I honestly don’t know what the YouTube algorithm thinks, sometimes. I know that a few times in the past I have praised it for delivering something that’s right up my alley, but… well, I don’t watch anything about cooking, and yet lately I’ve had an influx of things like this.
I don’t mind mysterious food instruction suggestions, of course. Part of my motive for putting this up as the Friday Film is so I won’t forget to try out a couple of the variations. I’ve never had great success with fried rice.
Also– fish sauce is a condiment you need. Just don’t think too hard about how it’s made.
The progress is still painfully slow, but I am nearing the end… of the first draft. I’ve just realized I need to get some themes better inflated now that I’m approaching the endpoint, so the second draft isn’t going to be quick and easy, either. Probably. I’m bracing for it.
And while I complain about the speed of production, the fact that this first draft is going straight into a machine provides me with a small comfort– it’s now twenty pages long, which by my standards is a fairly lengthy number.
I learned a new thing this week! And I’m going to share it with you.
Even more exciting, it’s about fountain pens!
I use the elements of the title a little freely. Myths need no foundation in historical accuracy (for which we may all be very grateful; seek out the Norse and/or Japanese creation myths if you want a read filled with shocked laughter). It’s less “busted” than “explained and then undermined”. In an age of clickbait, I feel I’m still in bounds.
The Long Weekend was indeed very long for us. We got to watch a well-loved family member slowly expire. In the current climate of pandemic, our loss is bearable and small, but we feel it.
Hercule Grey, 2004 – 2020. The late Doctor Awkward Puss.
He was in his seventeenth year, so his passing was not entirely shocking. It was, in a way, a good death, because it was timely. We’ve lost too many to sudden tumors that manifested when they were relatively young. Old Doc just sort of stopped, like a clock that wound down, at an age where such a thing might be expected.
There was a small element of relief in it, too. For the past couple of years, he’d been a scrawny old man– my wife described him as “a furry bag of feathers”, and while he got plenty of rewarding cuddles from the newer members of the flock, he (and we adult humans) were perpetually concerned that the boisterous play of the young ones might do him an injury.
We have some pictures of him taken in what turned out to be the last two weeks of his life, which I will not be sharing. I have never forgiven the tabloid industry as a whole for the cadaverous LAST PICTURES OF DAVID NIVEN! which hung off the ends of grocery story tills, and I’m not going to share similarly gaunt images of one who should be remembered by the world at large in a different light. I will remember him in his appropriately sleek form, before his powers waned.
One of the last good pictures of Hercule, in which he is supported by Bram and Kees. Bram may be even more affected by his death than my wife.
A couple of post-scripts:
the name:
Hercule not after Poirot, but after Cyrano de Bergerac. As a kitten, he had a rather pronounced beak
Grey slightly after the fiendish probe-jabbers from Zeta Reticulum with their similarly-shaped eyes, but more so because my wife found his nature and presentation put her in mind of Joel Grey.
I am of course aware that this post (planned for this slot since Sunday) is going up on the same day as the announcement of the death of Diana Rigg. I could wish it were otherwise, but I’m sticking to the plan because I need to release the pressure. I will remember her mainly from her time in The Avengers, not because I insist a woman must be young and beautiful to be worth imagining, but because I watched The Avengers a whole lot during the first decade of my life. Emma Peel, competent and formidable, is firmly encoded in my core recollections.
The pandemic will, one way or another, end eventually. We’ll be able to go to places that aren’t home.
And since this thing is being released, according to those in the know, in 2022, I’m letting myself fantasize about going about in it.
Yes, the video is three years old. The reports I mention above are three weeks old.
My wife and I briefly owned a 1979 VW Bus. It was in wretched shape, and for reasons no mechanic could discover, it slowly filled it’s oil pan with gasoline. We still loved it. We are very much in accord in the desire for this successor.
I should probably also mention that there was no writing at all yesterday, as my wife was in the hospital to have a hernia de-herniated. She is fine, and as I like to point out when this sort of thing happens, the entire cost of the day was the gas burnt in a total of less than twenty minutes driving.
Well, OK, there was the pain-killer prescription, but between work insurance and the province’s Hey You Don’t Make So Much Let’s Help You Out drug benefit, a week’s worth of Tylenol 3 cost $7.96.
What's up at Ravens March. 
