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Review: "The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook"

The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook
Paperback – January 1, 2000
by george-foreman-connie-merydith (Author)

Today we finished reading our second cookbook of the year. The front matter includes Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, and Smart Eating for Healthier Living. The recipe chapters are Bring Out the Best of Grilling -- Marinades, Sauces, and Rubs; A Cut Above -- Beef and Lamb; Smoky Sensations -- Pork Chops, Ribs, and Ham; Tender Choices from the Sea -- Fish and Shellfish; Savory Grilled Poultry -- Chicken and Turkey; Quick and Easy Favorites -- Burgers, Sandwiches, and Snacks; Tempting Companion Dishes -- Vegetables, Fruit, Salads, and Desserts. Then in the back are a basic cooking guide, glossary, and index. The index lists both recipe titles and ingredients.

( Read more... )

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Monday Word: Chyron

chyron [kahy-ron]

noun

a text-based graphic overlay displayed at the bottom of a television screen or film frame, as closed captioning or the crawl of a newscast.

examples

1. How quickly or sl(owly can the chyrons listing adverse reactions scurry across your screen? "With TV Drug Ads, What You See Is Not Necessarily What You Get" KFFHealthNews. 09 Sept 2024

2. An update on our friend Nazgul: When the official NBC Olympics account shared Nazgul's story on Instagram, they added a chyron that includes his time during the event, his name, the country he represented (https://www.instagram.com/p/DU6TUJ1gZkp/) Italy, naturally), and his official place: a gold medal at the Good Boy Winter Olympics.

origins

First recorded in 1975–80; after Chyron Corporation, the manufacturer of a broadcast graphics generator

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Current Music: and smiles and knows she's home

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why do you elude me

Watching my soprano section shrink in real time the week of a concert due to the germ soup we're all swimming around in out there: augh. (People. This is why most of your section leaders and certain choir elders have decided to continue singing masked, even if we can't make it policy again for the whole choir for various bureaucratic reasons. Seriously, 3M, where are those black N95s we've been politely requesting for four years now?)

Still, glad to be singing with a group whose music is meeting the moment; check program notes, well worth a read for background. Keeping in mind the timelines for performing classical music are scheduled well over a year in advance. A program replete with music from immigrants, combining disparate musical traditions in the best ways.

*

We almost had snow in the Bay Area again last week - well, okay, the actual 2500' peaks like Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton got snow and it looked pretty, and of course the much higher Sierras to our east got feet of snow and "no you can't fucking travel today" warnings and avalanche deaths - and now we're missing the first real snow in Boston in years, and it's pretty, but I'm okay with that.

*

I dropped my phone awhile back, and while it was still technically functional, the back had enough spiderwebbing and flaking glass revealing the motherboard structure below that I got it replaced. It has literally taken most of the day since it arrived to get things swapped over. Mostly because this also involved a forced upgrade to Liquid Glass, which I'd been ducking, sigh.

*

A few months ago,

hyounpark and I were getting on the freeway when a billboard flashed "LOCAL BIRRIA BALLS" at us. For, like, half a second, just long enough for H to read the phrase aloud, and go, "Birria *balls*?"
Me: "That's like, bringing up ancient catchphrases in my brain. Remember 'I wanna dip my balls in it'?"
H: "... I don't want to know, do I."
Me: "MTV in the '90s. For what it's worth, they were golf balls."
H: "I suspect birria balls are going to be quite different, but I'm driving so I can't find out right now."
Me: "I'm on it!"
Me, five minutes later: "Well, I can't find a local option for whatever these are, and Google keeps asking me if I'm looking for 'birria bombs.' But apparently a Mexican food truck in Kentucky says they're meatballs made of birria? With Hot Cheetos dust on the outside for crunch? ... and there's a restaurant in West Virginia that agrees with them."
H: "... I mean, that sounds like uber-American stoner kid food mashup culture, but why aren't there more local search results if there's literally a freeway billboard promoting it?"
Me: "Or we can buy them frozen. From an Italian specialty food shop. In Denmark."
H: "Google, you have utterly lost the plot."

