Microwaving the crayons is a great idea. I'll have to give that a try. We also like tie-dying eggs with rubber bands.
When I was wee I had a "History of Art on Eggshells" tradition. I would draw parodies of famous artworks in crayon and then dye the egg. My El Greco egg generally looked pretty good, as did Van Gogh and Monet.
No, really. I said "parodies," I didn't say precise imitations. I'd essentialize.
Your Easter was far more high-concept than ours. Ours was considered a success if neither of my brothers managed to spill dye all over the kitchen floor or their clothes.
Huh. I'd totally forgotten that yesterday was Easter. The Muslim hordes had taken over, briefly. (And yes, apple-and-lamb khoresht is, as I'd suspected, just a little nasty.)
I didn't celebrate Easter or Passover. That's kind of lame. One should make an effort to get out for one spring holiday at least.
You can celebrate post-Easter Cheap Chocolate Day. Buy some half price Creme Eggs and think of the great cycle of the year and the fecundity of nature.
Or, actually, I guess Easter chocolate is mostly milk. There's got to be a dark chocolate bunny out there somewhere, though.
I am sucking on a Jolly Rancher as I type. Huzzah!
Or roll yer own Easter turduckens
A lot of things marketed under the name "slivovitz" are pretty crappy. There are other plum eaux de vie that are good, but I think the name itself would turn people off.
One should make an effort to get out for one spring holiday at least.
If you want to make the trip down, we could improvise some pagan fertility rituals or something.
11: This stuff is incredibly cheaply packaged -- the bottle looks exactly like something that would come out of Communist Poland -- but the flavor is very nice. A very smooth, intense plum flavor.
I totally forgot it was Easter, too. The friend I had in town and I went to go out for brunch and then sightseeing on Sunday and found that some places were (shocker!) closed. Fortunately, Kitchenette was still open so we had a yummy non-Easter brunch featuring the best cheese grits ever.
My reaction to 12: "where the hell is John Emerson?"
13: As long as you're talking about candy, that's fine. We're only a little late for the Kanamara Festival, btw.
Him and Farber and McManus are at the old guys' convention.
(I might have forgotten it was Easter if not for the fact that I got the day off on Friday. That is always a good reminder about the imminence of a holiday -- I saw e-mail from HR Thursday about Good Friday hours and said to my desk-mate, "Wow, do we have the day off tomorrow?"
As long as you're talking about candy, that's fine
They are awful sweet.
(I can't believe I have to do all the work in this double entendre.)
If memory serves, Slivovitz is the brand favored in the new Dan Clowes/Terry Zwigoff flick, Art School Confidential. I had no idea it was a real brand though. I mean, with a name like THAT...
It's not a brand, it's the generic name of Polish plum brandy. I don't even know what the brand name was of the stuff I was drinking -- the label was puzzling.
it's generic? yeesh. this stuff is sounding better and better...
No, no, all I meant by 'generic' is that 'slivovitz' is a word like 'cognac', not a brand like 'Henessey'. I was drinking some kind of slivovitz, but I don't know what kind -- the label was partially in Polish and partially in Hebrew, neither of which I read, and I couldn't pick out a transliterable brand-name.
I've had two (2) slivovitzes, neither of which had anything approaching a strong plum flavor. Each had vague hints of plumminess (and were suitable for, say, rinsing a glass before filling it with something else, which actually resulted in a pleasing plum aftertaste). Neither tasted just plain "alcoholic", but what flavor there was was quite subtle. I can't remember the brands.
I also have a French, IIRC, plum eau de vie that's quite plummy.
But, LB, you should find out what it was, and then tell us, or at least me.
Maybe I'll scan the label. The question is moot, though, because it's no longer being made (although if I happened to be running a distillery, I'd be calling Polant for the recipe now.)
I've had my fair share of slivovice (the Czech version) and it certainly puts the hair on your chest. Or something like that. But I recommend checking out the Hungarian version--I think the name is palinka. Much tastier in my experience, with equally mind-reeling amounts of alcohol.
slivovitz is also serbian/croatian.
in germany you can drink different varieties of plum, like mirabellgeist or zwetschkenwasser. mmm.
the french learned that from the alsatians, i believe.
also, what's up with knocking slavic words for things?
slivovitz... it's even a punch-line word in the Merry Widow!
For everyone that missed Easter, you can still celebrate the Orthodox one in a couple weeks. Get some Serbian slivoviz too!
One year my Dad brought home a Ukrainian egg dyeing kit. It had all kinds of wax, but I didn't prgress very far. Ideally you were supposed to be able to build complicaed patterns of mult-colors. All that I could manage was dyed and undyed waxed white. More than that, and it was just mud.
My dad brought home the same kit -- you have to read the manual; there are rules about which colors may be layered on which, mostly that lighter colors have to come first. We got to the point of making recognizably Ukranian looking, but still very kindergartenish and lame, eggs with it.