asakiyume: (shaft of light)
In order for me to learn how to say things in Tikuna, my teacher sends me short recordings over WhatsApp. I then save them in files on my phone and computer and listen to them over and over and try to copy what she's saying.

These recordings are so, so charming, they always make me smile. She starts off with good morning, good afternoon, good evening (in Spanish), and in the background there may be music, or kids playing, or the sounds of cooking, or the sound of rain, or birds and insects. Sometimes she's whispering because she's sending me a message late. I never realized how VERY QUIET my own environment was until I started getting these lively recordings--such a gift.

And then there's how she frames what she's teaching me. She had just explained to me how to say "I want to eat pineapple (followed by fish, and then grilled chicken--"I'm getting hungry!" I told her), and next she wanted to tell me how you would ask someone "Do you want to eat pineapple?" She introduced the phrase by saying, "When you want to ask someone if they want to eat pineapple, for example, your niece, your child, your uncle... [brief pause], your husband ... [another pause] your dog, your grandfather, your grandmother, you ask--" want to know how to ask it? )

I was grinning and grinning at that very broad and inclusive list. She's very close with her nieces and her boyfriend's nieces; I'm not surprised she put them first ^_^
asakiyume: (yaksa)
Four generations
At Readercon I came across this quartet of women. (They were wearing masks, as per Readercon's careful regulations, but they took them off for the photo.) The one holding the book is its author, Terrie M. Scott. The one to her right as you look at the photo is her mother. The one on the far left is her daughter. And the girl between her daughter and her is her granddaughter. Her daughter, granddaughter, and mother all came with her to help her sell her [latest--turns out she's written quite a few] novel.

I was so touched by this display of familial solidarity. You could see that the other three were super proud of their daughter/mother/grandmother. We should all be so lucky in our families!

I'm thinking this novel is not likely to be my cup of tea these days, but I bought it anyway because I was so impressed with the family, and I wanted to support Terrie's efforts. And who knows, maybe I'll be surprised.



Koffee
Did I ever share any of Koffee's music before? I first discovered her when someone I followed on Twitter shared her song Toast. She looks about 12 in that video, and also like she's ready to take on the whole world, with hands and eyes wide open.

Today I'm very in the mood for her song Blazin

Light me up, i'm at di gas station waitin'
We are di ones on fiyah
Got di whole world blazin'
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
I wanted to try to bring some of the good things that I saw in neighborhoods in Leticia to my neighborhood in western Massachusetts--the sense of (mild) commerce and work mixed in with homes, of people doing things by foot or small transport, right in their neighborhoods, interacting with each other in the spaces by their homes rather than life lived in a series of space stations (the home station, the work station, the shopping station, the kids' activities stations) only reachable in your spaceship, which you pilot through the vacuum of space.

To that end, I decided to press the little wagon that [personal profile] wakanomori had built for my bicycle into service to sell ice creams in the neighborhood. But not to earn money: for one thing, I already have a job that earns me much more. For another, I think it would be, shall we say, confusing for my neighbors. But selling things for a cause is okay: people are used to that idea. One of my neighbors was super enthusiastic about the idea and came up with the notion of choosing a different local cause each week to raise money for (and suggested that we do rounds once a week all through the summer). The advantage of two of us is that if one of us can't do it, the other one can take charge.

The Icicle Bicycle--not yet loaded with ice cream, but with a llama balloon.



So we launched the Icicle Bicycle! We've done it for three weeks now, and it's gotten (touch wood) really good reception so far. We have some repeat customers, and each week some new ones. We get parents with little kids, teens on their own, and adults. It's wonderful!

Last week was also Tanabata, Japan's version of the pan-East Asian star festival, which commemorates the one day a year when the Weaver Maid and the Oxherd Boy (aka the stars Vega and Altair) cross the Heavenly River to see each other. Japan celebrates it on July 7, and one of the traditions is to hang wishes on decorated branches of bamboo. So I invited people who were buying ice cream to hang wishes on a branch of, uhhh, burning bush:



I kept the branch in my front yard for a few days for people to enjoy, but rain was causing the wishes to fall off, so I took everything down, and I confess I read the wishes. And oh my heart, such a mix...

