No Chaser

Film report

Have you seen Mad Hot Ballroom? No? You must rent it now.

posted by: NoChaser at December 31, 2005 06:48 | link | comments |

Is this your first time . . . ?

Recalling awkward sexual situations, uncomfortable social predicaments, or delightful Rocky Horror viewings, this question sets one up as an outsider with an implicit promise of initiation into something truly remarkable.

I've never paid much attention to it but am now beginning to loathe that question, and I'm afraid I have certainly noticed it much more here in Cornlandia. For example, I've been asked, "Is this your first time in the midwest?" quite often, and yes, I thought it was pretty obvious from my violent culture shock (can we really keep calling it that at this point?) that it was decidedly my first time.

But, where I have heard this question most often in the past six months is at restaurants. "Is this your first time at Galactic Cracker-that-Passes-for-Pizza?" "Is this your first time at Overpriced Land o' Buttery Beef?" "Is this your first time at Cream Sauce Heaven?"

Yes, indeedy, first and probably last now that you ask.

In one restaurant, I was so fed up with this manipulative effort at making me feel like there was something profoundly uncommon about the restaurant's offerings that I said, "Yes, it is, and I'm curious to know what is it that is so unique about this italian restaurant that my not being here before would make any difference." "Well," the waiter condescended, assured that he had me beat, "We have this special oil mixture that we pour into a little dish here," as he proudly dispensed his special sauce, "and you can dip your bread into it. It's quite tasty."

For crying out loud, the guy is right. Offering salad dressing as bread-dunking opportunity is brand new to me. Of course, for the past say fifteen or twenty years, it has been customary in many American restaurants to serve tasty olive oil -- occasionally laced with garlic or herbs or truffles or balsamic vinegar -- for bread dunking, but gee, this is innovative culinary experimentation. Boy, am I thrilled to be initiated into this amazing new club!

I'll admit, I am a food snob although I try to be, and actually am, far far more tolerant than I used to be when I regularly sent things back, walked out of restaurants with bad service, cried over a bad meal. But (you knew that "but" was coming didn't you?) this pathetic attempt to make a restaurant appear special by asking "Is this your first time?" and not even having a really good gimmick as payoff drives me insane. Granted, I'd run if confronted with a gimmick, but at least I'd run in good humor.

posted by: NoChaser at December 28, 2005 16:15 | link | comments (4) |

Bathroom Redo Number Two!

At long last, and after many requests, here are the photos for the upstairs bathroom makeover. Clonk is along for a shared blog post.

Here's a before shot of the bathroom. Clonk wants to acknowledge it is a nice space with a huge tub.



As you know, the bathroom was previously coated with green plastic tiles, archived in this photo.



I knocked all the tiles off, which left a very smelly, ugly mess of adhesive, which Clonk removed over the course of several days using what later proved to be the blunt end of an adhesive scraper. The following pictures also record the hideous oak cabinetry I was so eager to banish. Needless to say, they were removed.







The scraping revealed not only drywall, but, in some cases, layers of building materials underneath. Clonk notes, "If you ever have to scrape tile adhesive, consider demolishing your house instead."



After the scraping was completed, Clonk went in with the mud and spread it all over the walls. It went fairly "smoothly."



Installing the tiles was a lot of fun for Clonker, evidenced by the ratio of swearing to tiles -- 1:1. But the results are nice.







I painted the bathroom with three coats of primer and white paint, then a coat of the fabu blue. We installed the sink, the mirror, and the towel rack with a minimum of arguing, et voila! New bathroom.

posted by: NoChaser at December 23, 2005 10:04 | link | comments (4) |

Career Opportunities

the ones that never knock . . .

Now that you've got The Clash stuck in your head for the day, I can tell you that I have had exactly zero requests for interviews this year as opposed to precisely two last year. And, frankly, I'm relieved. Why, you ask? Because it opens my life to new and thrilling career opportunities like the one that arrived in my inbox this morning.

