I'm not complaining, though -- if anything, it makes watching DVDs with her an adventure.
Life is too short to indulge in crappy art. With movies or novels, they have to be endorsed in a trustworthy fashion (friends, trusted critics) for me to commit my valuable time to them.
On the other hand, I'd watch just about anything with my mom.
Movies this week:
Last night was The Good Shepherd meh
Tonight was Memories of Murder, Korean 2003, cops destroyed by serial murder case. Good movie.
Will Penny with Heston, and Lawman with Lancaster, are early revisionist westerns. The Field with Richard Harris, and caught some The Sporting Life
There were more.
Right now TCM is showing Spirit of the Beehive, Sp, Victor Erice 1973, maybe the best of group. Beautiful kid lead, beautiful movie.
All letterboxed of course. All classics of a sort, except for the first.
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For the egg-noggers. It occurred to me this morning that there would appear to be no reason you couldn't cook the yolks a bit with some of the milk (eg. as you would for a custard) to kill any salmonella good and dead before adding in the liquor and egg whites. (If memory serves, it's the yolks not the whites that pose a risk.)
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3: no reason to do it either, though, as the liquor cooks the eggs.
5: If nothing else, alleviating a little food-borne paranoia is a reason. Googling on the subject yields mixed results as to whether the alcohol would kill the bacteria -- but, of course, googling also suggests taht the odds of an egg having salmonella in it are like 1 in 20,000, so... I'm not saying my gastrointestinal upset this morning had anything to do with the egg nog, just saying I might give the yolk-cooking a try next time.
My mother has a paranoia about food borne diseases. All meat gets cooked until completely dry, then she cooks it a little longer.
if you'll cook the yolk it'll be called omelet
is it still a drink?
100% ethanol used for decontamination for example
is the liquor 100%?
70% is ok too for killing bacteria purposes :)
6: happily, I have no such paranoia.
To be fair, I had raw tuna and rare beef last night, too, and I don't intend to start ordering those well done to avoid risk of illness.
I think if you cook the eggs and milk to 170, that kills bugs but won't curdle it into an omelette.
My mom always rents movies she's already seen in the theater but forgotten about. Drives my dad crazy.
My mom has also developed an irrational love for movies she wouldn't let me see in the theaters the first time around because they were too racy. Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing. She has the videos and will watch them again and again like a teenage girl. When I try to remind her of how she railed against their immorality twenty years ago, she feigns forgetfulness.
Movies made in the last couple decades don't use pan and scan to get the full screen video. Because the producers have the video and TV market in mind when they film, they actually shoot in the aspect ratio of the full screen, and use black bars to get the letter box aspect ratio. Directors mostly have the composition of the letterbox aspect ratio in mind when they shoot, but all they have to do is lift the bars to get full screen, so you don't loose information.
My mother has a paranoia about food borne diseases. All meat gets cooked until completely dry, then she cooks it a little longer.
My wife's parents are like this, which makes holiday cooking kind of a nightmare if red meat is involved. Last Christmas I made a crown roast of lamb; it was perfect &mdash perfect, I tell you! &mdash and in my head I could hear the little chops screaming "noooooo!" as I put them back in the oven for the in-laws.
re: 15
Is that true? Surely the standard 1.85 ratio is defined by the standard frame size on 35mm film combined with the lens technology?
Digital video technology is still not that widely used.
Who the fuck watches full-screen DVDs?
I suppose the people who are still renting DVD's at a store.
re: 15
Looking at the wikipedia articles on cinema and tv aspect ratios, there's nothing about adding black bars.
All meat gets cooked until completely dry
This makes me die a little bit inside when I read it.
If memory serves, it's the yolks not the whites that pose a risk
Alas, this is not true; dishes made with raw egg whites are also susceptible to contamination. When I made the gingerbread house this weekend, I made "royal icing" from the Joy of Cooking recipe, and Mrs. Becker gives roughly the same advice as LB in 13: heat the egg whites to at least 160 (but never more than 175), and you sterilize them without causing them to curdle.
a beautiful house, when do you eat it
on Christmas or after? don't know about customs of making gingerbread houses at all
or is it for decoration only?
This makes me die a little bit inside when I read it.
One of my former colleagues is a Frenchman married to a Lebanese woman whose father has a PhD in food science and worked for the health ministry in Lebanon. Every visit to Lebanon involved a titanic struggle inside his psyche between the good son-in-law who didn't want to complain about the food and the good Frenchman who was aghast at the tragic waste of good meat.
On a similar note, the law in my state requires restaurants to put an asterisk on the menu next to raw and undercooked foods to warn of the risks of foodborne illness. The barbecue place near my house took some liberties with the standard legal boilerplate, so that the warning by the steaks and hamburgers reads, "While undercooked meats may taste better, they carry a higher risk of foodborne illness."
when do you eat it on Christmas or after?
I think traditionally on Christmas, but probably most people leave them up as decorations until they become inedible. I think most gingerbread house recipes are optimized for aesthetics rather than taste. This one actually should taste pretty good (I ate some of the cookies made from the dough and they were tasty), so I plan on eating it.
What you need is a swarm of goats.
ttaM: I can't remember where I heard the info about aspect ratio, although I vaguely recall that it was in a conversation with a film studies person. I am not entirely reliable here, but the upshot of the conversation was that no information is lost when converting recent movies to the full screen aspect ratio.
26: this is not exactly true, according to the course I took on the subject; they frame the movie with both in mind, but because more detail is possible in a cinemascope or whatever frame, they will often frame e.g. closeups with more of the background visible than they would framing for 4:3, so when you use the tighter closeup for the 4:3 version, you are losing information, but you're still getting a intentionally framed shot rather than a kluged together after-the-fact monstrosity. Still, it's possible to do things with the image in a wider ratio that you just can't do in 4:3. Also, some directors likely still say "fuck it" and do things like put two characters at either edge of a cinemascope frame because fuck you, that's why.
