee was quite good (I am currently not all allowed caffeine for medical reasons), but my hot chocolate was mediocre.

Pros:
- Close to our house
- Good coffee
- Plenty of chairs, both soft and hard
- Ostmacka! (Swedish cheese toast).
- Cool Sweden map that I could use to illustrate out vacation to Lucas.

Cons:
- Too far from downtown Ballard
- Cash or check only (what the HELL? The actual HELL?)
- No pastries
- I make better hot chocolate myself
- Lacks in cozy
- While there might have been “for here” cups, we weren’t asked about them even if we got toast for eating in.
-  Supposedly really bad service at times (I have no personal experience there, I found it firmly in the range of average.)
- I’m pretty sure white moccha wasn’t one of their options.

Verdict: Nope, this isn’t the place. Not bad, but not the place where we’d want to hang out half our weekends.

Note: this text is a little long for me, and very very rambly. It has been crossposted from my private private blog, and I am less strict with my writing there. Apologies.

Star Trek. In some ways, it becomes necessary for me to see it from three points of view: as a (sci-fi) movie among others, as Star Trek, and from a feminist point of view.

As a movie? It rocked. I am so weak for space, for things blowing up, for goodlooking fights and grunge-and-smoothness mixed up, love it. That being said, it was a bit… I am not sure choppy is the right word, but around the beginning and the end, it felt like they were trying to squeeze in more things than there was room for, and the narration suffered for it. Explain red matter? (of course not, mister Abrams) Show, not tell, Spock Prime’ story? Perhaps narrate Kirk’s personal background a little better than that inane wee!Kirk’s car scene? Ten more minutes could have given a lot.) Still a lovely, beautiful, otherwise well paced and terribly captivating story about a bunch of very interesting individuals. I could certainly be seen non-Trekkies who are open to scifi (do they exist?) like it, although the space element the time travels element obviously would scare off the rest. I would love the make my mother watch this on DVD, but then I would be annoying as hell to hear her commentary.

And as Trek? I honestly only have one complaint: explanation. I know people have had opinions about the “feel”; i.e. smoothness, effects/location, the changed transporter look… essentially everything that didn’t look just like TOS and the movies, and I honestly can’t care. It worked. Granted, I haven’t watched TOS in a few years, but it seemed obvious from the start that Abrams was going to try to catch a non-trekkie audience, and I think he managed to make it general enough without playing too fast and loose with the source material. It looked good. It felt good. It felt mostly Trek, with one exception: explain to me what is going on! Give me made up technobabble to explain things that couldn’t possibly work! My coworker Joe had opinions about both the Red Matter and the ejecting-the-antimatter scenario, arguing that an explosions couldn’t provide anything else than thrust, and thus couldn’t possibly outwarp warp. I argue that an uncontrolled antimatter explosion could very well warp space time more effectively than an engine, but that’s not the point. The point is: tell me how. Trek is the goddamned poster child for Science Fiction as the Idea that the World Can Be Understood; tell me how it works, even though the laws of proper physics don’t apply. It just need to follow its own laws. This, mister Abrams, is no time to be mystical, much as I know you love it. Trek is a lot of things, but mysticism was never a part of it.

Oh, also? the water scene? Loved it but it wasn’t Trek. Skip Scotty’s sidekick, save time for narration.

As for the casting… I was unspoiled, but because I mind spoilers (I don’t, I relish in them), but because I hadn’t realized how soon the movie was coming. I knew exactly this: some dude from Heroes (that I had never, at that point, watched) was playing Spock, and this made a lot of people upset, and Simon Pegg was playing Scotty, which made Lucas (my SO) really happy and excited. I was honestly half-thrown out of my seat when I realized Karl Urban was Bones (obviously, as long as there are geeks of any kind, he’ll never have to worry about getting laid Ever Again), but the summary can pretty much be I loved [x] as [y]. Seriously. Zachary Quinto was spot on as a almost-but-not-quite-solidified-Spock, and I actually didn’t want to strangle Chris Pine’s Kirk (unlike Shatner’s) (mainly because other people did it for me, perhaps? Can we rename this movie “James T. Kirk hangs off ledges and gets strangled a lot“?) or perhaps because he was more fucked up, got sat on more. I liked it.
But the feeling was there. The optimism, the thrill, the grandness and good fun combined. And the chemistries, even when not yet fully evolved to series levels; I can see how this universe came to be the one to result in slash (I am not ignoring Spock/Uhura, I am just assuming it will peter out slowly. So there.) “subverting our cultural icons with complete disregard for decency and the law” indeed. Love it. Maybe I’ll go download Amok Time now.

But. How about the feminist perspective?
Okay, let’s just say that the problems there can come from two directions: from the original, and from the new writers. Some things that irked feminist reviewers are the very reasons I don’t watch TOS; the uniforms, the lack of female officers. I honestly think the writers did what they could there; switching out more would have fucked with the fans too much. Uhura was given a personalty and a reason to be on the bridge other than that of a glorified secretary. They could have done a genderswitch a la BSG, but that wouldn’t have gone over well, plus messed with the time-travel idea. Still, I would have loved to see Uhura actually throw a couple of good punches in the bar brawl; I don’t particularly care who she’d hit.
But… the underwear scenes? The two cases of refrigeration? (from “the woman in the refrigerator”; killing off a female character for the sole reason of eliciting a reaction from a male character; in this case Amanda Grayson and Nero’s unnamed pregnant dead wife.) The fact that Winona Ryder six years older than Quinto and plays his mother? Rotten, you guys. Why not bother with giving Amanda a personality, or bother having her say something insightful about the value of emotions other than “yadayada I’m so proud of you always yadayada”? Why not bother showing Kirk’s mother doing something else in life in giving birth to him? Supposedly she’s an officer in this universe, why not give her a title and a throwaway reference from Pike? If Romulans had female military, why not female miners? I know it’s based in a rotten sort of time period, but the revamp people made it worse in some respects, and that bothers me.

That’s all I can think of right now.

I had such an amazing breakfast Sunday that I can’t not mention it; nevermind that it was at 2 p.m. We’ve been meaning to try La Boulangerie for a while now, as it’s on our way to the freeway and we pass it regularly.

And. Oh. Man. The owner must be baking 24/7, because the (tiny, tiny) cafe is stocked full of delicious French pastries and breads. I had a raspberry croissant, and Lucas had a pastry of some kind, and were both so delighted we thought we’d just about melt. The coffee drinks were delicious, too; my moccha (short, automatically double-shot) was served in a rustic-looking cup and tasted like heaven – not like chocolate, not like coffee, but like something heavenly in between. We would have brought some of the bread with us home too, but we were short on cash (credit cards aren’t accepted) and it will have to wait. Maybe next time, and then we’ll be there earlier and perhaps just order the rustic rolls and some jam. And yesterday’s bread is half off.

Cons? No hot chocolate, and tacky-looking fridge. But the former can probably be accomplished by special order, since both chocolate syrup and milk is available.

La Boulangerie, 2200 N 45th St Seattle, WA 98103 (I-5 exit 169). Bread, pastries, coffee, juice, chocolate.

I don’t know if this chemistry.com thing is any better, but this commercial is awesome