Asakiyume mita

Happy 2026 ... the microfiction prompt word today was "champagne." I ended up in South Dakota on Google Street View, and then downloading the New Lakota Dictionary to hear how a word was pronounced but ... have a microstory:

Driving through Bullhead, South Dakota, Mike noticed a sign on a roadside stand: "Bullhead Champaign."

He pulled over. Bottles with fancy labels in both English & Lakota stood in a row.

"You know you can't call something champagne unless comes from Champagne, France, right? Also, isn't this area too cold for wine grapes?"

The seller regarded Mike coolly.

"This is made from sandcherry. Aúŋyeyapi in our langauge. And it's p-a-i-g-n, not p-a-g-n-e. Totally different."

From this blog I learned the Lakota name, as well as an alternative name, tȟaȟpíyoǧiŋ, and this fun piece of lore: that you should pick the fruit facing the wind to ensure they'll be sweet.

The checkout line at this Walmart was going to be very slow: ahead of us were four grown-ish children and their mom, and their cart was packed to overflowing.

“How about you bring the car around for my dad,” I suggested. “You guys wait, and I’ll text when I’m through.” My husband nodded, and the two of them headed out.

Between me and the family with the packed cart was an older couple; behind me was a younger couple. All of us had just a few things—I had a laundry basket, a bathroom scale, and a shower curtain for my dad’s new living situation.

Lining the checkout alley were tempting items to impulse purchase: Goya adobo seasoning, both con and sin pimienta, Goya canned beans, Jarritos sodas, Sanchis Mira Turrón de Alicante—nougat candy from Alicante, Spain. We who were waiting had a long time to contemplate these items. The couple ahead of me grabbed a shaker of adobo seasoning. The couple behind put a couple of the sodas in their cart. I stared at the nougat candy. Would it be like torrone, the Italian version of nougat candy that my grandmother used to have? That candy came in small boxes with pictures of famous sites in Italy or of women in traditional regional dress.

I added a package of the candy to my cart. The family with the very full cart was through; the older couple ahead of me were putting their items on the conveyor belt.

“Necesitan bolsas?” the cashier asked. No, they didn’t need any bags. The cashier wished them a Feliz Navidad, and it was my turn.

“Hi, how are you, you want the shower curtain and the scale in the laundry basket?” the cashier asked. She wished me happy holidays and switched smoothly back to Spanish for the couple behind me.

Sanchis Mira Turrón de Alicante turned out to have the same flavor but a completely different texture from the Italian torrone my grandmother used to get. The Italian torrone was thickly chewy, a workout for the jaw; the turrón was hard and broke into dangerous sugar splinters. Ah well. Maybe I’ll have better luck with my next impulse purchase.

Not to be all Youtube recs all the time, but the same mutual who shared the Greensleeves video shared this tribute to the city of Kyoto via a compilation of anime clips set in Kyoto, to the tune of "Toki Doki" by Takénobu, which has the chorus "boku no Kyoto" (my Kyoto), and I loved it very much.

Since several of my Dreamwidth friends have been to Kyoto and are fond of the city, I had to share. You can also go to the AO3 location and leave the creator some kudos if you're inclined :-)

I don't like to go longer than a week without posting, but I just did! So this is me waving hello. The reason for the absence is family stuff: my dad is finally moving somewhat closer to me (and very close to my younger brother), plus the Tall One has also been moving. Stressful and time consuming.

Thanksgiving included a clogged main pipe out of my dad's (soon to be former) house, where we'd gathered for the day. This necessitated an emergency plumber! Plus there were some shenanigans with the turkey roaster that delayed the turkey. "It's our toilet-less, turkey-less Thanksgiving," joked Little Springtime. But in the end the emergency plumber fixed the clog and the turkey finished cooking, and people's spirits remained relatively high, so it can be categorized as a Fun Tale of Obstacles Overcome rather than A Horrible Time. (It became that once we knew a plumber was coming. Hero of the story: the plumber.)

