(1) Syfy offers a free viewing of the first episode of The Expanse — Episode 1: Dulcinea. (Also available on the Syfy Now App, Hulu, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, iTunes, Playstation, Xbox, and Facebook.)
(2) Variety says additional episodes have been ordered for Rachel Bloom’s series and CW’s iZombie.
Freshman comedy “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has landed five more episodes, bringing its first season total to 18, while “iZombie” has received an additional six-episode order, giving the second season a total of 19.
Audience for the Bloom series is growing slowly.
While the positively-reviewed “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” hasn’t gained much ratings traction, it has posted its best numbers to date in recent weeks. Paired with sophomore critical breakout “Jane the Virgin,” the six episodes averaged a 0.34 rating in 18-49 and about 1 million total viewers in Nielsen’s “live plus-3” estimates.
(3) Misty Massey tells about a live slushpile reading in “Getting What You Ask For” at Magical Words.
Many, many times I hear writers complain how much they hate getting form rejections from editors, because such things do nothing to help them understand why the editor didn’t want to buy their story. Editors don’t understand, they cry, that writers can’t fix stories if they aren’t told what went wrong in the first place. Some writers say editors are lazy, others think they’re cruel. For whatever reason, it’s always the editor’s fault.
A couple of years ago, David Coe approached Faith Hunter and me to present a panel called Live Action Slush. (For those who don’t know, the writers submit the first pages of their novels anonymously. A designated reader reads each page aloud, and the three of us listen as if we were slush editors, raising our hands when we reach a place that would cause us to stop reading and move on to the next submission. Once all three hands are up, the reading stops and we discuss what made us stop reading.) David had done such a panel at another con, to great acclaim, and wanted to bring it to ConCarolinas. We had two sessions, both standing room only. As far as we could tell, anyway. We were asked to present it at Congregate later that same summer, and since then we’ve offered it in various incarnations at any cons we attended.
Most of the time, the writers seemed happy to hear our suggestions, although once in a while we would run into a writer who just couldn’t handle the idea that their story wasn’t already perfect. You see, the point of Live Action Slush is to give the writers exactly what they’ve been complaining they never receive – a specific, clear reason for the turndown. Sometimes the problem is that nothing is happening by the time we reach the end of the first page. Sometimes the writer spends the entire first page describing the characters without giving the reader the slightest idea what the book’s about. Characters might be hideous stereotypes, or flat and wooden. There are tons of reasons, most of which are easily repaired once the writer knows what has happened. But there are some writers who really aren’t ready to hear what needs fixing. They’ve come to the workshop fully expecting that the panelists will declare their first page to be utter brilliance. Those are the writers who storm out of the room, instead of staying to listen to the critique of other writers under the same scrutiny. They go into the hallway and tell their friends how mean we were, how we don’t really know anything. Most important, they don’t make any changes.
(4) In an Absolute Write forum, Alessandra Kelley gives the context for a wisecrack James Frenkel made on a Windycon panel and asks “Is what I witnessed abusive behavior?”
There are a number of important questions that urgently need discussing if we are to have any sort of careful, agreeable, professional and accepting environment for our conventions.
Many people make thoughtless remarks or cruel witticisms or little jokes. Should people be more mindful of them?
Is it right to treat a category of people as inherently funny or insulting?
How much tolerance should there be for little jokes? At what point does laughing them away become aiding and abetting the marginalization of a segment of the community?
Should a person with a known history of abusive behavior be held to a higher standard than others? What about a person in a position of authority?
Should we not speak up when we see such behavior?
(5) Lucy Huntzinger reports that the Down Under Fan Fund will be receiving a $2,000 donation from Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon. The DUFF co-administrator said, “Thank you for supporting face to face encounters between international fandoms!”
(6) Today In History
- November 23, 1963 – Doctor Who begins on the BBC.
The first of a four-part pilot episode of the series aired on the BBC on this day in 1963. Titled “An Unearthly Child”, the story introduced the Doctor, the Tardis, and many other things that would become hallmarks of the program.
