There's a new book coming out by Joyce Tyldesley, entitled Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt. Already out in Europe, its U.S. release date is soon, and from the review...

...Octavian staged it? O.o

Oh, hey, um...so the moon's full, and eclipsing say...'bout right now. And it'll do it tomorrow, too. Go look.

In accordance with IMCS regulations, we're working up accords to formalize the use of "Brisbane Rules," otherwise known as "Pirate Rules" additions to Mornington Crescent (first formal match to be fought this week). Thus far, we've come up with:

• The adversary who falls behind is left behind (but that's a normal rule, following precedent from the Lockisseum Cup Challenge Grounds, on a ruling from 14 Mar 2003).


• The sanctity of parlay is preserved, in that any adversary who invokes this right shall be taken to the home port of the Referee (hereafter called the Pirate King) unharmed.


• Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's disallowed, specifically when prefaced with "It's more of a guideline anyway."


• In accord with the articles of Bartholomew Roberts (1720), "each quarrel is to end ashore, at sword and pistol." Thus, duelling will be undertaken between the adversary closest to victory and the adversary who has earned the most points before one is allowed to play the Mornington Crescent station. In the event that these so-named adversaries are the same person, the adversary shall duel with himself.


• Photographic confirmation of largest hat allows one extra foul, though not when the last play has been made using the Bermuda Triangle inversion.


• Handicaps waived when adversary possesses one or more alcoholic drinks within easy reach.

These are all subject, of course, to the normal exceptions and reversions as set out under the larger "Australian Rules" umbrella variation of Mornington Crescent as set out by the AMCS in 1998.

Any revisions, suggestions? Exceptions I've forgotten?

Physics and dance combine to illustrate the theory of parallel worlds: Merce Cunningham just showed two pieces at Dia: Beacon similar to what he'd done at the Tate a few years ago.

Carl Warner's foodscape photography creates still lifes from food in remarkably detailed settings.

I have spent possibly as much as 45 minutes out of bed, today. I've gone through an inhuman number of tissues, my eyes are swollen and it makes me tired just to stand. In general, I'm a very small ball of histamines, congestion, and apathy.

But when I see Oliver Queen tell Vic Sage, "What part of "blow me" do you not understand, Mr. Atlas-Shrugged-is-the-word-of-God?" I had to laugh, no matter how much it hurt. For just a minute, I felt better.

Thank you, Frank Miller. Thank you.

A while ago, thirteen_letter had wondered aloud when the American version of biscuits first appeared. Bakerina consulted her rather authoritative Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, to little avail other than to point out the rise of chemical leavening on the North American continent. From what I read, potash was used by the Native Americans as a chemical leavener, though this may want cross-checking by someone with a handy copy of Peter Ciullo's Saleratus: The Curious History & Complete Uses of Baking Soda.

Got curious again today, mostly because I was making a batch of baking powder biscuits for supper tonight. Through Google Books, I've managed to track saleratus biscuits in The American Housewife of 1841, which gives a receipt for Butter-milk Biscuit that's remarkably like what I just made a couple of hours ago.

Earlier than this, however, I've managed to track down a copy of Eliza Leslie's Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats of 1832. This collection provides a recipe for "Sugar Biscuits" that uses both a pearl-ash chemical leavener as well as the beating technique used to create hardtack in the 18th and early 19th centuries.¹ The Frugal Housewife of two years earlier does give a recipe that equates to the modern biscuit, but is called "short cake" instead and is not separated into single servings.²

Prior to this, "common biscuit" is seen both in the two 18th century editions of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy and in Lucy Emerson's New England Cookery of 1808, referring to a sweet cookie-biscuit brushed with beaten egg white and dusted in sugar. New England Cookery also elaborates three other versions of biscuit, the closest to the modern variety being completely unleavened.

So, it would seem, up to the first decades of the 19th century, American biscuits were the same as English. Then, biscuit came to be used for a hardtack analog leavened by beating in air, about the same time as chemical leaveners were coming into use³. Beaten, single-serving biscuits were then "assisted" in the same way yeast breads were receiving leavening assistance from chemical leaveners, and eventually biscuits came to rely entirely on chemical leavening.

