geegaw.com

Iron Chef Leftovers

The menu at Chez Gaw:

Mock Satay (Chicken Pieces Glazed with Leftover Takeout Curry Sauce)
Place 1/2 lb. sliced chicken breast in bowl. Spoon 1/4 cup curry on top. Turn chicken pieces to coat. Marinate at room temperature for 1 hr, then transfer to broiler pan. Broil for 8-10 min, then remove pan, turn pieces, and broil for an additional 7-9 min.

Leftover Rice Stir-Fried with Garlic and Nam Pla
Finely mince four cloves of garlic. Sauteé in oil till golden. Turn heat up high and add one half-cup of leftover rice, using spatula to press clumps of rice against pan till surfacer of rice caramelizes slightly and changes color. Turn off heat; stir in 1 tsp. nam pla (fish sauce) and salt and pepper to taste.

Almost-Expired Baby Carrots Sauteed in Leftover Butter and Rosemary
See title.

ig-nascent

A hobbit celebrates his birthday by giving presents to all his friends. Juliet (Eclogues) has given us a wonderful pantoum in today's entry. Happy birthday, Juliet.

I had pretty much skipped over the essay on Pooh slash, or "P/P" (Pooh/Piglet), in Postmodern Pooh, but A. read it and found the following quoted excerpts, which are taken directly from Pooh with non-double-entendre-genic material ellipsed out:

"And I would go in after it," said Pooh excitedly, "only very carefully so as not to hurt myself, . . . and I should lick round the edges first of all, . . . . and then I should come back and start licking in the middle. . . ."

So Pooh pushed and pushed and pushed his way through the hole, and at last he got in . . . humming to himself in a rather sticky voice . . . a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness . . . And for a long time Pooh said only "Ow!" . . . and "Oh!" . . .And then, all of a sudden, he said "Pop!" just as if a cork were coming out of a bottle.

It's funny, but I don't know. Seems wrong somehow.

"They Finally Let You Wear The Tutu and You Pee On The

Stage."

HEY LAURA: the End-Year Google Zeitgeist (via Rog via Sylloge; or, via Plurp via Leuschke; or, like, everywhere).

Has anyone told Nathan that 1000 Blank White Cards is now listed in Hoyle's (3rd Revised and Updated Ed.)? According to Susan, the official entry is as follows:

1000 Blank White Cards

The game of "1000 Blank White Cards" was apparently invented by Nathan McQuillen of Madison, Wisconsin, when he noticed a box labeled "1000 Blank White Cards." No hint was given regarding how they were to be used. so he encouraged people to draw on them and things went on from there. Although the game was developed with adults, I think it makes a very good game for children, so I've included it in the setion of games for children.

The game is fairly simple and can be played by any number of people from 2 to infinity. You take a lot of index cards, cut them in half, draw your own cards and play them on each other. [...]

Here's my primary association with Hoyle's Book of Games: it's mentioned in a Chameleons song, "Home Is Where The Heart Is." The line in the song is actually a direct quote from a 1960's sci-fi spy show, The Prisoner, where the main character says "Let's play it according to Hoyle, then. All cards on the table." You know, typical spy banter. For the life of me, I cannot recall which episode that is.

I don't have Quicktime

I don't have Quicktime installed so I can't watch this Dave McKean short film, "The Week Before," at DF1lm (click on "Screening Room" in navbar). But maybe you can.

Finally finished Lord of

Finally finished Lord of the Rings at 2am this morning, whew! Laura got it for my birthday, a boxed set with silver runes and intricate black designs stamped on the books' black spines, and Laura, thank you so much, it was a fantastic read (no pun intended). My favorite passage, spoken by Gandalf of course, on the subject of Gollum:

Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.

I also picked up Frederick Crews's satirical sequel, Postmodern Pooh, at Arundel Books, dust jacket illustration by Art Spiegelman. It started out cute and amusing, but I shouldn't have read it all in one day, because by the end of the book the funny little digs and jabs had snowballed into an overwhelming mass of anger. It still made me laugh, though, especially the Harold Bloom figure ("Orpheus Bruno" -- but wouldn't Oedipus Bruno be more apt?). Here's a vitriolic little excerpt from Bruno's diatribe:

Preeminent among your smelly little orthodoxies is the one to which we were all subjected a few minutes ago: militant feminism. After hearing such a harangue as Professor What's-her-name's, one must strain to remember that women at their best -- the silent, beautiful ones that Yeats so admired -- deserve comparison with the graces, the muses, the naiads and dryads. Moreover, there are women who can write with the best of men; one such prodigy will even figure in my argument here today. But academic feminists aren't women; they are harpies, demons from hell. I'm not so foolhardy as to spice their witches' brew by leaping into the cauldron myself. Rather, I withdraw discreetly from the scene, leaving the baritone banshees to judge for themselves how little satisfaction can be gleaned from endlessly "liberating" one another.

