Tracing constellations on the panes

1. Not only can Fentiman's Dandelion & Burdock be purchased from Zing! Pizza in Porter Square, it's delicious. It hardly tastes like a soda at all—there's a sort of sweet fruit hit, and then the aftertaste is complicated and herbal. And fizzy. If you carbonated the kinds of tea I can drink, this might be the result. I don't know if it is going to displace their Victorian Lemonade, which is made with fermented ginger, juniper, and speedwell, i.e., awesome, but I would definitely go back for seconds. What I want to try now is their shandy and their ginger beer.

2. The Long Voyage Home (1940) is one of my favorite movies; I discovered it by chance on TCM a few years ago and I have no explanation for its obscurity. The script is a composition of four one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill—Bound East for Cardiff (1914), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and Moon of the Caribbees (1918), collectively known as the Glencairn plays after the tramp steamer whose crew make up the recurring cast—and it improves on them. The cast are a true ensemble who come in and out of focus as the story turns, but of particular note to me are Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, and a not-yet-iconic John Wayne. The cinematographer was Gregg Toland, who used the film to beta-test some of the techniques he would ultimately make his name with next year on Citizen Kane. John Ford directed it in between Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath. In short, it is the kind of movie that should be available from Criterion with a print that does justice to its densely expressionist black-and-white photography and articles by people who know more about Ford and O'Neill than I do, but failing that I was very glad to see it screened tonight by the Harvard Film Archive as part of their gigantic, multi-part John Ford retrospective. rushthatspeaks accompanied me and liked it, which made me happy. I never have any idea which likes or dislikes of mine are going to overlap with anyone else's.

3. I watched the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. They made amazing use of folklore, projected light, and puppetry. At one point a fiddler in a witched canoe—a Quebeçois legend—was dueling his own shadow on the moon to the tune of Loreena McKennitt's "The Old Ways." The air was full of fall-red maple leaves. I really hoped nineweaving was watching.

4. I had quiche for dinner. It contained cabbage. It was quite tasty. (rushthatspeaks' recipe.) I am not going to dispute this fact, but still: cabbage. Does not compute.