Many thanks to the Feeding America historic American cookbook project.

¹: If you're (crazy and) really keen on learning about hardtack, I got my information from my new copy of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog (thank you, thirteen_letter!) where they quote from Wm. Falconer's New Universal Dictionary of the Marine of 1815.

²: The author, Lydia Maria Francis Child, also describes the use of saleratus to assist in the rising of yeast dough, which is echoed in a number of later texts.

³: The earliest American use of the various carbonates (calcium and potassium) seems to have been in gingerbreads. While not commercially available until the mid-19th century, American settlers were selling off the ash from their cleared land to fuel burgeoning ceramics and glass industry along the eastern seaboard--and potash would have been widely available.

Have been amusing myself this afternoon with the "package deals" offered by Eternity Travel (sponsored by the Museum of Science, Boston), where one can choose from a wide selection of tombs, embalming techniques, mummy cases and interesting little extras (like ushabti!), then have one's journey through the afterlife evaluated for the likelihood of success.

This headline is a couple weeks old, but surveys using ground-penetrating radar around Borre in Vestfold have uncovered two new Viking-Age halls there. Evidently, they may have some effect on the interpretation of the Kaupang settlement at Skirringsal.

Haven't seen any references to it on my f-list, but has anyone tried Joost? They look to be a Pandora for television programmes, and the selection of National Geographic documentaries interests me rather a lot.

A listing of some of my favourite words, ( continually incomplete )

Amusing quotes from tonight's session of Exalted:

Me: "Could I roll Perception + Bureaucracy to identify the coin?"
B: "I could roll Perception + Larceny to tell you what it could be fenced for."
*laughter*
Storyteller: "You get three stunt dice for that."

Z: "Breeding in the Wyld could cause blindness, sterility...."
G: "...nausea, dry mouth...."
B: "...tentacles...."

Z: "If the wood complains, does that mean it's made of meat?"

Me, with a character looking into a box that seems to contain a puzzle: "I'm sorry. I only do out-of-the-box thinking. I don't think this is really my purview."

The Beeb is reporting on the analysis of a gladiators' graveyard in Turkey from Imperial Rome.

...well, haven't quite gotten that far, yet. Am in quest of the ability to print things from my laptop on the printer networked to the main desktop. We're all technically on the same network (same gateway and workgroup), but I'm on the wireless router, which is attached to the wired LAN to which all the desktops are connected. Before I got on the wireless, I could at least manually get to \\something (Vista wouldn't automatically detect it) and the network drives there through the command prompt. Now that I'm on the wifi, though, I can no longer get there. I'm entering that bit of the jungle I consider to be rattles-and-drums territory, and the natives are spooking me.

I've installed an update to the XP machine that allows for Link-Layer Topology Discovery, so I can finally see the verdammt thing on my "full" network map, and have updated it to IPv6, since XP with SP2 can handle it without any difficulty. Have updated the firewall exceptions to handle UPnP, and the default ports are open. Now the DNS is playing dumb. *headdesk*

Don't want to play around with anything scarier until smarriveurr comes home and can keep me from doing really stupid things.

Thinking aloud ahead.

I haven't really updated my website in any detail since 2004. Am thinking it needs a complete overhaul, as I'd like to take it in a less artistic and more academic direction, and while I like the look, I can do better code than the current has. I really use LJ for the blogging bits, and Flickr for photography, so I'd leave those out of the new version. Also wonder whether I might move it from its current host off to a different one.

Thoughts on what I should include?

Might anyone have an .mp3 of Holy Mary Mother of Bert's "Spleen"? Doesn't have to be HMMoB--Tal's cover would work just fine. :)

I love $1 coins. I gleefully hand them to recalcitrant cashiers who look at me with disgust when they have nowhere to put them in their till trays. I hoard them for Pennsic, so I can carry around a big clanking purse when I want to buy a Shiny. Maybe I just got used to £ and € coins while abroad, but they're easier on my wallet. As a general point, they wear a lot less easily than $1 notes. I'm amazed the Sacagawea coins didn't catch on, but I think that goes under the same heading for most Americans as my beloved metric system: "can't be arsed."