Dear diary. We had

Dear diary. We had bad headaches all day. I bought a rug for my room, and a stereo. Finally took True Names off my Amazon wish list! After waiting two years for it to come back into print, the acclaimed cyberspace novella turns out to be a scant 80 or so pps. of oversized type -- perfect for reading in a bookstore. Definitely worth the half-hour it took up.

Judith(Calamondin) had an amusing dream today. I have lots of dreams where I turn to technology to solve my problems, and it can't. After exercising too much a few days ago, I'm achy and painful, so while asleep my brain keeps trying to think of reasons why this would be so. In one of the dreams, I threw a party and all the guests started beating up on me with baseball bats....

Still trying not to be cryptic. I think there was a mass fallacy once, where depressed people a few centuries ago used to believe they were made out of glass. Also, trepanning (or "trepanation") used to be in vogue. I hadn't heard of insulin comas in a therapeutic context, but Jim (Everything Burns) finds all sorts of stuff.

ho! ho! ho!

Thank you, O anonymous posters to diablog. I do hope no one is feeling pressure to be cryptic or obtuse. I try to be neither (but sometimes can't help it).

The entrance text for Paul(Alamut)'s Immortality Suite gave me chills. Ooh! His third project, Afterlife, sounds beautiful. There is a photo of the dream bed which Paul linked to as The Palace at 8pm. At 4am: that may be my favorite sculpture by Giacometti.

For future reference, my tilapia fillet recipe, no wok necessary (adapted from this whole fish recipe):

2 tilapia fillets (approx. 4 oz. each)

1 tbsp cooking oil

4 tbsp finely julienned ginger

4 scallions thinly sliced

Sauce:

3 tbsp rice wine

3 tbsp soy sauce

1 1/2 tbsp vinegar

1 tbsp sugar

Combine sauce ingredients in a small bowl. Heat oil in a flat non-stick skillet on medium-high heat. Sear tilapia fillets, 1-2 min. each side, turning carefully with spatula. Transfer seared fillets to plate.

Stir-fry ginger in remaining oil over medium heat until it begins to change color. Return fish to skillet, pour half the sauce over the fish, sprinkle half the scallions on top. Cover and leave to simmer over medium heat for 1-2 minutes.

Uncover skillet, flip fish with spatula, pour remainder of sauce and scallions on fish, simmer for an additional 1-2 minutes or until fish is cooked through.

Transfer fish to serving platter. Pour leftover sauce over fish (if sauce has dried up, deglaze with a couple tablespoons of water until it revives). Smack your lips. Serve with rice.

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December 24, 2001

bad reference: partial lead dots stripped

This is very exciting: manilastories.com just opened, nice work Lia(Cheesedip)! I am racking my brains for memories of Manila... I have only the vaguest and most fragmented ones. Security guards with guns, garlic and cheese pizza at Shakey's, Malacanang Palace, lots of yellow shirts and People Power and whatnot, bullets grazing my friend's house, Filipino foods like lumpia, adobo, etc. As kids we weren't allowed to walk around inside Urdaneta Village (our gated community), let alone Makati. For Halloween we were chauffered door to door. It seemed to be a generous and creative culture, but poverty and the crime rate were high (after the country's economy had been gutted by a certain corrupt leader) and my parents were being very protective of us...

The Google holiday bears have completed their task.

Also, I enjoyed the newest entry of lemonyellow.tensegrity.net:

LEMONYELLOW DOT TENSEGRITY DOT NET, IN WHICH
IT IS SHOWN THAT ALL HUMAN THINGS
ARE BUT A DREAM, AND MANY
OTHER THINGS WORTHY
OF KNOWLEDGE AND
MEMORY
***
**
*

And I received a recommendation from the mysteriously not-offline Paul(Metameat): "Sons and Lovers kicks ass." On the other hand, some diablogger warns that "when [Lawrence] tries to make 'real' people act out his theories, it gets pretty creepy," (charmingly put, by the way) so who knows? Then again, Flannery O'Connor was creepy and kind of a preacher too, and I love her fiction....

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December 23, 2001

a quietus

I had not read much from D. H. Lawrence before, having been told that he was bad. But he is not bad; he is apt. A lot of glorious high rhetoric in a Whitmanesque style, piles of vocatives. I really like The Ship of Death (here quoted in two versions, each with its strengths: I may prefer the former).

