Yesterday's Washington Post had an article about Japanese food shows.
I was really delighted to see them mention the Dotchi no Ryori Show, and even get the English translation of the title correct: "Which Dish?" Is this show available on English channels? Some of the search results when I was looking for that link seem to indicate that it is.
At my house, we call the show "Dotchi Kitchen," literally "Which Kitchen." We have a tendency to call Japanese shows by names which are neither the Japanese name, nor an English translation of the title, but instead which are more descriptive, for our purposes anyway. Thus Gokusen (or see the official site) becomes "Gangster Sensei," Nintama Rantaro becomes "Ninja School," and Aibo becomes "'That dumb cop show—you know, where the murderer is always a woman, what is up with that?' 'Well, there was that one time when the chef stabbed the restaurant critic to death with a frozen squid.' 'Yeah, but he was probably gay.'"
Anyway, Dotchi Kitchen. Their food wranglers (I don't mean the chefs, I mean the people who handle the filming) are the best in the business. This show isn't just food porn, it goes to a whole other level. It's food erotica. It's only a shade removed from full on smell and taste-o-vision.
Sometimes we can't watch it.
Dotchi Kitchen is in the form of a game show. At the end, after being subjected to the barrage of food erotica and seeing the dishes prepared right under their noses, a panel of celebrity guests votes on which of the two competing dishes is the best. Those who vote for the winning dish get to eat. Those who don't have to stand around behind them and watch. They all talk trash at each other. "Oh, this is so good. Too bad you can't have any." "You bastard, you said you were going to vote for the carbonara!" "I changed my mind. Mmm. This is the best pork tenderloin I've ever had. Too bad you can't have any. Oh well, more for me."
Sometimes we don't watch it. Like the time it was ginger pork stir fry vs. Salisbury steak.
It sounded … painful.
The quest for the perfect double old fashioned glass continued today. Yes, more shopping. We drove down to the Prime Outlets mall in Williamsburg, where we knew we'd find a crystal store. We found other things too, like the store selling chocolate dipped slices of cheesecake on a stick. The only thing more mall-American than that might be deep fried, chocolate dipped slices of cheesecake on a stick, but they didn't have that. (We did not partake.)
If Oz gets motivated about his waffle wishes, we know where to get the perfect waffle iron. I looked at overpriced wallets and decided not to buy any of them. I'm picky and I won't have a wallet with a zipper. You'd be amazed how this limits your options.
But the crystal was the main thing. In fact, Oz insisted that we not go into any other stores until we completed the crystal-related part of the mission first.
The basic configuration for the ideal whisky glass is outlined as follows in Bluff Your Way in Whisky: "Whisky should be drunk from a cylindrical glass, preferably cut crystal with a design that reaches at least one-third of the way up (so you know how much whisky to put in) and a heavy bottom (to make that satisfying clunk when you put it down)."
I have a couple additional requirements. The pattern should have a cut at the level to which I'll be pouring my wee drams. This way I can't pour a double and pretend to myself that it's still a wee dram. The glass should also not be too large in diameter for me to hold comfortably. The glass I've been using is a tumbler from Royal Doulton, in the Dorchester pattern. This is a very nice glass and the only reason why I wanted another glass is that I was bored and felt like spending money. And, hey, they sure make that easy at the mall.
We looked in the Waterford and Mikasa outlet stores, where we saw several patterns which met my specifications. The Mikasa patterns were kind of simple, which gave them correspondingly lower prices and you could buy individual glasses instead of sets. At the Waterford store, they had some great fancy glasses from Waterford and Stuart Crystal. The Waterford glasses came in sets of four, however, so I had to pass. The Stuart Crystal glasses had the advantage of being sold in pairs. I ended up with a pair of 9 ounce rummers in the Madison pattern from Stuart Crystal, which doesn't look like much in the pictures, but is really sparkly in person.
A most excellent glass.
I am waiting for work right now. Some may be arriving any day from New Jersey and a client in California is waiting on a go-ahead from her client, who is dragging her heels on reviewing our quote for her patents. I've already mentally given myself the week off. I'll be out of sorts if that California job comes through, but I'll be able to console myself with all that money.
To amuse myself I'm procrastinating on some of the household chores which have been piling up around here. Basically, I'm doing the exact same thing I do when I have work, except for the work part. I do the little chores that take a few minutes and then pretend I've been productive.
