the wombatcave

Semi-randomly rummaging through Google Books due to another freeform Making Light thread.

The "Knickerbocker Glory" layered ice cream concoction seems to've originated in the US and was carried over to the UK by the 1920s, perhaps via American doughboys during/after the Great War. Oddly, it lived on in the UK despite being eventually forgotten in the US (at least by that name), so that the term was considered sufficiently exotic to be "translated" in the US editions of "Harry Potter".( Read more... )

Have concluded that Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series has succeeded in eating me as a new fandom, at least to the extent of getting me to read (or at least browse) assorted reference materials that I probably wouldn't've read otherwise, ranging from world butterfly compendia to early Qing histories/biographies.

A particularly odd book that I found in the local library system is A Manchu Monarch : an Interpretation of Chia Ch'ing by A.E. Grantham; this particular copy was a 1976 reprint with no original publication details inside. It's "odd" in that its subject breadth isn't too different from a standard popular history and it doesn't wander into historical novel by inventing dialogue, but it keeps having stylistic freakouts into florid narrative overkill; e.g., "as the newly liberated spirit passed away from the sick-bed in the early hours of a spring morning, grateful itself, it may have merged more readily into all the blossoming loveliness outlined against the blue of a cloudless sky."( Read more... )

Having succumbed to a combination of persistently window-shopping colored pencils and the imminent expiration of a few cents of eBay bucks (a trial bonus program), I have bought some mechanical pencils with refillable colored leads for no good reason.

(...well, technically I've been using colored pencils in a very simplistic way to chart out my daily activities, which doesn't really require many colors; for the past month or three, I've been using a mini-set of 12 little conventional colored pencils that fit (with a sharpener and eraser) into a boxlet about the size of a deck of cards. However, I've really only been using 6 of the colors (and have virtuously resisted the urge to buy larger sets to get more contrast), and have been anticipatorily worrying about having to replace just those colors once they're sharpened down to unusable nubs.)

In the local stores, I'd been eyeing the Crayola Twistable colored mechanical pencils, but Crayola doesn't seem to offer refills, which rather misses a main point of mechanical pencils IMHO. More recently (i.e., a few hours ago when I found it online), I was considering the Pentel PH158, which is a single pencil that can carry 8 different colors of 2mm leads (Pentel actually has 12 colors of 2mm refills, including black), but decided that the barrel would probably be uncomfortably large for me to use.

So I'm now waiting for a whole 8-piece set of the Pilot Color Eno 0.7mm plus eight refill tubes (Pilot doesn't list them on their US site, but they're available through JetPens and sundry eBay sellers). On reflection, the "soft blue" member of the set probably won't be that useful to me, but oh well.

On a slightly different note, I was somewhat tempted by the Marvy Color Tricks mechanical pencil, which produces that trippy multichromatic effect you get from a single lead subsectored into red, blue, and green (they do have refill leads), but couldn't quite convince myself to get one despite their extreme affordability. Alas.

I was going to post these snippets about Meiji education to a thread on RKDreams, but the forum has gone blinky *again* :b the pre-Meiji math stuff is pretty nifty in its own right, though.( Read more... )

You'd think that "Mel Odom" would be a unique, distinctive name, but I can't clearly determine whether there's just one (semi)public figure by that name or two.

My first introduction to Mel Odom's work was the cover art for Richard Adams' Maia, which I keep expecting to be reprinted in light of the success of Jacqueline Carey's "Kushiel" novels. (Then again, my impression of the "Kushiel" series is incomplete at best, since I've only managed to wade through the first book, and that with copious skimming through the last half or so.) Later, he did the covers for some of Guy Gavriel Kay's books-- Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of al-Rassan-- as well as various others, all in a very distinctive style which now carries through into the "Gene" collectors' dolls that were first released sometime last decade.

But also, within the past few years I've been seeing various pulp skiffy written by Mel Odom, who has a copious bibliography but no mention in his author's notes or his own website of a past artistic portfolio. Did he get born again and renounce his earlier, earthier works? What happened?

