Smokey the Magnificent

Occasionally when the dreary futility of life gets me down and I find myself pondering how wizened my knees will look at eighty, I go to TipNut and laugh at the tips.

To soften butter, for instance, it is recommended to take a butter curler or grater to it in order to increase its surface area and susceptibility to atmospheric variation. To which I say: Dude. Fling it in the microwave if you were dim enough not to get it out ahead of time (don’t feel bad, I never remember).

And to soften hard brown sugar, all a harried housewife has to do is this:

Buy a clay disc or if you have a pottery piece on hand (from a broken clay pot, etc.), set it in water for about 30 minutes. Dry the piece so it isn’t dripping wet. Put the clay piece in a container with the sugar and seal. Check after a few days. Keep the piece in with your sugar for months if you’d like–will keep it soft.

Am I just ridiculously lucky, or is hard brown sugar less of a global pandemic than TipNut’s 15 tips on the matter would suggest? Can anyone raise her hand if she’s ever actually found rock-hard brown sugar to be an issue? And keep it up if she’d rather go through the above process than simply stab the stuff with a fork? I didn’t think so.

And then there’s the recipe for “Real Whipped Cream”. “Recipe?” thunk Smokey upon reading this, being the kind of domestic cherub who whips up marinades with a slosh of this and that, all but twirling the pepper grinder. (Helpdesk Man was once impressed by this to the point of imitation, and gave Smokey the Magnificent’s husband-made morning sickness scrambled eggs a dash of red wine vinegar just to be arty. Friends, do not do this thing.) It turns out “Real Whipped Cream” has gelatine in it. Yummers. Better, however, than the imitation variety, made with sugar, egg whites and “2 large ripe bananas, sliced”. The mind reels.

TipNut also provides its readers with various recipes for homemade veggie washing solution. As opposed to buying it, presumably. That way lies madness.

I feel better already.

What do we think of baths, then? The pinnacle of earthly bliss, or not worth the damp?

Gentle Readers, I have hit a snag. I’m supposed to be writing an article about good wholesome films for girls - you know, the kind you could watch at a 10-12-year-old’s sleepover and not have parents ringing up later wanting to know why little Maisie is gibbering in the closet or where Susan learned That Word. Nudity-free, decapitation-free, the cinematic equivalent of organic grass-fed pastured beef.

Trouble is, I can’t think of any.

So far I’ve got Singin’ in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables - the sorts of films it takes a particular type of modern 12-year-old to stomach, and even then I’m a bit dubious about the cake scene in Singin’ in the Rain. So I thought of adding some more recent, snazzy fare. But nope. Ever After? Has a bad word. The Disney/Pixar films? Most 12-year-old girls would probably think they were too babyish (not being old enough to know better), and besides, they do tend to have a fair amount of violence and even suggestiveness in them. Plus, a lot of parents are anti-Disney. Then there’s The Princess Bride, but nope, bad word again; or Labyrinth, but nope, David Bowie’s trousers. In despair I went back to the oldies, but even the cheesiest musicals I could think of have distinctly dubious elements. I briefly considered The King and I, Oklahoma! and The Wizard of Oz (no good, magic and witches, somebody would be bound to object) before giving up and pounding out an article on media portrayals of fat people, about which I am currently disputing Suite101’s editor on whether it constitutes an opinion piece.

So. Thoughts? I am looking in the 10-12ish category, so no Beatrix Potter, however immaculate. Something fun, girly or less girly as you please, but no guns, in which all the characters are clad neck to knee and say “Oh bother” when disaster strikes. Anyone?

Oh, smeg. NaNoWriMo is kicking my cotton-clad hindparts. 2000 words a day isn’t too bad if one keeps up, but flake a few days on account of relentless partying and tiens! how it creeps up! I need to write 5000 words by tonight, and it’s nearly 4PM.

On the bright side, by relentlessly churning out articles I’ve learned a lot. Adipositivity, for one thing, is very interesting; so is uncanny valley, Disneyland’s accommodation for autistic and gluten-free patrons (quite impressive, incidentally) and the health risks of pasteurised milk. And I’ll stand a bar of choccie for whoever can link those topics via Wikipedia articles in 50 steps or less.

My dear mama remains at large in England. Apart from a brief phone call shortly after her arrival I have not heard a peep, which leads me to conclude she misses me tremendously and is afraid to hear my sweet dulcet tones, lest they open the floodgates and cause her to come over all peculiar in the Bird and Baby. But today I got a pleasing card in the mail, indicating that she is still a) alive, b) kicking and c) having the jolliest of larks. Of course, that was a week ago now. She could be at the bottom of the Seine as I type. But we will dwell on cheerier matters. For instance: what is the funniest book you’ve ever read?

I’m torn on this myself. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would probably be the obvious pick, or 1066 And All That. But then I found Professor Branestawn high-larious as a youngster, and the Jennings books likewise - and while I don’t find them as funny now, I’m not sure HG2G and 1066 made my older self laugh as heartily as my younger self did with the aforementioned. But that could, of course, be due to my gradual shrivelling into a Scrooge-like, cynical shell of a woman.