Tanabata wishes )

Please join me in praying for all these wishes to be fulfilled, especially the one about the father.

And if you're in my neighborhood on a Friday around 6 pm, you can pick up an ice cream for a dollar ;-) This week's cause is our town library. I'll be away, but if it doesn't rain, the Icicle Bicycle will be making rounds.

carrots

Jun. 6th, 2023 04:02 pm
asakiyume: (Iowa Girl)
The cashier was a very tiny, very young looking girl. Like I might have guessed fourteen. But probably even in our new, child-labor-laws-are-to-be-laughed-away reality, she was actually more like ... sixteen. I was buying, among other things, carrots. A five-pound bag of big, fat carrots.

"Wow," the cashier murmured. "These are really big carrots."

"They really are!" I agreed.

"I wish I could get my brother to grow carrots," she said, all wistful and dreamy.

"Does your brother have a garden?" I asked.

"Yes. He just started it. He just graduated."

"Oh! Congratulations to him."

"He wants to study botany."

"Wow, that's great. I have a nephew who's studying something like that." (Actually he's studying permaculture and sustainable agriculture.)

"Is he successful?" she asked, very serious.

"Well, he only just finished his freshman year," I said. "But yes, so far he is."

She smiled a dreamy smile. "That's great."

--I look forward to seeing her again, the dreamy cashier who appreciates big fat carrots. I hope she can get her brother to grow some.
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
I get a lot of hope and ideas for ways things can be better from stories about what people are doing in so-called developing countries. Often they seem like things I myself could tackle, or I with a few friends--like writing a newspaper to cover events of interest or concern in my local neighborhood. Unlike Mohammad Hasan Parvez, I could even do it with aid from a computer. He writes out the newspaper by hand.

Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does various jobs--works as a brickmaker or goes to sea to fish. There are no newspapers in his area, and in any case the national papers have no interest in reporting on what goes on there, but a mentor of Parvez's, an award-winning journalist, suggested to him that he himself could publish a paper.

He calls his paper Andharmanik:
The river Andharmanik is known for some characteristics. The most common myth about it is that if someone splashes the river water in the dark, it emits light and creates an arc.

“Andharmanik means a ruby that lights up the dark. I want my paper to be like that — a beacon of hope for our community,” Parvez said.

The paper has been running since May 1, 2019:
In the past four years, Parvez has cultivated a team of 15 volunteers — labourers, farmers, and fishermen — who work as newspaper reporters, feeding Parvez with the daily happenings in different corners of their district. Once a month, they have a team meeting where Parvez gathers all the news from his volunteers.

Parvez writes headlines and gets them printed out in a big font from a local cyber cafe. He then pastes the headlines onto A3-size papers and writes the rest of the content with a fountain pen. He prints at least 300 copies from a Xerox machine. His volunteers also act as hawkers and distribute the paper in different villages.

You can read the whole story here, in a story by Faisal Mahmud, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The story is published in a Turkish newspaper. I discovered it because it was tweeted by the mentor, Rafiqul Montu (and retweeted into my timeline by my friend Jaspreet Kindra).

I'm grateful to everyone along that chain, and Parvez himself, for this work and for the spark of energy it gives.

Parvez at work
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
When we went to the Amazon in July, we took shelter from a downpour at the Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas SINCHI--the Sinchi Amazonic Institute of Scientific Research, "a nonprofit research institute of the Government of Colombia charged with carrying out scientific investigations on matters relating to the Amazon Rainforest, the Amazon River and the Amazon Region of Colombia for its better understanding and protection." There we met Dr. Clara Patricia Peña-Venegas, who gave me a copy of her extremely informative dissertation on cassava.

When I went back in March, I met with Dr. Peña and asked her what new things she was working on.

WELL. She's working on developing biodegradable, sustainable packaging alternatives to plastic for Leticia and the surrounding communities. Plastic trash is a huge problem for Leticia because (as noted in the post on the world's smallest Coca-Cola bottling plant) everything has to be shipped in and out of Leticia, but that's very expensive, so plastic trash just... piles up.

