(1) A postcard from the Baen beachhead at Dragon Con.
This #dragoncon photo goes out to my fiends at File770: pic.twitter.com/78ejOGHsRS
— Ray Radlein (@Radlein) September 5, 2015
(2) The Stanley Hotel in Colorado inspired Stephen King’s novel The Shining, a connection the hotel’s operators have used to market the resort for years.
But unlike King’s fictional Overlook it never had a hedge maze – until this summer when the owner had one built to placate his customers.
Missing from the experience, however, has been the hedge maze that Mr. Kubrick used as the setting for the film’s climax….
At a colleague’s suggestion, Mr. Cullen [the owner] opted to hold a contest for the design, a move that amplified the public-relations potential. A panel of judges received 329 entries from around the world, and the winner was a New York architect named Mairim Dallaryan Standing.
Mr. Cullen chose to form the maze from juniper trees that grow to just three feet high, making the Stanley’s maze far less imposing than the 13-foot labyrinth in the Kubrick film. Mr. Cullen said he was concerned about losing children in the maze.
This summer, that decision has caused some disappointment….
The owner of the real hotel builds a maze to please King fans, who then are not pleased because it doesn’t match the source. How fannish is that?
(3) John O’Halloran’s Sasquan photo album – mainly the Hugo ceremony.
(4) Lou Antonelli on Facebook
I’m going to write an alternate history set in a world where cloning was perfected in the 1920s and by the beginning of the television era in the 1950s entertainers are able to license copies of themselves for live performances.
The clones of bigger stars are more expensive than the clones of lesser ones. One man has to settle for a Teresa Brewer clone, but he bemoans the fact that he couldn’t afford a clone of the star he REALLY wanted.
The story will be called…
“If You Were a Dinah Shore, My Love.”
(5) The works of Karel Capek are being celebrated at a festival in Washington D.C. Celia Wren penned an overview in the Washington Post.
Prepare for rebellious automatons, a 300-year-old opera singer, and a pack of newts taking a page from Ira Glass. These and other inventions will unfold locally this fall courtesy of the Czech writer Karel Capek (1890-1938), with help from other artists.
Capek is the focus of the Mutual Inspirations Festival 2015, led by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and offering films, theater pieces, lectures, art exhibits, and — for children — a Lego Robotics Workshop. Now in its sixth year, the festival pays tribute to an influential Czech figure, such as Antonin Dvorak (2011), Vaclav Havel (2013) or Franz Kafka (2014).
The Mutual Inspirations website has complete details.
Running from September 3-November 21, 2015, the festival highlights events at select venues in the Washington area, such as the Kennedy Center, the Gonda Theatre in the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University, the Avalon Theatre, and Bistro Bohem. Highlights of this year’s festival include a jazz-age evening of music and dance, theatrical readings of the new work R.U.R.: A Retro-Futuristic Musical, the world premiere of War with the Newts adapted by Natsu Onoda Power, a robotics demonstration and lecture with Czech robotics expert Vladimir Ma?ík, a panel discussion on R.U.R. and the Rationalized World, and a Lego Robotics Workshop for children facilitated by the Great Adventure Lab. Additional noted speakers include Templeton Prize-winner Tomáš Halík, art historian Otto Urban, and theatre/ interactive media arts scholar Jana Horaková. The festival incorporates a variety of events, including theatrical performances, film screenings, a concert, lectures, and exhibitions. With over 30,000 people attending the festival over the last three years, the festival strives to reach a wide audience through its vibrant programming.
(6 George R.R. Martin, in “Awards, Awards, and More Awards”, encourages the Puppies who are talking about starting an award of their own.
He discusses how many different awards there are in the field and includes lots of pictures – which is easy because George has won most of them.
A great many of the awards discussed above were started precisely because the people behind them felt someone was being overlooked by the Hugos and/ or other existing awards, and wanted to give an “attaboy” to work they cherished.
