Towse: views from the hill

April 30, 2009

[URL] Dickensurl.com

Filed under: app,URL,writers,writing — Towse @ 4:41 pm

Dickensurl.com

Convert your URL to a Dickensian quote.

Mine?

Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny knocks him down, his destiny must pick him up again.

From The Old Curiosity Shop

Above quote has been attributed to
http://www.towse.com/blogger/blog.htm

[via Bella Stander’s twitterfeed]

Job announcement for the times

Filed under: commentary,news — Towse @ 4:16 pm

Ad running in the righthand sidebar of SFGATE.COM.

United States Courts-Ninth Circuit
Bankruptcy Judgeships
$160,080/year

Recruiting for 4 vacancies on the Bankruptcy Court.

(We need more judges because we’re having more bankruptcies?)

April 29, 2009

"Batman wore those socks …"

Filed under: culture,video — Towse @ 10:13 pm

Batman Garage Sale with Adam West from Adam West

"Outrage" Documentary: Outing Gay Conservatives

Filed under: politics — Towse @ 12:58 am

“Outrage,” a new documentary from filmmaker Kirby Dick, takes issue with the secret lives of closeted gay politicians — especially conservative Republicans who outwardly oppose gay rights.

The film, which premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, features tell-alls from men who say they’ve had relationships with various Republicans, including Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Bush strategist Ken Mehlman and former Senator Larry Craig.

[...]

Whoo. Boy.

What do you think of “outing” closeted gays?
Justified if they’re publicly bashing gays and gay rights?
When is privacy a right and a given? When not?

[found through a mention on Huffington Post]

Scrabble ad. Really!

Filed under: video — Tags: — Towse @ 12:39 am

[another gem from Andrew Sullivan‘s blog]

Terrific Schweppes advert

Filed under: video — Tags: — Towse @ 12:14 am

Not a “water” balloon ad, but …

[hattip to Andrew Sullivan]

April 26, 2009

Bruce Sterling brings his ray of sunshine to the subject of swine flu.

Filed under: health,news,URL — Tags: — Towse @ 10:22 pm

Practical Tips for Combatting Swine Flu In Your Home | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com

There is always some flu around and flu is always killing some people. Even when a raw mutant flu manages to kill off more people than a shooting-war, flu has never ravaged whole cities as cholera or the Black Death can do. As awful pandemics go, flu is like the snotty-nosed little sister of awful pandemics.

I’ve been tracking Twitter and checking what people are twittering about porcine influenza.

We now have multiple Twitter accounts aggregating swine flu news with names like stoptheswine, SwineFlu, SwineFluTweets and more. Someone’s even picked up the domain name swinefluoutbreaknews.com.

There’s hype hype HYPE! and folks madly re-tweeting such things as How swine flu could be a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear war http://bit.ly/4CKca (something from UK’s Daily Mail Online)

Chill, people. Really.

For up-to-date information go to the CDC site

April 24, 2009

This Is Your Wake-up Call: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing

Filed under: publishers,writing — Tags: , — Towse @ 8:34 pm

This Is Your Wake-up Call: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing

[...]

The underlying problem facing the industry is twofold: there are too many books, and too many of them are derivative of each other. You’ve heard of Gresham’s Law—the idea that bad money drives out good. Our industry has long suffered from Grisham’s Law, where opportunistic authors and publishers try to imitate John Grisham and other category leaders with books modeled on someone else’s commercial success. That strategy might make sense if there were great demand for these imitators, but in today’s overcrowded, competitive marketplace, this kind of thinking is dangerous, because it devalues the environment into which we present our work.

[...]

[link via Dystel & Goderich Management blog]

April 23, 2009

The classic Alice B. Toklas recipe

Filed under: books,food,history,recipes,writers,writing — Towse @ 9:46 pm

I found a good home for my softcover edition of The ALICE B. TOKLAS COOKBOOK. I have an older, hardcover, first edition that I intend to keep but, really, there aren’t many differences ‘twixt these two.

One difference, the newer edition has a foreword by MFK Fisher.

One other crucial difference, for those of us who spent our young adult years in the sixties and seventies, this edition contains the recipe that (for legal reasons) the publisher could not include in the first edition. Yes, the recipe for Haschich Fudge — no, not brownies … fudge, even though the talk was always of Alice B. Toklas brownies.

The Haschich Fudge recipe is not a Toklas original, but rather came to Toklas from painter and film-maker Brion Gysin, according to the notes.

————-
Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise — of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by ‘un évanouissement reveillé.’

Take 1 teaspoon of black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of coriander. These should be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa [sic] can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognised, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
————-

Now that I’ve saved the recipe (although for what reason I don’t know), I can pass the copy of the later edition on to someone who will give it a good home.

zoomed in food… look closer

Filed under: food,photographs — Towse @ 9:45 pm

zoomed in food… look closer

Delightful food closeups.

[found via StumbleUpon]

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