Maru's Mun Journal

Yay Hobbit the first: my friend the Nazgul animated the trailer for 'Battle of Five Armies' in virtual Lego, as a proof of concept/portfolio piece. You can see it here:



Yay Hobbit the second: we just found out that we get the movie a week earlier than the US!!

... that is, soccer, for the Americans.-

( How Maru and the Nazgul went to the stadium to see a match )

My friend the Nazgul has a cookbook, published via Books On Demand. It is a cookbook vaguely related to a certain popular teenage wizard, without ever properly saying so. She's collected suggestions from around the net, tried them out and put them together, with some additional input from the things we usually cook on a Sunday. There are some sauces that require wine, and some drinks recipes that definitely contain alcohol. Now she is planning to put out an English version through Lulu, mostly aimed at an American audience. She is wondering whether Americans might take exception at recipes with alcohol in a book which might be seen partially aimed at teenagers, in places where the drinking age may be as high as 21.

[Poll #1749549]

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Bonus recipe from the collection:

The Dark Lord's Darkest Desire:

Take a litre of clear, tasteless moonshine (alternatively: vodka) and a package of hot hard Danish liquorice candy, put into a bottle and keep behind the siphon of your kitchen sink for two weeks. (The place is important!!) Then shake, and put in the freezer for a bit to cool down to freezing point. Drink carefully from very small glasses.

[[Adapted from the underground recipe for Finnish salmari.]]

The Nazgul and I went to the first medieval market of the year. I probably shouldn't have gone, as I am still quite sick and went through that place wheezing, coughing, spluttering, and largely useless. Most of the time, I sat on a beer bench drinking mead beer and looking at people's costumes with the Nazgul. I did get two more pint mugs from the same potter as last year's (in the icon), and we posed with the other hobbyist 'Scot' with his veeeeeeeerrrra laaaaaaaaaaaaaang sword...

There are more pictures, but I'm not quite up to making a full picture post right now.

Soon. Promise!

Finally, the Nazgul and I went to have our hair done again. We had found our hairdresser, Muriel, again. She's at a salon near the university now where lots of students go to have their hair cut. She did really good work on us.

Afterwards, we went to the Starbucks at the square where the demonstration had been two weeks ago, and took pictures of each other, for documentation purposes.



Here is me, with my freshly retouched Tracy-Turnblad style blonde stripes in my fringe.



And the Nazgul, with a green streak instead of a blue one this time. The lady Muriel had forgotten the pot of blue at home. Seems they're not keeping those extreme colours in the salon; they're her speciality.

In the Starbucks, people were a bit odd. To my left, there was a little high-heeled orcette trying to read a book by marking everything she had read with blue highlight marker. You could see the Nazgul's librarian heart flinching, wincing, and cringing at such a senseless sacrilege. On my right, a Japanese girl was reading and listening to music when suddenly, a very odd old man appeared and told her and me to take our stuff away, he had to sit there. "No," I said, while stowing my bag and denim vest behind me, "you don't have to, you want to." He sat, there, drinking tea and smelling slightly of used book shops, ramrod straight, with no hair, and a terribly, terribly green pair of trousers. In our usual drama coffee shop, we don't get quite that sort of terrifying dryness and oddity, or the sort of Essex girl (mutatis mutandis) that was mutilating the poor book on the other side.

We drank up, and fled.

My copy of 'Paragenesis' arrived yesterday! Now I have the book with my short story in on paper, to touch and carry around! Here it's lying face-down on one of the little outside tables of my favourite Italian café, where I was enjoying one of the last few nice days of the year while reading up on what everybody else wrote for it.



Today, my order from Evans arrived as well! I had to get Falk the Metropolitan to take some pics of me wearing it at once, as I can't possibly wait with posting about it on my tumblr until the Nazgul is back from the Fake Plastic Trees. Today she was in Muscat, haggling over the price of daggers...



Autumn arrived as well, so here you see my cats, cuddled up in my wonderful dark purple fleece blanket, being comfy and cosy. I have been mean to them by buying a little bottle of catnip scent oil with which I made them go doolally earlier. Anything can be turned into instant catnippy kitty lovedoll now!

