My friends, when searching Hathi, IA, WikiSource, Perseus, DPLA et al gets frustrating, here you go - an easy to use, odd, kind of self-indulgent but not at all stupid, free E-BOOK site for all your ancient/medieval/renaissance/etc. eras up to about 1920? reading needs!
...with my apologies to Mr. Peenee for taking so long to provide the link. (Let's test his memory.)
It is a cookbook centered around what arguably could be called the first 'fad' appliance - a chafing dish. Basically you were young, single, poor and living in the big city for the first time in some horrible little crappy room. But we got you fam! Here! Have a chafing dish!! You can cook in that squalid little room in a pretty little pot OVER A FUCKING CANDLE FLAME OMGWTFBBQ *running in circles like a chihuahua* - although a spirit lamp is the official line (what else can I do with this sentence?) and thus your ass will save money all over the place and will accrue all kinds of other benefits, including the ability to cure scabies by laying on hands like a monarch of the realm, which I made up.
Our author writes with such cheerful aplomb it's enough to make you laugh out loud, which I did several times, although I admit that in such matters I am a cheap date. Still, never have I enjoyed reading a cookbook so much! And there's footnotes! And outside links! And commentary by the owner of this site!
OK. I woke up this morning, shuffled around, poured a little Irish in my coffee and BAMMO I won the FGES competition.
Me, first thing in the morning, reacting to the news.
That shit just doesn't go around happening to people! There was shock! There was awe!
I tipped a little more Bushmills into my cup and read the message again. Sure enough, I have won this years' Freakin' Green Elf Shorts Competition!
And honestly, who better?
I haven't shaved yet. Geeze. It's early.
For now, I await further instructions. Thank you, people who decide these things, for this singular (and probably unwashed) honor! I will do my best to uphold the etc. etc. and I look forward to going ass-ass commando in the Green Velveteen, sowing confusion wherever I roam, making hooting noises, chewing on old people, knocking shit over.
For the first time in my adult life I am in the closet, and I am going through a whole identity restructuring process as a result.
I have been out since1978. I'd been signaling for years before that.
Let's face it, straight men either don't believe in bisexuality, or they think it's something drunk chicks do. That, in combination with the PNW zeitgeist, the ultra- liberal Oregon of my youth and the freedom of Seattle...I never had a worry being out. Not one.
And it was very, very easy for me to be 'out' too. That's what I'm trying to explain. I never faced any risks. I was a cute, curvy young woman and I didn't look butch even in a three-piece suit, smoking a cigar - it was ridiculous. Straight men thought it was hot, gay women thought it was hot, gay men thought it was hot, and straight women....I left alone. And that was fine. Even though I out-grew that suit, and I miss it.
So here I am at 65.
I knew that I was moving to a conservative state; but I thought it would follow the rule I'd grown up with - the towns and cities would be liberal, and the county would be made up of morons. But conservatism in Idaho is REALLY DIFFERENT. It isn't just a few cranks. Here, it's the world. It's the NORM.
And you know what, kats and kittens? It scares the living shit out of me.
Now I think about what I wear going out. I think about how I express myself, and how I move, for the love of fuck. 'Is this or that gesture too masculine? Should I not be in the 'dude' section of this hardware store?'
And this sounds silly. I know. It is silly. But it's fucking with me. Now that I'm old, now that all my personality traits are cast in stone, now that I no longer get the 'pretty' pass, now that I no longer live in a certain place, I feel like I have a target on me. Like people are watching me very closely for the slightest 'off' trait.
I know this is not the place y'all come for stuff like this, but dammit, I'm queer and I'm trippin' hard.
Yes I know what Trump just did. I am not that blogger, though, so the above sentiment must stand for what I might say otherwise.
Which would basically be 'FUCK TRUMP' so there's that.
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Let's all get a grip on ourselves and take a few deep, cleansing breaths. Light up a #. Pass it around. Take off your bra 'n shit.
Here is a pictuire of Chiyo Gomes.
This is is foreshadowing! And it's a super obscure hip reference because I too am super hip and obscure.
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Friends, have you been stymied by a lack of Victorian knowledge? Ever need to know how to carry out the process of cupping and bleeding? Or how to catch, raise and apply leeches? Ever stood in your kitchen crying because you had no idea how much a 'tumblerful' was? I know I have. Just sobbing. Hysterically sobbing.
I have found the answer to these and many more questions here:
Do you long to live like a middle-class early Victorian person? 'Enquire Within Upon Everything' has got you fam. Within these pages are instructions for reviving the victim of a hanging, how not to sound like a Yorkshireman, cooking cooking cooking, the many uses of lead, opium and nux vomica in combination for treating divers conditions in man or beast - even how to play Slobberhannes!
FUCKIN' SERIOUSLY!
SLOBBERHANNES AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!1
I mean it is all here. And I love it! I can't stop reading it! Open it to any virtual page and you'll find the most wonderful stuff!
Well holy crap it's New Years Day and I am sitting here enjoying a Dagger Falls IPA and listening to some Tool. The 'Dreaded Lurgy', as my UK friends might call whatever bucket of snot disease I had, IS GONE. I am recovered, and grateful to be feeling healthy again. At the mo I have a pot of beans on the fire. The whole El Apartmento II smells nice and homey. Tomorrow we'll have Huevos Rancheros for breakfast, with tortillas, and it will be fucking glorious.
Our little town was decorated quite nicely for the holidays. I'm old enough now that I appreciate this kind of thing.