(7) Today’s Birthday Boys
- Born November 23, 1887 — Boris Karloff, birthname William Henry Pratt, in Camberwell, London, England.
- Born November 23, 1914 – Wilson “Bob” Tucker
(8) Early suggestions coming in for the 2016 Worldcon program…
WorldCon Panel Proposal: THE WRITING LIFE – 5 esteemed panelists sit, paralytically drunk, mumbling incoherently about the end of publishing
— Myke Cole (@MykeCole) November 23, 2015
@MykeCole I do that panel at every con, and also at my house
— a taction for the take-tack on the terror shank (@robertjbennett) November 23, 2015
(9) The Kickstarter for The Dark North – Volume 1, a premium coffee table art book with new stories from Scandinavia’s best illustrators and concept artists, is just fully financed, but it’s still possible to contribute.
Artist: Lukas Thelin
(10) “Being a Better Writer: Names” by Max Florschutz at Unusual Things has four good ideas for dealing with a fundamental sf writing challenge.
So, naming things. This is, as you might guess, a requested topic. And to be honest, I think it’s one worth talking about.
See, naming things can actually be pretty tricky. When creating a world from scratch, or even just a redesigned/repurposed version of our own world, often one of the first things a lot of young writers do is assign their characters, places, and things very interesting names. It’s kind of a trope by this point, but if I had to guess my prediction would be that to the new writer, the goal is to excitedly show you how fantastical their world is. So they don’t have people with names like Joe or Samantha. They have people with names like Krul’Qa’pin or something like that. And they live in the city of Byulnqualalaltipo! Aren’t those fantastic?
Well, in sense, sure. They’re also completely unpronounceable, for a start. And that is just the start.
See, there are a host of problems with names like this. The first being that they’re difficult for the reader to read, pronounce, and parse. They’re these very out there, fantastical names that are hard to make sense of, and the more of them a writer puts into his story, the harder it will be not only for the reader to keep interest, but to keep everything straight. Especially if the writer has gone and made a number of the names similar through conventions such as “I’ll stick apostrophe’s here and here and that’ll make a name.” And while it certainly might create names that look impressive, the truth is that a lot of “name creation techniques” that novice writers go for tend to create a whole host of problems like what we just discussed.
Okay, so this is writing that, if not bad, is certainly not good, clearly. But in order to avoid this trap, it’s worth understanding why it’s a trap in the first place. Why are writers doing this? What makes creating a multi-syllable name that defies typical English attractive?
(11) A dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, (which did not win the brackets, darn it) sold at auction for $1.56 million today.
The blue and white gingham dress, one of 10 thought to have been made for Garland in her role as Dorothy in the movie, was among the top items in the Bonham’s and Turner Classic Movies Hollywood memorabilia auction….
A year ago, the Cowardly Lion costume worn by actor Bert Lahr in the movie sold for almost $3.1 million at a Bonham’s auction.
(12) National Geographic reveals “An 80-Year-Old Prank Revealed, Hiding in the Periodic Table!”
You wouldn’t know it, because it’s hiding down there at the bottom of the periodic table of elements, but it’s a prank—something a five-year-old might do—and the guy who did it was one of the greatest chemists in America. It’s pure silliness, staring right at you, right where I’ve drawn my circle, at element 94.
(13) At Motherboard, “For the First Time Ever, Astronomers Have Observed the Birth of a Planet”:
The new research, published this week in Nature, provides hard evidence of a developing gas giant orbiting a young Sunlike star called LkCa 15, located 450 light years away in the constellation Taurus. What’s more, it appears as if at least two other giant bébés are also forming around the star, though only one was directly detected.
“No one has successfully and unambiguously detected a forming planet before,” said astronomer Kate Follette, a co-author on the study, in a statement. “There have always been alternate explanations, but in this case we’ve taken a direct picture, and it’s hard to dispute that.”
(14) Click at your own risk! From ScienceFiction.com – “Thanks To A Leaked Children’s Book We Have Some HUGE ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Spoilers!”
