S. Worthen | Weblog

Soup and Cheese news
The latest in historical soup news: bone soup from the Warring States period.

Last week's cheese in space was not the first cheese in space, although it probably was the first gruyère. Last year, a piece of cheddar went into space with a weather balloon. I thought you should know. I wonder what kind of cheese will be next?

Filk and Eurovision news
For Heather Dale fans: she will be performing in the UK in February.

Were you thinking, however transiently, of attending the Eurovision finals in 2011, especially now that Italy is back in the competition? Tough luck. All 32,000 sold out in a few hours on Sunday. A few more small blocks of 1000 will be released in the coming weeks, and the semis go on sale in January.

My thanks to all of you who answered the purple-rice-tasting-of-beef polls. (Here and here.)

The lines are part of a Rhysling-nominated poem, "Corrected Maps of your City", by Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska-Merkel. Those lines, however, threw me right out of the verse. It sounded too mundane, too normal to evoke the weird alternate reality for which the poets were clearly aiming. I have eaten some version of this dish - if the beef taste is allowed to come from beef broth or lumps of the meat, and rice is Forbidden Rice, a clearly purple rice.

I'm particularly glad to have heard from those of you who answered "That sounds like made-up food from an alternate universe." It's reassuring to know that they would have worked as intended for at least a third of you, possibly more if you hadn't had time to think through it so much in advance.

( More explanation, and commentary... )

First, answer the original poll on purple rice & beef.

Then, if you're feeling like you would like to fill out another poll just now, here is one which examines more aspects of the same issue. (Polls are not, after all, editable.) The other one looks like it will resolve my actual point of curiousity (about which more in another post. Not today.) This one is optional extra detail.

[Poll #1587862]

This poll is dedicated to desperance, who requested clarification.

[Poll #1587851]

Over the coming months, as you read works of fantasy, fairy tale, science fiction, and travelogue, could you do me a favor and note if you happen to spy the word "stew" used to refer to food in the work? Name, author, year of publication, page number and, ideally, an exceedingly brief description of context, where context might be (reheated meal over fire while traveling; laboriously cooked in a kitchen; meal in tavern with bread)

I wouldn't mind knowing about stew-free books either. For example, based on recent reading, I can tell you that there is no stew anywhere in The Night Sessions or Flood, but that Hope's Folly and Moonstruck has characters eating it.

Astute readers may be able to immediately guess at context without me telling them, given how well known the definition in Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland is. I'm doing a paper on the topic for July's DWJ conference, and would love to cast my net of references further afield than I'm able to do by myself, given how collectively vast these literatures are.