Out Of Ambit

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Out of Ambit

Saturday, October 11, 2003

We made "Variety"...
However fleetingly. (Yes, it's probably "premium content..." ...sorry.) (We also made the Hollywood Reporter, in the October 3 issue, but that too is premium content, and I won't bother linking to it.) From a report on Mipcom, which started today in Cannes:

"Mexico's Televisa is fielding its latest telenovela, "Dark Fate"; Canada's Chum is pushing reality show "The Morning After"; Germany's Tandem is touting its Siegfried saga, "The Ring"; Oz's Southern Star is highlighting its comedy "The Sleepover Club"; and Indian sellers like Star TV will be pushing Hindi movies."

posted by Diane: 14:42 | link to this post

Today's weird writer story
"The novelist DBC Pierre, the smart bet for next week's Man Booker Prize, "last night confessed to betraying and fleecing his friends in a manner that even Byron would have blanched at.

"The reformed drug addict and gambler admitted to selling his best friend's home and pocketing the proceeds as well as working up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scheme to find Montezuma's gold in Mexico. "

posted by Diane: 11:59 | link to this post

Friday, October 10, 2003

Hey, the "Young Wizards" books have their own page on Amazon.com!
Neat!

...Now if only I were clear about exactly how people are supposed to find it. I stumbled over it just now while looking for something else....

Aha, got it sorted. From their main page, click on the "Books" tab, then look down the navigation menu on the left: under "Your Favorites", click on "Teens." The link comes up about halfway down the ensuing page.

posted by Diane: 12:48 | link to this post

"..but words can never hurt me"...? Maybe not...
In the Guardian this morning: "The pain of rejection is more than mere metaphor. A team of scientists have found that to the brain, a social snub is just like stubbing a toe.

"Brain scans carried out on volunteers showed that when they suffered a social snub, the brain's 'pain centre' went into overdrive. The finding suggests that any emotional stress, such as the demise of a relationship or the loss of a loved one, might be far more closely linked to real pain than previously thought."

posted by Diane: 08:12 | link to this post

Thursday, October 09, 2003

Do you remember this lamp?...
Now you can buy it.

It comes with a Major Award certificate. And a box labeled FRA GI LE. ("Probably it's Italian...")

Dear heavens above, how am I going to keep Peter from trying to buy this thing? A Christmas Story is absolutely one of his favorite movies (probably just about tied with The War Lord and Victor, Victoria).

I'm going to hide all the credit cards now.

posted by Diane: 10:11 | link to this post

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

"The White Cat"
No, not the fairy tale by Comtesse d'Aulnoy (though that's on my mind at the minute too). This White Cat is the subject of one of the most famous old Irish poems, found written in the margins of a Latin manuscript copy which its author, an Irish monk, had been writing in a central European scriptorium during the eighth century. (The original manuscript is now in the Stadtsbibliothek in St. Gallen, in the northeastern part of Switzerland, near where it was written.)

Pangur Ban, "[My] White Cat", is the title of the poem in Irish Gaelic. It's just turned up in a collection of best-loved Irish-language poems, "The Great Book of Gaelic" or "An leabhar mòr", published online by Archipelago. The poems in the collection were selected by a group of Irish and Scottish poets, each of whom nominated a poem and a favorite translation: some of the links on the "Great Book" page have sound as well, so you can hear the poem in question being read as Gaeilge.

(Incidentally, there's a downloadable .PDF version of the whole journal here, if you're interested.

(Thanks to Languagehat for the link.)

posted by Diane: 12:45 | link to this post

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

The World as a Blog
I love this idea.

posted by Diane: 21:31 | link to this post

Sunday, October 05, 2003

I've always loved Tom Baker...now I know why
With me, he's always been tied with Peter Davidson as Best Doctor -- PD for a Doctor who radiates compassion, TB for one who is a child in an adult's body, relentlessly funny but also essentially serious. ...Not to mention the scarf. I crocheted that scarf once. Only once. In any case, I favored the Baker Doctor enough that he turned up once in a place he very much shouldn't have been, in my prose...well, bearing in mind some other writers' problems in this direction, perhaps the less said the better.

However, something else has come up (as we say). UK and Irish TV-watchers know Tom Baker's as a voice which turns up doing all kinds of commercial work.