(15) “Steven Moffat Reveals the Nightmare Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special We Could Have Had” on io9.
But while those meetings went on, more and more actors publicly denied that they would be a part of the special, prompting growing discontent from Doctor Who fans—who didn’t realize that behind-the-scenes problems with the script, and a ticking clock, meant that Moffat very nearly had to scrape together a story with whatever actors he could find. Case in point? In one form or another, there was a story outline for “The Day of the Doctor” that featured no Doctors at all… only Jenna Coleman as Clara.
(16) A project known as “Justice League Dark” is inching closer to a greenlight. Joblo lists the front-running candidates to direct:
Things are heating up for DARK UNIVERSE, as casting rumors have been swirling around the past week and now we have word on who the studio is eyeing to direct the supernatural superhero tale. We’re told that BIG BAD WOLVES directing duo Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, as well as EVIL DEAD remake director Fede Alvarez are the top contenders to take the gig right now. Both sets of filmmakers have a strong grasp of the dark and macabre genre and would easily fill the shoes of Guillermo Del Toro, who left the film after turning in his screenplay and toiling with the studio over casting and scheduling. However, Del Toro’s script is said to be excellent and one of the main reasons that the studio is pushing to get JLD underway with a shooting start in early 2016.
Yahoo! says Dark Universe is expected to put the spotlight on some of the lesser-known heroes and villains of the DC Comics universe whose adventures typically involve magic or supernatural elements of some sort.
Among the characters rumored to have a role in the film are occult detective John Constantine, who was featured in a short-lived television series of his own recently, and Swamp Thing, a multimedia sensation who was the subject of two live-action movies, a live-action television series, and an animated series to go along with his long-running comic book series and other projects. The film will also reportedly feature the villain Anton Arcane, the antihero demon Etrigan, and the sorceress Zatanna, as well as Madame Xanadu and the body-swapping spirit Deadman.
(17) Ice Age 5 short: Scrat In Space!
[Thanks to Hampus Eckerman, Will R., JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day RedWombat.]
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Darren Garrison:
Actually, everyone would earn a right to be offended if they received that kind of response.
I have to say in a way I agree with this. I’ve started insisting racist/sexist/*ist who make stupid comments and jokes now have to listen to my lectures on why what they said was Wrong, stupid, hurtful.
Most of those people get angry but I suspect a portion also are offended to be lectured to by a woman, younger/older person, sick/disabled person. And I just don’t care about their offense. Generally when it comes to social justice I don’t care if I offend straight white people.
So on the one hand I vehemently disagree with the statement quoted above as it’s usually said by someone in the majority who is telling someone in the minority to get thicker skin. I fully agree with it when it’s a minority making that decision about someone in the majority who is showing bigotry and/or a lack of empathy.
I’ve been very sick over the last few days so if this makes no sense please correct or ignore me and move on.
It’s weird you think jokes are always just jokes, as if there’s some inherent quality to them that stops them from being damaging. I grew up in Texas in the 1970s hearing jokes about blacks and gays, only they were called n—— and f— in most of them. Even as a child I knew that stuff was hate masked as humor.
Do we go too far today to take offense at humor? Sometimes. But I prefer that to the past you seem to miss.
Kevin Hart used to do a lot of jokes about gays, then he stopped. I asked him about it on a Reddit AMA a year ago:
His response:
If you’re directing a joke at a target and that target isn’t laughing, it’s not just a joke.
It requires some familiarity with CSS and isn’t user-friendly. You have to find the gravatar ID of the target user by looking at the source code of a web page here, then add a new style matching that ID.
Here’s the basics:
1. Click the Stylish button, then click Manage Installed Styles.
2. Click the Edit button for the style used on File 770. You’ll see a bunch of CSS blocks that are identical, except for a sequence that begins with “grav-” such as grav-a9bea8198715ed10882ecba7c7adaf37.
