World’s Worst Novel: Chapter Twenty-Seven

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72 Responses to World’s Worst Novel: Chapter Twenty-Seven

  1. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    Blankenfields. 🙂 J.P. Mulligan.

    this article goes with yesterdays theme. the news media has become nothing other than corporate/government PR. the internet is in play, and i hope it can remain honest and objective, though already much has been lost.

    http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/12/518822.html

  2. EO says:

    oops, I put my goose fat post on the old thread! 😳

    i’m such a gurnard…

  3. EO says:

    Someone please explain to me how an 11 pound goose can cook faster than a 7 pound duck! Kind of messed up my whole dinner vs football game timing thing. Anyway, it looks pretty good. Just shy of 4 cups of lard collected and maybe I’ll get a little more yet.

  4. xty says:

    Twice we have attempted to cook a goose. Once years ago at thanksgiving at the cottage, and even Bucky wouldn’t eat the leftovers, and the second time when I had the brilliant idea to cook a goose for Christmas. The Joy of Cooking warned about setting the house on fire because of the fat and suggested cooking the stuffing separately which I luckily did, because we ate the stuffing and pretty much threw out the goose. It turns out there is a reason Scrooge sends the Cratchets a turkey for Christmas, which they eat instead of the goose they were going to eat if he didn’t reform. But I wish you luck and since you want the fat, you are at least excited about the right thing!

    But I think sticking to duck might be a good idea – why would it be cheaper? Eager to find out how it goes.

    And yes, Blankenfields and James is obviously like investment bankers we can read about in the newspapers, but now he is dead.

  5. xty says:

    The goose cooks fast because it has no meat on it? Secretly just a bag of fat?

  6. EO says:

    You nailed it, Xty. Pound for pound, there’s less meat on a goose than on a duck. What’s there is pretty damn tasty, but there’s not much of it, especially for the cost. 5.69 a pound (that’s yankee dollars) for goose, or 2.99 for duck. Gravy, again excellent but not much of it. That goose was 60 bucks. We had my Mom over for dinner and she loved it, so what the hell. You never know when you are going to run out of opportunities to feed your Mom a nice dinner.

    Fat-wise, pound for pound I’m not sure it’s much different. I got more out of the goose, but it was a bigger bird.

    The nature of the fat itself, well mine is not hard yet, but from memory it’s whiter and harder than duck fat. More like pork lard. I looked up the %’s of saturates on the interwebz, and goose is more saturated than duck, but less than pork. With the duck lard, it’s really only slightly more saturated than olive oil, and damn near liquid at room temperatures, and with a yellowish tinge. I keep mine in the fridge anyway, so I don’t care. I expect the goose to be somewhat more solid.

    All in all, the duck nailed a balance between moist meat and crispy skin that is hard to beat. I think the goose meat was a little dryer and chewier, but with an amazing flavor nonetheless.

  7. EO says:

    And by the way, Spaten Optimator is an excellent “pairing” (talking snooty now), with goose. The dark meat, dark gravy, dark beer, you know the drill. Mom had a couple of swigs and concurred, along with her Whisky Old Fashioned.

    Hmmm….that pic didnt really work out.

  8. EO says:

    Well, that football game sucks!

    But, whether it’s the whisky, the beer, or the goose fat oozing out my pores, I feel strangely well lubricated anyhow.

  9. xty says:

    My bottle of wine picture looked like that too, no matter how I tried to re-size it. A glitch in the matrix.

    And good frozen morning.

  10. xty says:

    I meant to say that any resemblance to any actual figures is entirely accidental and my novel is entirely fictional. Only the economic crimes are real.

  11. xty says:

    Ah, I finally found a good explanation, because it doesn’t give one, of the expression “his goose was cooked”:


    The known facts first. Various forms — do his goose for him and cook his goose as well as goose is cooked — start to appear in British writings in the 1830s, as in this report of a court case:

    The complainant said that on Saturday morning he was at the plying place at the Tower stairs, when Crouch began to abuse him, and swore he would “cook his goose,” by which he meant he would ruin him, or put an end to his mortal existence.

    True Sun (London), 26 Oct. 1837. A plying place is one where a porter, cabman or boatman waited to be hired; it’s from an old sense of ply meaning to solicit patronage. British taxis, for example, still officially ply for hire.

