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Am I still recuperating from Mythcon and hoping to finish a con report later? I am.

In the meantime we still need to eat. Lunch and dinner food service at Mythcon having consisted largely of A Dozen Ways of Reheating the Same Leftover Chicken, we got a little tired of chicken and I called a moratorium on it for our dinner-making, which I've kept up for 9 days now.

The problem arose of what to do after we were invited to a potluck on Sunday and I volunteered to bring the fruit salad. I had this leftover melon and pineapple, more than I'd want for breakfasts in the time it was still good, and what to do with them? I tried searching online for dinner recipes that included melon, with very little success. A suggestion to put steamed veggies in a hollowed-out melon to impart its flavor was only practical after I finished eating the honeydew, and the results weren't very impressive. An Indian melon curry, recipe found online, seemed beyond my capacity to make from scratch, but there are large Indian groceries here that carry lots of curry mixes, so I went to one of them to look. No luck, and when the clerk offered to help, it turned out that he was handicapped by not being sure what a melon was; he seemed to think it was akin to a kidney bean. I didn't want to risk using some other mix; Indian curries seem to be quite specific.

Then there was the pineapple. What uses pineapple? Sweet and sour! We don't eat pork here, and chicken was out as previously mentioned; how about shrimp? I wound up using this recipe, though I cut out the bell peppers and cherries and substituted other veggies instead, and maltodextrin for sugar (my normal substitute) and organic, no-sugar-added tomato paste for ketchup (for what is ketchup anyway but tomatoes with added sugar and vinegar, both of which are in the recipe already?). This was one of those recipes that was a lot more time and trouble to prepare than to cook, but the results were tasty; a thick sauce, but not goopy or oversweet like many sweet & sours.

Now I have half a can of tomato paste left. Historically, this will sit in the fridge until it turns green. I want to avoid that. What else uses tomato paste? Meat loaf glaze. Off to find a recipe for meat loaf with ground turkey.

flying reviews

As in, seen or read on an airplane.

Veronica Mars: The Movie
Veronica is back, still solving lurid crimes largely by sneaking unauthorized looks at other people's cell phones and computer files, eavesdropping on their incriminating conversations, etc etc. You'd think they'd learn to keep their devices locked under passcode by now, but no. That makes me sound like an old hand at the TV show, which actually I barely remember and had trouble following at the time (largely because I didn't find the plot twists that interesting). But several of the characters popped back into mind as soon as I saw the actors' faces again, and the plot was no trouble to keep track of, as it's done in two hours instead of taking an entire TV season. I don't think you need to have seen the TV show at all to enjoy this if you just want a capable if amoral detective thriller.

Ithanalin's Restoration by Lawrence Watt-Evans
I picked this up at the Mythcon sales table for a buck for a light read, because I know LWE as a most reliable current practitioner of light fantasy in the Leiber (Lankhmar)-de Camp (The Goblin Tower) manner. Wizard's spell goes wrong and his soul leaves his body and splinters into pieces that enter the furniture in the room, all of which becomes animate and runs away, leaving nobody but his apprentice to hunt them all down and reverse the accident. This book having been written in the last couple of decades, the apprentice is female. Chasing animate couches around the city makes for less risible a story than you might expect. Why the furniture runs away when it's the wizard's soul that animated it at all is never made quite clear, and there is ample room for a sequel in which high authority chews the restored wizard's head off for having created so much trouble and chaos.
Hardest thing about the book was pronouncing (in my mind) the wizard's name. Eventually decided to render it as "Ethan Allen," which is of course the name of a furniture store. Is LWE making a deliberate allusion?

oh, it's a Robin Williams post

One on my FL is chiding the world for paying more attention to Robin Williams' death than more urgent problems, but the point is, I don't have anything to say right now about global warming or transphobia or the Middle East that I could possibly expect you to want to read.

