Two things I realise I love, God wot: (a) hanging around with geeks, and (b) the Oxford English Dictionary. The other day at Jo's game Jean made a beef cobbler for supper: that's the supremely British dish with a sort of stewey thing topped with scone dough. It's all the best kinds of British cold-weather stodgy goodness, with a side order of self-indulgence and arteries-going-clang. Fired with emulatory¹ enthusiasm, I constructed one last night and presented it to the Evil Landlord for supper. He did his usual suspicious-German act, prodded it a bit, muttered things about misshapen alien fungi over bubbling lava pits, and then demanded to know why it was called a cobbler. I hazarded a guess that it was something to do with being cobbled together haphazardly out of bits. Then, being fundamentally a geek, I researched it.

The OED is generally a dry, wordy, knowledgeable god, although actually not entirely to be trusted on cooking terms. (Mad SCA cooks are often able to spot mis-attributions, misunderstandings and, quite often, earlier cites than those the OED has dredged up for certain medieval cooking terms). For a start, the OED has no idea where the term originates, and spurns with a slightly inexplicable disdain the notion of a root verb meaning "to join". Apparently a cobbler is also "a drink made of wine, sugar, lemon, and pounded ice, and imbibed through a straw or other tube", which strikes me as being a recipe for sweet, sweet, hiccuping drunkenness. (Dickens refers to "sherry cobbler", which has to be murder through a straw). The OED food definition, however, cites only the fruit version, with an 1859 cite describing "A sort of pie, baked in a pot lined with dough of great thickness, upon which the fruit is placed; according to the fruit, it is an apple or a peach cobbler". Subsequent examples reflect the more modern version, which has inverted it so that the dough (still of great thickness) goes on top. This food history page finds an earlier cite (1839), still American and fruity rather than meaty.

The failure of the OED to reflect the actually very common English usage for a dough-topped stew or casserole is, I have to say, fairly characteristic. So now I am left sort of semi-informed, and with a terrible urge to go and acquire a bunch of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks so I can track the damned thing down definitively. (It's not in Mrs. Beeton. Phooey. And I forgot to dig through Elizabeth David last night, owing to thing.) I have a deep, dark, partisan sort of feeling that the British meat cobbler predates the American fruit cobbler, but I may simply be prejudiced.

Today's entry in Random Ginormous Fantasy Series Month is a sort of semi-diss, mostly because I recently re-read it and it didn't stand up at all well. Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series was one of my huge favourites when I was a young, naive Masters student. It's a terribly post-Tolkienien fantasy realm, complete with Elves, Dwarves and Sauron-analogues, with additional world-hopping by people from our world. It's rather nicely rooted in Celtic and Arthurian mythology, including gods, and Kay is pleasingly able to off main characters satisfyingly and inevitably when the plot calls for it. But, ye gods! the man's writing style! It's an early work of his and I didn't find the same degree of irritation in his most recent one, Ysabel, which I really enjoyed; but Fionavar is all about the Torrid! Portentuous! Adjectival! Overwriting!, mostly in great crumbling flights of sentences all starting with "And". Emotionally overwrought doesn't even begin to cover it. Thank the borrowed Celtic gods he Got Better. And it's a great pity, because the world of the series is beautiful, compelling and mythically rich.

In a nutshell: elves, dwarves, goblins, Big Bad Evil, epic battle, epic romance, loss, love, rape, seduction, politics. Emotionally overwrought. Sexy gods and goddesses, sex with same, resulting conflicted half-gods. Dragons, heroes, seers, kings, princes, monsters, thundering herds of sort of deer. Doomed love triangles across time and space. Emotionally overwrought.

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¹ Why does that sound as though it should have something to do with emus?

Good lord, my subconscious has suddenly caught on to the fact that I'm all wistful about the comparative dream-lack in my recent life. Last night it presented me with the following:

1. An extremely high-speed motorbike ride to Jo'burg with my friend Michelle, racing each other on separate bikes. (I think she won).
2. My desperate attempts to photograph a medieval church which was projecting a mirage image shaped like a gigantic, glowing white elephant.
3. Hanging around with my mother and Obama in the latter's private airport. (Not aircraft, airport. Grimy, and full of middle-class families with screaming kids).
4. Some kind of military scenario aboard a battleship in which the captain was deliberately sabotaging things by flipping strategic switches on enormous switchboards. We later sank.