On a related note, I am not a fan of Terry Pratchett. His parodies are laboured and overly in-jokey, making it very difficult to dive into a series without having already read several previous books (which is obviously unacceptable on the grounds of creating a universe-ripping time and causality paradox). I’ve read a half-dozen or so of his novels and tried gamely to find them funny, but… nope. Nothing. It’s like waiting for a sneeze that doesn’t come. PG Wodehouse on the other hand is corking, but doesn’t come into the running because I find his books witty rather than funny. What is the difference, I wonder? Some kind of viscerality to the humour, a response reached by the head rather than the gut? A “Heh!’ rather than a “Haw!”? A certain distancing from the humour, appreciating it rather than letting it sock you unawares? Three years, $12000 and a BA and we never covered this. Tsk.

You know how people do things like reading the Thousand Books You Must Read Or Out Yourself as a Prole list, or wearing the same pair of Spanx for a year to protest the girdle industry, or vowing to eat no more dairy than can be produced by keeping a cow on their patio? And then they blog about it, and end up on Oprah, and write a book based on the blog called My Year Pretending to have Astigmatism: A Social Study, and become enormously wealthy? Yup. Well, I don’t think I could be oosed actually doing that, as it would require a modicum of effort (and look at me, I’m about 8000 words behind on NaNoWriMo). But if I did, here are some things I might do (but again, and this is important to remember, probably won’t):

1. Read through the entire adult fiction section of the library, A to Z, in alphabetical order, and make pungent comments on my blog about the new authors I had thusly discovered, as well as making arty charts showing the percentages of various plots, genres, stereotypes etc within said books.
2. Take a photo of my squish every day for a year and watch it expand and contract interestingly according to my diet and gluten intake and such. (Could be depressing, though.)
3. Attempt a different hairstyle every day for a year, photograph the results and make tutorials of the process (not a bad idea for a niche blog, actually. My photography’s rubbish, though…).
4. Watch films in chronological order from the very earliest motion pictures to the present day, choosing five of the top-box-office movies worldwide per year (at least, from when they started having a box office). Make sage comments about how films are not what they were.
5. Make a reproduction Gucci handbag, Christian Dior dress or similar object using only items gleaned from the neighbor’s trash and a bucket of mod podge. Do this once a week, prompting Thoughts about Waste and the like.
6. Try to stretch a single chicken into a year’s worth of meals. (I suppose the key would be to start with a live one and eat the eggs.)
7. Live solely off free food samples from the supermarket.
8. Read the religious texts of every major or semi-major religion… the ones that have texts, anyway - and draw deep theological conclusions from therein.
9. Take videos of self performing random acts of Broadway song in public places. Tenuously link this to anti-terrorism or the Universal Power of Song to break down barriers, find true love, get self arrested &c.
10. Attempt to teach the snortlepig one new animal a day, until she can name the obscurest members of the animal kingdom at an impressively tender age.
11. Track down classmates from primary school to make a point about Internet safety, the academic standards of said primary school, rates of early marriage among Dutch Reformed Christians, etc.
12. Declutter household down to a fixed number of items (say, 200).
13. Write a sonnet every day based on the news headline in the local paper.
14. Go on a quest to educate cafe owners in my town about how to make a decent iced chocolate. Become the Internet authority on the subject of NZ iced chocolates; add video tutorials to the website, and end up being flown down to Wellington by restaurants on a regular basis to review their iced chocolates and thus give them the coveted Smokey Seal of Magnificence.
15. Boycott all words derived from Romance languages to make an obscure political point.
16. Campaign for a knighthood, then insist on being knighted as Sir Smokey. (I’d totally do this if it ever came up, incidentally. Refusing knighthoods is weedy and smacks of false modesty and/or communism, but a firm yet tactful insistence on being Sir, not Dame, is all about equality. Dame Smokey. Eugh. Who needs it?)
17. Refuse to look in a mirror for a year and note impact on self-esteem, muse on body image and tally embarrassing spinach-between-the-teeth anecdotes as they occur. (Difficult to implement, though. Would have to avoid shop windows, driving and the like. Not that I drive anyway.)

Any further ideas?

Today is Guy Fawkes’ Day. Give Catholics a look of wounded innocence in commemoration.

Unless you live on the wrong side of the world, in which case you should wait until tomorrow. Otherwise it would just be mean.

Meself, I’ve had a pretty busy week. I had Bible study this morning, for which I had to make items of yumminess. Then tonight is singing group, which requires further items of yumminess; and Helpdesk Man’s singing shindig, for which he has to take a big ol’ plate of yummy items. Tomorrow night (Friday, try to keep up) Helpdesk Man’s three ex-flatmates are coming over for a post-Guy Fawkes barbecue, which means I will have to make savoury as well as sweet items of yumminess. And the next night, three ex-cinema-employee friends of mine are coming over for dinner and a movie, which involves feeding them… wait for it… items of yumminess again.