We learned of his death from one of the 38 channels of television offered by JetBlue on the flight home from Boston, during one of the brief intervals when they weren't all playing commercials.  This is the first time that I've learned of any significant news event from television news, excluding only live feeds directly connected with presidential elections, for well over 25 years.  After this, I'm not minded to shorten the interval.  I spent most of the flight listening to the classical radio station.

I was never a fan of Robin's standup, inasmuch as I saw any of it.  It seemed to me that its humor lay more in the speed and intensity of his delivery than in anything he actually said.  I did enjoy Mork and Mindy, insofar as I saw any of that, but my real appreciation of his work probably dates from seeing The World According to Garp in first run in 1982 - I was in Spokane on the way back from Moscon, as I recall - a movie that earned my highest accolade, "That was weird."

So I appear to have thought of him primarily as a dramatic actor.  Certainly he had the desirable quality for a comedian wishing to broaden his range of being able to be serious - you didn't look at him waiting for the jokes to crack - and that in itself puts the lie to the statement that he was on permanent manic and couldn't turn himself "off".  Of course he could.  I liked him in movies like Insomnia - crooked urban cop Al Pacino chases elusive rural creep Robin Williams through the wilds of Alaska, what a weird concept, and, like RW and SMG in The Crazy Ones, they worked well together.*

Of the manner of RW's death I have only this to say: that the bios have reminded me that he was a friend of Christopher Reeve, which in turn brought to memory this story, that after Reeve's accident he felt suicidal, so his friends snuck Robin Williams into his hospital room in the guise of an eccentric Russian doctor intent on performing a colonoscopy.  Reeve laughed, and it was then, he later said, that he decided to live.  So of Williams you could say: Others he saved.  Himself he could not save.

I have a memory of a Robin Williams movie role that I can't identify in the filmographies.  Or maybe it's a dream.  He played an uncredited cameo as a research doctor or bioscientist of some kind who suddenly bustles in to a lab or hospital scene or some such well into the course of the movie.  Anybody recognize what I'm talking about?

*SMG issued a memorial statement describing RW as her father figure (like Buffy, she was largely absent of a real one), which sounds strange until you realize that she's 26 years younger than he was. So, yeah, that's about right.

Mythcon, day 2

Paper showing that Tolkien shows more respect for animals in LotR than in The Hobbit, and not just the favored ones. It's just as true of the wargs. All except the Eagles, whom he treats as a taxi service.

Paper proposing that Bilbo is able to keep the extent of his wealth secret from his neighbors because he lives in the hills. No, I don't get that line of reasoning any more than you do.

Paper declaring that Lewis holds a simplistic caricatured view of Biblical-inerrancy fundamentalists. Post-paper questioning of presenter revealed that no, some of them really are like that.

Paper finding Tolkienian eucatastrophe in several classic mainstream literary works by presenter reading out plot summaries of them (e.g. Pride and Prejudice, King Lear) at tongue-twisting top speed. Good post-paper discussion finally devolves into dispute over whether Wrath of Khan (the first version, of course) is eucatastrophic. Me= no. Everyone else (Trekfen, it turns out) = yes.

Collaborative readimg of selected sections of Beowulf. Volunteers come up from the audience and read a chunk, in Anglo Saxon or Tolkien's translation, their choice. A magical hour. I get part of Beowulf's announcement of his arrival, my favorite section. Afterwards, GoH Ursula Vernon compliments me on my reading. A kind remark, but others were better still. Only at Mythcon.

Late evening chatting with the pipe-smokers outside about Ardmore and Rutgers and Colorado Springs. Warm, balmy evening in the dark.

Mythcon, day 1

Discovery - apparently this has been published, though I have not seen it - of an unpublished preface to the Screwtape Letters, attributing their discovery to Ransom and stating that they are translated from the Old Solar, which puts quite a new perspective on the context.

Lone professor bearing the Sisyphean load of counter-acting Jacksonian readings of Tolkien by showing his students film scenes of, e.g., Aragorn being angsty about the burdens of becoming king, or Arwen hauling Frodo around like a sack of potatoes, and then saying, "Now let's look at how Tolkien did it." Yet another rebuttal to the lie that most Tolkienists like the movies.