I am somewhat unsurprised to have woken up rather tired, and with a sore neck. Also, this mutant glowing red eye is becoming more mutant and painful by the hour. Hopefully the judicious application, to a complicated schedule imposed by the Nice Replacement Doctor (mine's on leave, the slacker), of two different sorts of eyedrops will somewhat lessen the sensation of having been plugged in the eye by a red-hot curried baseball bat.

Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Series Month continues! And, in the Department of Multi-Volume Fantasies I Inflicted On My Hapless Masters Supervisor, Patricia McKillip! More exactly, McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed series, which squeaks in under the wire as a Ginormous Fantasy Epic only because it was published in three slim vol.s rather than one fat one. It is, however, one of my favourites. McKillip writes dense, evocative, luminous, sometimes difficult prose which makes you both work for your meaning, and damned well enjoy it. Her world is small-scale, slightly domestic, filled with wonderful eccentrics and landscapes through which her heroes, Morgan and Radaerle, wander with a vague and slightly bloody-minded determination. The plot, world, quest all revolve around riddles, presented ritualistically, their posing and answers central to identity, destiny and history. More importantly for my bunny-hugging Masters purposes, rulers of the various realms in the story have a land-sense, a magical connection with their demesne which both underlines and permits their stewardship of it. It makes my little ecological heart go pit-a-pat.

In a nutshell: riddles, arguments, quests, travels, love stories, the cussedness of kings, bonus shapeshifters and incredibly beautiful descriptions of same, harps and harpists, storms, lost children, ruined cities, these were pearls that were his eyes. Occasional moments of blank incomprehension owing to having been socked between the eyes by an indecently good turn of phrase. Too short.

I think I'm randomly dubbing July Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Series Month, just because. (Probably mostly because my posts seem to be very boring at the moment. I could tell you about the irritatingly arrogant phone call from the delusional wannbe-Fine-Art-student this afternoon, or how I woke up this morning feeling as though someone has socked me in the left eye, but see? very boring). Also, I'm randomly craving Ginormous Epic Fantasy Serieses, which means I absolutely have to dig some of them out of my backbrain/bookshelves in order to re-read them. And as with YA Fiction Month I'm trying for more obscure examples, which all things considered is fortunate: I know David Eddings died recently, but there are limits.

Does anyone else remember reading Geraldine Harris? Her Seven Citadels series comprises four books following the quest of Kerish-lo-Taan, Prince of the Godborn, for the seven keys which will unlock the prison of the Saviour of Galkis. He travels through a variety of bizarre, vivid, faintly Eastern, rather hallucinogenic adventures, in which I remember swamps, wastes, strange deserted cities, jungles and diaphanously-clad sorceresses, or queens, or possibly sorceress-queens. (Did I mention that the names are great? the names are great. Ellandelore and Gidjabolgo and Chirandermar). Kerish himself is a fascinating figure, initially naive and sheltered, but gaining maturity as the story twists and turns; his growth belies his frankly Mary-Sue-ish physical construction (I mean, black hair with a white streak, and violet eyes flecked with gold? In less able hands he'd end up dating Aragorn and destroying the One Ring). The writing style has a deliberately stilted, slightly archaic quality which fits very well with the story's frequent strangeness and its measured, inevitable pace. (And, in fact, with the fact that the author is apparently an Egyptologist when she's not writing YA fantasy). Ultimately the narrative does a weird, dissolvey, shifty thing and folds into itself in a completely non-standard fashion given its extremely questy nature. It's a strangely memorable and trippy read.

You don't get a picture because my edition of this is the initial UK imprint, the black-edged Unicorn edition, a scan of which I absolutely cannot find online. Internets, you have failed me.

Oh, yes. Devil's Peak. Silly hat.

I've discovered a minor problem with our Luvverly New Sofas, TM. They're insanely comfortable, but if I happen to realise that my 10 days of leave have switched my brain off as a gesture of sheer self-defense and recovery, and embrace this effect in order to spend three days in a row crashed out on the sofa reading Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Serieseses, the cushion directly under my buttocks ends up compressed to about half the width of its neighbour. Note to self: plump cushions. Also, switch them around occasionally. Also, take leave more often.