Yesterday I made clean spots on the walls. I got these Scotch Brite Easy Erasing Pads last week and finally broke one out. To my great surprise, they work as advertised. I wiped the handprints off the walls by the stairs, did a little dance when the walls came clean, and then proceeded to attack the large smudgy paw-printed areas below the windows. My lazy cats, who have no problem jumping onto a bed which is thirty inches off the floor, feel the need to kick off the wall below the window when jumping onto a windowsill of the same height.
Now I have large clean areas below the windows, which serve to highlight how dirty the rest of the wall is.
Great.
When Oz came home last night, I was all "Woo! Look at the clean spots!" He was not terrifically enthused, so I kept talking about the clean spots. He started talking about how he went to the gym in the morning, before my not-employed ass was even awake (okay, he didn't say that exactly), worked out, steamed, and got a really good shave. He insisted that I rub his cheek.
I did and said, "Yeah, yeah, nice. But about the walls."
"You don't sound really interested in my shave."
"So now we're even, okay?"
We didn't prune the crape myrtle this weekend. It was snowy on Saturday and on Sunday it was just too damn cold. Instead of lying around the house, we drove up to Fredericksburg to browse in the antique shops and visit our favorite (my favorite, anyway) used book store.
I had this idea that I wanted a new glass for drinking whiskey out of. I have a nice crystal tumbler, but I'd like to have another with a different pattern. Well, they don't have those kind of glasses at the antique stores, we found. Decanters and cordial sets, lots of china teacups, depression glass, all that girly-foo-foo stuff, but no crystal tumblers. I guess people don't part with those. I did find one set of Czech crystal tumblers, but the pattern didn't do anything for me.
Also, I found an adorable glass candy dish shaped like a rabbit in a basket, but I didn't get it because I have no place for tchotchkes. Another discovery was some neat Chinese, Japanese, and Korean items, now that one of the places in the big antiques mall has an Asian source. They had bean cake molds, baskets, apothecary cabinets, and these iron crosses with Buddhas on. We didn't buy any of those things either.
We bought books!
We went to the bookstore first thing. We haven't been up to Fredericksburg in a few years, what with engineering school preempting fun little daytrips, and we were surprised to find that Riverby Books had taken over the whole building at 805 Caroline Street. The first floor had formerly been occupied by a gift shop which sold smelly candles. In the past, we always held our breath and ran through the gift shop up the stairs to the bookstore. This time we walked in and saw books! And smelled books!
I found a scholarly work on netsuke which Oz decided didn't have enough pictures for him. For me, I found Charles II, The Weaker Vessel, and The English Revolution 1600-1660 (to which someone had taken a hole punch, but only through the margin). For me, Oz found Artificial Intelligence (2nd edition), a textbook on the edge of which the original owner had neatly lettered his name and phone number, but which otherwise showed no evidence of having ever been opened. He also found a boxed 1968 Heritage Press edition of A Journal of the Plague Year. This book has a leaflet from the publisher about the special features of this edition, including how the cover looks like burlap to reflect the winding sheets of the plague dead (conveniently overlooking how at the height of the epidemic the dead were flung into mass graves without any such wrappings) (But a cover that looks like dirt wouldn't be very appealing).
I'd better get reading.
I offered Oz the shrimp off my pad thai. He picked them up and put them on the edge of his plate. The waitress came to our table and, since it looked like we were done, she offered to take our dishes.
"Oh, but he didn't eat those shrimp yet," I said.
"That's okay. I'm going to put them in my pocket," Oz said.
The waitress and I laughed. She asked, "What? Do you have a dog in the car or something?"
"There's a cat," Oz said. He picked up the shrimp and put them in the pocket of his rain coat. (The cat in question is actually back on our block, hanging out by the neighbor's house and waiting for handouts.)
"You.Hey!"
"Did you want something to put them in?" the waitress asked.
"He put them in his pocket!"
"He did?"
Oz sat there and grinned while I sputtered, "Shrimp? In your pocket? You put them in your pocket?"
As we left the restaurant, I told him, "I'm blogging this."
Now it's a few hours later and I am. The shrimp were delivered to Phoebus the cat upon our arrival back home. Oz is standing around saying, "So, you've blogged the shrimp in the pocket?"
"Yes. If you're going to do quirky, eccentric things, you have to expect it."
"I didn't think it was that quirky," he says.
"Well, you just have no perspective."
I was translating an article about computer vision today. In the author bios at the end I found that these guys are working at an interesting place. The Future University Hakodate! More specifically, the graduate school. Wouldn't you like to attend The Graduate School of FUN? I think they even realize themselves how this sounds in English.