Richard West's GoH speech on the place of sfnal views of the universe in fantasy, and of fantasy-oriented insights in sf. Lot of good stuff, includong the discovery of green suns, Tolkien's key example of the subcreative imagination, in Robert Sawyer's Starplex. Take-away quotes: "Science fiction is fantasy masquerading as realism." "I prefer fuzzy sets to definitions."

mysteries of Boston

1. Taxis at the train station
On arriving, we headed to the taxi rank, where the only two cabs present were leaving with other passengers. Then a windowless, black minivan pulled up and a nattily dressed driver hopped out and addressed me with "Taxi?"
I looked at his van, which was entirely unmarked. Then I looked back at him and said, "You're not a taxi."
Interestingly, he didn't try to argue the point, he just accosted the next person in line. I didn't see what happened next, as just then what actually looked like, and indeed was, a taxi pulled up.

2. The restrooms at the Boston Public Library
No toilet paper. No paper towels. No dispensers.

3. Boston's reputation as hard to navigate
I've done London. I've done Rome. Boston, not so tough.
After 3 days in town, I finally rented a car to get out to the suburbs. OK, on the way out, unexpected one way streets did send me on a slightly exciting twisty tour of Beacon Hill. But despite my suburban host's horror that I was planning to drive back downtown, in the dark, without a GPS, I guessed at the right routes and exits and pulled up directly to the hotel's front door with no delays. Navigation-fu at its mightiest.

4. Using "wicked" as an adverb
When did this become a thing? I never heard it until about a decade ago, and then from just one Bostonian I had not previously known. Now it's all over subway hoardings, t-shirts and other tourist kitsch, even the name of the municipal wifi network.
Surely such a heavily commercialized usage ought never to be heard on the lips of any self-respecting local again.

Harvard

The older buildings are mostly of red brick. Not as attractive as the stone edifices of Princeton. Wait till B sees Yale, someday.

The building security guards don't want you to use the resstrooms, though the buildings are open to the public.

All the art museum galleries are closed, in preparation for being consolidated into one giant art museum.

We contented ourselves with the Museum of Semitic Archaeology, which was small but free and quite interesting. Walk-through exhibit of daily life among the ancient Hebrews.

First try at a used book store not quite as enticing as the little old ones over in Boston.

Ride on subway reminded me of Tom Lehrer's unrecorded song listing the stations. How many songs are there about subways, anyway? The Man Who Never Returned, Take the A Train, JC Cohen, Gilbert and Sullivan's Nightmare Song ...

culture in Boston

Most everyone that matters to me in the performing arts is off at Tanglewood or somewheres, but there is a little going on.

1. Noon concert in King's Chapel with a viola da gamba and theorbo (bass lute) playing music of Marin Marais. Very melancholy. Well, it is by Marin Marais.

2. Shakespeare in the Common. 12th Night. I didn't find any of the romantic leads very inspiring, and the clown trroupe might as well have been wearing big signs reading "We're the clowns, so laugh already!", but Malvolio (Fred Sullivan Jr) in the scene where he finds Maria's letter was awesomely good, a complete transformation from sober pomposity to absurdity, so good in fact that, as this was the last scene before intermission, and as Shakespeare in the Common isn't designed for attendees who brought neither blanket nor lawn chair, so I had spent the whole first half standing up, leaning against a tree, and I was tired of that and didn't fancy an 11 pm walk back anyway, and I knew they couldn't top that scene, I just left then.

8 states in one day, without moving a muscle

MD, DE, PA, NJ, NY, CT, RI, MA. Via Amtrak.

not where you'd expect

I'm spending the weekend researching in a Catalan library. No kidding. There are two rooms, and the shelves are filled with books in Catalan. I'm not using them, but they're there, and impressing everyone with their sheer existence in one place so far removed from their home.

Outside in the hall, there's one small bookcase of books in Spanish. If you must.