All that being said, I am pleased to relate that I can say many mostly good things of the Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Series Du Jour, which happens to be Jim Butcher's Codex Alera one. I hauled this off the Evil Landlord's incredibly disorganised bookshelf of recent acquisitions mostly because I expected it to be fairly mindless: I haven't been impressed with Butcher's Harry Dresden series, which I find is a bit flailing and unwieldy and doesn't quite either achieve freshness in the overcrowded paranormal category, or pull off its voice. I have, however, been thoroughly sucked in by the Codex Alera, to the point where I'm somewhat miffed to realise, after ripping through four books in short order, that there are actually five in the series and the EL doesn't own the last one. Pshaw.

The setting is relatively straightforward Ginormous Fantasy Epic, with a rather well-constructed and believable political landscape entailing city-states ruled by magic-wielding high lords who are more or less at each other's throats; the whole pot is stirred by the fact that the aging First Lord doesn't have an heir. There really aren't any serious surprises in the way the story unfolds, since Butcher tends to telegraph the twists books ahead, but I really enjoyed both his hero and his thoroughly beguiling magic system. Magic is permitted by controlling furies, which are more or less animist elemental spirits. Effects are elementally categorised and their associations are well-thought-out. I found it interesting that the assumption is that everyone in this society can manipulate furies to some extent or another, and with very widely varying degrees of ability which are built into agriculture, warfare, weather control, travel - you name it. The apex is in the High Lords' families, who are ridiculously powerful in a way that completely underpins and rationalises the political system. More importantly, the hero is the usual young man growing to maturity, but he's singular not in enormous magical power, but in a bizarre and absolute lack of it. He's also charismatic, stubborn, slightly naively idealistic, highly intelligent and efficient and thoroughly likeable.

Nutshell Assessment: Upsides. Intelligent magic, intelligent politics, occasional inverted clichés. Lots of detail in tactics, combat, martial arts (the author is a martial arts geek and it shows). Lovely non-human races (one doglike lot, one set of strange alien brain-suckers), NO ELVES! Or dwarves. Or anything remotely resembling a hobbit. Considerable narrative tension, humour, likeable protagonists.

Nutshell Assessment: Downsides. Only mild peril. The characters perpetually end up threatened by capture, torture, death, rape, mind-rape or worse, but always escape unscathed. After a bit you stop taking peril seriously. Lots of detail in tactics, combat, martial arts. Solidly unobtrusive writing rather than any striking linguistic skill. (But I have to say, way better than Harry Dresden). Have to either acquire the last one in hardback or bloody well wait for it. Phooey.

Back at work, alas. On the upside, it's pretty dead, and I'm mostly cruising the internet and answering email backlogs in a desultory fashion. I can't work out if it's an upside or a downside that the Japanese Peace Lily in my office has produced two flowers while I was away: it seems a bit of a pointed commentary on my ineffectual druiding ("look! I do better without you!").

Making Light pointed me to today's happy dose of religious bigotry, now with bonus illogic and out-of-context references to Catullus. Apparently all men are actually latently gay and permitting gay marriage will only encourage them. Mostly this speaks volumes about the latent gay urges of the writer, don't you think? Homosexuality is never such a bugaboo as when you're trying to deny it in yourself. (He's righteously and rather entertainingly hacked to shreds in the comments, I'm pleased to say).

It's making me ponder, though, and alerting the Department of Logical Extrapolation. We're in South Africa, home of a liberal constitution I'm rather proud to live under, which explicitly states that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is not permitted. By this logic, surely it's not OK for a religious figure to stand up in a South African pulpit and denounce homosexuality as wrong? by doing this, don't they "discriminate directly or indirectly" against homosexuals, most importantly by teaching and encouraging discrimination?

And if this is the case, surely it's theoretically possible to take them to court? As far as I know the Bill of Rights's provisions on discrimination are only actually translated into law in the case of employment equity and right to marriage, but the Constitution is supposed to be binding on the courts. Point 8.3 of the Bill of Rights states that "When applying a provision of the Bill of Rights to a natural or juristic person in terms of subsection (2), a court ­... in order to give effect to a right in the Bill, must apply, or if necessary develop, the common law to the extent that legislation does not give effect to that right". If someone tried to sue a church for frothing anti-gay sentiment, the court would be obliged to create a precedent based on the constitution in order to deem whether this was a crime.

