Am I required to keep him alive?

[sovay]

I just watched my first episode of Fringe (2008–2013). It is amazing how disorienting it is to be told a city is Boston when it is very plainly either Toronto or New York. Also, I think the show's Harvard University might be Yale. Can you do that without starting a small war?

(John Noble is awesome. All mad scientist buttons checked. Including the one where he looks good in a lab coat.)

I saw these cat portraits on Tumblr a few days ago, but I had no idea they were actual guard cats of the Hermitage Museum. I approve.

The baked Alaska this afternoon was an amazing sucess. I am very proud of my skills with folding egg whites. rushthatspeaks and tilivenn can be proud of their ice cream wrangling and attention to baking times. The weevils in the confectioner's sugar were a surprise no one was looking for, and so was the time out where we had to get more eggs because the kitchen was too hot and humid for the first attempt at meringue to peak at all, but the results in Earl Grey and cardamom ice cream were wholly worth it. The sponge cake base was fluffy, the ice cream was sliceable and cold, the meringue on top was crisp-brown with the delicious marshmallow taffiness of burnt sugar at the tips. Egg whites are exactly as effective an insulator as I was always told. We really have no excuse for not reverse-engineering a butter-pie now.

I wish my head did not hurt this much.

Comments

[skygiants]

Someone needs to reverse-engineer a butter-pie IMMEDIATELY, and then give me the recipe. :D?

[gwynnega]

Earl Grey and cardamom ice cream sounds amazing.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm.

I wish your head wouldn't hurt at all.

Nine

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

When in doubt, it's Toronto. (Think of it as My Neighbour, Toronto.) I've occasionally had the reverse experience, of seeing parts of Bristol and being told firmly that it is actually central London. House of Eliott, for example.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

I tried watching Fringe several times, but kept bouncing too hard off the first one or two episodes. I finally took the advice to skip half of the first season (normally I am a dedicated completist) and go from there. It worked well enough for me, and I'm up to season 4, a couple of weeks later, and love it.

Cardamon ice cream sounds fantastic. I had some amazing rum punch with cardamon bitters a while back, and have been putting cardamon in everything since.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Ha, yeah. Luckily, I have very little sense of Boston beyond the bits you can see in The Departed and/or on the way to Burlington, so it's not that much of a wrech. Also, to be frank, I'm used to being told somewhere is somewhere else and knowing in my heart it's Toronto, because it's happened to me all my life.;)

That said: Episode two of Fringe is seriously some of the worst TV I've ever seen. Don't be disheartened! Keep going anyhow. ("Hey, I know that bridge," Astrid says, at one point, to which Steve and I both replied, out loud: "That's the Magical Bridge of Many Colours!", because the line was almost identical to one in Cal's then-favourite Little Einsteins episode. Which tells you how long ago this was.)

BTW: New Ian Tregillis book! A third instalment of Milkweed, called Necessary Evil! It starts with a Gretel-POV chapter!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

It is disorienting when one is told a city is a city that it's not. There was a popular sitcom (Family Ties, I think.) when I was a kid which was allegedly set in Columbus, OH, my place of abode at the time. It almost never showed any real views of Columbus, but as best I recall they accomplished this by having hardly any exterior scenes at all. Being shown some other city would have been unbearably strange.

Thanks for sharing the cat portraits! I googled and turned up a few more examples than were shown in the NYT piece. Do you happen to recollect which Tumblr you saw them on?

I'm delighted to hear of the amazing success of baked Alaska. Cardamom ice cream sounds delicious, and I wish I could talk the local ice cream operation into making some, even if I'd probably never have the patience to make baked Alaska with it.

I'm sorry for your continued headache.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

I hope you feel better soonest.

Fringe is an incredibly wonderful series but it takes most of the first season to get going, and then from there it's pretty awesome all the way through to the end and yet full of flaws and mistakes and continuity errors and some profoundly silly writing and bad acting but interwoven amongst all that nonsense is some of the most amazing television ever created, brilliant ideas and brilliant acting and great effects both special and aesthetic. Just jaw-dropping -- right alongside what the hell were they thinking. Worth it for all that's great, which is a ton. Can you imagine if they had allowed everything that wasn't working to stop them, thus depriving us of this show? I shudder to think of it! And take that as a lesson for me and for all of us, to be a little bit less perfectionist and a little bit more willing to wing it and risk failing big time.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

Weavils in the confectioners' sugar...?

I mean, ok, I can certes see that, but still.

I hope your head is better. I hope that when I read more recent posts, I wil hear that it is.