We finally saw that particular billboard again (it's one of those electronic billboards with a rotating stash of ads), and this time, it had a URL attached, so we discovered that the local birria balls are literally just flavor packs, you have to provide your own birria in ball form.

Current Mood: ecstatic

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heated rivalry

My review: Book of Heated Rivalry

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Ta dobra.

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/ta-dobra/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19305

A fine post from bulbulistan redivivus, that collection of writings of bulbul/Slavo (see this LH post):

Hans Stumme (1864-1936) was a German linguist whose work is is probably known to anyone interested in Berber and North-African varieties of Arabic. Stumme travelled a lot and collected huge amounts of spoken data from – inter alia – Tunisians, Išelḥiyen and the Maltese. […] It is quite clear that Stumme was particularly interested in collecting folk literature, such fairytales and songs, where his books remain an invaluable source of data for folklorists. At the same time, Stumme’s work is extremely valuable for the study of the languages involved […]

This applies doubly to Maltese where there have been at least two major studies of the fairytales (1, 2). As far as I can tell, there is little focus in reevaluating Stumme’s dialectological work (but that might change soon), which is a shame, because there is so much fascinating stuff in there. Like for example song no. 70 from the collection of Maltese songs (Kössler-Ilg and Stumme 1909, p. 27). I am reproducing the text below in standard Maltese orthography and Stumme’s original German translation accompanied by my English one based on the Maltese text.

Ta’ dobra sejrin jsiefru […]

Die Slawen wollen abreisen […]

The Slavs are about to leave […]

A note here: the phrase tathom qalbhom is a bit of a mystery. […]

But that is not why we are here. We are here for the multi-word expression in bold that Stumme translates as the ethnonym “Slavs”. The composition of the expression is clear: the element ta’ is what Arabic dialectology refers to as genitive exponent, i.e. possession marker, the equivalent of ‘of’. In North African varieties, it usually takes the form mtāʕ/ntāʕ etc., the apostrophe at the end of ta’ is what remained of ʕ in Maltese. ta’ (or tal- with a definite article) + NOUN is how Maltese creates group names: ta’ Lejber ‘Labourists’, tal-PN ‘nationalists (lit. of Partit Nazzjonalista)” are perhaps the most prominent examples. Similarly, in a version of the Maltese translation of Bandiera rossa, the first verse goes Tal-pinna o ħutna, ukoll tal-mazza where pinna is ‘pen’ and mazza is ‘sledgehammer’, the two expressions meaning ‘intellectuals’ and ‘workers’.

What the of the dobra? That is quite simple; as Stumme himself puts it on p. 11, we’re dealing with “die Leute, die immer dobra ‘gut!’ sagen” (“the people who always say dobra ‘good!'”). That we do so and that we are perceived as such I can attest to from personal experience, recalling for example an Albanian lady in a B&B in Italy who upon learning that I am Slovak went “Oh you are one of the dobre dobre people!” That this is also how the Maltese thought of us back in the late 19th century is fascinating. Now the question remains which Slavs are these, since the general adverb of agreement usually takes the form dobre/dobro. The only language I can think of where people use a form with an [a] at the end is Czech, but there the vowel is long and considering the geography of the region, it is more likely that Maltese would encounter South Slavs. So probably not Czechs and definitely not the Polish or Slovaks, otherwise it would either be ta’ dopxe or, of course, ta’ kurva.

To je dobré!

https://languagehat.com/ta-dobra/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19305

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"Lumos." (Harry Potter) G

Title: Lumos.
Author:

lannamichaels
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Series: Part 1 of Leontes Granger
Pairing: Hermione Granger/Neville Longbottom
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Leontes Granger is sorted into Gryffindor.

