Babelfish wins the internet. Translated off a page in Dutch, Richard Thompson's "Old Kit Bag" becomes "The Old Seals Farrowed." There had better not be a moratorium on World War I selkie stories.
This weekend was Birthdays Observed. First my brother's best friend, then my brother himself, so we had two cakes and a barbecue. What is it about setting fire to meat that feels like such a basic evolutionary success?
My brother's friend is of the species non-genetic family; mine like that is in Hawaii, my brother's in Vermont. His birthday was in the first week of July, but Friday was the first chance he had to visit in months, so we made him a cartwheel of chocolate: layers of chocolate meringue with chocolate mousse in between, also known as death by theobromine. (I got no good photographs, but my mother might have. The real feat was not its construction, anyway, but its almost complete disappearance. I think pocket universes were employed.) He had bonded strongly in previous years with Wilfred Owen and W.H. Auden, so I got him the complete poems of Rudyard Kipling and burned a copy of The Widow's Uniform as a sort of multimedia bonus; I was not sure how he would feel about eccentric folk music, since his tastes are more industrial, but he saw the track titles and yelled, "BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS! YEAH!" Irrelevant dead white imperalist etc. stuff it. Wes came back from Iraq in 2006; he wants to start up a business as a climbing guide in Vermont: we are hoping he will not be redeployed. Peter Bellamy is the least I can give him.
When my brother was four years old, my mother made him a chocolate-peanut train cake—engine, cars, tracks, all decorated with small candies—that he has remembered fondly for nineteen years, along with its rapid and messy dismemberment by a cohort of small children. So he requested a train cake this year, and after much searching through back issues of Gourmet (ending when my mother gave up, pulled a basic recipe off the internet, and made the rest up), we complied. Of this, there is photographic evidence.
( And the children are all gone into town to get candy and we are alone in the house here. )
He is a photographer himself, so I got him Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, which I am hoping will not scar him too much; the latest CD by The World/Inferno Friendship Society should be in the mail, because Brian Viglione is currently playing with them. He and his fiancée are beginning to discuss the details of their wedding, such as how to work some of the pagan aspects they would prefer into the ceremony without causing her Catholic mother to spontaneously combust. (The major victory: they are not getting married in a church. Particularly since it would have required him to convert.) I am wondering if it is an appropriate wedding gift to get them an athame.
This is what domesticity looks like in my household: talking about rocket sleds and liquid stitches while frying eggs and those leftover mashed potato cakes that are sort of the Western equivalent of the latke at a quarter to eleven because two out of three guests have suddenly decided they need a non-chocolate source of blood sugar. I check my e-mail, they talk about proteins. It's pretty cool.
This weekend was Birthdays Observed. First my brother's best friend, then my brother himself, so we had two cakes and a barbecue. What is it about setting fire to meat that feels like such a basic evolutionary success?
My brother's friend is of the species non-genetic family; mine like that is in Hawaii, my brother's in Vermont. His birthday was in the first week of July, but Friday was the first chance he had to visit in months, so we made him a cartwheel of chocolate: layers of chocolate meringue with chocolate mousse in between, also known as death by theobromine. (I got no good photographs, but my mother might have. The real feat was not its construction, anyway, but its almost complete disappearance. I think pocket universes were employed.) He had bonded strongly in previous years with Wilfred Owen and W.H. Auden, so I got him the complete poems of Rudyard Kipling and burned a copy of The Widow's Uniform as a sort of multimedia bonus; I was not sure how he would feel about eccentric folk music, since his tastes are more industrial, but he saw the track titles and yelled, "BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS! YEAH!" Irrelevant dead white imperalist etc. stuff it. Wes came back from Iraq in 2006; he wants to start up a business as a climbing guide in Vermont: we are hoping he will not be redeployed. Peter Bellamy is the least I can give him.
When my brother was four years old, my mother made him a chocolate-peanut train cake—engine, cars, tracks, all decorated with small candies—that he has remembered fondly for nineteen years, along with its rapid and messy dismemberment by a cohort of small children. So he requested a train cake this year, and after much searching through back issues of Gourmet (ending when my mother gave up, pulled a basic recipe off the internet, and made the rest up), we complied. Of this, there is photographic evidence.
( And the children are all gone into town to get candy and we are alone in the house here. )
He is a photographer himself, so I got him Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, which I am hoping will not scar him too much; the latest CD by The World/Inferno Friendship Society should be in the mail, because Brian Viglione is currently playing with them. He and his fiancée are beginning to discuss the details of their wedding, such as how to work some of the pagan aspects they would prefer into the ceremony without causing her Catholic mother to spontaneously combust. (The major victory: they are not getting married in a church. Particularly since it would have required him to convert.) I am wondering if it is an appropriate wedding gift to get them an athame.
This is what domesticity looks like in my household: talking about rocket sleds and liquid stitches while frying eggs and those leftover mashed potato cakes that are sort of the Western equivalent of the latke at a quarter to eleven because two out of three guests have suddenly decided they need a non-chocolate source of blood sugar. I check my e-mail, they talk about proteins. It's pretty cool.
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