Here are some outtakes from a recent recording session. Says Warren Ellis, that amazing creature, "Tom Baker is legendarily somewhat conflicted about doing voiceovers for ****ty-product advertising. " (Sorry for the asterisking, but younger readers do pass through here.)

...Uh, no kidding. Warning: the linked .MP3 is not suitable for people who have trouble with the F word. Or hearing a voice like that of a slightly renegade or cranked-off Deity pronouncing it.

Thank you, Warren...

posted by Diane: 21:35 | link to this post

A beef stew kind of day
Autumnal weather is swinging through Ireland: the northwest wind is blowing, and the temperatures have dropped hard from the Indian-summer range we've been experiencing for the past couple of weeks. Last night was the first frost. So today there's a fire in the fireplace, and the beef stew recipe below (properly, it's a daube) is on the stove.

The recipe dates back to a time early in the last decade when I stumbled into that mysterious and useful French information system, Minitel. What brought me to the National Tripe Butchers' site, I have no idea. But there I found two super things: a recipe for heart with garlic and red wine that produces the only genuinely delicious -- indeed, the only genuinely edible -- beef heart I've ever had (three days' marinating in that harsh red wine and some balsamic vinegar seems to do the trick; when Queen Prezmyra says "O, I could eat their hearts with garlic!", that was the recipe she had in mind...), and this recipe.

I translated it, installed it in my copy of Meal Master, and set it loose on the Net some time back in MM format, posting it (I think) to rec.food.cooking. Then various disk crashes and restores caused my various MM databases to become less than complete, and the recipe went missing. Today, though, I went hunting for it and found it (stripped of all attributions) at Chef2Chef. No matter: I recognize my own recipe-writing style, and at least I found the thing again...

So here it is, restored to MM format.
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
 
      Title: Shin of Beef Stewed in Red Wine
 Categories: Beef, French, Meat, Stew
      Yield: 6 Servings
 
      6 oz Smoked bacon or salt pork
      1 ea Large onion
      1 tb Olive oil
      5 lb Shin beef off the bone
      2 ea Cloves garlic
      1 ea Bouquet garni
      8 oz Red wine (or more)
      1 ts Salt
      8 oz Beef stock or water
 
  Cut the bacon or salt pork into small cubes and put them, with a
  tablespoon of olive oil, into a heavy and fairly wide iron or
  earthenware pot. When the bacon fat runs, add a large sliced onion
  and stir about until slightly brown. On top, arrange the shin of
  beef, off the bone, into thick pieces. Add the cloves of garlic,
  crushed but not chopped, and the bouquet garni (either one of the
  "instant" ones, or a small bunch of parsley, thyme and bayleaf, tied
  up with a string). Pour in a large glass of red wine (about 8 oz) and
  let all come to a fast boil for 4-5 minutes. Add about the same
  amount of beef stock or water, and allow to boil again. Add salt. .
  Cover the pot with paper or foil and a well-fitting lid. Transfer to
  a very slow oven, 290 degrees F or gas mark 1, and in about 3 hours
  it will be cooked. Or you can half-cook it one day, remove it, and
  finish it the next. Serve with potatoes or rice to soak up the sauce.
  (Egg noodles also work well if you thicken the sauce slightly.) This
  dish can also be simmered *very* slowly on top of the stove.
 
MMMMM
This is a recipe for which the French verb mijoter was invented:
that lowest simmer, at which the surface of the steaming liquid merely trembles and only the very, very occasional bubble rises to trouble it. After three hours, the meat has reached a tenderness that still has texture. But for this you also have to have shin beef, which can stand up to the long cooking. If your butcher can't get you shin beef for this, find a butcher who can. It's not worth it otherwise.

posted by Diane: 15:24 | link to this post

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I write for a living. That being the case, sometimes I want to talk about anything but writing (at least, writing per se). This is where that happens.

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What I've worked on today

"Today" means in the last 24 hours: look for the checkmarks. Projects disappear from the list below when they leave my desk for the last time on their way to press/production. Publication dates / airing dates may come much later: check Amazon or Variety for more information. Projects with ** are collaborations with my writing (and everything else) partner, Peter Morwood. The list is alphabetical: don't infer anything about priority from list order. One other note: I'm not going to discuss deadlines, so don't ask. This, however, is the year when many things which have been hanging fire for a long time will get finished at last.