So... this is weird. All November, I've been writing my nano novel in two files -- one for the manuscript itself, the other with brainstorming and alternate scenes and such. And every time I wanted to calculate my wordcount, I used google's calculator function to add them together.
Today I knew I was getting fairly close, but I'd been typing a while since I last checked, so I wasn't sure exactly where I was. I entered the numbers into google, and lo and behold! Precisely 50,000!
I have this strange and overwhelming desire to make duck breast with cranberry sauce. The problem? I hate cranberry sauce.
What's more, I know it's traditional to serve duck with sweetened sauces -- orange, prunes, honey, etc, but I hate that, too. When I make duck breast, I usually make it with mushrooms because it's the only savory duck sauce I know.
The thing is, I love duck, and I love cranberries -- I love them for their bright color and mouth-puckering tartness. What I don't like is the sickly-sweet version most people slather all over their thanksgiving turkey. In fact, I avoid all Thanksgiving oriented cranberry sauces -- the canned kind, but I also dislike the chutneys and relishes made with orange juice or cider. Still too sweet!
But for some reason, I have this idea in my mind that cranberries -- the bright, tart, eye-opening kind, could be terrific with duck.
So, I've been trolling google for recipes, but everything I find involves orange juice, or cider, or some ridiculous amount of sugar, and for god's sake, I'm not making dessert!
Now, I could just cook my duck breasts and heat my cranberries with some water (or wine? one suggestion I've been intrigued by was port, but they recommended adding a boatload of sugar) and just serve the two together. But I lack confidence! Will cranberries without any sugar at all really knock me out? Or will they be perfectly tart with just a tiny hint of sweetness?
In the past, I've always baked cranberries into bread pudding or chocolate chip cookies so the cranberries themselves remained tart, but they were surrounded by sweet. Which maybe means even I need my cranberries a little sweetened. But cranberries in this country are far too expensive for me to just play around with.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Or should I just screw the duck and make chocolate chip cookies?
Today's the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, and it seems like a good time dispel that nasty rumor that has circulated even since the man was alive: Elvis was not a racist. I mean, unless you want to argue that every white person who lives in Western society is inherently racist...
Elvis was many things: poor, tacky, naive, easily manipulated, and eager to please -- but by any normal measure, Elvis was not a racist.
holy shit. Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day! If I were Godard, I'd be looking out right now.
Bergman's death was already a bit weird for me, because he was one in a long line of famous people who I had recently come to appreciate, had long assumed dead, had recently discovered were not dead, and then they died within the next month. It's a weird power I have.
ETA: I've been reading all the various obituaries and whatnot for Bergman over the past couple days, and something has really struck me about the way the Seventh Seal is always presented. I watched the Seventh Seal last year, in an attempt to fill in the giant gaps in my filmic education. And I remember the chessgame with Death -- how could I not? It's a gorgeous scene, visually mesmerizing, layered with meaning, just incredibly powerful. And apparently, everyone else who saw the movie remembers the same thing -- in article after article, everyone mentions this striking scene.
My question is, did anyone ever watch the rest of the Seventh Seal? Because aside from one or two other moments, I found the rest of the movie... uh... a bit dense. Difficult. Hard to follow, even. I've always assumed that I was just too stupid or shallow to see get what everyone else got. But now that I see everyone else remembers the exact same scene I do? I've got to wonder.
And don't even get me started on Fellini or Kurosawa.
I had this crazy idea this morning to liveblog my reading of the whole book. But then I was afraid I'd accidently screw up a cut tag at some point during the day and spoil someone... so I just wrote it all in a text file and I'm blogging it now. It might be a little incomprehensible unless you are psychic with me -- perhaps I'll add some clarifying notes after I've slept a bit.
"Yeah, but back then, bagels were hard all the way through. They were chewy as all get out and the real joke was about how heavy they were and how they lay on your stomach all day. They still make them that way at Yonah Schmimel's Knishery, down by Katz's, which hasn't changed its recipe in almost 100 years ,and also farther down the lower Lower East Side (which is having an orthodox Jewish expansion out of Brooklyn) on Grand Street."
I'm posting these lyrics because only one real person on the web has done it before, and he has included enough errors to make the lyrics difficult to Google. And now I see that various bot-created lyric sites have picked up his version, perpetuating the errors.
Um... my feed seems to have burped all over everyone's friends lists -- mine included. I have no idea why that happened, I swear I didn't do anything weird.
I'm sorry. If anyone knows something I should do about this, please let me know.
1) Please come read my new blog: lapetiteamericaine.wordpress.com. I'll probably still update my LJ occasionally when I have something to say that's not intended for a general audience, but mostly I will be there. And look! I already have four posts up! So it's not like I'm asking you to look at an empty apartment or anything.
2) If any of you with paid accounts are feeling particularly friendly, you might set up an LJ feed for lapetiteamericaine. If you want to. I'm just saying, I wouldn't be bothered. (And let me know, so I can let other people know.)Looky here! Add that, it will be like I never left you.
3) Those of you on my flickr contacts list: sorry. I lost my cable for my camera, but now that I have a nifty new card reader (thanks, emma_rising!), I'm finally able to upload all my pics from the past month. I know, it's a lot. But...
4) If you're interested (or really bored at work), you can witness my entire trip to WD-50 in painstaking and slightly blurry detail by going here (start from the bottom). You can also see highlights of my trip to the Museum of Modern Art here. I haven't titled and commented the MoMA pics yet, but I will shortly. Done!
5) Are you still reading this? Then you get to hear about my brand new email address: lapetiteamericaine AT gmail DOT com. I have no idea what email address most of you have for me, but it probably doesn't work anymore. Use this one instead.
accomplished
troubled
nostalgic
apathetic
okay
uncomfortable![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ecstatic