It sounds kind of appealing, but the big draw for me is that it's in Hakodate, which is a neat city. It's the gateway to Hokkaido, so they have some nineteenth century, Japanese frontier meets the Industrial Revolution architecture. The geography of the city is very cool too. I like how you can see the star shaped fort in that satellite image. I only got to spend an afternoon there in my travels way back in 1988 and we had to run around with one eye on our watches to be sure we didn't miss our train. One thing I remember, in a touristy area near that fort, there was a little old man carving and painting wooden rings with pictures of the special things of Hokkaido and Hakodate (lilies of the valley, a couple buildings, a mountain). He jumped out at us, said something in unintelligible English, and shoved one of those rings on my finger. It was a present for the blonde alien girl!
Ah, Hakodate.
For our Valentine's Day, we made pie. Any day is a good day for pie, Valentine's is no exception. Oz cut a heart into the top crust as the steam vent. We took pictures, but the light in the kitchen makes the pie look way yellow and unappetizing. So imagine a nicely browned top crust cut with a heart surrounded by little rays, all oozing this pink strawberry-rhubarb syrup.
We're still waiting for it to cool. It smells so good. Do we have wills of iron or what?
This morning I got a Valentine from my backyard. I walked by the window at the top of the stairs around eight o'clock and saw the sun slanting across the fence and through the crape myrtle to light up the first reddish baby leaves on the rosebush. I went out back later and saw tight purple buds on the tips of the hydrangea branches. Spring, yes! Note to Oz: You are now forbidden to prune anything, except for the crape myrtle. Which we should prune this weekend.
It hasn't been all tea and chocolate here at the house of sniffles this past week. I also read a bunch of books, including two not very good books. Usually I don't bother to finish bad books, but this time I decided to take them as "how not to write" lessons. And one of them I didn't finish after Oz said, "Oh yeah. That guy is all build up. It takes forever to get where he's going and then you wonder why you bothered."
It should tell you something that the book I picked up afterwards as a palate cleanser was a Stephanie Plum novel, which by contrast seemed really well written.
Lesson #1: Show-don't-tell or Tell-don't-show, but for God's sake, don't Show AND Tell the same thing in the same paragraph!
This was the reason why the book I didn't finish took forever to get anywhere. Every paragraph of exposition had a couple bland sentences of Telling and then a few not bad sentences of Showing what was just Told. I wanted to send the author a pack of red pens and a strongly worded note about using them. A good bloodletting would have been murder on the word count, however, leaving the author with a novella which would have been harder to sell. This was a debut novel from someone who'd been writing short stories. Tough transition to the new form? Egregious padding? Bored reader.
Lesson learned: My red pens are my friends.
Lesson #2: Let's cut the "um" crap already!
In the other bad book, the story was told mostly through dialogue. This does not always make for a bad story, but requires that the author clearly differentiate character voices, keep the attributions clear yet not intrusive, and avoid repetition, especially repetitious speech quirks. Like, uh, you know what I mean?
One of the recent trends in the writing of dialogue is to make it more realistic by including non-verbal vocalizations: um, ah, er. The um is the one I hate the most, but the er is a close second. Ah doesn't bother me as much.
These vocalizations are annoying because they are crutches which a writer uses instead of writing words. Consider, there are two basic ums, the um of snottiness, as described in the TWoP forum guidelines, and the um of hesitation. While literature has been peopled for centuries with snotty and hesitant characters, they've only recently started to say "um" all the damn time. For the past few hundred years, the hesitant characters have been pausing, hesitating, clearing their throats, fidgeting around and looking out the window. They have occasionally emitted the odd " . " The snotty characters have been snotty with words.
Lesson learned: I already avoided um. I just hate it more now.
Other lessons:
Throwing in a couple random drag queens does not a screwball comedy make.
A scene written mostly in dialogue, in which ten characters sit around talking and interrupting each other, is incoherent. If you have one long speech, which communicates something important to the reader, don't interrupt it with ten interjections which add nothing (though they do pad out your line count nicely).
Sometimes bad books get great cover art.
Why is it that, although I drink whiskey on a regular basis, I cannot develop a whiskey voice? (Obvious answer: I don't drink enough.) But all it takes is weeklong head cold, during which I haven't even coughed all that much, and I'm purring in your ear like Lauren Hutton. Well, not your ear, obviously, but you see what I mean.