( The boy!Hermione fic )

Current Music: Vampire Weekend, "Capricorn"

Sifting through centuries for moments of your own

The snow has plastered our windows like blinds. This morning it scudded so thickly down our street that the air itself couldn't have been any clearer: it made walls instead of veils of the late streetlight. The yew trees look like calcified humps of stalagmite. It's still blowing around out there, bending the whippier evergreens of the neighbors' yard like a wind sock. I can hear a commuter train whistling dimly from over Route 16. I am informed we have broken the previous state record for snowfall in a day set by the 1997 April Fool's Day Blizzard which had itself surpassed the Blizzard of '78. Our porch is drifted ankle-deep.

Forewords and Afterwords

Forewords and Afterwords by W.H. Auden

A collection of essays, including reviews, all written on occasion, for a particular book.

It produces a great variety of subjects.

Some are of period interest, of various kinds. The appropriate treatment for migraines being psychoanalysis? On the other hand, this is where I read his observation about how going over to Rome was a shocking scandal in the upper classes -- like the birth of an illegitimate baby -- but something that did happen, whereas becoming a Baptist was inconceivable.

Much about poets and other writers, some interesting observations on heroes, and more.

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Dreams of Dead Stars, Part III, ch. 25: Determining Direction

Information is shared, and a course is charted.

( Read more... )

Snow shows no sign of stopping

And I am trapped at work!

I mean, the buses are running, but nobody else is coming in, and it’s not a job you can just shut down for the day.

mountweazel

mountweazel or Mountweazel (MOUNT-wee-zuhl) - n., a deliberately fictitious entry in an encyclopedia or academic work, generally identifiable as false, planted among the genuine entries to catch other publishers in the act of copying content.

A form of copyright trap. TIL the German word for this is a nihilartikel, now sometimes also used in English. Coined in 2005 by Henry Alford in The New Yorker from an fictitious entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia for one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a supposed photographer who died on assignment while covering an explosion for the equally fictitious Combustibles magazine.

---L.

Current Mood: awake

2 things make a post

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Bits and pieces, catching up

I've been busy lately with several things on the go - doing HR art for the ICE OUT donations challenge, recording a long SGA podfic for the Podfic Big Bang (And Hope by Sihaya Black), and trying to fit in recording a couple of shorter ones for Romancing McShep and Romancing SGA, as well. Oof. Plus a lot of HR fic reading. I've accepted that it's impossible to keep up in any meaningful sense, and just surf along reading stuff I see reccd or authors I know I like a lot, and the few WIPs I'm following. Eventually I guess I'll catch up with numerous gems in the fandom that I missed in this avalanche of new fics, many of them extremely good.

In terms of reading very good authors, I had an exceptionally obsessive episode today where I started a story by one of my fave HR writers and couldn't read it. Because (unlike in ALL their other fics) they'd chosen to do all the Ilya POV narration in Ilya-speak, with most of the articles dropped. Russian doesn't have separate articles, I gather, because the distinction between "a ball" & "the ball" is done with word order - which is why in English, Russians often drop their articles. An example:
1. Девушка читает книгу. (The girl is reading a book)
2. Книгу читает девушка. (The girl is reading the book)
In both sentences, the meaning is nearly the same. However, in Sentence 2, the placement of “книгу” (book) at the beginning, before “девушка” (girl), highlights the importance of the book and implies a specific book.
The parts of the fic where it was Ilya's dialogue were fine because that portrays his actual speech, but the narrative (for me) is his thoughts (internal narration) in tight 3rd POV and there's NO WAY he'd be dropping "articles" in his thinking in Russian. It made him seem stupid, which he very much isn't, and I couldn't bear to read it. So I just now copied it into Word and betaed it, adding back in all the articles from his narrative POV parts. If you recognise the fic, hit me up in a DM and I'll share the edited version. It's a bloody good fic otherwise, 9000 words.