    This is another appearance from a decade later:

    “I rather think, friend Sandy,” said Smith, looking cheerfully back at the bedroom as he turned the corner, “I rather think, to use a figurative expression, your goose is cooked!”
    Paddiana; or, Scraps and Sketches of Irish life, by William Henry Gregory, 1847. Later Sir William Gregory, the author was Governor of Ceylon in the 1870s.

    The idiom is so common and yet so mysterious that numerous stories have appeared to try to explain it. One suggestion online is that it derives from a wry joke about the fate of the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus — whose name is similar to husa, his native Czech word for a goose — who was burned at the stake in Constance by the Catholic Church in 1415. The gap of four centuries before the idiom appears, in another country, renders this implausible. Myron Korach argued in Common Phrases in 2008 that it refers to a battle fought by Eric, a king of Sweden, who was known to love eating goose. His enemies set one up for their archers to shoot at but Eric won a great victory and with relish cooked and ate their goose. We may disregard this tale for similar reasons. We may also take no notice of the vague story that a besieged town once displayed a goose to show that it had enough food, provoking the attackers to set the bird on fire. A connection has also been made with the goose who laid the golden eggs; the farmer who owned it killed it to find the secret, only to be left with no gold but merely a goose to cook.
    We may not know the details of its origin, but
    http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-coo3.htm

  12. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    test

  13. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    uh-oh

  14. xty says:

    How did you do the first one?

  15. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    i searched for ‘Galliano bottle image’. i opened with Microsoft picture manager and resized it as close as i could to your window size – i assumed your size is 700 X 600 pixels. the image i chose was larger than your window.

    i think what happened with EO’s picture is that it did not have enough pixels for the stretch to your window size.

    i like this article. it is good to question assumptions, though most assumptions are not recognized as such.

    http://www.theautomaticearth.com/the-most-elementary-question-must-not-be-asked/

  16. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    but perhaps the false paradigm (panacea?) of limitless economic growth is becoming self evident.

    https://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/us-loan-reserve-multiplier-declines-back-to-nixon-era-levels-m2-money-velocity-at-all-time-low/

    and Tricky Dick surely was the most handsome of the modern presidents.

  17. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    the secret to delicious British cuisine. yup EO, you guessed it.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/goose_fat_roast_potatoes_24965

  18. EO says:

    Ah…so it’s good at taking big pictures down, but with a small picture it will just do a crappy job of making it big instead of leaving it alone? I hadn’t considered that it would feel compelled to mess with smaller pics.

    I have no doubt that most of that goose fat will go into our family recipe Oatmeal Cookies. The recipe calls for a full cup of melted lard per batch, and we quite often make a double batch. Family members are already clammoring for a share. I still have some duck fat leftover, and some home rendered lard as well. We are set for the holidays. 😎

  19. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    test. this image is 200 X 300 pixels prestretch.

    edit: maybe you can change your settings to only resize pictures larger than your window Xty.

  20. EO says:

    Mine was a poor choice. I just checked and it is only 85 by 150. I didn’t realize. I never should have used it to begin with. That was an impossible task for any resizer.

  21. EO says:

    No, wait a minute. In Google images it said it was 905 by 1589. But the one I just retrieved from my trash says it’s only 85 by 150. I just saved that same one off the web again, and now the one on my desktop says it’s 182 by 320. Looks like I screwed up by just dragging it off of Google images, instead of going to the source itself. But still, I don’t know why it’s not 905 by 1589. User error on my end somehow?

    Let me try this 182 by 320 one. NOPE.

  22. EO says:

    One more try. I think I have the 905 by 1589 one now. It all depends on exactly how I go about stealing it off the web.

    Hmmm. It has enough pixels to be clear, but it’s still stubbied up. Too tall apparently? I don’t remember ever having a problem with that before this wordpress change.

  23. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    each consecutive pic looks fuzzier. i think it’s the optimator.

  24. EO says:

    Wouldn’t be the first time!

  25. xty says:

    Okay let me try

  26. xty says:

    Wrong year but the picture worked. I guess the recent wordpress update changed how they treat images in comments. It really improved how you put them in posts and widgets.

    Now to read those articles.

  27. xty says:

    That was quite the graph. All I do now really is watch the price of gold. It tells you a lot about what is going on, barbarous relic and all. I find the financial news just noise.

    I do remember the 2% “solution” appearing and becoming a paradigm for growth and continuous debt and arguing about the strange notion of forever running a deficit but growing to pay the interest … decades ago.

  28. xty says:

    And that is why we have to have light rail in Ottawa. Gotta have a monorail.