So she and other researchers at Sinchi have been working on various substitutes, using, among other things, cassava starch--and they have prototypes! These samples look a little battered, but that's because they've undergone various stress tests.

tray made from a palm leaf:

palm leaf tray (test sample)

tray made from plant fibers:

pressed fiber tray (test sample)

Stiff-plastic substitute made from cassava starch. This could be used for things like cups:

stiff plastic (test sample)

5-second video of a flexible-plastic substitute, also from cassava starch:



She said they've tested various different types of cassava, and the starch from all of them works equally well--which is good, because it means that local farmers could keep on growing whatever they're growing now, but some of their produce could go to make these products--assuming there's a way to produce these materials affordably for local hotels and businesses. They have a test plant in the nearby town of Puerto Nariño to try to make this happen.

What's cool about this initiative is that they're not trying to find THE ONE TRUE PLASTIC SUBSTITUTE or dominate the world packaging industry: on the contrary, they're trying only to develop something that will work in this immediate region. This is important because it means it would be self-limiting: you wouldn't get people clear-cutting vast swaths of the rain forest to grow cassava for plastic substitutes, which would be a terrible unintended consequence. But if it's solely for local businesses to use, then it would provide farmers with additional income without too much damage to the forest, it would provide job for people in manufacturing, and it would provide hotels and businesses with an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic, one that would biodegrade and wouldn't clog and pollute waterways.

... On our (motorized) boat ride back from the flooded forest, we were moving through large patches of water hyacinth, and floating in the water hyacinth was... lots of trash. At one point the engine stalled out. Why? Because a plastic bag had wrapped itself around the propeller. That experience highlighted just how bad a problem plastic trash is.

I would love to see other hyper-local plastic substitutes developed. Cassava starch doesn't make much sense for my locale, but maybe potato starch? Things that can be locally produced, so there's not the pollution and expense of shipping. And things that biodegrade. (And of course they need to be produceable without huge amounts of petrochemical inputs, or that, too, defeats the purpose....)

This tweet contains a longer video from SINCHI, where Dr. Peña talks about the program (in Spanish).

amigurumi

Mar. 7th, 2023 10:57 am
asakiyume: (turnip lantern)
Still not ready to make the Nando post, so I'm sharing something cute instead:

The ninja girl has taken up crocheting amigurumi! I don't play video games, but this is apparently the player character from a game called Cult of the Lamb. Cute lamb with a bell around its neck, a zig-zag-edged red cloak, and an Eye-of-Sauron-type crown!







ETA: [personal profile] ironymaiden has kindly explained the nature of the game way here.

Laundromat

Jan. 16th, 2023 05:16 pm
asakiyume: (turnip lantern)
I like laundromats; I always have. Even having my own washing machine, there are times when I've needed to use a laundromat. Last weekend my dad and I had to use the laundromat in his town because his ancient (dating to my childhood) washing machine had finally given up the ghost.

The laundromat in his town--well, one of them; a woman I talked to in it said there was at least one other--is very cute. Behold: device to help you get into bleach containers. (We didn't need this as we brought our own detergent and didn't use bleach, in any case, but it was good to know it existed)

thingamajig-4 Corner Laundry Room

Olde-style art:

A self-service establishment (with WiFi!)

Automatic washer

Helpful cleaning tips:

Helpful hints

Humor about cleaning symbols (above the driers):

May forever be lost to the black hole

And who knew that this particular method of inserting coins was called "Vendmaster" or that it was made by a company called "Vend-Rite"?

Vendmaster by Vend-Rite

In the laundromat that day was a mother/grandmother/guardian and a little girl: the woman was crocheting a blanket as she waited. Also some older men (not as old as my dad, though), plus some twenty-somethings. No one was chatting with each other, but I had a companionable feeling, doing the same task side by side with other people. It was like being part of a flock, or at the very least like wandering through one.

How do you feel about laundromats? Are there any spaces like a laundromats that you enjoy?
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
On December 14 [personal profile] wakanomori shared a Guardian article with me about Joaquim Melo, the 64-year-old owner of a remarkable bookstore in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon. The bookstore, Banca do Largo,
serves as a refuge for Amazonian writers and activists alike, pushing to protect the region from exploitation.​ By promoting local literature, particularly works by Indigenous writers, Melo believes he can help spread new ideas about societal organisation and the environment that are different from the capitalistic frameworks prevalent in the west.