There is no reason the Sad Puppies should not do the same. Give them at Dragoncon, give them at Libertycon… or, hell, give them at worldcon, if you want. Most worldcons will give you a hall for the presentation, I’m sure, just as they do for the Prometheus Awards and the Seiuns. Or you can rent your own venue off-site, as I did with the Alfies. Have a party. No booing, just cheers. Give handsome trophies to those you think deserve it. Spread joy.
That’s what awards are supposed to be about, after all. Giving some joy back to the writers and editors and artists who have given you so much joy with their work. Celebration.
Since RAH is already taken by the Heinlein Foundation for its own award, maybe you should call them the Jims, to honor Jim Baen, an editor and publisher that I know many of you admire. If you launch a Kickstarter to have a bust of him sculpted for the trophy, I’ll be glad to contribute. (It may surprise you to know that while Jim Baen and I were very far apart politically, we shared many a meal together, and he published a half dozen of my books. Liberals and conservatives CAN get along, and usually did, in fandom of yore).
(7) Kevin Standlee philosophizes about the relationship between a stable, democratically-run society and good sportsmanship.
A prerequisite of a stable democratic society is being a good loser.
If your definition of “democracy” boils down to “I get what I personally want or else the entire process is wrong and corrupt,” then you have reduced yourself to the spoiled child who throws a tantrum and overturns the table when s/he loses at a board game.
Could it be that our society’s over-emphasis at “win at any cost” and “second place is the first loser,” and a complete de-emphasis on learning how to be graceful in defeat is undermining the entire democratic process? After all, if you’ve been conditioned to think that Winning Is The Only Thing and that losing gracefully is for suckers and wimps, how can you possibly live with yourself when your “side” loses a political election, even if the process was demonstratively fair? In such a situation, you almost naturally are doing to insist that the process itself is wrong, because you’ve built up a self-image that requires you to win.
I’m also worried that we’ve overly emphasized not hurting people’s feelings when they are young by pretending that they can never lose. When they reach the real world where not every corner is padded for them, they can’t handle anything other than “I showed up, so I need to win.” I admit that possibly I’m just being old and crotchety about Those Darn Kids.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m disappointed that Popular Ratification, into which I invested a lot of myself, lost at the ratification stage. But I can see that the process was fair, and I neither consider myself a moral failure because my cause lost nor do I consider the entire WSFS legislative process invalid because I got outvoted. I get the feeling, however, that a whole lot of people out there can’t live with the concept of losing.
(8) Didact doesn’t care.
I really can’t make it any clearer than that, unless the good people over at File770 want me to break out a pack of crayons and draw them a picture. And I don’t speak any dialect of dipsh*t, so even that probably won’t help.
Didact, Vile Faceless Minion #0309, repeats:
WE DON’T CARE whether or not our nominees won awards. Not this year, not next year, and not in any other year. It matters not the minutest quantum of a damn for us. As far as I, personally, am concerned, the Hugo Awards have lost their point and purpose and need to be torn down and replaced wholesale.
I don’t know why I have such a hard time getting it through my thick skull that they don’t care. Really. It’s just embarrassing. As many times they’ve been forced to repeat this. Think of all the time they could spend on something they do care about if only I would just get it. All my fault. My bad. So sorry.
(9) And dammit, Jonathan M has uncovered another of this blog’s deepest secrets.
https://twitter.com/ApeInWinter/status/640547743925186561
(9) Great photos from a vintage computer exhibit.
(10) Megan Guess at Ars Technica – “I watched Star Trek: The Original Series in order; and so can you. Or, Filling the gaps in your cultural knowledge is equal parts boring and fun”
At the beginning, this is how I approached The Original Series. Despite how much everyone wants to talk about Star Trek‘s progressiveness in 1966, you can tell just by a quick glance at the costuming that womankind is not going to be treated as equal, with all the rights and responsibilities pertaining thereto.
But around the end of season one, I couldn’t help but become a little bit invested in the world of the Federation. I was always happy when Lieutenant Uhura was given real lines in an episode, because she was just what you’d want in a starship officer of the future—brave and serious, but with a human side, too. Nurse Chapel was also welcome—she had gravitas without being robotic and cold.