The new $1 coins, though, I must say, are hideous. I really like the edge-incused inscriptions, which bring them up to par with the £ and the €, but the portraits look like they're in the tradition of the early 19th-century Half-assery School. John Adams, in particular, looks like a puckering bilious frog, and James Madison seems hydrocephalic.

I hope my aesthetic difficulties don't make these coins too hard to use. I love exercising my Dept. of the Treasury-given right to use $1 coins as legal tender and thus be within my full rights to annoy my fellow Americans.

My new laptop arrived today, and I've named it Chrome because everything is so Shiny. I've moved over most of the data from my old drives, except for my email. It would seem that Eudora and Vista aren't getting on, yet.

Yes, Vista. So far, it's a real pain in the tocus. The 3-D windows are nice, but the navigation and idiot-proofing are really frustrating, as an advanced user. I'm having trouble with backwards compatibility on my LAN, and can't get to network drives except though a command prompt. And you know that really handy "Filmstrip" view for photos? Gone. Gaah.

We'll see how this works out.

It's on its way from Tennessee! Am in total squee mode.

*waits expectantly for the FedEx man*

For the express purpose of saving my sanity as far as my data is concerned, I now own a Thermaltake Silver River R2.5 Enclosure for my IDE drives. I've checked both laptop hard drives--both the one from FuturePerfekt and the one from Haven/Avalon--and neither seems to have bad sectors. Everything that's absolutely vital has been backed up, again (I'd done a day or two of work last week without backing up, before Haven/Avalon had more power problems [because Murphy's an Irishman, and I'm dumb]) and the not-vital-but-of-personal-value data are living in their old drives until my new system turns up.

I'd seriously considered "drinking the Kool-Aid," as pir called it, and buying a Mac for this iteration of personal machines, but I was worried about playing nice on the network in a PC-dominated household. I chickened out and bought another Dell Inspiron, this time of the E1505 series, which comes with 1G RAM, a Core Duo chip, and a hopefully-optional free upgrade to Vista; I may partition for Vista, but that'd probably be it, as they've axed some of the features from XP I really liked. Oh, and I actually paid for MS Office this time.

We're (okay, it's mostly smarriveurr playing with it) still working on fixing Haven/Avalon, the HP I was using last week, re-soldering the pins on the power jack, which clicks on the board and generally frightens me that it's going to arc (!) to the board. This does seem to be a problem common to HP models, especially boards that are a couple years old. The first solder job worked well enough to charge the battery, but not enough to boot (wtf?). If it fixes, that'll become smarriveurr's machine, I think. He seems to enjoy playing with the fire-metal magic that is soldering, and he could do with a more portable machine for his sanity's sake. Dad taught me the basics of soldering ages and ages ago, but I'm still a little nervous about playing with circuits that are so small. I may practice on jewellery for a bit before trying electronics.

I'm getting a 'free recycling kit' with my new machine. I may post my fried mobo back to Dell with a snarky note, as I've parted out most of the rest of FuturePerfekt, except for his hard drive, three sticks of RAM, the adapter and the broken motherboard.

I find the hard drive to be the seat of a system's Ka, whereas it's harder to pinpoint in a more mechanical device (e.g. a car). Anyone else think that?

While at femmetofarad and drmcsexypants' place this past weekend, I had the pleasure of using a rotary nutmeg grater. I generally ascribe to Alton Brown's theory on unitaskers, and don't own much that can't do multiple chores in the kitchen, but I am sorely tempted by the idea, as the fresh nutmeg on the eggnog was fantastic. I would compromise with a spice grinder, and, really, I should just break down and buy one (or maybe locate one on Freecycle). I'm making puerco pibil this evening, and what I didn't have pre-ground was a pain in the tocus to get down to powdery form. Crunching recalcitrant peppercorns by hand in a mortar is entirely overrated as a satisfying activity.