Photo of the bookshop, from its website:



I was delighted--I went looking for more and found this video (in Portuguese) about the place. You might click on it just to hear the ambient noise--birds, animals, people, and traffic. And you'll also get to hear Mr. Melo talking <3

I started following the bookstore's Instagram, which updated rather overwhelmingly frequently, always with pictures of Mr. Melo with his customers--locals and tourists alike.

smiling faces )

Then--nothing! I attributed that to algorithm bullshit. But then I went looking and discovered that the account had posted a death notice--Mr. Melo passed away on New Year's Day.

On the death notice was a quote from Chico Buarque (whom Wikipedia tells me is a Brazilian singer-songwriter):

Não há dor que dura para sempre!
Tudo é vário. Temporário. Efêmero.
Nunca somos, sempre estamos.

(There's no pain that lasts forever!
Everything is various. Temporary. Ephemeral.
We never are, we always are ...

I love what Spanish and Portuguese make possible linguistically by having a permanent-state verb "to be" and a temporary-state verb "to be." Because it's so true: we're never an immutable thing, we're always changing. We are dot dot dot

Sometimes you learn of a person just 18 days before they leave the world. Judging from the comments on the post of his death notice, he was well beloved. I hope his bookshop is able to continue.

Datlow!

Nov. 28th, 2022 06:14 pm
asakiyume: (Hades)
When I first came online in 2006 and fell in with the SFF... H writing community, a name that kept on coming up was Ellen Datlow's. I became aware that she was an editor and that she published best-of anthologies. I used to whisper her name to myself with strong emphasis on the first syllable of her surname. Ellen DATlow, Ellen DATlow...

Nothing of mine ever ended up in a best-of anthology, but it's okay--other good things came my way.

Then this afternoon, Vanessa Fogg (a writer I love; her novella The Lilies of Dawn was published by the same small press that published my Tales of the Polity) mentioned that a poem of mine was on Ellen Datlow's long-list of recommendations for Best Horror No. 14. I thought, Vanessa must be wrong. I haven't written a poem in a thousand years, and I don't write horror.

But my friends, she wasn't wrong! It was a poem I had written in December 2020 (so, indeed: a thousand years ago) that was published in Not One of Us in 2021. I had to go back and find the poem and read it--then it all came back to me.

I've been feeling pretty resigned about my writing's lack of reach (not depressed, just, well, that's how things are<--that sort of feeling), so this was a welcome surprise. 2006 me would be dancing around, saying Ellen DATlow! Ellen DATlow in a spirit of affirmation!

...I guess I write horror after all!
asakiyume: (squirrel eye star)
Some of you may have seen art by this guy before: he does comics with very realistic birds. This is a story in 31 tweets, and it's just beautiful--funny, profound, and heart-pricking by turns.

Link is to the first tweet.

First image:

asakiyume: (Iowa Girl)
One of the things I loved when first we went to Colombia was the fruit--so many fruits I had never heard of or tried. And one of the things I loved when we went to Leticia was the fruit--so many *new* fruits I had never heard of or tried--and also: the fruit as ice cream.

For instance, at Helados Nai Pata (not actually in Leticia but in the town of Puerto Nariño): You can have araza (Eugenia stipitata), camu camu (Myriciaria dubra), and copoazu (Theobroma grandiflorum), none of which I'd heard of before arriving in Amazonas, or maracuya (passion fruit), guanabana (soursop), coco (coconut), and mora (which means "blackberry," but that picture is clearly a (red) raspberry, so who knows).



I was longing for tropical ice cream when we got home, so I looked to see if any of our local roadside ice cream shops had tropical flavors. Answer: no. This surprised me. I would have thought that the combination of cosmopolitanism from the local colleges and the large Puerto Rican community nearby would mean someone had created one. Maybe my search wasn't good enough? Well, in any case, I then moved to searching online for ice cream with tropical flavors, and I found (cue angel choir)
Frutero
(~ ~ its website ~ ~)

Passion fruit! Guanabana! Coconut! Guava! Mango! I was so excited. And they had stores in my area! I went to one, searched the ice cream aisle ... nothing.1 Desperate, I went and ordered myself a six-pack.