Life's been quiet apart from reccing, writing, arting and podficcing, and I'm looking forward to a dinner out with friends this Wednesday. Also enjoying sweet corn, and the start of the stone fruit season, with gorgeous nectarines. My garden is blowsy and straggly now, in late summer, and I need to take some time (ha!) to trim it back a bit. It's still warm here, about 22-24 degC highs, usually, and drier of late so I'm still watering the entire garden by hand every 3 days.

One bloody annoying thing that happened was that my credit card was hacked back at the end of January (picked up via notifications coming up on my phone from my banking app asking me to approve a bunch of things I hadn't bought). Luckily all smallish purchases (kids? An unambitious thief, anyway) and I think the bank will refund them. But that meant cancelling that card and them mailing me another (a process I last went through several months ago). And then the mailed card never arrived (presumed stolen from my letterbox) and I got another couple of false transactions on the new card that I hadn't even seen yet! So yet another card cancellation and this time I got it mailed to my bank. I was very glad that after the last debacle several months ago I'd arranged a second credit card via my other bank (I have accounts at 2 banks for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture).

Anyway, in terms of recs:
- I'm reading all Evilharlowe's HR works on AO3 - they really are a fantastic writer.
- Happened on a great short edit that sets Shane and Ilya's tuna melt hiatus to a Chappel Roan song (The Subway - amazing song) - heartrending edit, very well done, but man, I wish it were a full-sized fanvid.
- Bringing to your attention this workout video by Hudson Williams. Leg day and his skincare routine are really paying off! (CN for casual mentions of eating extreme diets or 'not eating' to make his body fit acting roles. Which is worrying but probably routine for actors.)
- there's a LOT of HR podfic by now and every day there are 1 or 2 new ones. It's a great way to revisit fics I read and loved while I do art. For example,

cathexys podficced Magneticwave's Clear to a Hedgehog. This link gets you HR podfic on AO3.

Enough for now. Waving at you all - hope things are going as well as they can.! 💗

I guessed people would call out, and I was right

I didn’t guess that I’d be stuck with the roads closed until at least noon tomorrow.

Well, I’m getting paid every hour I’m here, at least.

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vital functions

vital functions

Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )

ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.

Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...

Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.

Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.

Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...

Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...

NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.

Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.

This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.

A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...

Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)

Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?

Who Hit John on the Picketwire.

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/who-hit-john-on-the-picketwire/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19301

I just rewatched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance after decades, and it was just as good (and cynical) as I remembered — I especially enjoyed Edmond O’Brien as Dutton Peabody, editor of the Shinbone Star who orates about the power of the press as he swigs from a jug of booze. But what drove me to post was the name someone uses for that booze: who-hit-John, which Wiktionary defines as “Hard liquor; whiskey.” Nobody seems to know the origin; it’s not in the OED, and Green’s has only one cite for it, from the ridiculously late date of 1980 (“But without a hangover and a headful of Who-hit-John, it is a different light”), but I like it and will try to remember to use it when the occasion arises.

Also, the river which plays such a role in the movie (gun-slinging cattlemen to the north, law-abiding farmers to the south) is called the Picketwire, which is the wonderfully anglicized name of the Purgatoire River in southeastern Colorado (though the territory-turned-state in the movie is never named):

The Purgatoire River, also known as Rio de las Ánimas, has had multiple names. It was named by New Mexican Governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío in 1719 during his exploration of the region. Valverde named it “Rio de las Ánimas,” meaning “River of the Spirits,” as a warning to subsequent explorers of the dangers of crossing the nearby Ratón Pass. Surviving the crossing, they found water and firewood at the river. Over time, the true meaning of the river’s name became lost, and various interpretations emerged. By the end of the 18th-century Spanish traders believed it to be “Rio de las Ánimas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls in Purgatory,” after a supposed massacre that occurred on its banks. This led to the birth of a legend of the same name that explained its history. French trappers learned the name and later translated it as “Rivière des âmes au Purgatoire.” They related their translation to members of the Stephen H. Long expedition in 1820 who renamed it “Purgatory Creek” by removing all references to souls. Mexican traders on the old Santa Fe Trail expanded on the legend and named the river “Rio de las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls Lost in Purgatory,” believing the souls to have become lost. Mountain Men had difficulty pronouncing the French translation and called it “Picatoire,” while Anglophone settlers during the Colorado Gold Rush anglicized it to “Picketwire,” despite the river having no relation to any fence.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the surname Valance, it’s a variant of Vallance: “English and Scottish: of Norman origin a habitational name from Valence in Drôme France named with Latin valentia ‘strength capacity’.”