Also, the Tortoise Poems are dramatic and brutal and, on occasion, cute. My favorite is "Tortoise Shell." A caution: the last two ("Tortoise Gallantry" and "Tortoise Shout") contain explicit tortoise sex.

I guess at some point I ought to try a novel... The Rainbow? Or Women in Love?

To those who posted the John Donne quote and the painting of Nell Gwyn, thaank you! I'm glad a couple people like this new design! And the link to the geegaw slogan MP3 is back, by request.

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December 22, 2001

the dewiest flowers

. . .   The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Estonia: the tiger chest, for tea."

-- Wallace Stevens, from "The Man at the Dump"

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December 21, 2001

the darkest night of all

I am decorating my new apartment.  I do not know very much about art.  Therefore, I shall decorate with art related to books in some way.  For example, torn out of the pages of my books.  I know it's wicked, but honestly, I think the pages will be happier framed in the open air than stacked in a cramped bookshelf.  A list of acquisitions:

In the entrance hall to my room: Dürer's engraving of St. Jerome in his study.  Available here.

Hanging over the bed: Elizabeth Bishop's Daisies in Paintbucket (scroll down for larger picture).  Available here.

On the wall facing the bed: one of Chardin's singeries (monkey pictures), for example: Le singe peintre (the monkey painter).  Chardin's connection with Proust is tenuous, but there is one.  And I like monkeys.  However, I have no idea where to find a color image of this.

Also on the far wall, by William Blake: plate 2 from The Book of Thel.  Available here.

I didn't know about the Blake Archive till now.  Their Generic Image Search is just plain fun (they enumerate the search items, so you can look for "scepter," "scissors," "scroll," "sea," "sea of time and space," "seat," "serpentine," "shackle," "shadow"...) Sadly, this just seems to search descriptions of pictures, and not return the pictures themselves.

New diablog feature: The last 10 comments are now displayed over there on the right, and the rest get archived along with the pre-hiatus entries.

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December 20, 2001

impractical

Okay, that old chat-room comments thing, which Dan has dubbed "El Diablo Gee (insert "mano cornuto" hand gesture here)", is back!, because it makes me so happy to read what my site visitors have to say.  Look over on the right hand side.  However, I have changed it so you have to check a little box that says you promise to be nice.  I think that constitutes sufficient precaution.

A few lines from the poem at the bottom of this week's dagmar_chili:

But how do you fare, as your washed, misdriven double?

[...]
everything being mulched, drained stains the rivers out here.

  chestnuts.
Brass and top-hat criminality,
There is nothing worse than stealing from a drunk:
This is the best way, Tiger.^*

(^* Ref.  the seventh panel in this tract.)

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December 19, 2001

avenues of surmise

Thanks for the welcomes-back.  I'm still feeling pretty rusty in the old writing-joints, but bear with me.  So, uh, how 'bout that Friendship of the Ring thing that just came out? La la la.  Here are some random google searches I just did:

"nerve biscuit" => bands, medical case studies, a survivalist recipe archive
"catatonic medallion" => tons of fanfic
"sacrament collapse" => tales of religious prostration

...

I think someone should start a "new" blog, and call it Lemonyellow; and dating the first entry 31 March 1999, she should go on to recapitulate one entry from the archived Lemonyellow site a day until running out, by which time our industrious plagiarist would have, in the manner of Pierre Menard, acquired the ability to write Lemonyellow entries of her own accord, and take it from there.

(addendum: we have a volunteer.)

Don Quixote, Author of Pierre Menard.

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December 18, 2001

apostasy-a-go-go

The title refers to my intention to read a few selections from religious or Gnostic writers, maybe Blake or D.  H.  Lawrence, before Christmas.

A.  points out Peter Blegvad's website, amateur.co.uk.  Quite the combination of arty, witty, theoretical, and smart, with too many good things to pick out individually.  "On Numinosity" is an illustrated essay on the nature and emotive power of metaphor.  "Imagined - Observed - Remembered" uses drawings to chart the transformation of some objects beginning in l through the titular stages.  And so on.

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December 17, 2001

yowza!

It's been marvelously, invigoratingly icy and clear today.  Furthering my self-help addictions, I am consoled simultaneously by Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy and de Botton's The ConsolationS of Philosophy (have read about a third of each book).  De Botton has six consolations where Boethius has only one, philosophia, but Boethius postdates and supercedes many of de Botton's sources.  Of course, they cannot really be compared at all.

In weblog community news: while I was gone, Sylloge came back from his nearly-a-year-long hiatus, with his own version of diablog.  Onepine.com was abducted by aliens, causing DavidChess to find this new temporary home, on pitas.com, and Plurp to relocate after several days' outage.  And [Sub]culture has finally returned to its original home on hine-digital-art.com!

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