  29. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    shut up Xty! the stock market indexes (indices) are all going up. inflation is going down. the USA is creating McJobs. be the change. change you can believe in. quit looking out the window. it only sucks in your state (western puppet country). aw shit, i must be reading too much zero hedge propaganda. so sorry for the biting cynicism.

    but thank you for reading the articles! i mean that! and admit it. Tricky Dick was hot.

  30. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    that probably didn’t go right. that comment more than partly is in response to the Pollyanna bullshit post(s) over at Dan’s.

  31. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    less than 8 minutes left to delete my rant. 😯

  32. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    15 seconds.

  33. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    oops. 🙂

  34. Dryocopus pileatus says:
  35. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    c’mon.

  36. Dryocopus pileatus says:

  37. xty says:

    Don’t worry, I got the sarcasm. I have had some really daft conversations with people about debt it seems to me … I remember a ludicrous one with of all people a deputy finance minister I met at a pre-prom party [not kidding, life is weird in small colonial towns, and it was a public school, and his first name was Tiff, short for Tiffany, which he claimed was a more common male name when his parents foisted it upon him] about our participation in the GM bailout.

    For odd reasons I don’t want to rant about the origins of the 2% number, but it became an absolute central belief in treasury departments and financial ministries and it has ground out a kind of visual progress for a long time now, nothing but condominium towers being constructed as far as the eye can see, and these sort of pop up strip malls that appear in former fields, and we haven’t had the 20% interest rates of the early 80’s since.

    The cost of it all I agree will be enormous and those that live in the glass towers do not see or understand the problems others have.

    Good morning nonetheless!

  38. xty says:

    Lots going on in the old bean this morning as I am off to Newfoundland for a week tomorrow and am about to flurry about, and do all the things I have been procrastinating about.

  39. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    don’t forget to

  40. Pete Maravich says:

  41. xty says:

    It can’t be helped, it just keeps on playing, even though all my bags are not packed but should be!

  42. xty says:

    And good morning ditto … but I think I might eat the cod too …

  43. EO says:

    Looks like we’ve got angst in our pants this morning on Wall Street. Buckle up!

    Main Street, as I look out my window, looks like just a slight dusting of snow.

  44. xty says:

    Free wine but no lunch – what was the airline thinking?

    Half pinned in the St. John’s airport, early for my baby, and I check the price of gold out of old habit! Qu’est-ce que ce pas?

  45. xty says:

    It was super sunny and we flew right over St.Pierre and Miquelon where I did a six week French immersion course when I was 18. This is the Avalon peninsula out the window:

  46. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    there are no fundamentals at all driving these markets. well maybe some. i don’t think the supply and/or demand of crude oil changed enough in two months to explain a 40% drop in price. so maybe fundamentals decided to matter in the energy markets, but just kind of all at once.

    so looking out a window from a few miles up is a very good of point of view to have. especially a window that you can’t open!

    ce que l’enfer c’est passé? 🙂

  47. xty says:

    Basically agreeing while disagreeing with you – we can discuss supply versus demand, the effect of QE, etc., and then some things have a timeline of decades, some of minutes. Why would the price of gold go up so much while I am flying to Nfld? Emotion and fundamentals. People sitting on the edges of their seats, trying to out guess the trend. And then the trend will settle back in, a trend which I tend to think will see slowly rising interest rates and slowly rising commodities as we drift back to low inflation. At least that is what I see around me and we are all so bound by our personal contexts. You live in a particularly depressed part of the States.

    One of the reasons I won’t argue about whether supply or demand is driving the price of oil is because we won’t know, might never know – only time will tell and then we will misinterpret the past based on our biases. It is not that I am without hope, or just blasé, but I have decided that the macro and the micro are attached, or should be, and somehow I let that go, worrying so much about the macro … what the dingdangfuckaroooo can I do about the price of oil? Buy more or less, and that is it. So eventually the market will out, but through a maze of government intervention for good or evil that either does what it is meant to or doesn’t. Can’t sit and wait or watch it so much anymore. Tired of outrage, not because we shouldn’t be outraged but because it is so often just a tool of control, on any side.

    That sounded cranky. Not meant to be just trying to explain why even a 40$ change leaves me cold. We won’t/can/t/will never know why it happened, and it was probably a programme that got triggered,

  48. xty says:

    I found two scanned in pictures from Miquelon where we managed to go camping over a weekend when we were in St. Pierre. Like a different world and time.

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