https://languagehat.com/who-hit-john-on-the-picketwire/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19301

Current Music: Pram, "The Owl Service"

The bones of houses show in the summertime

I spent much of yesterday running pre-blizzard errands, but the local state of the parking spots is the truest gauge of the meteorology about to go down.

I have not yet managed to get hold of her memoir, but I deeply appreciate being notified of the existence of E. M. Barraud, who identified herself with chalk-cut hill figures, candidly described her relationship status as "technically single, but 'married' in a permanent homosexual relationship with another woman," published under her assigned initials and was known in Little Eversden where she worked for the Women's Land Army as John. She gave her wartime responses for Mass-Observation as both a man and a woman: "People are people, not specifics of a gender." I had never even encountered her poetry.

Current Mood: amused

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heated rivalry

Skating and dancing

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Weekly proof of life: recent media | Spring Crunch Eve

Reading: Last week I finished Stephanie Burgis' Wooing the Witch Queen (fun!) and read Heated Rivalry. I opted to just skip straight to the actual HR novel rather than first reading the Scott/Kip novel, which worked out fine, since I also had that context from the show. I enjoyed it a fair bit, but now I'm in the awkward position of wanting to see the next chunk for Shane and Ilya but no more urgently than after I finished watching season 1 of the show. The choices now are a) read the entire series (presumably doubling back to actually read book 1), b) skip ahead and read The Long Game, or c) hold off entirely and wait for season 2 of the show.

I also read a few more volumes each of Hikaru no Go and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but I'm still in rereading territory with both. (I think I've already read up to vol. 12 of Kurosagi, but for Hikaru, I think the odds are against me really realizing when I've hit new territory until I go to enter a volume in Goodreads and find it's not already on my Read list there.)

Watching:

scruloose and I are caught up on both The Pitt and Frieren, and we finished Midnight Mass last weekend (a very solid, intense ending).

With my crunch time at work starting, it's not an ideal time for us to start a show that's a significant time commitment or that's going to leave me desperate to see a next episode when work is eating most or all of my evenings. It's possible this will result in me just showing

scruloose Heated Rivalry, since it's apparently our key cultural export of the decade and all. *g* Only six episodes and I don't have to worry about being impatient to see what happens next or about being spoiled.

(I still don't feel actively fannish about HR at all, but am enjoying being adjacent to it and seeing all the fannish excitement and meta and such. I have saved many fic recs to my read-later list on A03, but have yet to actually read a single one [and may never, given how slowly I go through fic--there's still a steady stream of Guardian fic I haven't read that also goes on that list].)

Weathering/Working: We have what sounds like a significant nor'easter blizzard arriving at some point tomorrow, with heavy wet snow. Will this be where our luck fails for the season and we lose power for the first time? (I'm completely astonished that it hasn't happened yet. Probably it's not really because the generator and backup power are warding that off, like carrying an umbrella around...)

And of course the spring crunch is set to start tomorrow in the late afternoon, right around when the storm is likely to be in full swing. Will the weather have much impact? (Mainly, I guess, in terms of Those Who Speak all being able to make it there safely; I kinda hope that there's some kind of backup power in their actual building, but I don't know for sure one way or the other.)

Pokémon: Perished Pidove Nominations & Sign-ups Extended!

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