Also, a discful of recent Bollywood music as MP3 arrived as well. I was at the Indian shop this afternoon, getting more chai spices, and when I took out my earphones to ask the bloke behind the counter about some Bollywood movies, I realised that my life contained entirely too much Medieval Scottish Heavy Metal Bagpipe Folk Rock, and not enough Bollywood, so I hastened to remedy that!

What did not arrive was episode 4.10 of 'Mad Men' on surfthechannel.com. They didn't even make an entry for it. I am worried...

The two serious appointments/things to go to this month (apart from my vacation, of course!) all had to happen on the same day.

Today.

First, I went to a course about an email marketing tool for my slavery, with three of my co-slaves. That was tedious but kind of important, and took seven hours.

Then, I met the Nazgul to go to her library where there was an event with the illustrator Shaun Tan, whose exhibition we'd seen when the Little Lady was there. Poor bloke came all the way from Australia and was sitting jet-lagged in the front row and then first got treated to an half-hour introductory lesson of which he didn't understand a single friggin' word. I found that really rude of the organisers.

And then, during his talk, when he had this picture from 'The Arrival' up in his presentation,



my cell phone went off with a horrible ringtone of alarms and howling panic, because my mum had a question. Normally, my cell phone never rings, but she was very insistent tonight. Everybody totally jumped out of their skins, as if those people-sucking giants were actually attacking.

I was very sorry, and said so at the little book-signing afterwards. He drew me the white shark-tadpole critter into my own copy of the book, which I bought especially to get it signed. Now, despite having been such a nuisance, I have my own shark-tadpole critter, which is very cute. Will scan or take picture later, but now I'm just too tired to do anything at all except poke everything once and then go to bed. This is the shark-tadpole critter; you will agree it is very cute in a surrealistic way?

Neat, aren't they?

There weren't that many new things this year in Kaltenberg, so this post gets a bit eclectic. For more general pictorial explanations, refer to the post from former years, found through the 'Kaltenberg' tag on my journal.

We went on a Sunday, which meant it was full of kids. That wasn't as bad, actually, as we'd thought. What was bad was that there were hardly any visitors in costume, and nobody cheered for the Black Knight, except us, more or less. We decided not to go on a Sunday again. If we get trouble with rain again, we'll just not go.

But ( on to the pictures! )

Because the German football team was playing the Australian one tonight, the Nazgul and I went to the Australian pub around the corner, hoping to see blood. Or at least some creative crowd control measures.

We ordered a Fosters each and waited, metaphorical popcorn at the ready.



There were these two sad Australian hipsters right in front of us (cut out of this picture because, honestly, taking pictures of perfect strangers with the express purpose of mocking them online is not nice) that first had their drinks taken away again (because somebody else had ordered the same combination first, it seems) and then sat there, earnestly sharing a portion of potato wedges. The bloke had taken out a little plush koala with that sort of grabbing mechanism and put it on the lapel of his shirt as a sign he supported Australia. The rest of the Australian supporters were these people in yellow shirts.



However, everything went perfectly peacefully. There was no blood, nor any sort of enmity. Only glumness, as the poor Aussies didn't want to be seen being sore losers. After the German team had scored the first goal, a camera team with a big professional-looking TV camera came to film some Australian fans being unhappy, which they achieved when the second goal was scored. Luckily, only a single person in the whole pub had one of those infernal vuvuzelas. But the droning sound from the TV was unlike any other football noise before.

essayel had said in thread earlier that Aristophanes compared the sound of bagpipes to a wasp farting in a bottle. A stadium full of vuvuzelas sounds like a million of those wasp-farts.

And no, having only one and blowing it from time to time is pointless. The point is to have many and create the wasp-fart effect, or more correctly, drone.

Somebody ought to have told that to whoever it was who kept on forlornly tooting his vuvuzela through the sound of heavy rain that we heard after we came back at half-time and made dinner. Whether the TV team scored any footage of bawling Australians, we don't know. At least the rain precluded all noisy victory celebrations.

In unrelated news, my cats are snoring.-