Wakanomori brought an Edo-period board game that he'd put together from images available online, and we played it. It's Genji Monogatari-themed: you march around the board and land on different chapters from the Tale of Genji, and each square comes with a poem--not from the Tale of Genji but from the makers of the game. Plus gorgeous ink paintings. Very aesthetic and allowed for a good review of the happenings of the story--or introduction to them, for several people present. (Not sure if anyone's read it from beginning to end. Maybe Wakanomori has.)

One clear day the novice asked the master, What is the meaning of blue?

The master said, Look up.

I watched the documentary El sendero de la anaconda (The path of the anaconda, 2019) over the weekend, mere days before it's set to leave Netflix, mainly to feast my eyes on the sweet, sweet drone shots of the Colombian Amazon, not primarily down where I was, but up further north, where lie the absolutely stunning waterfalls of Jirijirimo and the massifs of Chribiquete. (The subtitles were not crooked; it's that I was taking snapshots of my computer and then I cropped the photos, etc. etc.)





The documentary went here and there, but one thing it touched on is rubber plantations, and in the story of these is the black swan event. The story goes like this:

In spite of torturing (completely literally) the local population to try to cultivate rubber commercially in the Amazon in the early years of the twentieth century, efforts were unsuccessful because of a pest of rubber trees endemic to the region. But the seeds were spirited out and taken to Southeast Asia, where successful plantations were established--and that's where all the world's commercial rubber came from.

Come World War II, Japan conquered the area and took control of the rubber plantations. Bad news for the Allies! They were desperate for any alternative source of rubber, so they sent an ethnobotanist down there--Richard Evans Schultes, in fact, the guy who's fictionalized in Embrace of the Serpent (review here). They wanted Schultes to locate a specimen of rubber tree that was (a) productive and (b) resistant to the pest. And he did find one!

Meanwhile, however, the Allies had developed synthetic rubber, and that was how they supplied themselves for the rest of the war. And then after the war ... "the clonal gardens that had preserved the germ plasm that had been collected at tremendous cost of blood and treasure were cut to the ground [on the orders of the US Department of State]. The files were seized and classified. Was it some kind of crazy conspiracy? No; it was just bureaucratic idiocy. That, plus faith in the future of synthetic rubber," says Wade Davis, the film's narrator, a writer, anthropologist, and student of Schultes.

Aye but there's the ... rub. Because along came radial tires--they need natural rubber. And then, even more important, along came airplanes that fly at 30+ thousand feet. "Only natural rubber has the qualities that allow it to go from the subzero temperatures of high altitude to the shock and impact of hitting the tarmac at 250 kilometers per hour within ten minutes. And because of that we use more natural rubber than ever before."

And it all comes from Southeast Asia, from trees that are all clones of the trees grown from the original smuggled-out seeds. "A single act of biological terrorism or the accidental introduction of the spore into Southeast Asia would completely disrupt the industry."

So that's fun!

The film leaves Netflix on November 14. It's a little bit unfocused, and even though it wants to uplift an indigenous worldview, it's VERY heavy on White Guy Talking, but it does have a few local voices. Still: it's very, very beautiful.

Wherein I manage to answer every question with a No, I don't have one of these, but how about this tangentially related answer? (Via sovay and osprey_archer)

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

There aren't any of these right now, but back when I was a kid, I picked up Patricia McKillup's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld because of this cover. I loved the evening sunset glow of it, very Maxfield Parrish-esque.

2. Pride, challenging books I finished.

When we're talking about reading for pleasure, I'm pretty much of a quitter when the going gets tough, so I can't really say there are any of these. Maybe reading the Portuguese version of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Ideias para apiar o fim do mundo), but see, then it's not entirely pleasure reading; it's partly language practice. And it's a very short book, so...

There are books that have lingered in my currently-reading pile pretty much untouched, and it's not that they're super challenging, they just take more commitment than I can often muster, e.g., Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, which I want to read for the information, and it's engagingly written, just .... for pleasure I'd rather read other stuff.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I did this a LOT as a kid, but I haven't as an adult (except for, e.g., reading childhood faves to my own kids). Instead what I do is reread particular sections or passages that I love, but honestly, I don't even do that very often; mostly it happens when I want to share something with someone. This happened recently with Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, for example.