3. Make a copy of a CSS block, then switch its “grav-” section to the target user’s Gravatar ID.
Thinking back to Milt Stevens bringing up that he told an off-color joke in 1974 and lots of people, whom he could name, laughed at it, reminds me that in 1974 I started prep school (scholarship boy, he said vainly). My roommate in 9th and 12th grade, who was my best friend at the time, was gay. I had no idea. I suspect he had only a partial idea, since he made efforts to relate sexually to women. Today we’re Facebook friends and I’ve met his husband, who is a great guy. He helped me out financially during my period of illness last year.
But I am certain that when we were in high school I made his life worse than it needed to be. With jokes. Not even particularly vicious ones – I was never a virulent homophobe; I just partook of a kind of background disdain. Despite, or perhaps because of, being nobody’s manly-man ideal. (Ask me why I never participate in Movember – haha I couldn’t grow a real beard or mustache to save my life.) But I certainly made jokes about gays. I laughed at jokes about gays.
At a minimum, this did nothing to make my roommate – my friend’s! – life easier. At the very least, it must have given him the idea he couldn’t trust me completely. At worst, and in all probability, I hurt him.
I did wrong.
Was it the worst thing anyone ever did to gay people? Do I rank with the great oppressors of history? Don’t be absurd. Nobody would suggest that. Do I beat myself up over it constantly? No, not constantly. But I wish I had it to do over again. And I owe some level of atonement.
There’s a natural (I hope…) impulse to get very defensive about one’s own sins. If I did a thing, it must be either an abomination or completely excusable. And if I’m criticized for something, you must be saying it was an abomination. And if it wasn’t an abomination, then you’re engaged in a Dreyfus-Affair level of libel against me. Because you accused me of committing an abomination! So you must be terrible. And I must be doubly innocent, because first, what I did was completely excusable, not being an abomination, and second, I was unjustly accused!
I infer these to be the emotional stakes behind Milt Stevens conduct here, starting with the 1974 gambit. And I get it. But the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that we are all fated to do wrong, that wrongness comes in degrees, and that decency means navigating between self-hatred and complacency.
——————
Also, maybe don’t implicitly threaten to out your old friend as among people who laughed at an off-color joke 40 years ago, and what will all his new Ess Jay Double-Ewe blog buddies think now, huh? If that was one of the things that was going on.
Meredith: The thin floppy pancakes made of just eggs, milk and flour are what I grew up calling “Swedish pancakes”. They’re my favorite sort, served in a stack slippery with lots of butter. Unfortunately, you mostly can’t find them in American restaurants; American restaurants ALWAYS have buttermilk pancakes, and sometimes have buckwheat pancakes, but hardly ever have Swedish pancakes. Sometimes they’ll have crepes, but for some reason they’re seen as a sweet dish more often than a savory one, and often have sugar in the batter. And when they’re wrapped around something, it’s usually fruit or something sweet like that.
I do like crepes/Swedish pancakes rolled around things, but I prefer savory fillings like chicken with a gravy or bechemel.
My favorite pancake toppings are good butter and raspberry or boysenberry syrup. Fox’s, in Pasadena, introduced me to boysenberry syrup when I was a kid and set off a lifetime fascination.
Content note: Discussion of the experience of Gamergate targets. I thought it’d be good to put the pleasant stuff first.
I know an artist who’s logged over 2,000 Gamergate-related death threats, from men who think that women shouldn’t be artists working in her particular field, and that if women are allowed in, they should certainly never criticize writers or publishers about anything they put out that might have sexist, racist, homophobic, etc., elements. She had to switch her social media presence over to an alias and stop making public posts altogether; she still gets the threats, but only over old issues, not because of anything new she says.
I know a couple who do some writing and editing on the side. One also works as a teacher at the elementary grade level. The other has a fairly awful family, with an extensive history of mental illness badly managed. They moved, and Gamergaters (not guessing; there was boasting) submitted a collection of charges to the school district that the teacher staying with their partner given this history was prima facie evidence the two were collaborating in abuse of their own children. It was enough to trigger an automatic investigation, though they’re in an area that’s relatively sensible about such things, so it got settled quickly. One of them is now just plain gone from social media, after the third attempt at friends-only distribution fell apart thanks to at least one included friend finding it funny to pass screenshots on; the other has managed to go private successfully.