So I'm interested in why this hasn't happened yet. Am I misreading the constitutional notion of "discrimination", so that saying that gays are evil isn't actually discrimination? because, ye gods, it really is. Or does no-one call them on it because of the usual failure of political will in the face of large-scale and dearly-held beliefs? I cannot sufficiently state how happy it would make me to have every narrow-minded fundamentalist church in this country slapped with the requirement to shut the fuck up with regard to their personal bigotries about homosexuality, because "it's my religion!" cannot trump "it's illegal". But that's going to happen like an academic post in science fiction is going to fall into my lap tomorrow. More's the pity.

Things I Learned At My 40th Birthday Party:

1. The properties of thixotropic fluids. A sudden, entirely spontaneous demonstration of fluid dynamics in non-Newtonian fluids was perpetrated by smoczek, aided and abetted by various engineer types, who generated small pots full of a cornstarch/water solution and exhorted the unsuspecting to prod them, slowly and fast. That stuff is weird, having a sort of optional viscosity which solidifies, or not, depending on the kind of force exerted. Strangely magical, actually.
2. All geeks, of whatever variety, can instantly name their favourite space probe when asked. This is a bit like the Zoobiscuit Test: a category of questions which, while bizarrely pointless, generate instant compliance when put, because the interlocuter clearly agrees that they're important. I didn't at first think that I fell into this particular geek category, but in fact mine is Cassini-Huygens, probably on account of my obsession with Saturn. (Its moons get in my eyes. Also, rings).

I am happily surrounded by geeks, who are excellent company and know me well enough to give excellent birthday presents. The house is full of booze, flowers, chocolate, books and cooking paraphernalia, and there is surprisingly little cornstarch solution tramped into the carpets. It was a lovely party, thank you all.

(The subject line, incidentally, appropos of absolutely nothing except that my mp3 player presented me randomly with the Magnetic Fields's "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget" as I was travelling back from visiting my dad this morning, causing me to laugh a great deal. It's a sort of evil-minded parody of Robert Burns meets the Childe Ballads, the young lady protecting her virginity via a fairly classic shape-changing competition, with the usual Magnetic Fields demented twist. The verse which made me nearly drive into a tree (again!) went: "I'll turn into a vampire and kiss you on the neck / Well I'll turn into a siller cross and send thee back to Heck..." Hee. Parodic bowlderisation of vampire references in the service of the rhyme scheme ftw.)

Hah! knew it. Administration is clearly bad for the dream-life, I need another job, stat. Not even a full week of leave, and last night I dreamed I was cuddling one of the young Arnold Schwarzenegger's musclebound gun-toting characters on a mattress on the floor of a hotel room in the French Riviera. (Which is odd, as I seriously don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Possibly because I can't spell him). Later I stopped off at the run-down petrol station in the middle of nowhere in order to fill up my scooter with milk and also to decline, definitively, to make an emergency bridge fourth for a tournament. Even in the dreamscape my absolute hatred of bridge and all its ilk shone forth very clearly.

I have been listening to the Magnetic Fields for the last week or so, the three new albums I've just acquired - Get Lost, Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip. This is earlier Fields, the few before I, which is the one before 69 Love Songs. I was all ready to be all "meh" about them - they aren't doing to me what 69 Love Songs did, which was to charm me utterly and instantly with a sort of wicked, louche genre-bending (and man, am I ever a slut for genre) and insane levels of tunefulness and zan (which is the noun for "zany" I just made up). All three of these earlier albums lack the vibrate-your-teeth catchiness of 69 Love Songs, but after the third listen or so I've realised that in fact they've been sneakily climbing up my spine while I wasn't looking to coil affectionately around my cerebellum. I have a sort of vague impression that the songs are all boring and uniform - possibly as much because of Stephin Merritt's mournful baritone as anything else - but I realise that any particular song I happen to be listening to at a given moment is neither boring nor uniform, but quirky, recognisable and subtly catchy. 69 Love Songs is almost an intensification of the qualities of the earlier albums, but its roots are definitely here, and digging deeper into my consciousness by the minute. Magnetic Fields, voted Band Most Likely To Turn Out To Be An Alien Brain Parasite. Fact.

Because I have to: courtesy of grumpyolddog, "Hey There Cthulhu", a particularly iconoclastic filk which renders a slightly saccharine song pleasingly demented.