And so it came to pass that one day a whole box of ice cream, preserved with ~ ~ dry ice ~ ~ arrived at my house:



And one of the two founders included a letter asking me to let him know what I thought--and after I tried the guanabana (which took me RIGHT BACK to Colombia), I wrote him an effusive letter, and THEN he set up a one-on-one focus-group session to collect my thoughts on ice cream, Frutero, its various flavors, and so on, all of which charmed and delighted me even more.

Meanwhile, I was noticing things about the ice cream. For instance, that it makes where it sources its fruit part of its package design (and most of it comes from Colombia) and how many of each fruit is in a pint:

guavas from Colombia--four pink guavas! )

I went back to the company's website and discovered that supporting farmers in Colombia as part of their mission. (I understand that claiming something is not the same thing as accomplishing it, and that how accomplishment is judged is a whole other issue, but at the very, very least, it shows that you want to appeal to people who care about the mission, and if those people are your customers, they are liable to keep you honest.) So I was even more favorably disposed to the company. Meanwhile, they sent me a bunch of coupons and explained to me why I hadn't been able to find their ice cream in the supermarket I'd tried (see footnote below).

stuff about Frutero in supermarkets )

As you can see, I like the ice cream a whole lot--I think the coconut has the most intense flavor, followed by guava, and I really like the guanabana and passion fruit too. The mango is very nice, but not quite as intensely mango-y as, for example, the guava is guava-y. The tangerine is very good but familiar, and the pineapple I haven't tried.

I wanted to share in case YOU TOO would like to have some tropical ice cream. If you have a store near you, you can click on the link at the website to get a coupon for two dollars off two pints. The store are mainly in the northeast and California, but there's a scattering thought the south and southwest. In the north or in other countries, alas, you cannot access this (though people like [personal profile] anna_wing no doubt have access to local tropical ice cream).

Because I'm in promotor mode, I'm also going to interview the founders. I admire people who create things, and I'm very interested in aspects of their story (like the connection with Colombia), so look for that in November 😌

1There was a good reason for this: the supermarket I was looking in (Stop & Shop) carries it in its natural foods section instead of its ice cream section.

Fernando

Oct. 3rd, 2022 09:25 pm
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
My dad had to have some surgery last week, so I've been staying with him. (He's recovering just fine--drove to the supermarket today--but he's 91, so I want to be sure he feels completely stable before I leave.)

When he was still in the hospital, we took walks around the unit, and we passed a bulletin board that had comments that people had left, thanking and praising the nurses, nurse assistants, and techs. These two for Fernando caught my eye:



[text: "Fernando is an asset to your work unit. He brings empathy, respect, humor to his profession of taking care of patients. He even can tell a good story or two."]



[text:"When I arrived, I was put into the wrong room. My helper (tech) was Fernando. We started talking & I told him Fernando the bull** was my favorite story. A day or so later, he actually came to see me. To say I [hi?] and how am I doing. That really made my day. Thank you Fernando for caring."]

When we continued our walk around the unit, we came to a bulletin board announcing that Fernando was the employee of the month. Well deserved, it seems.

**I suspect they mean The Story of Ferdinand (1936), by Munro Leaf.
asakiyume: (good time)
One of the luxuries we have maintained is a landline. It's a great way of keeping spam off your cell phone, and it's always charged. Not only have we kept the landline, we've kept a corded phone, which means we don't need any wireless capability for it, which means it doesn't stop working if we lose wifi or power.

For the longest time we had a Panasonic corded phone, but eventually it failed. When Wakanomori went to get a replacement, the only thing that was available was a Panasonic knock-off:

~~The pashaphone~~





I somehow took it into my head that it was made for the Russian market--I think because of the name, though really that should have inclined me to Turkey?--and in fact a complete stranger on the internet started reminiscing with me about late Soviet caller-ID phones when he saw my tweet about it

But in fact the Pashaphone doesn't appear to have any connection with Russia.

It does, however have a connection with China--namely, it's made there. The whole thing is really light. In fact, it weighs about as much as the pink eraser whose tip you can see poking into the photo over to the right of the number 9. It feels like a child's toy phone.

Well, the problem with a corded phone is that sometimes you stretch the cord further than it can easily go and pull the phone off the counter and onto the floor. I've done that a couple of times already since it came to live with us, and something rattled loose inside the poor baby, so Wakanomori took it apart to see what it was....