Of course, for every Uhura or Chapel there was the endless supply of one-off Kirk foils planted on every strange new world, waiting for a strong-jawed spaceman to rescue them. Sometimes they were decent characters, like Edith Keeler in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” one of The Original Series’ most famous episodes. In it, Kirk and Spock end up in the 1930s and a depression-era charity worker—Keeler, portrayed by Joan freaking Collins—preaches futurism to a group of unenlightened hobos. (And then Kirk falls in love with her. Because of course.) Other characters were worse—you need only search “Women Star Trek Original Series” to find the lists of the show’s hottest, most vacant babes.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Mark and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day James H. Burns.]
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From the article linked by JJ:
Wow, Chuck, tell us what you really think. (I, for one, welcome our rainbow Nyan Cat overlords.)
Have you read “Dies the Fire” by S.M. Stirling? It’s the first book in his ‘Emberverse’ series, which is up into the third generation of survivors. I love the entire series, but I cannot bring myself to re-read that first book, because it is just so … so apocalyptic.
The conceit is that Alien Space Bats decide to change the physics of our universe just enough that electricity and gunpowder don’t work. Suddenly, the only weapons you can use are muscle-powered. So 99.99% of the human race dies out because, well. Imagine the LA basin with no electricity, no internal combustion engines, no guns. So, the water doesn’t come out of the taps.
For the same reason, as much as I love Pournelle, I’ve never been able to re-read ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’.
@TheYoungPretender
It’s a great place for city people like oneself to watch the cycle. Afterwards, you can go enjoy a corn dog or deep fried cheese curds.
Sure you can.
Predictions: how far into the future will we have to go before mikes pixel scroll leads with “no puppy related drama today”
If we discover intelligent alien life some of you will blog about how that just shows that this Hugo fight is now more important. We dont want our new friends reading crap SF.
Sorry I am now ambushed by memories of all the stories that I found so bleak that I wish I could scrub them from my memory, and one of them I actually translated, from George Alec Effinger, called, I believe, One. But God knows Effinger had earned his right to be bleak…
In response to JJ:
That’s pretty much it. Literally, it says Martin is “explaining, with examples, that what the Puppies are baying is not true.” As for the puzzling “stink mark,” this actually seems to be an indicator of anger rather than smell – if you do a Google image search for punpun mark (or rather, for the kana equivalent, which I don’t seem to be able to paste in here) that’s clear from the kind of emoji it turns up.
“but I cannot bring myself to re-read that first book, because it is just so … so apocalyptic.”
re “Dies the Fire”
Not that I ever re-read most things, this class of books least of all, but I found this first one by far the best of the series. It is in fact the …apocalyptic…. things few writers go into that makes it interesting.
I’m going to ignore the first part since Mixon is hardly the only one making the argument (and forgetting that contributes to the erasure of RH/WF/BS’ targets) but I’m also unsure how the community’s behavior has been inappropriate. I’m at a best a fledging member of the community, but the behavior seems mixed, including apologists for RH/WF/BS, people accepted her initial apologies and haven’t looked back, people who thought he initial policy was insufficient, people who won’t work with her anymore, people who will, and people who still have no idea who RH/WF/BS is. I’m also sure she received rape and death threats since the Puppies and other assholes exist.
Apologizing for RH/WF/BS I find unacceptable–it merely enables an abuser, erases her targets, and condones her continuing abuse.*
Rape and death threats are likewise, unacceptable. They were wrong when RH/WF/BS did them; they are wrong when they are done to her.
Both behaviors also seem marginal. There is a whole range of other responses the community has had, most of which are acceptable even if I may lean in one direction (namely, no tolerance to abusers unless they change–and even then, maybe not).
Furthermore RH/WF/BS was hardly the only voice pushing for diversity–in fact, it seems she worked against it–and Puppies aside, most people seem interested in opening sci-fi to new voices from all sorts of backgrounds. So I’m not even sure the fear that people would no longer pay attention to social justice, etc. holds much weight.
I have no idea what people mean when they disapprove of the community’s behavior. It’s been varied and it’s largely been entirely appropriate. It’s hard not to think, especially given their imprecision, it’s simply support for RH/WF/BS and, at least tacitly, abuse.
