the good old days

Pre-children, we never used a lot of milk in our house; Buzz has always been mildly lactose intolerant, so it was only used for the occasional recipe. Now, though, the two kids get plenty of milk every day (yes, I’ve fallen for the Dairy Council’s message that MILK BUILDS BONES). The local health-and-organic grocery store has milk in actual glass bottles from a organic, no-hormone Virginia dairy. You can return the bottles for a deposit (and should, since it’s a $2 deposit), and it’s just a seriously awesome way to buy milk. The bottles are just cool.

Unfortunately, the milk occasionally has a tendency to go off before the expiration date, far more than any other brand of milk I’ve ever bought. The store is always quite nice about it and exchanges for a fresh bottle with no questions asked, and it’s (kinda) on the way home so it isn’t extremely inconvenient. Tonight, we opened a bottle that allegedly had 3 days to go, and noticed it was sour… and Buzz decided, “Hey, people used to cook with this stuff, that would make it a Retro Recipe ingredient, right?”

Well… he’s right, but I’m not feeding it to the kids until he eats it with no ill effects.

See those chunks on the glass? That’s how you know it’s, uh, “good” for this recipe, originally from The Pioneer Cook Book.

Mrs. Ethington’s Old-Fashioned Muffins
2 cups uncooked oatmeal
1 1/2 cups sour milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup melted shortening
1 well-beaten egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

Pour sour milk over oatmeal; allow to stand a few hours or overnight. Combine sugar, shortening and egg; add to oatmeal mixture. Sift together remaining dry ingredients; blend. Bake in greased or paper-lined muffin tins at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes 18 muffins.

After soaking up sour milk overnight, the oats had become a very solid mass. It broke up without too much trouble when stirred into the other ingredients, but it was interesting getting it out of the bowl.

The muffins themselves were good — a little on the bland side, though, so use a whole 1 teaspoon of salt instead of the 1/2 the recipe calls for. They are certainly hearty, and probably good for you with all that oatmeal goodness.

I’ll give it 24 hours before I feel really comfortable stating that the sour milk wasn’t a bad idea, though. Buttermilk would give the same tang (which wasn’t really obvious in the end product), and unspoiled milk should taste just as good — why use the spoiled stuff when there are alternatives? (Unless you happen to write a weird blog chronicling your occasional attempts to poison your family, of course, in which case go nuts.)

Dear GameStop,

I buy computer and video games for myself. I buy them for my spouse. Over the next twenty years, I expect to buy quite a lot of them (and new gaming consoles) for my two children.

I used to shop at your store a lot. I’ve always been treated politely by the staff, whether I was simply purchasing an item or whether I needed help.

Then today, I saw this.

WOW.

Your corporation doesn’t seem to have the basic sense that the staff at your local store manages to display, and I don’t plan to continue subsidizing outdated nonsense about women not understanding gaming or being attracted to your store only because of a free Oprah or Cosmopolitan subscription. You’ve lost my business for life.

Regards,
Me

This afternoon my daughter insisted she did not want to learn math. ANY math. At all. We asked what she wanted to be when she grows up; she replied doctor, and I explained doctors need to know math — for example, to figure out how much medicine to give somebody. She frowned and said she would “just be a mom, then.” I pointed out that moms need to know math so they know how much money to spend on clothes and food and toys. So she decided she would never grow up…

I frankly don’t know where the math-hatred is coming from, since she’s only turning 5 next month and hasn’t learned addition, let alone anything hard. She has had to watch me struggle with thermodynamics homework for the last few weeks, and I suppose that’s been scarier to watch than I thought.

But I want to keep her excited about kindergarten next fall, and I’ll be showing her this later today — then do some age-appropriate math lessons. (Right after she gets home from her super-girly ballet lessons.)

Cleanser has gone back to graduate school this year, and she’s currently taking two thermodynamics classes.  It’s not for nothing that thermo is famous as a trying subject, and she’s spending a fair amount of time studying and doing homework for these classes.  (I can answer some of her thermodynamics questions, but my knowledge is limited to the general structure and theoretical underpinnings of the subject.  Physicists are, as a rule, much more interested in understanding how the microscopic physics of atoms and molecules determines macroscopic mechanics of heat and work than with actually knowing how fluids move and interact.)

So, to lighten things up, I am offering cleanser a few historical images, each related, in some measure, to thermal physics.  First, an 1800 cartoon, depicting “The Comforts of a Rumford Stove.”

One reads about such appliances all the time in Jane Austen novels; apparently, they were the state of the art in the early nineteenth century, having been invented by Count Rumford around 1796.  Rather than being rectangular, the Rumford stove (which was really a kind of fireplace), had angled sides, which better directed heat out into a room.  According to a company that still makes them, modern Rumford stoves meet the ASHRAE standards for high intensity radiant heaters.