In re: 13: if you're worried about the raw eggs (though of course they're not raw, as the liquor cooks the eggs) I would avoid drinking my egg nog.
I would avoid drinking my egg nog
IYKWIM
"And I Hope You Do, Because I Suck Dicks?"
It's like a Rorchach acronym in that way.
Man, I drop letters like Run drops rhymes.
"Because I Sure Don't" was the original concept.
35: Yeah, but how funny is that?
It's like a Rorschach acronym that way.
Okay, folks, wish me luck - it's time to pick up my sister at the airport and take her down to Mom's and be all familial and holiday cheery, while in the grip of mild depression and major apathy. I'm not talking black dog depression here, just, I don't know, grey puppy. I just want to sit here with my ass growing roots into the couch, watch some DVDs, maybe if I get real ambitious go shoot some polygonal people-avatars on the internet. I'm so unmotivated I can't even wrap the presents.
*sigh*
You need to tie that grey puppy to the back of your pickup and have some fun, man.
Sounds to me like you've got the true Christmas spirit Ham-Love. I wish you a thoroughly tolerable and somewhat relaxed evening.
Ogged: Objectively Anti-Puppy
I'm feeling sort of the same way, Hamilton-Lovecraft. I'm trying to motivate myself to go for a brisk walk. I think that I'll feel better if I do. But first I have to go upstairs to get my walking shoes, put on my coat and brace myself for the cold. It's too many steps. I'll probably rest on the bed for a bit before I get out there. Sad.
But the act of driving may make you feel better. Writing this comment has made me feel a bit better. But basically, ogged is right.
Dexatrim and Red Bull, Ham. That jittery feeling is close enough to real energy to fake it.
Not only do raw eggs crawl with salmonella (because of God's one-hole chicken design) but the avidin in the whites binds to the B-vitamin biotin, leading to a debilitating and ultimately fatal deficiency disease. The symptoms are really too horrible to describe.
But by all means, drink Sifu's eggnog! It would be rude not to.
Yeah, I had to take a break from wrapping presents yesterday. The flipping curling ribbon wouldn't curl as it had for the first batch. Dull scissors? Old ribbon? Since screaming obscenities at the packages wasn't my idea of Christmas spirit, I decided to walk down to the drug store and get some bows. They didn't have any I liked, which was good since I had forgotten my wallet. Still, the walk was very relaxing.
And what's with that, God? You could have dedicated a sterile chute specifically for eggs, but you couldn't be bothered, could you? And what's that avidin-biotin bullshit, anyway?
i'm confined to the lab all these days and not complaining (ok, resent a litlle bit)
these people have holidays and are still unhappy
i don't understand, where is justice
42: Yeah, every time I actually managed to do something yesterday, it made me feel better (and now that I'm frantically getting together my overnight bag and bag-o-presents-and-wrapping-paper, likewise). But even knowing that doesn't make me want to do anything.
46: Where were you when God was designing that magnificent self-propelled, edible, egg-laying machine, anyway? A couple days ago I took apart a roasted chicken, shredded the meat to put in pasta sauce and chicken salad, which I'll be eating the rest of the week, and have bones n skin left over to make tasty stock out of. The only animal more perfect is the pig.
re: 26
That's sort of true because they use anamorphic conversion. But it's not true that they shoot in the 'TV' format and then add in the black bars for wide-screen.
A tip for y'all wrestling with the depression (I love the phrase "gray puppy" - perfect where I've been a lot lately) or just general mood ugh. I read early this year about a study suggesting that 8-16 ounces of black tea each day helps with one's ability to cope with stress, and I've found it so. It doesn't stop the spike-to-the-head moments of utter despair and collapse, but it does definitely help me bounce back from them more quickly, and it keeps some minor calamities from feeling so major. It's kind of an improved keel for stormy times.
Ogged: Objectively Anti-Puppy
I think he just wanted to restrain the puppy for sexual experimentation, nothing so crass as dragging.
54: Huh. I went on a bit of a chai kick when I was breaking my cigarette habit awhile back and I was convinced it was purely the placebo effect of a replacement vice that helped. But maybe it was the mood enhancement! I think I'll go make myself a cup now.
I go to the gym to cheer myself up. Unfortunately, day before yesterday they sold my membership to another chain and closed my small friendly gym. The new gym is full of people who stare at me disapprovingly for being a fat ugly chick in a meat market gym.
The only cheer in it now is that it makes me happy to make them all angry with my very presence. Suck it, beautiful wiry gym people!
You're beautiful to us, winna, and wiry people all get cancer and die, so there's that.
I don't want the wiry people to get cancer and die! It is too funny when they stare at me in open bewilderment.
Once they're used to the influx of new people they'll stop staring. It's just that now I'm an affront to their Spike TV watching bordello atmosphere. They'll grow accustomed soon enough.
And now off to disturb them on Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas, all!
re: 54
Brits all drink shit-loads of tea. We are, however, generally morose buggers.
61: yeah you've got an uphill battle with the climate and cuisine though. Sans tea you'd have leapt into the sea en masse many centuries ago.
yeah you've got an uphill battle with the climate and cuisine though.
Yeah, hence a couple of hundred years of going out and pwning anywhere with a warm climate and spicy food.
Re aspect ratio: I'll stop pretending I know what I'm talking about.
59: And now off to disturb them on Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas, all!
Just be careful about getting between them and their image in the mirror. They've been known to charge when ego-wounded.
But by all means, drink Sifu's eggnog! It would be rude not to.
I've had it! More than once! More than a week ago, and I'm not dead yet!
You'd better like bourbon a lot if you're gonna try it though. A whole lot. Just sayin.