*I’ve only looked at her twitter posts so maybe threats of continuing abuse is more apt.
Wishlisted. YA don’t bother me, and it sounds cool.
Except for the password scene at the speakeasy. Whenever I’m prompted for a new password, my first thought is “5w0rdf15h”. (But I never use it as that would be too easy.) It did give us the title of the Hugh Jackman hacker movie, didn’t it?
I loved that the big football game was between Darwin and Huxley. They must have had a falling out that I didn’t read about.
Okay, side point, which matters only to me and Anna: when did I have the chance to meet you in person? I will regret missing that forever. When were we in the same vicinity? I have recollections of you being on the other side of the continent, but never really close to where I was. And the closest I have been to where you are is a hellish night in Heathrow on my way to Prague in the winter.
TechGrrl:
I started it with great interest, but found I just bounced, hard, off the writing; to my ear it was clunky and wooden to the point that I just couldn’t get into the book.
So I gave it to my brother in law who loved it and has now read all the others.
“George Alec Effinger”
Dang ! I forgot him ! I had all his stuff, and then out like a light.
He even had a computer game in the early days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit%27s_Edge
I actually played this. Was pretty good mystery game IIRC.
He wouldn’t have been an SJW type, exactly, but he had a lot of pushing the envelope things in there, even for an underworld romance.
@JJ/Dawn Incognito
Okay, that’s a special level of kerfluffle. Wendig also started “I stand with Irene” so he’s two for two on great internet responses.
(Nyan cat is, in all modesty, one of the rainbow-est cats …)
@Guess:
It is our coarse sensibilities, for sure. But if our foibles serve to make you feel better about yourself by comparison, our efforts ain’t been in vain for nothin’.
James Morrow’s This Is the Way the World Ends, as well
I’ve said my piece about what I think is the important thing to draw from Erin’s tweets, and I don’t think I want to get into the Sriduangkaew debate any more today. (ETA: After the Hoyt post my nerves/temper is a bit too frayed.) I’m this |–| close to throwing a food subject out there as a distraction.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
The number of things automatically warned for is quite small (my own Must Avoid is sometimes included but not always), but once you’re aware of a specific trigger it’s usually easiest to crowdsource your warnings or ask a trusted friend familiar with what you can and can’t cope with.
The EU fans getting all worked up seem to be forgetting that Lucasfilm have considered the novels canon until a movie or TV show contradicts it for the longest time. Like in the Zahn trilogy there’s a depiction of the Clone Wars that bears no resemblance to the actual movies – even though Lucas took the name Coruscant for the capital world of the Empire/Republic.
Did Tuomas just admit that this whole thing is just because Worldcon members have opinions he disagrees with about who gets awards?
What’s the over-under? Finally achieving knowledge or Freudian slip?
Meredith, here’s a random food topic: most of that all I have been eating for the last three weeks is tomato sandwich/tomato salad, because I have a connection to the cullings from a local farm. Some are dry-farmed Early Girls (a local specialty) and others are heirlooms.
This is a great consolation to me, as I was unable to find my preferred tomato starts (Paul Robeson) this spring, and the Black Krims I planted were replaced by feral cherry tomatoes, which are okay, but not as nice as the others, which grow really well in my yard.
Also on the subject of tomatoes: I read an article about the “best tomato sauce ever” today and it was so complicated I thought it was going to make most of its readers swear off making it forever. Really it’s okay to just cook some tomatoes!
@Maximillian
Oh, did Tuomas’ post get out of moderation? I’ll go find it.
… Okay, so, Tuomas wants evidence that Hugo voters don’t have preferences? Er? Of course Hugo voters have preferences, they’re people, all people have preferences.
Ugh, I can’t believe people are defending RH/BS. If she and VD/TB were both drowning and I could only save one of them… I’d be looking for a drowning dog to save.
OMG – those pictures of the vintage machines is a chase down memory lane.