Last year I signed up to receive job postings from Australia and the UK. Today my Australia source sent me this:

### -- LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF XXX
University of Swaziland, Swaziland

The Lonely Planet site has this to say about Swaziland, "The smallest country in Africa is also one of the most easy going - laid-back Swazis are more likely to celebrate for fun than demonstrate for reform. A progressive and hands-on attitude towards wildlife preservation has endowed it with a striking bunch of national parks." Sounds good.

However, the first site you get if you google Swaziland belongs to the CIA and has a different agenda from the Lonely Planet site: "Autonomy for the Swazis of southern Africa was guaranteed by the British in the late 19th century; independence was granted in 1968. Student and labor unrest during the 1990s pressured the monarchy (one of the oldest on the continent) to grudgingly allow political reform and greater democracy. Swaziland recently surpassed Botswana as the country with the world's highest known rates of HIV/AIDS infection." Interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that Clonk yesterday kept joking for some bizarre reason that I was "drinking beer in Mozambique" or something like that. Mozambique happens to be a neighbor of Swaziland. Now, if you believe in Clonk's powers of divination, you may think next year would find me living in Southern Africa. If, however, you know Clonk to be a complete lunatic prone to ramble and blurt out bizarre blather, then you will guess next year might hold something more practical in store.

posted by: NoChaser at December 19, 2005 09:27 | link | comments (4) |

Home-y thoughts

I feel like I have been moving furniture and laying down plastic and taping trim and painting all week, and I guess that's because I have been. The bedroom is a lovely green and my office is now "delicious melon," a kind of creamy orange, quite warm and cheery. Clonk is in the bathroom again, plastering the walls this time. A while back, I heard a crash and some swearing, which is de rigueur.

Conversely, I have been sitting with a warm dog on my lap, reading news on-line and checking out Leslie Harpold's advent calendar. This year, she has links to some advent calendars dedicated to baking, so you get a new recipe each day, and this seems appropriately seasonal to me.

My mother and grandmother were always very into baking. I spent much of my youth hanging around the kitchen helping to bake breads, cakes, cookies, pies. In fact, Clonk's official acceptance into the family occurred a few years ago when my mother taught him to make pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

Christmas was an especially busy baking time because there were so many types of cookies to prepare. The short list includes these five favorites: Brandy Balls (no-bake brandy-soaked chocolate cookies rolled in powdered sugar); Russian Tea Cookies (melt-in-your-mouth, slightly nutty nuggets rolled in powdered sugar); orange-scented sugar cookies (rolled flat, cut into shapes, baked, and then decorated with frosting, dragees, jimmies, and colored sugars); Hunky Cookies (cream cheese dough folded over an apricot filling); and Pfeffernusse (ground walnuts, sugar or honey, egg, and spices.)

Interestingly, both my mother's and my favorites are the most difficult to make. My mom loves Hunky Cookies, but warmly refers to them as "son-of-a-bitch cookies" because the dough is temperamental and very hard to roll out and shape. I love Pfeffernusse, but you must grind the nuts (no big deal) and then as you mix the ingredients, the dough becomes incredibly stiff, which is amazing since they bake up quite light. Every few years, the Pfeffernusse would kill the electric mixer in a fury of smoke and spark.

Since I moved away from home years ago, I have not owned an electric mixer and do all my baking by hand. This is fine for most things, but I have tried Pfeffernusse only once by hand. It was nearly impossible for me to stir the dough, and I eventually had to borrow a neighbor's mixer to complete the project. I have not eaten Pfeffernusse since. I still make cookies every year for the holidays and every year I miss these spicy rascals. Perhaps this year I will try Pfeffernusse again, maybe bringing the food processor into play.

posted by: NoChaser at December 17, 2005 07:29 | link | comments (6) |

Dear Editor

A friend of mine asked me to review a piece that came into the journal she works on, and when I agreed, she sent me the standard email with a deadline, etc. I worked at a journal too and have commiserated often with her about how annoying it can be. For example, anyone who has worked in any area of academic publishing knows what a hassle it is to get academics to turn shit in on time. So, I sent her this response . . .