Milt, you’re committing a basic error by separating out death threats and jokes. To Gamergaters, death threats they issue are jokes. Except when they’re not. And never when aimed at themselves, of course. But whenever it’s convenient, they’ll explain at length about how their stuff is all just pranks, and don’t involve any real risk, including swatting, and certainly including death threats. All of the above is avowedly jesting intended to deflate blowhards like women who think sexism is real and men who agree with them.
This is part of why some of us have gotten much less forgiving of the whole “it’s a joke” explanation/defense.
@Darren Garrison:
See, I am with you on the bolded part. I may be globally wrong there because I am bundled in all kinds of privilege, but I think in practice all of us are going to reserve judgment in any specific case on the balance of offense given versus insight conveyed. (Or whatever value. As a personal example, I get off the SJW Bus regarding many, but by no means all, claims of cultural appropriation.)
But the defensive hostility behind “go screw yourself you nitwit flake” seems worth reflecting on. It might be more productive to recognize that “You have your reasons, and I have my reasons.” In particular, it’s probably more productive to just break off the exchange once one decides not to apologize, retract or modify than perpetuate a round of name-calling.
This is actually something I see “Black Twitter” doing a lot. An African-American activist sort will get into a contentious exchange with someone, of some or other length, but at a certain point, will respond, “Good evening,” or some other signal that “I think it’s time for us to stop talking now.” Each side has said their piece and there’s no point in going around in circles or spiraling out of control.
Generally when it comes to social justice I don’t care if I offend straight white people.
Ah, but just because an idea came from a minority or a woman does not ean that the idea can’t be mockably idiotic, deserving nothing but pointing and laughter. Cases in point, the nitwit flakes mentioned in this article:
http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/this-obsession-with-cultural-appropriation-is-leading-us-down-a-very-dark-path/
Wow, Milt. Every post you write makes me happier I don’t interact with you IRL.
It’s highly dependent on the pancakes.
For crêpes, I like Nutella and banana for sweet, though sugar and lemon isn’t bad. For savory, I like chicken, goat cheese and spinach.
Swedish pancakes are very nearly crêpes and I eat them with lingonberry jam and butter.
German pancakes are MADE for lemon and sugar. There is no other way to eat them in my world.
For Æbleskivers It’s plain powdered (confectioner’s) sugar. No applesauce. Yes, heresy, I know.
For American style pancakes, I don’t eat them often but when I do it’s butter and maple syrup. REAL maple syrup. Grade B maple syrup. I never could understand paying MORE for LESS maple flavor in Grade A. I actually prefer waffles (not the Belgian style–the thinner, crisper square American ones). Also with butter and maple syrup.
Here in 9591 we have bred trees that will drip pure maple syrup right on our plates. Just remove the plug.
Jim, your story is to the point regardless, but I feel the need to point out that it wasn’t Milt who made the comment about the ethnic joke from 1974. (I double-checked that before I suggested that he may have misread the room and not realized that this was a discussion about punching downwards with a certain emphasis on kids before he praised the punching of people who needed a good punchin’. Had I waited ten minutes, I would have changed my mind on whether that interpretation held up under scrutiny and not posted, but that particular bit of jackassery is not Milt’s.)
@Amoxtli: Gah! What a dope I was. I apologize, Milt Stevens, for getting the attribution wrong, and then compounding it with the baseless accusation regarding your possible intent in bringing it up.
The 1974 joke was told by Robert Whitaker Sirignano, who in the pre-puppy years was File 770’s most prolific commenter.