It is snowing here and we have prepared by running out for Thai food and to the grocery store. We stocked up on raisin bread, pasta, broccoli, fruit, juice, seltzer water, pie crust, frozen strawberries and rhubarb, Belgian chocolate, and kind of a lot of Ben & Jerry's. I got carried away with the ice cream, yes. I don't know what came over me.
I'm on the mend. Despite all the upper respiratory misery, I was able to deliver this week's translation job early. The incentive: not working this weekend. So far this year I've only worked one half of a weekend day. Here's to sort of keeping one of this year's resolutions.
Just a couple weeks ago I said to Oz, "Isn't it great how I haven't gotten sick since I got out of school. No more hanging around those germy computer science students has done wonders for my health."
So now I have a sinus infection.
I'm sucking down decongestants and chamomile tea. Since I have deadlines and no sick time, I'm working through the grogginess. On the bright side, when I reached my target for the day early at, oh, 12:30 or so, I got to stop working. Instead of getting ahead, I went upstairs and crawled under a blanket with a box of tissues and a Georgette Heyer novel. I also drank berry tea and nibbled on Belgian chocolate.
I'm sure you're all really sympathetic now.
Yes, I'm working on my historical novel again, so not all the words I'm writing will appear here. This is a way for me to bide my time until I start revising The Egyptian Building. This handily allows me to put off revising TEB, but we won't talk about that right now.
The historical is not getting written (or rewritten, rather) at the same breakneck pace as the contemporary novels. Damn if those details don't keep popping up. When you have to stop in mid-sentence to research wagon wheels, structure of, you just can't write as quickly.
Llike almost anything on close inspection, wagon wheels are surprisingly interesting. One of the things I needed to learn about was the structure of the iron tire in the seventeenth century. I knew that a hoop-shaped strip of iron was bound around a wooden wheel to help with durability. But when? Was it always hoop-shaped? Yes and no. Those crafty Romans had the hoop-shaped iron tires, but those vanished with the Roman empire. Through medieval and early modern times, they attached iron "shoes" around the rim of the wheel. The hoop-shaped tire didn't reappear until the eighteenth century. This I now know, thanks to the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights.
Therefore, my characters are traveling in a wagon with shoes. One of the wheels needs to be fixed.
You'd think that what with having a groundhog frequenting the back yard and all, we'd see some groundhog action around this time of year, but no. Over in Japan it's setsubun, which I mentioned last year around this time. Here we didn't throw beans at demons, or even eat beans to wish for good health. Go see what mehan did for his setsubun in Aomori.
As long as I'm being self-referential, I'll talk about the hand-slapping-forehead moment (that's my hand I'm talking about, by the way) I had last week. I was lying around watching Tensai Terebikun Max, as I often do, and remarking again on the Steam Knights vs. Jokey Mahorns dichotomy, when, duh, I got it. Finally. The Japanese word for steam is jouki (蒸気). Oh, the bilingual puns! The brain, it is to hurt!
And in gutter news, which I'm sure that everyone finds so fascinating, it seems that my gutters are not quite patched. It rained last night, so I ran outside this morning, all in my fuzzy pink bathrobe and flannel flamingo pants (oh, way to make a good impression on the neighbors), to see how the newly "fixed" gutters handled themselves. A couple of the leaks seem to be fixed, but some others do not. Particularly one right over the front door. Duh, guys! I called the roof people and theoretically they will send some people back to patch those leaks, seeing as how they haven't been paid yet or anything. It's supposed to rain more tomorrow. I'll be out on leak patrol.
The roof guys came today.
I have a standing-seam tin roof and built-in gutters. The roof periodically needs to have its coating scraped and replaced, the gutters periodically need patching. What with the whole engineering school/not working much/stretching the savings thing I've had going on for the last several years, roof maintenance has basically involved a lot of hiding. Whenever it rains I go upstairs so I won't have to listen to the water rattling through the gutters and banging on the oven vent and the flashing over the downstairs windows.
"La la la la, I can't hear you."
Oh, I wish.
The last guy who worked on the roof slathered it with asphalt primer and aluminum fiber coating. I went up there a couple years after he worked on it and, damn, but there were twigs and small animals plastered to the roof. My own La Brea in the sky.
Now I'm getting the roof done and the gutters patched. No more hiding! But the coating needs to be removed. Scrapers will not do the job. The roof guys are beating the roof with hammers. The whole house is shaking. The upstairs light fixtures are rattling. Chips of asphalt and aluminum fiber coating are pattering to the sidewalk.