Too much yumminess! My head asplode!

Plus I’m supposed to be writing 2000 words a day for NaNo. So far, amazingly, I haven’t gotten behind. I haven’t even started today though - and I should, while I’m trapped under a sleeping snortlepig, because when she wakes up I will feel obliged to go make two kinds of pie. And cinnamon almond cookies. And rice-stuffed roasted pumpkin. And focaccia. And fudge.

If I had time and more spirulina in my system, I’d also make stock. I’ve been reading up on Traditional Foods and wallowing in angst and guilt as a result, so today I bought chicken carcasses and beef bones from the butcher. Also beef dripping, which is staring at me stolidly from the fridge and making me feel nervy. Anyone have any luscious dripping recipes?

And since I’m currently out of library books… what is the most hideously depressing book you’ve ever read? For me I think it was The Book of Sorrows by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

So the piggie’s into drawing of recent days. It’s quite good - sometimes a pen and a pad will occupy her for a good half hour. Other times she draws on the leather couch with black ink, but we shall not dwell on this. Anyway, she seems vaguely aware that her own snortly drawing skills are still in the abstract stage, so she has developed the habit of thrusting the pen at us and demanding “DUCKY!” or “DOGGIE!”, and gloating with extreme triumph when we produce one.

Today I thought I’d mix things up a bit, so when she demanded “DOGGIE!” for the third time I abandoned my usual cartoon pooch and attempted to draw Bitzer Maloney.

“DOGGIE!” gloated the pig in triumph, and then gave it a closer look. “COW!”

“No, he’s a doggie”, I said, feeling slightly hurt.

“DOGGIE! ….COW!”

“He’s not a cow, he’s a doggie.”

“…’ORSE!”

I think I need to take a remedial cartoon class.

Yesterday La Pigge:

• fell off the couch on her head from being a doofus
• tipped her grape juice into her chickpea curry
• fell off a kitchen chair on her head from being a doofus (secondary doofustude possibly caused by previous fall)
• removed two rotary cutting blades from their packet and played with them for a bit, but did not cut herself
• put a largeish handful of rock salt into her mouth
• correctly recognised my cartoon drawings of a Ducky, a Car and an Apple
• preferred bits of apple and chickpea curry to marshmallows
• mocked my knees
• glued carrot to the leather sofa with drool

Last night, quite unexpectedly, she woke up in the middle of the night with an almighty yell. I suspect it was her conscience.

Need four thousand words

Before accusing night falls.

Less eleven now.

Ever noticed that everyone on the internet is American? This puzzles me. Is it because Americans are more prone to forum use? Is it simply the forums and blogs I frequent which are American-centric? (Unlikely, because the blogs I like are a pretty eclectic mix). Or did New Zealand somehow just get tacked on to the American Internet, and are other countries in fact happily surfing away on their respective nets? An English Internet, for instance (no smileys) and a Canadian Internet which is presumably bilingual? I do not know. Sometimes the fact that there must be billions of web pages out there in Japanese, which I do not speak, awes and frightens me: the thought of hundreds of separate Internets for hundreds of people groups is just too much for my tiny brain. What if I’m missing something? What if someone once said something really witty on the Internet for Ex-Pat English-Speaking South Africans, and I missed it? What if the Northern Irish Internet has a blog dedicated to photos of steampunk reptiles, but I can’t see it? Boggles the head, is what.

Anyway. My point was, pumpkin pie good, Grand Canyon good, liberty and justice for all, swell; but it peeves me that the US of A has so thoroughly taken over media that we feel Othered in our own living rooms. If we post a message on a gardening forum we have to gulp and explain that our seasons are the wrong way round and we’re not, in fact, mad to be planting tomatoes in October. If we post a recipe on a message board we automatically substitute light corn syrup for golden syrup, knowing that nobody reading it is likely to know what golden syrup is. If we watch a movie we don’t even notice the American accents, but a Kiwi accent popping up has us all wincing. Not just because the Kiwi accent is fairly atrocious - so are plenty of American accents, I happen to think - but because it just seems wrong to hear a Kiwi on the big screen… because, well, that’s where Americans go. (And Brits, yes. But even though British accents aren’t as jarring, I think we do notice them more than American accents. Or don’t we? I do.)

Anyway, the reason this is getting my goat is that I notice I’ve started to use American spellings. And I don’t even like American spellings. They may be etymologically purer and easier on the fingers, but they don’t have the quaintness and class of British spellings, and in theory I eschew them. But after years of reading message boards dominated by Americans - not to mention writing for Suite, where American spellings can be better for SEO - I find “labor” creeping up in my writings.

It frightens me.

It also frightens me that I know a considerable amount about Twinkies, Oreos, Dr Pepper, Ding Dongs and Cheese Whiz, despite the fact that none of these items are available in this country. Actually I think Oreos may have crept in pretty recently. Also Reese’s Pieces, but I’m comfortable with that.

That is all.