Lentil Curry

I discovered that this recipe works quite well.

LENTIL CURRY

1 package (1lb) lentils
2 onions
4-5 cloves garlic
1 package (1lb) tofu
10 cups broth
handful of dark green leafies
curry powder to taste
half & half to taste

Rinse lentils, then cover in broth and simmer ~30 mins. Meanwhile, cube the tofu and sauté on high heat. You want the outside of the cubes to get nice and crispy. Caramelize the onions and garlic in the same pan. Add dark green leafies of your choice – I used the green tops of leeks because that’s what I had, but it should be very tasty with collards. Once those are wilted, add the whole caboodle to the lentils. Season with curry powder (maybe also some salt and pepper) to taste, then add half & half until it’s creamy. Serve on rice.

This makes a ton, probably enough for about 6 people.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley (Well, San Francisco, Really) Part 2

Never, ever go to Fisherman’s Wharf on the Fourth of July. I let an old friend from high school talk me into it, and man. Between the hour spent looking for parking, the hour-long waits at every single restaurant, and the twenty-minute line at the restroom, it leaves one wondering how the entire population of the Bay Area has managed to squeeze into a space about the size of three blocks. We had a good time, though. I got to try sharkmeat (It’s like tuna but without the fishiness; that is to say, extremely mild. It would be good with horseradish.) and we saw some pretty sweet fireworks.

And I managed to get some cool shots of the carousel at the end of the wharf:

The Art of Rough Travel: Advice from a 19th Century Explorer

Sir Francis Galton, inventor of the standard deviation, psychometrician, and distant relative of Charles Darwin, is one of those remarkable people of the Victorian Era who did a little bit of everything. In 1850 he joined an expedition to what is now modern-day Namibia for the Royal Geographic Society and lived there for two years. When he returned to England, he decided the best way to use his knowledge was to write his own version of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being a Victorian Explorer, for the benefit of future generations of pith helmets.

Thankfully, this peculiar text has not been lost to the mists of time. The Mountaineers Club had it reprinted in 2006 with modernized spellings. The result is highly entertaining.

The text is divided into several sections, beginning with “Preparatory Inquiries,” on through “Beasts of Burden,” “Food,” “Game,” and “Bush Remedies,” and finally winding up at “Miscellany” and “On Concluding the Journey.” Each of the chapters is logically organized and clearly written, so if an explorer can find what he needs to know to avoid being trampled by a charging rhinocerous.

There are places where it’s hard to believe this book is not a parody. What pith-helmety type would take a how-to manual along to dip into from time to time? Galton devotes two whole pages to how to make a proper pot of tea out in the bush, and now and then you run across un-PC little zingers like this one:

“Savages rarely murder newcomers; they fear their guns, and have a superstitious awe of the white man’s power: they require time to discover that he is not very different to themselves, and easily to be made away with.”

Therein, however, does not lie the value of The Art of Rough Travel. It is an absolute treasure trove for fantasy writers. Galton has inadvertently written the Idiot’s Guide to Problems that Fantasy Characters Face. How fast can I expect my hero to travel on his way to Mount Doom? Well, he can go about 3 miles per hour if he’s walking, or 4 if he’s walking fast. What if he’s traveling alone in hostile territory? He should tie his horse’s reins on a short leash to his wrist. If the horse hears something wrong, it will jerk its head up, and serve as an alarm clock. Okay, but what should he do if he runs out of food? See “Revolting Food, That May Save the Lives of Starving Men.” How much can his elephant carry? “The average burden, furniture included, but excluding the driver, is 500 lbs., and the full average day’s journey 15 miles.” The book is studded with little examples that would not just make one’s story more believable, but inspire stories of their own. Galton recommends that a traveler should get some jewels, encased in silver (it’s a non-irritant), inserted into the flesh of the arm and allow it to heal over. That way, if thieves steal everything including the clothes off your back, you still have a little money to fall back on.

Most of the time the advice is real, serious, and useful. The invention on flashlights has made Galton’s section on improvised candlesticks somewhat less relevant today, but the human body and keeping it alive in bad circumstances doesn’t change, and the wilderness is precisely the place you might find yourself without the modern conveniences that make you so different from the Victorians. Any good backpacker could find something to learn from this book, be it the right way to rappel down a cliff, tie a knot, or waterproof one’s bedding. I heartily recommend it to anybody writing an adventure story, or just anybody on the lookout for weird and fabulous ways to stay alive.