@rcade:
Thanks for pointing that out. I checked out the Jetpack report on File 770 for 2014: http://jetpack.me/annual-report/43944589/2014/
It’s going to be *very* interesting contrasting that to the report for 2015 …
@Darren Garrison:
Cases in point, the nitwit flakes mentioned in this article
Re: the article, in the same way that two wrongs don’t make a right, two failures of logic and perspective don’t make a coherent argument. (Which is unfortunate for a fair amount of British journalism.)
But in general, the person who errs and goes too far on the side of being polite to others is more commendable than the person who errs and goes too far on the side of being self-serving. They’re equally mistaken, but only one of them is behaving like an asshole. If only more people’s mistakes consisted of extending an excess of courtesy.
We roll pancakes around things?
@Jim Henley
Can I ask if you get off at around the same bus stop as Darren Garrison?
@Stuart M:
You can ask, but I can’t give you an informed answer. Darren’s views are his own and I haven’t made any effort to coordinate.
Hampus: We roll thin ones around things, on occasion. Not the thick ones that are my favoritest pancakes – I tend to think of crepes as something other than pancakes that happen to use the same batter, personally, but that may be an idiosyncrasy of mine.
I note that cultural authenticity and appropriation are issues in Man In The High Castle – issues to some of the characters, I mean.
@Hampus “Token Swede” Eckerman:
We roll pancakes around things?
The list of Swedish perversions is long and legendary.
IHOP 770: A wretched hive of scones and blini.
IHOP’s Swedish pancakes are a wretched hive.
@Jim Henley
Fair enough, it was more specifically a query of if coming to the same conclusion about the recent yoga ban at Ottawa Uni that he linked to, than all of his personal views on the subject.
@Bruce Baugh
Yes! Particularly one scene with some side characters. Very interesting considering the current discussions.
Bruce Baugh:
We do have flat pancakes, but when we roll them around things we call them crepes.
Judging from the comments I now see that we are blamed for another countries perversions. I will now retreat into my igloo together with my pet icebear to sulk.
@Stuart M:
recent yoga ban
[citation needed]
Swedish pancakes are absolutely best served as a wretched hive of layers, blueberry jam and whipped cream between each layer. Then whipped cream and strawberries in top.
Ultragotha: Æbleskivers! Alas, my Æbleskiver pan has gone missing. I like my Æbleskivers with a dusting of powdered sugar. And a tart apple filling, not too sweet. (And I’m just copying and pasting the ligature Æ which is why they’re all capitalized.)
Hampus: Not only do I sometimes roll Swedish pancakes around things as if they were crepes or blinis, my Swedish ancestor married my Norwegian ancestor! (Much to the dismay of both their families.) So it’s possible my family learned this perversion of the One True Pancake from the Norwegian [grin].
I will now retreat into my igloo together with my pet icebear to sulk.
That honestly sounds like the best way to spend an afternoon that I can think of.
But I also reserve the right to carefully look at something I said, decide I was right all along, and say “go screw yourself you nitwit flake.” Nobody is owed a right to not be offended.
And then they will consider you to be a dick. Is that your goal? To have people regard you as a dick?
Cally – I got my æbelskiver pan at a yard sale for $3. But here you go.
Also, lower case æsc just for you.
.
Filers outside the USA may not know we have a chain restaurant here called International House of Pancakes (IHOP). They serve American-style pancakes and other breakfast food mostly. But also French toast, crêpes with various sweet and savory fillings, crêpes with lingonberry jam and lingonberry butter they call Swedish pancakes, and Belgian-style waffles.
So, I’ve always wondered. *Is* it a French thing to dip stale bread in beaten eggs and fry it (French toast)?
*Do* Belgians usually make their waffles in round waffle irons?
How prevalent are Swedish-style crêpe-like pancakes in Sweden? I’ve had exactly one breakfast in Sweden—in the southernmost Youth Hostel in the country—but they didn’t serve pancakes.
And why don’t they also offer German pancakes or Æbleskivers? (OK, German pancakes take a while to bake so I can understand that one.)
What other International pancake-like things exist out there?
What other International pancake-like things exist out there?
The unromantic but highly informative answer is that Wikipedia actually has an extensive rundown of international pancake variation.