My first experience at programming was on a remote time-share to a DEC pdp-10
Soon after that I started playing with FORTRAN on an IBM 7090. My high school got a DEC pdp-8/i, which I promptly took custody of, and the electronics department head was happy to have someone who was interested in getting the thing to keep working, even if it was a snot-nosed student 🙂
In college it was a Xerox XDS machine for general computing, and all 20 of us CS majors played with the venerable DDP 24 from CCC (Computer Controls Corp) and a pdp-8/s (it was a serial processor, and yes, at times you would see the bits stumble across the accumulator display) .
After school days I went back to work, and was wrangling Big Iron from Big Blue, starting with IBM 360 and 370 processors. One company I worked for tasked me to write code for their TRS-80 to be able to interchange data between the TRS and the mainframe, then somehow I wound up being the PC admin at a number of companies that were primarily mainframe shops
I didn’t actually own my own machines until I got myself a Commodore 64 an then was elected head of the 8-bit computer group. Strange. Then the new spouse and I used some of our wedding monies to buy our first PC clone with 4MB RAM (we elected to pay extra and upgrade to the 40 MB hard drive). Which got replaced by a couple of successive IBM Aptivas. Since then Dells, HP boxes and even one Gateway.
.
But the IBM mainframes will always hold my heart.
Favourite or recently discovered tomato-related dish/recipe, everyone?
Lately I’ve been doing a lazy pasta sauce which can be summed up as:
“Heat through preferred flavourings/vegetables/aromatics, add chopped tomatoes and heat through, add cooked pasta, serve.”
I usually go with onion/garlic/anchovies/capers, because lazy sort-of puttanesca is delicious. 🙂 I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite way to eat tomatoes, but it is nice.
@Lucy Kemnitzer
(Pretend this came first) Tomatoes eh? Tomatoes I can do.
@Kathodus
I don’t think either of them deserve to die.
It seems to me that the more “Benjanun Sriduangkaew” denounces her supposedly nefarious enemies, the more the reformed hate-peddler sounds like the old hate-peddler.
As for her fiction, it seems to me to be a pretentious mess, with mixed metaphors clogging up its arteries, filled with the same, rancid, murderous hatreds that RequiresHate specialized in.
@Kurt Empty America? John Birmingham’s trilogy that starts with Without Warning.
buwaya–
United States Naval Operations in World War II (15 volumes) Samuel Eliot Morison (though he was the editor for much of it) – This is the Iliad of modern industrial war, one of the finest pieces of prose ever to come out of the United States. Still in print!
If one doesn’t have time to read fifteen volumes, Morison also has a pared down version called The Two-Ocean War, which is equally delightful.
Anna: sympathies on the overdose of gloom. My current prescription /antidote would be some Martha Wells. What, exactly, depends on what you have and haven’t read. Wheel of the Infinite, maybe, or the Raksura books.
Lucy Kemnitzer
It is blindingly obvious that it isn’t up to you to decide whether or not your perceived needs of your perceived community override the suffering of individuals, and yet you assert that:
Which community is this? Where is it located? Who makes up the community? Who judges whether actions constitute behaving badly? Why haven’t you even identified these blindingly obvious questions, all of which have to be answered before anyone can even begin to take a view on your claim, much less answer them?
Since you decline to support your claim in any way I’ll try to answer those blindingly obvious questions for a specific community and a specific event; the membership of Loncon last year. Under the guise of being a sweet and caring individual newly come to the genre, as opposed to her genuine history of over a decade of deliberate destruction of anything she could destroy, BS set out to destroy the careers and quite possibly the lives of people who dared to disagree with her, and she would still be doing it on an industrial scale had Laura not given up a great deal of her time to reach out to the people BS was intent on destroying.
Anna has already provided a summary of the people BS and her cronies tried to destroy at Loncon itself; just reading it is stomach turning, and I can only imagine how dreadful experiencing it must have been. The profoundly racist belief that all brown people are interchangeable was what drove BS and her cronies into attempting to force Rochita to write a critical review of Tricia Sullivan’s book; when she very honourably refused to do so, on the grounds that she had no idea of whether the book was factually correct, she was immediately classed as an enemy.