... and we discovered a small slab of stone stuck in the phone that apparently serves no purpose other than to give it a little weight. It says 恭禧 (Gōng xǐ)--congratulations! As in, I suppose, "Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a pashaphone!"



How many devices come with little talismans inside them, wishing us well? Not many! But there should be lots! This is a trend to be imitated--quick, alert the business schools!
asakiyume: (Iowa Girl)
I love college radio. This song, "What if I?" by Molly Grace, played on WMUA--UMass Amherst's college radio station. I heard it when I was in the car in mid November, and the DJ was talking about the song, was talking about going to high school with the singer--I think he may have even said he had been in a band with her?

Anyway, I just fell in love with it in one listen, ESPECIALLY when it got to all the store names. If you're in the northeast, you're sure to recognize several of them.

I transcribed the lyrics, then found a lyric video which helped me correct a bunch of my initial mis-hearings (otoh I was able to offer a couple of corrections to the person who made the lyrics video, and they gave me a thumbs up for that, which was nice ^_^).

lyrics for 'What if I? )

asakiyume: (turnip lantern)
Yesterday, December 23, I did an angel with tidings of great joy. I had big, big ambitions for this picture! Unfortunately sometimes the execution doesn't quite live up to the plan. I can say about this angel's face... it has that naive look. Yes. Naive. Here are two views--one of the angel himself, and one photographed upside down and flipped (so the head and not the bottom of the robe are larger), in relation to the shepherd picture:





And here is the driveway this morning, just before sunrise!



...And now for something completely different



But what does a package of candy eyeballs look like? VENTURE BENEATH THE CUT IF YOU DARE

a whole lotta eyeballs )

I'm using them for these guys ^_^

asakiyume: (good time)
Today's Advent calendar picture is a wreath:



And the state of the overall calendar is...



Now for something completely different and unexpected.

The wonderful poet Virginia Molhere tweeted a video of a musician playing a bagpipe he'd made with a rubber glove (viewable here.) I said it would be fun to try to make one, and she found this Youtube video (by someone else, for a much more basic rubber-glove bagpipe) that gives a method.

I tried it (tweet w/19-second video here), and while it's not what you'd call a runaway success, it does make some noise! And the process of making it was a lot of fun. I'll try some refinements--mmmmaybe ;-)
asakiyume: (the source)
When we visited Bogotá in 2018, Wakanomori noticed that the manhole covers had frogs on them:



I always meant to find out the story behind the frog--was it a particular frog? Why a frog? But I never did.

Then the other day, Juegasiempre (also known as DjLu), one of the graffiti artists/muralistas whose work we became acquainted with on that trip, posted this beautiful frog on Twitter: la rana sabenera, Dendropsophus molitor. (Wikipedia tells me in English it's called the green dotted tree frog.) He posted that it used to be very common in the ravines of Bogotá, but now you can hardly find it. (Original tweet here.)

La Rana Sabanera, Dendropsophus molitor

I took it into my head that this MUST be the frog on the manhole covers and finally set about to find the answer.

... Well, it's not. The manhole frog is just a generalized frog, not any particular frog, but I found out that frogs have been on Bogotá's manhole covers for more than a hundred years, getting redesigns now and then. Some people thought the design was of a toad (sapo), so the workers for the Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado (Bogota's water and sewer company) would sometimes be called sapos. This is unfortunate because several years of watching telenovelas has taught me that that's also what you call a snitch.

There's a Facegroup page for people who want to preserve them--it's got some photos:





As for D. molitor, it's found only in Colombia. Females are larger than males, and they can grow to be about 70 mm. They can be green or brown, and some have stripes or lines that can be black, yellow, or blue. Although Wikipedia lists it as a species of least concern, one article I found said it's threatened in parts of Colombia by the introduction of another type of frog that competes for the same habitat.

Here's a cutie from Wikipedia (link):



Live long and prosper, little guy!

Resources consulted

"Conoce a la colorida rana que habita los humedales de Bogotá," Obervatorio Ambiental de Bogotá, 14 September 2020.

"Una rana nueva llega al acueducto," El Tiempo, 5 October 1991.