Regarding the cultural appropriation of Yoga – how I laughed at that when I read an article about it. Totally ridiculous when Yoga in itself is a cultural misappropriation.
What people exercise today, then they think they are doing Yoga, is the Scandinavian Model of Gymnastics as developed by Pehr Henrik Ling, father of the swedish gymnastics, in the 19th century. It became popular in the whole of Europe and from there travelled to India. The exercices by themselves aren’t part of any indian traditions, they were only apropriated and merged with older spiritual traditions.
I’d say that leaving the spiritual part out from Yoga is to go back to the roots of the exercises.
Cally:
You roll blinis? Aren’t they small for that?
I like my pancakes (American ones) with butter and more butter and lots of maple syrup (which can now be easily bought here, and I shall grow fat very soon for all the weekend breakfasts in celebration of this fact).
Crepes with butter, more butter, and cinnamon sugar. Also, Suzette, but that is more involved than I can usually do. Savory crepe dishes are yummy, but another category in my mind.
Sometimes I make flavored pancakes (thinner than American, more substantial than crepes), with apples, or cinnamon, or bacon and leeks in the batter. The latter are amazing with maple syrup.
Caught up, and found the food thread at last. And now I want breakfast, and it’s time to make dinner.
Somewhere in these hundreds of comments, people were praising Flora Segunda, and I’d really like to third or fifth that. They’re like something out of a treasure chest in an attic, if attics were all the things childhood stories tell you they’ll be.
Forgot to godstalk. Also, blueberry blintzes.
What other International pancake-like things exist out there?
Mochi waffles. They may just be a Hawaiian thing, because that’s the kind of food mashup Hawaii specializes in, and they’re amazing. Chewy, puffy, slightly crunchy, great with butter and any kind of fruit or fruit syrup. (Why did I not remember mocha waffles last night?)
eta: I also loved Flora Segunda. It’s like a lovely throwback to dime novels and also beautifully contemporary in its writing. I’ve the second one saved for a special occasion and I’m hoping it lives up to its predecessor.
I wish I hadn’t asked that. Now I’m craving all those different kinds of pancakes and I’m stuck here with a leftover stale Ikea cinnamon roll.
Gingerbread waffles with lemon sauce.
You can buy them frozen in stores and thats more or less it.
Pancakes is not a breakfast meal in sweden, it is more like a dessert or perhaps dinner replacement.
Lis Carey on November 24, 2015 at 11:39 pm said:
Chocolate. I want chocolate on my pancakes. It’s 7089, and they won’t let me have chocolate on my pancakes.
Not another dystopian future!
When chocolate is outlawed, only outlaws will have chocolate.
Though actually I’m something of a purist myself when it comes to pancakes, maple syrup and butter only, please.
Well, maybe the occasional butter and raspberry jam, if it is really Wild and Crazy Times
Fruit goes on the side – though why are you putting healthy fruit on pancakes?
And lemon juice is just weird.
ULTRAGOTHA: So, I’ve always wondered. *Is* it a French thing to dip stale bread in beaten eggs and fry it (French toast)?
I can’t give you an exact citation, but I found a recipe for what was essentially “French toast” in a medieval cookbook once upon a time–I can’t locate which cookbook offhand at the moment (might have been French; might not). I seem to remember that it was under the title “pain demain,” which is usually just a fine white bread–but it was clearly what a more modern diner would call French toast . . .
@Amoxtli
The subject of the yoga ban at Ottawa Uni is in the article that is in the quoted post below. You did respond to the same post, but may not have clicked it? It does represent one side which I think we can assume Darren agrees with.
NB: the Ottawa U “yoga ban” is not quite anything like you think it is.
Remember, if it feeds your personal sense of outrage too patly, it’s good to be skeptical.
Mary Frances-
There is a Colonial Massachusetts recipe that is basically baked French toast. Take half a loaf of bread (of whatever size standard New England loafs were in the 17th century) and slice it. Put it in a baking pan.