They went after her with every dirty trick in the book; but she stood firm. I greatly admire her, and her fellow heros, fighting the good fight at Loncon.
That’s a real community, as opposed to Lucy’s imaginary one; perhaps it might help if Lucy did some thinking before opining…
buwaya on September 7, 2015 at 1:28 pm said:
Emerson!
Am I the only one here who programmed an RCA Spectra 70? It was an IBM 360 knockoff, assembly-code compatible, maybe even machine-code compatible. I don’t remember for sure; I was taking a course in assembly language programming, and the textbook we were using was targeted at the 360. 1970 or 1971: my school had keypunch machines, and our card decks would get shuttled to the other school in the consortium, where the computer was located, and usually the next day we would get back decks and paper output. With this kind of turnaround, one gets even more careful with syntax.
L.B. –
“If one doesn’t have time to read fifteen volumes, Morison also has a pared down version called The Two-Ocean War, which is equally delightful.”
Also highly recommended, thank you.
It does have the effect of leaving one hungry for more.
As far as apocalyptic, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Charles Pellegrino & George Zebrowski’s Killing Star, which begins with a relativistic attack that wipes out about 99.9999% of humanity within the first chapter.
As for the Star Wars EU, I understand why people are upset (and for myself, I wish they would’ve at least kept the KotOR-era stuff as canon), but I also understand why they felt they needed to do it — I think the EU was already in danger of collapsing under its own weight, and it would’ve been … challenging, at best, to try to shoehorn a new movie trilogy into the existing EU continuity. (Don’t believe me? Check the timeline in one of those now-Legends books.)
My hope, FWIW (which is not much, of course), is that as they put together the new timeline, they resist the urge to have Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie personally involved in every single major event across the entire galaxy for the full 30 years between VI and VII.
I was one of the people only vaguely aware of Requires Hate, and not at all of Winterfox. (To give me what little credit I am due, I am very bad with names, and we didn’t appear to ever cross paths directly.)
I can’t say whether or not the Mixon report could be better–I know *I* sure as hell couldn’t have done it any better. Maybe someone else could have, but Mixon was the one who did it, (and another person ran an exhaustive running log, I think, that got taken down awhile ago?) and I think it very much needed to be done.
The reason I feel strongly that it needed to be done is because the testimony of at least one victim who said “After awhile, when you’re being told you’re a terrible person, day after day, you start to wonder if you really are and just never noticed.”
It is the nature of abusers to isolate their victims. That’s how they work. And something like the Mixon report, whatever flaws people might feel it had, stands there and says “You are not alone. She did this to a lot of other people. You didn’t deserve this.”
I don’t know if people who were victims before have felt better knowing that they weren’t the only people singled out. I hope they have. If there are more victims, though–and while I do strongly believe people CAN change, in practice I find that so few ever actually do–they’ll be able to find the Mixon report and go “Oh. I’m not alone. This is a known pattern of behavior. I’m not a horrible person, I’m just the latest in a line.”
That is important. Nobody should get cut off from the community and told they’re terrible and have nowhere to turn. Isolation is among the worst weapons of abuse and it’s the one that, on the internet at least, the community has some chance of stopping.
This is a ridiculous excuse for a recipe: slice the tomatoes unless they’re too small to slice, in which case you chop them. Put an amount of mayonnaise on the bread you like best at the moment. Put the tomatoes and their escaped juice bits on the bread: there should be at least as much volume of tomatoes as bread. Kind of smash it together and eat. When it falls apart, eat the bits.
Variations: add some amount of cheese and/or lettuce and/or cucumber. Or some kind of meat thing.
Cucumbers did not grow at all in my yard. They are my second favorite summer food.
@alexvdl – Do you remember anything about it? My first machine was an Amiga 500 and I played RPGs until the mouse ball was the color of a coal ash pit.
@Lucy Kemnitzer
I’d throw in a pinch of basil, or maybe cumin and black pepper. Some spring onions/scallions add a nice touch of sharpness.
Again re: Star Wars EU, I feel most sorry for the authors like Martha Wells and James S.A. Corey who were recruited into the fold right before the plug got pulled; I hope they get contracted to write in the new continuity.