A Visual Tour of Berkeley, Part 1

The houses here are only three or four feet away from the sidewalk. Homeowners compensate with these xerophyllic plantings that explode out of the itty bitty space allotted for them:




There's something neat to look at on every block in downtown:






And yes, that says "Mexican, Pakistani, Indian" on the sign. It's all one restaurant.

Shadowplay: Way to Character Development!

Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch trilogy is a guilty pleasure of mine.

The trouble with plain-vanilla high fantasy is that it’s been done so much that none of the new stuff is particularly original anymore, and Shadowmarch is no exception. You’ve got your castle, you’ve got your conniving nobles, you’ve got your twin royals sent into exile, and the army of fairies that would like to take over said castle. Add to that a good sprinkling of battle scenes, women wearing trousers (shocking!) and a black guy who comes from Very Far Away and everybody thinks he’s incredibly exotic. Heck, the book’s even got dwarves. He calls them Funderlings but I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Williams.

On top of that, it’s got a sprawling Los Angeles of a plot. If you were planning on reading Shadowmarch and Shadowplay, I hope you weren’t in too much of a hurry because Tad Williams is going to bloody well take as long as he pleases to get where he’s going. The first two books of the expected trilogy, which are really one story split into two volumes to make them possible to lift, are at 1000 pages and counting. He has … let’s see, now … at least twelve POV characters. This is the sort of book that comes supplied with an index at the end.

Conditions like this typically make me want to throw the book across the room. So why can’t I stop reading?

It’s the characters. To tell the truth, Tad Williams is a talented storyteller. About halfway through the first volume I’d had just about enough of Prince Barrick whining about some family curse and I was on the point of throwing the book across the room. But– but– what was going to happen to Chert Blue Quartz? He isn’t some high-strung noble at all, but this, er, dwarf who’s just trying to do his job as a repairman to the vaults under the city. It’s obvious his wife Opal is the light of his life, he’s worried about this human kid he’s semi-adopted, and he’d really rather not get caught up in all the castle’s machinations and probably killed. Was Chert going to be okay?

Williams has such a knack for warm, human, likable characters that you want to forgive him everything. Yes, even the saucy barmaid. And the buffoonish poet. And the princess who’s pretending to be a boy. Even though they sound like stereotypes, they come across as real people.

And did I mention that Gyir is awesome? He’s a fairy. And if you confuse him with the sugar-dust-and-tutu type of fairy it’ll probably be the last thing you do. He’s a badass sword-wielding human-sized dude, one of the Fey Folk, from out of those old folktales where people called fairies the “good people” because they were so terrified of offending them. He doesn’t have any nose or mouth, so he breathes out of slits just behind his ears.

The second volume, Shadowplay, has so much more to offer than the first. The Shadowmarch trilogy is the opposite of those trilogies that sag in the middle; now that Williams has finished introducing us to everybody, which took him 500 pages or so, interesting things are starting to happen. There is something to be said for letting things unfold organically like this. The people in this world start to feel like old friends of yours. The last scene had me pumping the air when a certain highly sympathetic Vuttlander does not get killed off by the plot yet*. The final irony is that nobody knows when the third book in the trilogy, Shadowrise, is going to be published.

Is everybody going to be okay?











* I would bet money that Captain Vansen is going to bite it. It’s like he’s walking around with a bull’s-eye taped to his armor.

Yes!

Draft 3 of The Confederacy of Heaven is complete!

That's my sophomore noveling effort, by the way. I haven't really mentioned it on this blog before, but I've been plugging away at draft 3 for the better part of a year. I think I'm going to go get a celebratory I don't know what yet, and work on something completely different for a few weeks.

Roofs vs. Rooves

So, I was just writing a scene where Our Heroine happens to be on a high balcony and she can see the tops of many buildings below her. And then Word wanted me to change "rooves." Aware that Word Spellchecker has the IQ of retarded lettuce, I went to the dictionary. No entry. I turned to Google, and there the Urban Dictionary gave the definition as:

The plural of "roof," for people too dumb to know that the real word is "roofs."

Whatever happened to poor old "rooves?"

I mean, the plural of loaf is loaves, dwarf is dwarves, and chief is chives. Okay, maybe not on that last one. But I'm sorry to see poor, downtrodden rooves, the way I've been pronouncing it all my life, get smacked around like that.

Also, Google helpfully suggested two searches that may be related to rooves: "pituitary gland" and "anaconda." What the heck?