Dear X,

Don't you realize it is the holiday season, and as such, I will require more than the offered six weeks? Actually, you could give me pretty much any deadline, and I would still demand more time. In fact, I could set a deadline and then would promptly fail to meet it.

Why? Because I am a very important person with many important things to do, like . . . paint my bedroom, make Christmas cookies, do some on-line Christmas shopping, go cross-country skiiiiiiiing, drink too much champagne, flirt with undergrads in the library, spend hours at the gym trying to work off this Christmas cake I can't keep my hands off . . . etc. etc. See? Terribly busy with very very important things.

Affectionately,
Dr. NC (currently unemployed)

posted by: NoChaser at December 13, 2005 16:23 | link | comments (4) |

Well, HP6 is in the bag, and I'm back to the usual stuff. I began George Gissing's New Grub Street. It's about the profession of writing in the late 1800s and the difficult class position(s) authors get shuffled into. It seems similar to the strange class position the majority of academics and writers are thrust into today as well, with an enormous amount of cultural capital and very little economic capital. Gissing has a wonderful sense of class struggle that is sensitive without being smarmy, critical without being preachy. I really liked the only other book of his I've read, The Odd Women, a book about unmarried women at the turn of the last century and their varied chances and modes of surviving.

Clonk is currently in the bathroom scraping the adhesive off the wall. We removed the mirror, the shelving, and the sink/vanity. This is a much bigger project than the downstairs bathroom because of the tile. We're also thinking about replacing the vanity because it is bulky and unattractive. It's oak, which I loathe. Clonk thinks it's okay, but I have bad associations with oak. The worst roommates I ever had became total cokeheads in the course of the five months I lived with them. The wife drank NyQuil all the time as well. Like I said, bad roommates. They also had tons of oak furniture, and everytime I see oak furniture, I think of them. So, I'm really pushing to get rid of the oak vanity. My case is aided by the fact that the room looks a million times better without the bulky thing in there.

In other news, I will be finishing up chapter 2 of the novel when I am done with this entry. That's exciting. Oh, and my editor has asked if I would be interested in publishing a book based on the columns I write for him. Hell yeah! I had been thinking about that anyhow, but didn't realize he'd be interested in publishing it. So, I'm very psyched about that.

On the job front, as far as I am concerned, no news is good new, and I have lots of good news.

We are enjoying the snow and have been taking walks. It's amazing how quickly you get used to the cold. And you really notice the difference between say 5 and 17 degrees. I got some snow boots, and my feet have never been warmer. I also got a great ice climbing jacket from MEC that is like down but not down. It is totally waterproof and warm. I won't be doing any ice climbing of course, unless Freeze erects a huge wall of ice outside the pub, but I will be keeping quite toasty this winter.

posted by: NoChaser at December 10, 2005 09:05 | link | comments (3) |

Comments and Cookery

Wow! Thanks for all the great comments on the bathroom remodel mania. I think I'll respond here to make it easier.

TT, I am wondering if you will hang your Naboo fighter from the ceiling? It will go nicely with the new Aerospace tint, no? Dumbledore was probably not terribly sexy in his youth. And, with Michael Gambon playing him now, I can only think of his youth as being somewhat like the thief in Cook, Thief (etc.). Which is kind of messed up now that I think of it.

Harold-Billy, I actually kind of like your bathroom the way it is. The tub is very nice, and I like all the white. When we visited RG, we were struck by how similar her bathroom is to yours. The big difference is that she has this amazing blood-red or maybe burgundy real linoleum. Perhaps a touch of that color would be nice. It's quite rich, looks beautiful with the white, and would go with the rest of your color scheme.