I’m not sure if this picture was an advertising image, or what.  The man’s face suggests it might have been some kind of parody; but that might just have been the drawing style of the time, which affected even commercial art.

The second image is of a clever invention of Lord Kelvin’s.  Although Kelvin is most famous for being one of the founders of entropy-based thermodynamics, he also worked on many other projects in physics and engineering (for example, the transatlantic cable).

This is a device he designed for predicting Tides.  The tides are primarily controlled by the moon’s position in the sky, which is determined by the satellite’s revolution and the Earth’s rotation.  However, the position of the sun is nearly as important, as are a number of smaller effects (some of which depend on local conditions).  Each of these phenomenon is cyclic, but they have different periods.  The pictured device is a mechanical rig for adding together these signals with different frequencies.  The net result is the tide height as a fuction of time.  (A detailed discussion of the methodolody can be found here.)

Goulash, like bread pudding, is a recipe that we have tried many variations with and enjoy having regularly. At its best, it requires something like half a jar of paprika with plenty of meat and onions. One of our favorites came from the Ships of the Great Lakes Cookbook (via NPR’s Kitchen Sisters), although it does require shrinking — its original intent was to feed a shipload of hungry sailors, meaning you’ll have goulash for weeks if you make the full amount. This version is from a Monarch Cook Book, via the Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook.

I love this cookbook cover, by the way. The product (iron range) prominently displayed, complete with a man jauntily waving his cap while standing on the oven door to demonstrate its durability. (Click the pic to see him larger, in his full mustachioed glory.)

Hungarian Gulasch
1-1/2 pounds onions, chopped
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp paprika [or many more depending on your preference]
1-1/2 pounds stew beef
1 cup canned tomatoes, diced or chunked
1 tsp vinegar [or more depending on your preference]
5 potatoes, diced
water
salt & pepper to taste

It’s really easy — first saute your onions in butter, then dump everything in a pot and let it simmer for ages. (The recipe claims 45 minutes is enough, but we usually give it a few hours.)

If you have a CrockPot, things are even simpler. Ours only recently broke (just stopped heating things one day), so we used the retro recipe as an excuse to buy a new CrockPot.

It seems I’m using the blog as an excuse for a lot of new kitchen appliance purchases. (Quick, somebody think of a recipe that will require a new fridge.)

See? I wasn’t kidding. Dump everything in the CrockPot and wait! It turns into a sweet, zesty beef stew, great for a chilly night when you want hearty and comforting food without much work.

We ended up using more paprika and vinegar than even the Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook suggested, and its measurements were a huge step up from the pinches of paprika in the original Monarch Cook Book; those 19th century Americans really couldn’t handle any spice.

In the early days of Doctor Who, nearly half the stories were “historicals,” in which the TARDIS would carry the Doctor and his companions to an interesting period of Earth history.  However, these episodes were not particularly popular, either with the show’s cast and crew or with the viewing public.  (Sadly, because of their relative unpopularity, few of these stories have survived.)  After a few years, the format was dropped; only one piece of purely historical fiction was produced after 1967.

However, “The Time Warrior,” the first story of Doctor Who’s eleventh season, saw the Doctor and a new companion traveling back to the middle ages.   The twist was that there were other time-traveling aliens in the middle ages as well.  That twist wasn’t new for the show; it went all the way back to “The Time Meddler” with the first Doctor.   But only with “The Time Warrior” in1973 did it become a standard Doctor Who format, which it continues to be up through the present day.

“The Time Warrior” introduced a new enemy—the Sontarans—and a new companion—Sarah Jane Smith.   The Sontarans remain popular foes, although I’m not terribly partial to them.   Their first two appearances are quite good, however.   Linx, the Sontaran officer who crash lands near the evil Irongron’s castle, is quite scary.  Even though Kevin Lindsay, the actor playing him wears a mask (or sometimes two), he manages to do a lot of real acting, and Linx seems like a genuine character.  He’s an arrogant warrior from a clone race, but he’s not an emotionless android.  His shiny black and silver space armor inspires awe, in both the medieval brigands he allies himself with and the viewer; it is at once elegant, yet obviously threatening.  And unlike many Doctor Who costumes, it doesn’t look at silly or dated, so it could be reused essentially unchanged in the new Doctor Who episode “The Poison Sky.”  (I am not particularly fond of “The Poisoned Sky,” however.  Nor of “The Invasion of Time,” in which the Sontarans try to take over all planets and all times in possibly the most mishandled Doctor Who story of all time.  I would like to able to attribute the decline in the quality of Sontaran stories to Lindsay’s untimely death—the man who played the villain in the first two Sontaran stories obviously took the part quite seriously, despite the fact that he was playing an alien warrior in a rubber mask—but I really have nothing to back up that theory.)