Mix 6 eggs, 6 cups of milk, 1 cup of sugar (I use demerara sugar and stir until it’s completely dissolved, it has better flavor than standard white sugar) and 1 Tablespoon of Rose Water. I also add 2 teaspoons of ground cardamom (not in original recipe).
Pour over the bread, let it sit until the bread is soaked through, then bake at 375f degrees until done in the middle.
I love this stuff. I’ll make a batch and take it for lunch all week. I do rip all the bread into small pieces, though. I like that better than slices.
I’d be interested in the citation for your medieval version if you can find it. I’ve poked around here and there to see if there was anything like this pre 1600. I’d love to take it to a medieval potluck some day.
@ULTRAGOTHA:
That sounds delicious, but surely it is bread pudding rather than French toast?
@Stuart M.
The subject of the yoga ban at Ottawa Uni is in the article that is in the quoted post below. You did respond to the same post, but may not have clicked it?
I certainly did read the article, and that’s how I know it didn’t mention a yoga ban. It said a few students brought up complaints about a single teacher, and then treated it like a ban so it could move on to such rhetorical heights as “next we can’t wear hilarious costumes based on ethnic stereotypes because liberals are legislating us back to the xenophobic dark ages”. I was questioning whether you read the article.
(A better citation would have been this one, which at least bothers to mention a class was cancelled. It still doesn’t give enough evidence for a ban, and draws some sketchy connections between the data points that are designed to imply more than the facts presented support. As per Lenora Rose’s link, all these articles are trying very hard to sell their papers with news about bans without putting direct factual evidence down, because they don’t have it. “Public service center suspends class for review, reasons disputed; university yoga classes continue” just doesn’t attract the same hype.)
Peace Is My Middle Name on November 25, 2015 at 10:34 am said:
You say toMAHto, I say toMAYto.
Yes, it’s bread pudding. But I’ve always classed bread pudding as basically baked french toast.
@Lenora Rose: Thanks for the link. To be fair, that blog post does say, “South Asian activists have been saying for years that western yoga is based in cultural appropriation (and if you’re interested on learning why, you should just google it, there is plenty out there written by actual south Asian people and I won’t try to speak for them).” It’s a thing that happens. I’ve personally see Twitter friends bring it up.
@Stuart M: Thanks for the clarification. My feelings about cultural appropriation are pretty tangled. On the one hand, cultural exchange is just what civilization does. People over here see people over there doing a thing, and decide it’s cool, so they start doing it. On the other hand, some groups of people have historically been oppressed and other groups of people have historically oppressed them. So the wrongness of blackface minstrelsy seems like an easy call. And whether or not you assign blame to the members of the Rolling Stones, releasing their version of “Time Is On My Side” when they did probably cost Irma Thomas a whole lot of money. (Per Bonnie Raitt in concert one time, Thomas’s version was climbing the charts until the Stones’ version came out.) One has to reckon with that. But by some lights it was cultural appropriation, e.g., for white British kids to get so into Ska they started forming bands (including biracial bands), and I think that people are just inevitably going to pursue their enthusiasms.
I haven’t got it all sorted out in my head. My personal line puts Westerners doing yoga on the “might as well” side. There’s no Irma Thomas whose pocket is being picked, for one thing. But I think it’s also incumbent upon us to fight oppression, so as to minimize the extent of cultural exchange that amounts to piracy.
Sound like a variant on Bread and Butter pudding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_butter_pudding
The raisins are the best bit….
NO! No raisins!
>shudder<
ULTRAGOTHA said:
Heresy? I’ve only ever had æbelskiver with powdered sugar topping. Where did this applesauce come from?
Now, fillings can vary. A chunk of tart apple is traditional, but the family recipe also allows them to be made filling-less and then have jam or butter added just before eating.
(And, to assuage your cut-and-paste misery: the escape sequence is æ/Æ to get æ/Æ . Which is heck to proofread. Sorry about all the edits.)
Or for another example, Northern Soul.