Looks a little techno-thriller-y/international for me, but I’ll check it out…
Yes, all we have to do to convince Tuomas that there isn’t an SJW conspiracy to deprive conservatives of Hugo Awards is to prove that people who make the effort to vote on awards don’t have preferences. Seems legit.
@TooManyJens
Sounds like an HG Wells fanfic:
The Man Without Preferences
1970 or 1971: my school had keypunch machines,
I was learning on a 360/20 at the time, with all of 24k of RAM. And real keypunches. The software was on cards, so dropping a deck was a Really Bad Idea.
Later I went to a school with a PDP-10 running RSTS and a CDC machine. I did a lot of the homework on Frisbie’s LSI-11: faster and I was guaranteed the output wouldn’t walk off.
@Meredith, re: tomato recipes
I’m eating gazpacho right now, but my favorite simple tomato recipe is one that I think originates with Marcella Hazan, and it’s for tomato sauce:
1 large can of tomatoes (28 oz/800 grams) (preferably whole, but I’ve done this with diced)
1 medium yellow onion
5 T/70grams butter (unsalted if your tomatoes came salted, but I’ve made this with salted butter and liked it)
Slice the onion into two halves, and put them both in a pot with the butter and the tomatoes. Bring to a simmer, and then simmer on medium-low heat for about 35 minutes, occasionally stirring/breaking up the tomatoes with a spoon.
At the end, remove the onion halves, add salt or pepper to taste, and if you like, use an immersion blender to smooth things up.
If you prefer, add a drizzle of red wine vinegar right at the beginning; or put in a hot pepper, split in half, to make it closer to an arrabbiata (and remove the pepper at the end).
It is delicious, and easy to make, even when one has very few spoons to cope with cooking. I particularly like the fact that I don’t have to deal with chopping onion into fine bits that make my eyes water.
ETA: oh, and if you’re using fresh tomatoes, then just blanche them and peel them first, and then repeat with the rest.
One thing I’ve been missing in the past couple of decades is apocalyptic inventiveness. In the mid-20th century we had things like Triffids and “No Blade of Grass”. And those were the good ones — there were a LOT of others, many that were way on the wrong side of Sturgeon’s Law.
John Creasey had a couple of series that were sort of ‘British Men in Black prevent this week’s apocalypse’, where the success condition seemed to be preventing the death of more than 10% of the global human population from any given threat. By the time I finished reading a handful of them that showed up in my local public library in the 70s, I was wondering how they still had enough global population later in the series to keep the economies and industries running. I suppose it was a Zeno’s paradox thing…
Most of the writers in that wave of apocalypses seemed to be British so I’ve sometimes suspected it had some psychological relationship to the end of the empire during a time that was fairly prosperous for ordinary people. American pulp fiction in the same period worried about nukes but seemed less uneasy about the underpinnings of things falling apart in unexpected ways.
I suppose recent writers have not felt the need for anything so peculiar in the way of causes to explain their apocalypses and YA dystopias.
@SocialInjusticeWorrier:
Don’t you mean Robert Musil fanfic?
@Lucy Kemnitzer
I am not sure the world is ready for a Robert Musil fanfic.
Come to think of it, I could see Stefan Zweig writing a short story about The Man Without Preferences.
I’m trying to figure out why I’d vote on an award if I had no preference who won.
Like…I didn’t care about American Idol, so does that mean I should be the person doing the voting under the Tuomas System?
Seems awfully counterproductive.
I can never finish my Musil fanfic. 🙁
@Kurt The best way I can describe that trilogy is “revenge tragedy”. Quite Shakesperian, really.
@Joe H. Yes! to that last comment about the SW EU books. Despite being a huge OT fan, the EU never did much for me, yet I enjoyed the Wells and Corey books. It didn’t hurt to find out that Wells was a fanfic writer in the H/L vein back in the day either. The new Wendig book worked for me, too. And this despite barely glancing on my favorite characters, or not being a huge fan of Wendig’s style.
Oh, hi. Am I delurking here? Guess so. Hello all.