However, while the Sontarans are hardly my favorite aliens, I would have an easy time making an argument that Sarah Jane was the best companion Doctor Who ever had.  She was certainly the most popular, with two spin-off shows of her own (a quarter century apart)!  Elizabeth Sladen’s performance (although she says that she was mostly just playing herself) is one of the things that makes the eleventh and twelfth seasons of Doctor Who its best (or maybe second best) period.  Certainly, Sarah Jane Smith was a world apart from the pathetic, ineffectual, and rather stupid Jo Grant, whom she replaced.  The show had been, by this time, four years without a regular male companion, and the producers may have wanted to make the next female companion stronger than the milquetoast Grant.  In her debut story, Sarah Jane refuses to make coffee for the Doctor, advises Irongron’s serving women to rise up and assert themselves, and never sits around waiting to be rescued.

Although I definitely liked this story, both the first time I saw it decades ago and again much more recently, I have to admit that the details of the plot are not all that memorable.  Linx crashes in Norman England and takes up with the bandit lord Irongron, who is warring with a more noble neighboring lord.  He kidnaps some scientists through time, and the Doctor pursues the captives in the TARDIS, taking Sarah Jane along by accident.  What follows is characters running back and forth between the two medieval foes’ castles, good guys getting captured and rescued, and several short battles.  Some of the battles are in typical medieval fashion, while others feature robots, muskets, and stink bombs, all provided by the more technologically advanced characters.  It’s mostly just an excuse to have fun, with some swords and arrows and one scary alien.

At the end of the first episode, I noticed in the credits that the man providing the arrow shots in the story (including the one that eventually slays Linx), Hal, was played by Jeremy Bulloch.  This led to a number of jokes later in the story . For example, when Hal was dragged before the wicked Irongron:  “Look m’lord! We’ve captured Boba Fett!”  A scene where Boba Fett got a bit too frisky with one of the serving women was shot but never used, which might be just as well.  (And incidentally, Boba Fett is not a clone.)

Finally, this episode was noticeable in that it must have a had a real budget.  The sets were well constructed and dressed, although by no means perfect.  The costuming and props (especially Linx’s spacecraft) were interesting and creative.  And there was plenty of material shot on location at Peckforton Castle (which was built only 160 years ago but is a remarkable-looking recreation of a twelfth century fortress).  For once, and quite pleasingly, the production values were worthy of the show.

For Buzz, who is still sad that his Jabba The Hutt shampoo was used up by his brother after Buzz left home for college.

via Found in Mom’s Basement

Let’s face it — perfume was incredibly necessary in centuries when nobody bathed. Back then, it was vital to douse yourself in something to distract from your personal funk. But when you wash off the sweat and grime, there isn’t much odor to cloak.

The actress in this Avon commercial (instructional video?) has more fun than anyone should have when applying perfume — and also apparently wears far more perfume than is appropriate. (After all, “everone in the room” notices it…) Let’s face it — perfume was incredibly necessary in centuries when nobody bathed.

There’s a good reason you don’t see Mr. Perfume in this video — he’s died of asphyxiation. But don’t worry, her guests won’t notice the rotting body odor, thanks to the gallon of perfume on her pulse points!

I know it’s better just forgotten, but perhaps you remember the hideous 2012 Olympics logo. We all thought it was clearly from the 1980’s — I mean, just look at it!

Turns out that we were wrong. It may be from the future after all. Look at this Dalek font:

Of course, it is also possible that graphic designer was unconsciously working from fond memories of watching the Daleks take over London and mind-control the entire population, when he was young back in 1964. That’s an even worse image for the Olympic Games than something “inspired by graffiti” and “aimed at the internet generation.”

Although, as a Dr. Who fangirl, I would be endlessly amused to see the parade of athletes like this…

OK, there are a lot of things disturbing about this comic book panel. But look at their faces. (No, not the registration errors which gave her a white moustache, look at the expressions.)

She’s obviously manic. ‘Nuff said.

But him — Depressed? Disappointed? Actually a zombie who’s “wait” was not eating her brain until their wedding night? It’s kinda hard to tell.

It’s also worth noting that they tell you the wait WAS worth it, implying that after the tedious religious formality was over they dashed off to a convenient closet and — um — “stopped waiting,” then came back out to pose for this PSA picture.

My Own Romance #31 via Lady, That’s My Skull