June, 2014 | The Plaid Pladd Blog

Archive for June, 2014

2014: Halfway Point

June 27th, 2014 by pladd

Alright, roughly halfway through 2014, so that means it’s time to check in on my goals to see how I’m doing. I’m not looking forward to the brutal truth.

1. Read All of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: 44%

After my initial enthusiasm, my reading pace has definitely flagged. I’ll forget about it for weeks, then freak out and read 20 pages in a day. I’m still on H.

I don’t know if this is happening

I have to try harder in the year’s last half!

2. Make a pie once a month: 33%

I’ve actually made more pies since the last time we talked! I think maybe three?

And there was pie day of course

Unfortunately, this is one of those goals you can’t catch up on once the month passes.

3. Make a new cocktail once a month: 0%

I can’t drink anymore

So that’s not happening

4. Get everything currently on my “To-Read” list off it: 58%

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s a slight lead, but I’ll take it

5. Make dwarf helms: 60%

I have literally not touched these since the last time we talked.

6. Update my blog at least once a week: 50%

Suckas

Total: 40%

Sigh

Previously: 2014 Goals
Quarter Quell

I realized recently that I’ve told you all about why my mom and Bova are amazing, but I’ve never written anything similar about Steven. Which is weird, because he is definitely amazing!! Usually I would debut such a list around his birthday, but that tends to get swallowed up in mine, which is the day after and vastly more important (let’s be real). So in the middle of June it will have to be!!

1. Steven is an amazing cook!

Homemade pasta day!

Steven is a great cook, especially if you want something more complicated and fancy than other people would attempt at home. Sure, you might be eating dinner 3 hours later than expected, but it will be delicious and quality-controlled on the minutest scale.

Everything that can be done by hand is

This attention to detail is also the reason why:

2. Steven is amazing at painting nails!

Well, he is

I am terrible at painting nails. At least I will be until painting your entire finger blue by accident comes into fashion. Steven takes painstakingly tiny strokes, and seems to have infinite patience. It means the process may have multiple lengthy steps, but the results look great!

This is like five different coats, what!

3. Actually, Steven is just amazing at defying gender roles in general

Picture unrelated

Natch I would never be with someone who was all “I only want to bro out and watch sports and you better change your name to mine so everyone knows I own you now etc”. But that’s an insultingly low bar so we’re not going to talk about that. Steven is amazing because he is actively interested in things and enthusiastic about things he enjoys no matter what anyone else thinks. “Do you want to learn to knit? “Sounds fun!” “Painting my nails is so hard.” “I can paint your nails–I have some cool ideas to try.” “Crap, I don’t know how to iron this bridesmaid dress without ruining it.” “I got it.”

Also there’s that whole My Little Pony/rainbow hair thing

4. Steven is not so great at crosswords, but he still tries which is amazing!!!

On Sundays (and Wednesdays, randomly) the News and Observer has TWO crosswords, so Steven and I always go to Panera, eat bagels, and do one each. Then we switch.

Mountain dew is the breakfast of champions

Even working together, we rarely finish either of them, but it’s being a regular at Panera that counts.

5. Steven is amazing at being stupid

And it’s amazing

Tagged: list, Steven

Posted in lists |

Brewer’s E and F

June 9th, 2014 by pladd

My enthusiasm for reading all of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has flagged a little bit in the last few months, possibly inevitably. I’m still trying to soldier through. Right now I’m on page 490, in G, and I thought I’d combine my entries on E and F, since E was quite short on its own. Right now I’m 37.75% done with this project, with 808 pages to go. I need to work harder in June to be at 50% by the halfway mark!

Here are some interesting things I read about this time:

The Eagle and the Child: The crest of the Stanley family and the Earls of Derby. The legend is that Sir Thomas Latham, an ancestor of the house, caused his illegitimate son to be placed under the foot of a tree in which an eagle had built its nest. When out walking with his wife, they “accidentally” found the child, which he persuaded her to adopt as their heir.

Because wives are not cool with your bastards, but they are strangely accepting of random eagle-foundlings.

Give us back our eleven days: When England adopted the Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian calendar, eleven days were dropped, 2 September 1752 being followed by 14 September. Many people thought that they were being cheated out of eleven days and also eleven days’ pay. Hence the popular cry: “Give us back our eleven days!”

And you bitch about daylight saving time!

The F section has a 3 page long list summarizing famous fakes and forgeries, all of which are really interesting. The ones I like best have motivations other than making money, like:

The Ireland forgeries: William Henry Ireland (1777-1835)… came out with two “lost” Shakespeare plays: Vortigern and Rowena and Henry II… His motive appears to have been a craving to secure the admiration of his father, whose antiquarian interests amounted to an obsession.

Piltdown Skull or Piltdown man: By 1912 Charles Darwin and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward had discovered a whole skull… thought to be that of a new genus of man… The hoax, which duped most experts, was apparently planned by William Sollas, Professor of Geology at Oxford, through his dislike of Woodward

The Vermeer forgeries: Hans (Henri) van Meegeren (1889-1947) began his series of brilliant fakes of Dutch masters in 1937… His intention seems to have been to indulge his contempt and hatred of the art critics by a superlative hoax, but the financial success of his first fake led to others, mostly “Vermeers.” Discovery came only in 1945 when Allied commissioners were seeking to restore to their former owners the art treasures that had found their way to Germany during the war. Among Goering’s collection was an unknown Vermeer, The Woman taken in Adultery, and its original vendor was found to be van Meegeren. Sale of such a work of national importance involved a charge of collaboration with the enemy. To escape the heavy penalty, van Meegeren confessed to faking 14 Dutch masterpieces, 9 of which had been sold for a total of 7,167,000 gulden and to prove his story agreed to paint another “old masterpiece” in prison in the presence of experts.