RG, you will not be surprised to hear that I could not put HP6 down last night and read 200 more pages. So, I think that means I've only got about 250 left, and I'm planning to go hit the book right after dinner. I'm guessing I'll finish tonight barring any extensive interruptions. So, we can talk all about it soon. I have laughed and gasped out loud much more with this one than with any of the previous. I am particualrly loving Ginny. Hang in there with the grading. While students papers may not cause physical damage, the psychological damage can be immeasurable.

Today, I spent all day preparing food for Clonk's 35th birthday tomorrow. I consulted with him last night about what he'd like to eat on his big day, and made as much of it as I could today. Here's what I made: cinnamon swirl challah for french toast; a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting; marinated mushrooms (with browned garlic, lemon, thyme, and red pepper flakes), marinated artichoke hearts (with cumin, saffron, garlic, and champagne vinegar), and a chunky roasted eggplant dip (with pesto and walnuts); and I prepped all the ingredients for the lasagne which included making sauce, sauteeing portabellos and spinach with garlic, and mixing up some tofu with romano cheese, garlic, and herbs. I really love cooking all day long. I like how it requires total attention and presents mental challenges. I wouldn't want to do it everyday, but man, it makes me feel great!

posted by: NoChaser at December 07, 2005 15:51 | link | comments (5) |

Remodel madness continues

After spending the weekend (re-)devouring Order of the Phoenix and going to see Goblet of Fire (again) about half an hour after finishing HP5, I felt I ought to devote some time this week to more productive activities. Fortunately, bathroom remodeling mania struck again, so I was not burdened with making laundry or vacuuming seem redeemably productive.

The upstairs bathroom is actually not too ugly, but it is covered in green plastic tiles, which are kind of ick. It also has several towel racks in extremely odd and unusable places, which is both stupid and annoying as stupid things generally are. But, now I can speak of this in the past tense because yesterday I removed all the towel racks (there were four) and whacked all the tiles off the walls. Perhaps "whack" is not quite right . . . let's see . . . I whacked, chipped, pried, scraped, and popped the 90 square feet of 3.5-inch Cleveland-made green plastic tiles off the walls of my upstairs bathroom.

In the process, I received one cut to the second knuckle of my left ring finger and several hammer taps to the third knuckle of my right index finger. I also got a piece of plaster or maybe adhesive in my eye before I realized I needed to put on Clonk's work goggles, which made me look like I was headed for a rave. All in all, the job was not too bad injury-wise and only took me about three hours total including setup and cleanup.

Now, sadly, the bathroom smells of the utterly foul tile adhesive still stuck to the walls. I am, however, too sore from yesterday's joust with those walls to attack again today. Maybe tomorrow the adhesive goes. Maybe we just put up wainscoting over it as Clonk has suggested.

And, in case you're keeping track of my Harry Potter binge, I am currently on page 206 of HP6. I'm trying to take my time with this one.

posted by: NoChaser at December 06, 2005 14:10 | link | comments (4) |

Bathroom Blog

Er, that is, bathroom blog entry. I'm guessing someone must keep a bathroom blog, but not here. No, instead, this is an entry with photos of the recent re-do of the hideous bathroom done in the ever-so-daring 1970's pirate chic.

As promised, photos of the before accoutrements are here, followed by the not-so-daring and admittedly Martha-ish makeover.

I have not mentioned that the bathroom was also painted in the same boring cream the entire house is painted in. We seem to have this experience regularly as the last house we bought was painted entirely in khaki. The cabinets were a very dark wood with really ugly metal knobs and a hideous towel rack that matched all the other pirate booty. The curtains were two short broadcloth peach and green striped numbers layered one on top of the other. Very weird, very Bloomfield, not very Barbary Coast.

The Faucet (made from real gold doubloons!)



The Hinge (attached to dark planks of wood that passed as a cabinet)



The Light Fixture (that makes you say "aaaaarrr!")



And the new version:

The Curtain



The Cabinet, etc. (Note that the light fixture is still insane, but at least not piratical)



The Mirror (this was attached to the cabinets in the original bathroom)

posted by: NoChaser at December 02, 2005 10:37 | link | comments (4) |