4. Sloth, books that have been longest on my to-read list.

I put things on my to-read list with thoughtless abandon; I don't even know what-all is on my list, and often they're things I'm only vaguely curious about. A bigger sign of sloth is the books I start and don't finish, like Governing the Commons, noted above. Or Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which I think is beautiful in its moment-by-moment observations (some of which jump vividly to mind when I type this), but which, overall, I have a terrible time sitting down to read.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I only own multiple editions of stuff I used when I was teaching in the jail, and I've been thinning those out (but e.g., I had multiple editions of Esmeralda Santiago's When I was Puerto Rican).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I take a deep hate to I generally don't finish, but there are books that ticked me off mightily in some aspect or other, even if I didn't overall despise them. The focus on the technology of writing as a sign of cultural advancement that was present in Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea annoyed me big time, though there were other elements in the book that I thought were very cool, very thoughtful. I have an outsized, probably unfair dislike of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers, very it's-not-you-it's-me thing (except that the dislike is large enough that I find myself whispering, But maybe it's a little bit you, actually)

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I don't want to live in any books right now.

As a kid, I tried to get to lots of fantasy lands (the ol' walk-into-a-closet thing, because as an American kid I didn't even properly know what a wardrobe was: in our house, winter coats were in a closet), and I played that I was part of lots of others. But probably the ones I wanted to live in most were Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Greensky books. I wanted to glide from bough to bough of giant trees with the aid of a shuba and low gravity, have a life full of songs and dancing to defuse personal tensions, not to mention psychic powers and an overall jungle environment.

wakanomori ran in the Cape Cod Marathon over the weekend--in the teeth of an approaching nor'easter! While he was slogging it out, I wandered the coast, nibbling rose hips and admiring plants like this one, with soft, enticing seed heads. I found out it's called "groundsel bush," also sea-myrtle or saltbush (Baccharis halimifolia)



These patent leather shoes grabbed my attention, tucked just so on the other side of the wall separating the beach from the sidewalk. No one was walking barefoot on the beach except gulls and cormorants.



They look like shiny eggs in a nest.

Or like an offering. In The Snow Queen, Gerda gives her new red shoes to the river, believing that the river has taken her playmate Kay, and that by offering the river her shoes, she can induce it to give him back. But the river hasn't taken Kay.

These black shoes aren't near enough to the ocean to really count as an offering to the waves or tide, I don't think.

So if they're an offering, to or for whom?

Or maybe someone just doesn't like their patent leather shoes and has left them for someone else to claim.

A couple of weekends ago was the B'town fair. I didn't get to see the parade, but I did seize some time to go to the exhibit hall and the 4-H tent. The theme for the fair this year was "Shake, Cattle, and Roll" (lots of good entrants for the brochure cover contest...), and inside the hall was this poster with cow** facts:



(You can click through to see it bigger)

These are amazing! Cows only sleep three hours a day? They are great swimmers and can swim for miles? I had no idea ...

Though ... it gives me a wicked desire to make up other cow facts that aren't true at all. After all, if a kid's display is going to have me believe that cows can swim for miles and steer with their tails, what else might be true?

--I have perfect night vision
--I have a kind of moo I use only with my calves. It's called the lullaby moo
--If the circumstances are right, I can live to be 80–90 years old

I mean, why not? Any fake cow facts you'd care to add?

**Isn't it weird that in English, we don't have a common, nongendered, singular word to use for this type of animal? We have "cattle," which can be either sex, but that's plural. But all our other words are gendered: "Cow" does not include bulls or steers (castrated bulls), which as terms in turn exclude cows. And "heifer" is a young cow, "typically one who hasn't had a calf."

What a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.

It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to Doédenna, Saint Death.

( There's so much! This is just scratching the surface )

So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.