Several peoples have asked me what I want for my birthday. I'm personally totally terrible with gifts for other people, it's completely random whether I find something for you or not, so I truly don't mind if you turn up just with you, booze and the desire to party, it's karmically inevitable. But in case you're in the mad present-giving mood and want some hints, here's the Usual List:

• Books, DVDs, cds, graphic novels always good. I have slightly random wishlists on both Amazon.uk and Loot.co.za, under my Real Name, TM. Anything on there is something I mean to acquire sometime. You probably want to ignore all the kids' books and music, they're there because I plan to get them for my niece. In the graphic novel arena I still only have the first Sandman volume, and am also pining vaguely after 1602 and pretty much anything Ultimate. Because they're so pretty.
• Cookbooks are always good, my sister's family + dad just gave me a couple of massive and lovely British winter cookbook tomes which have made me Very, Very Happy. I don't own any Jamie Oliver (stv, stop spitting) or Nigella Lawson. These are my Secret Sorrows.
• You absolutely, totally, cannot go wrong with either chocolate or flowers, love 'em both. Also vouchers, wine or exotic bath oil or bath pearls and other strange unguents.
• Functional owls. You know the drill. I love owls but hate bric-a-brac, so anything owl-inscribed that I can actually use gets my vote. (first_fallen, I'm not sure the loopy owl pen with the eyes that roll back actually counts).

Mostly, though, it'll just be lovely to see everyone.

This post does have a unified theme, btw. pumeza's birthday card to me was this (by Ursula Vernon, naturally):

Perfect birthday! wake up to bucketing rain and high winds, lie in bed enjoying it without having to dash off to work. When maxbarners arrives, tragically without smoczek because her work is being evil, hijack his plan to go out for a birthday breakfast and instead use him as an excuse to make waffles. With chocolate ice cream, because that's all that was in the house. Consume vast and unlikely quantities of same.

Read multitudinous birthday messages on Twitter and Facebook and email, being touched and surprised that so many people remembered. Realise that both Facebook and LJ send out reminders if you tell them your birthday, which I apparently did. Be touched and happy anyway.

Spend the afternoon in a warm kitchen with cats and tea and loud rock music, cooking enormous meals and chocolate cake for my favourite group of role-playing lunatics this evening. Why, yes, role-playing is my idea of a perfect way to spend a birthday evening. Why, yes, I am an enormous geek.

That Dreaded Age has apparently found me still firmly in the Cooking Huge Meals For Friends camp, to which I say, damn straight. It's also given me a bit of a warning about doddering dillyness, being as how I accidentally left my wallet on the counter in the liquor store this afternoon, necessitating one of those embarassing groping sessions at the Woolies checkout, immediately followed by fleeing the store without paying. On the upside, the Cosmic Wossnames dictate that I wasn't actually pickpocketed, and didn't drop the wretched thing in the street, and that the liquor store clerk returned it to me with the minimum of mockery, so I think we're ahead.

My subconscious seems to be firmly convinced that this is just another birthday and I'm really no more than a day older now than I was yesterday, so I seem refreshingly free of Milestone Angst. Thanks to everyone for wishes, will reply individually, eventually, but for now know that there's a Warm Glow that's not entirely about the Earl Grey. Also, looking forward to seeing a pleasing proportion of you on Saturday.

I do love extended birthdays. Celebrations for mine this year started yesterday, owing to smoczek having the brilliant idea of using my birthday as an excuse to go back to Overture, which the Salty Cracker Club loved. So I was hauled out there for a birthday lunch with smoczek and maxbarners and the Evil Landlord and the friendly_shrink and her Internet Romance, now Internet Husband, and fed royally. Also wined a lot. You can do the Overture meal with wine by the course, and they give you a large glass of wine with each dish, impeccably tuned to the food, and fill it up if you ask. (Jo asked. Naturally). They are also remarkably understanding if you turn down the aforementioned impeccably chosen pairing, as I did, on the grounds that you can't stand muscadel and would rather have port, which they cheerfully supply.

The food was wonderful. The food is always wonderful. The waiter's mastery of the lifted eyebrow when Jo ordered pork belly for dessert was commendable. The company was perfect. Probably the best part of it all, though, was the view.



and:



and Jo, hauntingly backlit:



Memo to self: take mother there while she's visiting. It's the perfect excuse.