There’s also an awesome 5 page list of Famous Last Words in even tinier type than the rest of the entries. Here are some favorites:

William Hazlitt (1830; English writer) “Well, I’ve had a good life.”

Heinrich Heine (1856; German poet) “God will pardon me, it i His trade.”

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1762; English poet) “It has all been very interesting.”

I was particularly pleased to read this entry about the phrase “Dinna fash yourself,” a favorite of Highland romance novelists:

Dinna fash yerself’! Don’t get excited; don’t get into a state about it. The word is not of Scottish origin, but comes from obsolete French fascher, “to anger.”

Also, a phrase you might use casually has dirty origins:

To fill someone in: To provide them with information… The expression probably derives from the earlier low sense of making a woman pregnant.

Brewer’s is judging you for your slang terms and your knocking people up.

Previously: D
Next: G

Tagged: brewer's

Posted in 2014 League of Six |

May Books!

June 3rd, 2014 by pladd

This month I got through 8 books, so I’m 49% done with this project! Gotta pick up the pace!

To Be Or Not To Be by Ryan North

Title: To Be Or Not To Be: A Chooseable Path Adventure
Author: Ryan North
Rating: 5/5
GoodReads’ Rating: 4.26/5
When it was added to my list: 11/4/2013
Why was it on my list?: Um, did you read that title?

THIS IS A CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE BASED ON HAMLET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You should buy it right now. The e-book is ridiculously easy to navigate, and the illustrations are amazing. My favorite ending involves becoming a ghost marine biologist. Let’s face it, the other books I read this month really didn’t have a chance of making Top Spot after this.

Hell House by Richard Matheson

Title: Hell House
Author: Richard Matheson
Rating: 3/5
GoodReads’ Rating: 3.8/5
When it was added to my list: 10/23/2013
Why was it on my list?: A list of good horror stories before last Halloween

I was interested to read this because my only Matheson experience is his seminal vampire/zombie work I Am Legend, which is pretty different than the Will Smith movie of the same name. I like how he tends to write horror in an almost clinical, science fictiony manner, where the “supernatural” elements can be explained by science even as traditional horror tropes are utilized. This is a typical “strangers locked in a haunted house” narrative, which I enjoyed, though like most genre novels, the characters were mostly two-dimensional and I didn’t really care about any of them.

An Exaltation of Larks by Robert Reed

Title: An Exaltation of Larks
Author: Robert Reed
Rating: 3/5
GoodReads’ Rating: 3.49/5
When it was added to my list: 03/09/2010
Why was it on my list?: No idea

This book was way weird. Like to the point where I don’t even really know how to describe it. Here is the first sentence: “Youth is a bird. A simple and vivid wild bird. Quick to anger, and love, and hungry to forget, if only so that it can do everything again for the first time. Yet this is not a time of birds. It is a time of turtles.”

Easy by Tammara Webber

Title: Easy
Author: Tammara Webber
Rating: 3/5
GoodReads’ Rating: 4.24/5
When it was added to my list: 11/16/2012
Why was it on my list?: Who even knows, that was 2 years ago

I struggled a lot when it came to rating this book, because parts of it are really problematic, but I was still able to enjoy it by purposefully not thinking too hard about it. It’s a fairly typical romance novel about college students, but it also addresses rape frankly and calls out the bullshit victim blaming that so often shrouds the issue on college campuses. I really appreciated that, but found a lot of the main character’s actions surprisingly chill for someone who should be dealing with the aftermath of a sexual assault. Hopefully no one reading this would think there’s something wrong with them if they aren’t ready to fall in love/lust with the next cool, hot dude they meet.

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Title: Enchanted
Author: Alethea Kontis
Rating: 2/5
GoodReads’ Rating: 3.72
When it was added to my list: 1/10/2013
Why was it on my list?: Probably because I was really into reimagined fairy tales in 2013, like everyone else

Ugh, I am so over reimagined fairy tales, and this one gave me nothing special to focus on. The characters ranged from forgettable to annoying.

The Counterfeit Family Tree of Vee Crawford-Wong by Tam L. Holland

Title: The Counterfeit Family Tree of Vee Crawford-Wong
Author: Tam L. Holland
Rating: 2/5
GoodReads’ Rating: 3.53/5
When it was added to my list: 12/2/2013
Why was it on my list?: A list of notable books out last year

I really wanted to like this one! The plot sounded interesting: after an assignment about making a family tree in school, Vee sends a fake letter to his father, supposedly from his long-lost grandfather in China asking for a family reunion, basically tricking his father into exploring a past he’d left behind. Unfortunately, Vee is completely unlikable. I think the author was going for how teenagers can sometimes be selfish or egotistical, but went too far until I couldn’t understand why any of the other characters would willingly spend time with him. I certainly didn’t want to.

The Ones I Decided Not To Read

Title: Breaking Beautiful
Author: Jennifer Shaw Wolf
GoodReads’ Rating: 3.93/5
When it was added to my list: 10/25/2012
Why was it on my list?: Good YA books published that year?
Why I’m not reading it: No joke, I have checked this book out on THREE separate occasions. The furthest I’ve gotten is Chapter 2. I have no idea why. I can’t tell you anything really wrong with it. I guess it just didn’t grab me, so I’m giving up.

Title: Wildwing
Author: Emily Whitman
GoodReads’ Rating: 3.43/5
When it was added to my list: 6/11/2012
Why was it on my list?: The cover looked really stupid
Why I’m not reading it: I don’t have time to ILL something for a funny cover

Previously: April Book List
Next: June Books

Tagged: 2014 books, book list, books

Posted in 2014 League of Six, Book Reviews, lists |

The Plaid Pladd