And now that I flail around for linkage mid-post, I finally find an answer (I think)-- there really are two of them: the prolific author who was born in 1957 and lives in Oklahoma, and the artist who was born in 1950 and lives in New York City. I've been wondering about this for so long that it's going to take a while for me to absorb this.

Just splatting down some links from a rough Google search; no informational synthesis or conclusions, just brief notes. ( Read more... )

Found a truly awesome site with all sorts of factoids/pix/essays about Japanese cultural history: a photoessay about the Battle of Sekigahara, an RK shrine, examples of scary modern architecture, you name it. It's so large and sprawling that it practically qualifies as a linkfest all by itself.

Over the holiday weekend, the wombat-consort and I popped into the Japanese Tea Garden in SF's Golden Gate Park. This is a particularly good time of year to see it, since February/March doesn't bring a lot of tourists from out of town despite spring springing out all over the place, which also means that in the transition back out of rainy season, there are a lot of clear, beautiful days.

The Japanese garden in Portland, Oregon is larger and probably more authentic-- when we visited it a few years ago, I was floored by the sheer scale of the shimenawa hanging over the main gates, as well as spotting lots of cool things I'd been reading about in Morse at the time and have probably forgotten by now, such as houses' foundation posts standing on above-ground rocks rather than being dug in-- but you can't get tea there, and technically you're not even supposed to smuggle your own in. Portland's classical Chinese garden does serve tea, but by comparison ends up looking a bit gaudy and not quite as well-maintained; possibly it would benefit from being visited first instead of getting all Zenned out beforehand.

Hakone Gardens, down in the South Bay, probably isn't that much farther away from us than SF. Parts of Memoirs of a Geisha were filmed there, which ended up killing some of their antique custom-sized tatami. While they do allow food and bevs there for special events, and sometimes even offer tea ceremony lessons, I don't think they have an open-circulation tea booth. Which brings me back to the tea.

We got a pot of green tea for the two of us, which came with a small dish of rice crackers and some cookies. (Other options were jasmine, oolong, and various cold beverages including iced tea; there are also packets of Pocky etc. available for purchase.) The tea was actually looseleaf instead of bagged, which was nice, and arrived with sufficient pre-steepage to drink immediately, but that also meant that it became too bitter to finish after two or three contemplative cups apiece. Since we were mainly watching the little birdies swarming around for crumbs rather than observing the tea staff, I'm not sure whether they simply have a throughput system where they top off old pots with fresh hot water or whether there's a mindboggling waste of tea leaves somewhere behind the counter. IIRC from our previous visit years ago with the wombat-consort's father, they do have sugar for the tea if you request it, prompting a small bowl of golden-brown rock sugar.

The circulating tea servers are young Asian women in kimono and obi, though all of these uniforms were worn so identically that I suspect hidden instant fasteners. They were also wearing tabi and geta/zori-- I didn't get a good look at the soles, though they weren't the elevated wooden platforms with accompanying karan-koron clatter; my own feet felt cold in sympathy.

Tea is charged per person rather than per cup/pot, probably for the purpose of traffic control-- you have to consume it while seated in the tea pavilion and can't take it walkabout, though a few stray Pocky wrappers elsewhere suggested that the snacks are sometimes smuggled out. Then again, some visitors msy've brought their own Pocky. There's also a general entry charge to the tea garden itself (the pavilion is completely encapsulated within the garden), although this is waived during the first/last hour of admission; Golden Gate Park around it is free, although the street parking (also free) can get tight during the weekends/holidays esp. since the re-opening of the De Young museum last year, right next to the tea garden.

Inevitably, the Japanese family who ran the tea garden prior to WWII ended up getting interned. ISTR reading an anecdote that during that time, not only were a lot of the garden's artifacts ransacked/destroyed, but some of the antique bronzes were specifically melted down and made into artillery shells marked "return to sender".

(On the one hand, I have to wonder about the metallurgical plausibility of this. On the other, perhaps since bronze is an alloy in the first place, it can be easily tweaked in molten form to enhance its fungibility.)