![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bits and pieces, yet again
Dec. 1st, 2005 01:52 pmOver Shabbat, I talked with a friend who got a pedometer and made a plan to get walking more: he's doing a virtual walk to the Arctic National Wildlife Reservation, in Alaska. My first thought was of Henry Krumgold's book Henry 3, which has, along with plot about living in the suburbs during the height of the cold war scare, some boys who have a car, but aren't old enough to drive it, so they drive it up on blocks in a driveway. Which is all they do, until Henry suggests a drive across Europe, using atlases and other reference materials. It's the same idea, essentially, made much, much easier with all the resources available online. Maybe I should get a pedometer, too.
Porter Square books is showing the Walmart movie this Sunday evening.
I've tried a couple of new foods recently.
Trader Joe's Montablue and Populet is clusters of popcorn, walnuts, and blueberries, which work surprisingly well. The blueberries are tarter than the crunchy caramel, providing counterbalance to the sweetness, and the walnuts are not bitter (my perennial problem with walnuts). (I couldn't resist trying it given the name :-)
Theora and Jaq kindly found a kosher brand of Jaffa cakes, so I have finally had the spongy cookie (is it really a biscuit, or more like a little cake?) topped with orange gel (I think?) and chocolate. Yummy, if one likes orange and chocolate together, which I do. The texture surprised me, with the cake part falling far into the background compared to the other parts, yet still necessary.
The Set game people had drawings in November from the people who did the daily Set puzzler. And I won, but I don't need a Set game on my (nonexistent) cell phone. I'll email the code to the first person who wants the free download of Set onto their cellphone. (Cell phone requirements are (a) J2ME enabled and (b) the phone plan includes internet service.)
I read the Narnia books as a kid, and missed any religious allegory entirely. I reread them just after college, and could see some parts, but I'm not particularly familiar with the allegories commonly used in the church. So reading this quote cited in Neil Gaiman's blog a couple of days ago, from Adam Gopnik's article on C.S. Lewis in The New Yorker made me think I should reread them (as if the movie coming out weren't enough reason on its own)(the rest of the article was rather interesting, as well):
A couple of nights ago candlepin bowling came up in conversation. I theorized that it started as a bowling/bocci hybrid, which turns out to be completely wrong: candlepin bowling was started in Worcester, MA, after a bowling alley owner got some very non-standard equipment, and he needed to figure out how to use it. Not somewhere I expected to find a Worcester connection (though it was obviously somewhere reasonably nearby, given the regionality of the game).
ETA, 1650 South Africa's Supreme Court has ruled in favor of gay marriage, though there's a year delay to allow the government to get laws in place. Not a place I would've predicted to be an early adopter... (link courtesy of Hammercock)
Porter Square books is showing the Walmart movie this Sunday evening.
I've tried a couple of new foods recently.
Trader Joe's Montablue and Populet is clusters of popcorn, walnuts, and blueberries, which work surprisingly well. The blueberries are tarter than the crunchy caramel, providing counterbalance to the sweetness, and the walnuts are not bitter (my perennial problem with walnuts). (I couldn't resist trying it given the name :-)
Theora and Jaq kindly found a kosher brand of Jaffa cakes, so I have finally had the spongy cookie (is it really a biscuit, or more like a little cake?) topped with orange gel (I think?) and chocolate. Yummy, if one likes orange and chocolate together, which I do. The texture surprised me, with the cake part falling far into the background compared to the other parts, yet still necessary.
The Set game people had drawings in November from the people who did the daily Set puzzler. And I won, but I don't need a Set game on my (nonexistent) cell phone. I'll email the code to the first person who wants the free download of Set onto their cellphone. (Cell phone requirements are (a) J2ME enabled and (b) the phone plan includes internet service.)
I read the Narnia books as a kid, and missed any religious allegory entirely. I reread them just after college, and could see some parts, but I'm not particularly familiar with the allegories commonly used in the church. So reading this quote cited in Neil Gaiman's blog a couple of days ago, from Adam Gopnik's article on C.S. Lewis in The New Yorker made me think I should reread them (as if the movie coming out weren't enough reason on its own)(the rest of the article was rather interesting, as well):
Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.
A couple of nights ago candlepin bowling came up in conversation. I theorized that it started as a bowling/bocci hybrid, which turns out to be completely wrong: candlepin bowling was started in Worcester, MA, after a bowling alley owner got some very non-standard equipment, and he needed to figure out how to use it. Not somewhere I expected to find a Worcester connection (though it was obviously somewhere reasonably nearby, given the regionality of the game).
ETA, 1650 South Africa's Supreme Court has ruled in favor of gay marriage, though there's a year delay to allow the government to get laws in place. Not a place I would've predicted to be an early adopter... (link courtesy of Hammercock)