The Most Noble House of Black and Bluebloods

[wombat1138]

Apropos of nothing in particular-- well, maybe reminded by commentary on the new HP:OotP trailer-- until the HP movies started to come out, I had a vague but persistent notion that all of the references to Hermione's troublesome hair meant that she had partial African ancestry. (She would've been in good company with the British royal family.)

Comments

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Less relevantly and far more obscurely, I always rather assumed that Jay Kalam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Space_Series) was African-descended, though I'm not entirely sure why.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

"While attending a Great Books course, Williamson learned that Henryk Sienkiewicz had created one of his works by taking the Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas and pairing them with John Falstaff of William Shakespeare. Williamson took this idea into science fiction with Legion of Space."

Cool! I've never read any Legion of Space, but I think I've read the original(?) material by Sienkiewicz, though now I can't recall which books(s) of his Trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trilogy) best fit that description. I do remember the general vibe: great rollicking, sprawling adventures that reminded me of some of the best elements of recent fantasy serieses. (Kinda no longer politically correct in some elements like their portrayal of the Tartars etc., but hey.) The movie adaptations of the second two books were pretty good too (there's a more recent movie of the first book, but I haven't seen that one yet).

In a vaguely kinda similar vein, recently we watched yet another Toshiro Mifune movie, Incident at Blood Pass, a kinda-maybe sequel to Yojimbo. As if to reflect A Fistful of Dollars, certain elements (esp. the music) persistently made me think of it as a "ramen Western", so to speak.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

JMS totally stole the Shadows from the evil aliens' spiderlike, subtly shifting starships in Legion. Which also has a shiny white hero ship called the Purple Star. Ahem. (Oh, right, you probably haven't reached Season 3+ yet.)

Have never read The Trilogy, though I've heard of the author. I suspect his portrait of the Chmielnicki massacres (as I know them) would determine how much of a shot I'd give the books. But does this mean I can publish a short story called "The Short Story", expand it into a book called The Fix-Up, and finally expand it into a long-running series called The Long-Running Series?

I actually saw Incident at Blood Pass a few months ago; was all right, though nowhere near Yojimbo's league. Which is true of at least two other Yojimbo sequels, Sanjuro and Zatoichi to Yojimbo, though at least the latter's got Zatoichi.

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I've missed a lot of stuff.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

So have we all; not to worry. We just miss different stuff.

Opinion?

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

Have you heard of/seen Washoku: Recipes From The Japanese Home Kitchen? I'm wondering if it's worth buying... one of these aeons.

Re: Opinion?

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

I vaguely remember browsing through this book at Borders or B&N such, but don't recall very much about it; based on Amazon's random excerpts, a lot of it is devoted to listing and explaining major ingredients/techniques in a vaguely similar vein to Shirley Corriher's Cookwise. (Yeah, she's the "Nutritional Anthropologist" who shows up sometimes on Good Eats.

Washoku does seem to be reasonably informative and useful, insetad of one of those irritatingly useless cookbooks that have huge glossy pictures but only a few insanely complicated recipes, or seem to contain a lot of recipes but on closer inspection most of them are the same recipe with umpteen minor variations. Because of the reference angle, the actual recipe quotient may be lower than, say, The Joy of Cooking, not that the JoC is what it used to be either. (Though I gather the latest JoC partially reverts back to its traditional roots from the foofoo stylings of the previous one, whose written content didn't bother me nearly as much as the shoddy binding that keeps shedding pages all over the place.)

Since I was mainly concentrating on the food that would've been eaten by peasants (or at best, not quite poor samurai) around the Tokugawa/Meiji transition period, the main recipe-type book I ended up buying was The Folk Art of Japanese Country Cooking: A Traditional Diet for Today's World (http://www.amazon.com/Folk-Art-Japanese-Country-Cooking/dp/1556430981/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-3643671-2353464?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177516393&sr=1-1); it's also a reference/recipe hybrid, but written with a more conversational style and a different subcultural emphasis. Not that I've actually cooked anything from it IIRC, though now that I've pulled it back out again, I should probably look through it for ideas. Esp. since I bought a 20lb bag of brown rice last week, and it goes stale faster than white rice.