I'm also ex-Sumas enough to appreciate how well things are maintained here in Fruitland. Trees are trimmed, buildings are in good repair, the plantings are maintained, streets are clean and well-paved, and codes are enforced. And hell yeah; if there's one thing this neck of the woods has down pat, it's water management. After living for more than twenty years in Dying Small Town Gothic, it's nice to be in a community that looks like a place where people give a fuck, you know?
Even now! 5:00 in the evening! Rain! Cold! Kids are out riding bikes, and people are walking their dogs.
Every day folks stroll along, and ride their bikes, or their recumbent bikes, or zip past on their roller-skis or electric scooters ,or alarmingly speedy motorized wheelchairs (!!!), and folks say 'Hello!' and will stop and chat for a bit. The tuner guys don't go blasting past, they just drift their cars down the street, and the bikers do a steady 20 mph. It's civilized, and it's nice. At my age, I can fully dig 'nice'.
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Most people drive SUV's, or big dually trucks - and here they get a full pass from me because most of this fuckin' place is dirt roads and bare prairie, except where it looks like God got pissed off and took an axe and just started hacking the shit out of it.
Oh hell yes. You need to have really good brakes here, and a really forgiving transmission too. 'Up' isn't a gradual climb. ''Up' is suddenly come around a curve and WHOAH MOTHERFUCKER you're looking at clouds. No warning. Similarly valleys. No gradual slopes here. They're sudden cracks in the eartWHAT THE FUCK and you're gaining speed down the side of some deep chasm, like it or not.
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If you decide to take an online, virtual overflight of Fruitland Idaho you'll see lots of suburbs and developments. And that's real. Google Maps is not lying to you. The thing is, there is so very, very much more Idaho than there is Fruitland. Or Weiser, or Payette, or basically every town here. Even Boise. Maps misrepresent how much actual nothing there is here. What there is here in Idaho is land, and a miraculous, neverending supply of ground water courtesy of the Snake River Plain Aquifer. So naturally, this is an agricultural state, and the name of the game is rangeland, wheat and produce.
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There are not a lot of people here, and there never has been a lot of people here.
Mostly there are antelopes.
And onions.
I am not even joking. I cannot count the times I've been driving down Whitley and an onion truck has blasted past and almost bounced an onion off my windshield. And these things are the size of CANTELOUPES PEOPLE. They do not go 'splat' when they hit the ground, or a car, or a tree, or the side of a house. They are VEGETAL CANNONBALLS. The gutters are full of them in September-October. People stopped at lights make their kids get out of the car and gather them up. I have seen this. It is not pretty.
Oh the antelopes! Right. Pronghorn antelopes. Yeah, they aren't the shy, retiring creatures that the internet would have them be.
Antelopes, as it turns out, are abundant, and are not what you would call a 'bright' creature. Example: I saw a rabbit hop up out of the grass near where some pronghorns were grazing near the town of Payette, and no, that would not do; so the entire herd just, like, turned and meandered across the busy highway. No sense of caution whatsoever. Cars and trucks rocking past at 45mph. There were almost several accidents as these stupid things ambled across four lanes of traffic to get away from this fucking rabbit that dared jump in their presence, or something. I do not pretend to understand the motives of yer bovid ungulates.
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Right across the river is Ontario, Oregon (YAY OREGON WOOT WOOT WOOT YEAH).
Ontario is where Idahoans go to commit sins. The colloquialism for 'gonna buy some dank' (or whatever the kids are calling it these days) is 'visit Ontario'.* Similarly 'I need an abortion' or 'let's get some shrooms*' or 'I need a minimum wage job that might actually allow me to eat on a daily basis'.
On the other hand, say you live in Ontario and you've just run out of meth. Just drive 3.6 miles to Idaho and buy all the pseudoephedrine you want over the counter here in Idaho, just you and a car full of Oregonian buddies taking turns, going from store to store, stocking up. Then you go back over the bridge, into Oregon, because Oregon apparently needs more meth, and nobody bothers to stop you, and you grab you a dixie cup and a stick and some...*
(The Biker just put on some Stranglehold (the Nuge) and it's pretty good. Not Ted, because he's an asshole. Just 'Stranglehold.' )
What Idaho has, are smoke shops. It is not uncommon to see two of them in the same retail strip, or a block apart. They are everywhere.
In a smoke shop, you can get liquor, beer, vape juice, tobacco in every brand and form imaginable, paraphernalia paraphernalia paraphernalia, and KRATOM.
Oh my God this place is Kratom central!!! And it's all old people who buy it, because Kratom is miraculous on pain, and the doctors here in I de hoe are real, real stingy when it comes to pain meds. So if you're poor, old and on assistance, you buy a $130.00 jar of Kratom tablets every month and cut them up into fours. Younger people also buy it enthusiastically, although they take it by the whole tab. That shit's fun for exactly twenty-five minutes - but in that time you see sounds, hear colors and love the whole universe. It's really something.
So I've heard.*
Another example of the border economy is that you pay six cents on the dollar sales tax for groceries here in Idaho (given a bill of 75.00 dollars, that's four bucks in sales tax) - but go 3.6 miles into Ontario, and you can shop until the cows come home and save that four bucks.
The punchline? The big bargain grocery store in Ontario is owned by Idaho distributors and stocked with Idaho-grown products.
AT A DISCOUNT.
IT'S WINCO.
IT'S WINCO'S FLAGSHIP STORE.
Let's hear it for late-stage capitalism, y'all!
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All things considered, we're doing pretty good. I am working my way through my cookbooks and my other projects. The Biker is recuperating from too many years of working like a dog. We are learning to love a new ecology, and the future is looking interesting and unexpected. God knows I never thought I'd end up here of all places.