"Preservemos las Tapas del Acueducto de Bogotá; Disprivatizar el Acueducto" (Facebook page)

"Dendropsophus molitor," Wikipedia.
asakiyume: (autumn source)
Last week [personal profile] mallorys_camera and I visited Mike's Maze, and I purloined an ear of corn from the walls of the maze. This corn is obviously not sweet corn for eating boiled or grilled--it's long in the tooth and deep yellow and gives the impression of being the sort of corn you might grow for milling into cornflour, or some other use like that. I don't have a picture of it still on the cob, but here it is as kernels in a bowl:



I was wondering what it would be like to try to pop it. I know that nowadays corn for popcorn is bred specially for that purpose--but what would this corn do? (Here is a picture of kernels of popping corn, for comparison)



I also know that you're supposed to dry popping corn before popping it, if you get it on the ear. (If you get it in a bag, it's already been done for you.) I wanted to speed that process up, so I put my kernels in a warm oven for a while. Was it enough time? Who knows! An uncontrolled variable creeps in.

I do my popcorn in a frying pan on the stovetop, so that's what I did this time. It sizzled for a long time, but eventually I heard some pops! Not that many, but some. I took the lid off the frying pan...



You can see that some of them started to bust open, but couldn't quite free themselves. Here's another picture:



For comparison, here's what my ordinary popping corn popped up to:



Here's the amazing thing, though: those not-quite-free popped kernels of maze corn (maze maize; I love it) taste ~wonderful~. They have a real tortilla-y, corn-chip-y flavor, whereas ordinary popcorn, let's face it, is not the most flavorful food in the world. My maze maize popcorn I happily ate just as it was, whereas I'm hard pressed to eat ordinary popcorn without sprinkling melted butter, salt, or herbs on it (or, if I'm in England, sugar). Furthermore, with the maze maize popcorn, even the kernels that looked just semi-swollen, with no hint of the white cloud on the inside showing through, were light and crispy when I bit into them--no risk of cracking a tooth!

Overall, I'd say it was less like eating popcorn and more like, I don't know, a sort of fluffy nut? But very satisfying! Very flavorful. I feel empowered with secret knowledge. I CAN POP ALL THE CORNS.
asakiyume: (man on wire)
Today Wakanomori ran the Hartford Marathon. With this marathon, he's run a marathon in every New England state (not to mention several in New York). But two people running in today's marathon were using it as a capstone for running a marathon in every state, so there are always new goals to achieve.

I kept myself entertained by limping around Bushnell Park, which is not named after a corporation, as I darkly suspected (there is a Bushnell Corporation, but it's headquartered in Kansas), but after Rev. Horace Bushnell (1802–1876), who in 1853 proposed a park for the city.

I spent some time on this carousel (video is under 10 seconds)



--riding this horse, whose magnificently lolling tongue I admired:

tongue lolling

The horses all had really horsehair tails ... I was reminded a little of [personal profile] sartorias's Marlovens.

Along with horses, the park had some charming frogs:

frog, children's playground, Bushnell Park

They have spouts in their mouths and were in a playground area, so I'm guessing they add a fun water component in warm weather.

The marathon was tremendously well resourced. Here is a helper:

a helper

But initially I was in some kind of a mood--maybe partly because of the evidence of poverty around the place we spent the night and on our walk from where we parked.

Not evidence of poverty; just a mood-appropriate image from some cornice
building decoration

my grumble )

But everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves at the park, and after writing a letter and watching a fountain and seeing a monarch butterfly high up in the air--and riding the carousel--so was I. As I leaned on the railing in the spot I'd claimed at the finish, a young woman came and stood nearby for a while.

"Do you know how I can get over there?" she asked, pointing to the other side of the street.

"I think you just have to walk along until you come to a break in the barrier, and then you can cross," I said. "Do you have someone running?"

"No, I'm just visiting, and it happens to be a marathon," she said, laughing. Then, a moment later, "I admire their spirit."

Me too. It's not a zero-sum game. It's possible to have both public bathrooms AND marathons.

mural, Hartford, CT

Profile

asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
asakiyume

June 2025

S M T W T F S
123 4567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 8th, 2025 12:14 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios