Recipes for Bantha Pudu

So, here is what you are if you hate having to scroll through a thousand-word essay for each recipe you’re trying to find online:

1. You’re bantha pudu because you don’t want to be part of the “community” that builds audiences and food fandom and are somehow preventing the blogger, who is providing you FREE recipes, dammit, from climbing in search engine algorithms so their content rises to the top of the search like a successful souffle.

2. You’re probably fat and not really a fan of good food because all you want is a quick way to cook up something you can shove into your cavernous gob.

3. You’re lazy because you want that recipe fast, without paying respect to the blogger who brings it to you.

4. You’re too dumb to understand the genre of food/recipe blogging on the Internet.

5. You’re a man who hates women, and want them to be dumb, silent, servile engines of food preparation.

6. You’re a woman who hates women who demonstrate any fealty to domesticity, husbands, dumb stories about the dog, or – gasp – paying the bills by talking about their sponsors’ products.

7. You’re too technologically unsavvy to use recipe filter extensions or to use the search function to look for the keyword “ingredients.”

8. You’re a hack.

Or so this piece in Slate tells me.

The article speaks of “content collapse,” meaning the audiences websites are built for are open to anyone on the Internet, not just that intended audience. Content collapse implies that these non-audience folks are still going to come to your website and very likely be confused about what it is and what it’s for and maybe – if they can find a way – complain about it. Or they’ll just use it for what they think it’s good for, and go about their days.

I’m a writer myself. I get that the Internet provides avenues of unlimited expression that is harder to come by in printed matter, as is pointed out here.

But I also know there are simple things writers can do to deal with content collapse without having to excise a single word.

I spent ten years as a newspaper journalist, where we write using the inverted pyramid. That means the most important information comes first, with the least important information at the end. Meaning if the article had to be cut to length, an easy way to make things fit was just to cut off the bottom until it fit. Now, there were times we did not write using that style. A more expansive style has its payoffs, notably in expression. But it brings with it inherent risks of needing a heavier edit.

Not so needed online, where there’s infinite space for an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters. Take this blog, for example. I do no editing or cutting here.

But I also don’t expect anyone – not even my mother, who is dead – to read this. If anyone reads it and finds it annoying, that’s fine by me. This is for me. I’m the author and the audience, shouting into the ether.

You should be glad you’ve got regular readers. And readers who come to you via content collapse. So take advantage of such. Put the recipes first, or figure out a “Recipe Here” button that those fly-by-nighters can use to get to the recipe quickly if they don’t want to read your prose. (And honestly, the misogyny thing. I have looked up many recipes online. I’m far more interested in the recipe than the sex of the person who put it online. Not saying misogyny in this case doesn’t happen. But scratching around for reasons to be mad if someone says they simply want the recipe seems foolish.

My wife is the same way. We want the recipe. And here’s why: We’re short on time. We both work two jobs. We have three teenagers who also cook. We have school and other hobbies that don’t revolve around food. There are times it’s fun to slow down and read a good story about a recipe we want to use. That’s not going to happen every time. On the nights I cook, for example, more often than not it’s after I get home off the bus at 7 pm, and we’ve got kids doing homework and both mom and dad heading to the online classes they teach and We. Do. Not. Have. Time. to read your thousand-word essays. We want good food. But the story time doesn’t always fit into the schedule.

Book Review: Life of Pi

In the author’s note comes the claim: “This book will make you believe in God.”

Maybe. In a pantheistic, philosophical way, an increase in a belief in God might occur. But while Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” is an engaging modern fantasy, even I, a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sees it relies a bit too much on philosophy and lot less on conversion via the spirit. This is a book that attempts to increase faith in God in the head, not necessarily the heart.

Others, of course, may have a different reaction. Others, of course, may see my church affiliation and scoff that since I believe in another “engaging modern fantasy,” – The Book of Mormon – my skepticism in Martel’s attempts at convincing others to believe in God is laughable.

That may be so. Through a different point of view.

“Life of Pi” is a tale of a modern spiritual journey, one that ends with the skeptics accepting the veracity of the tale of Pi, marooned at sea for 277 days with a zoo-kept Bengal tiger as his only mortal companion on a lifeboat on the pretext, it feels, of liking the story of Pi and the tiger much more than the story of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat,” but with more murders. Pi argues he saw it all – and that he believes what he sees. He doesn’t believe in bonsai trees, brought up by his Japanese interrogators, because he hasn’t seen them. Voila, the story of Pi and the tiger must be true, the story tells the head.

And I too like the story of Pi and the Tiger – liked it when I saw the film, liked it still when I read the book. But to believe this book will change minds in the realm of spirituality is to rely too much on the world of philosophy than anything else. Which is what you’d expect from Martel or any other student of philosophy or rhetoric.

Those who believe in God will read the book and find the affirmation they seek. Those who do not are unlikely to find their thoughts changed after reading this story, even if they consider the philosophical implications.

That aside, Martel tells a wonderful story of journey that can hold its head high among the likes of Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” and even Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” as it harks to the speculative nature of people who can look at a world thoroughly explored and still think, “There’s something new to be found out there.” Perhaps this is the central message to the novel, and if so it transcends a bit more the rather pedestrian arguments that come up to convince others to believe in a higher power. Like Butler and Swift, Martel brings us a highly fanciful tale, meant to put a pry bar in our minds to convince us that we don’t yet know the world we live in, neither through the windows of science, philosophy, and religion – which the book touches on. Only through a combination of these disciplines can we hope to find the fanciful. If we take the story on that level, maybe Martel does a better job at it than I give him credit for.

The tales Butler and Swift spin came at a time when great explorations were still being done across the globe. Martel’s comes in a time where such explorations only dredge up echoes of colonialism, oppression of native peoples – that might explain why his fanciful island is populated only by meerkats – and a roiling cynicism that makes any appeal to belief in deity seem a risky undertaking for a novelist.

Trump, Quoted

Picture it: Salt Lake City, Feb. 17 2020. KSL invites listeners to text the names of their favorite presidents in, or text in a presidential quote.

Youngest texts furiously.

At their next break, they read the following:

“Here lies the body of my good horse, ‘The General’. For 20 years he bore me around the circuit of my practice, and in all that time he never made a blunder. Would that his master could say the same!”

~John Tyler

"Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them."

~ Ronald Reagan

"I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."

~Donald Trump

I owe him a dollar because I bet they wouldn't read it on the air.

Trump window doodle courtesy of Rory Porter.

And of course, when they read his quote over the air, we all five of us roared, driving along as we were on Interstate 15 between Salt Lake and Ogden. Boy's day couldn't get any better than that.

Tom Holt: Absurdity of the Ordinary

Just finished reading Tom Holt’s “The Better Mousetrap.” Here’s what I see:

Lots of the ordinary. But juxtaposed enough with the extraordinary that we look at the absurdity of the ordinary in our own lives and say, “Yeah, if I could get rid of that, I could write my own novels (or slay dragons, or figure out why I keep getting dead).”



One of Holt’s great successes is to show how sometimes we let the ordinary and mundane fill up our lives when we could be having greater adventures, whether we have one of the three known Portable Doors or not.

Other writers do this too, of course. I think to Douglas Adams and Arthur Dent being the great maker of sandwiches, of course, among many other things Adams does. It’s a common fantasy or science fiction trope, and just about everyone from JRR Tolkien and JK Rowling and Ray Bradbury do it to some extent, some with more success than others.

My favorite example of this leans toward the conversation Mr. Halloway and Mr. Dark have in front of the cigar store in “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” where Dark is intent on finding Will and Jim but Halloway succeeds in throwing him off the trail by loudly bragging up the twenty-five cent cigar he’s just purchased at the cigar store. The cigar smoke is just the beginning of his methodic madness to blind the Dust Witch to the location of the boys, and it’s done not in a deliberate, sequential manner, but by chance and inspiration.

But Holt, I think does something a bit different with it. I’m still trying to pin down exactly what, but here are a few samples that stood out to me in “The Better Mousetrap”:

(I write a bit more about this scene in my previous Tom Holt post.)

The Door opened again in the back wall of a Marks & Spencers in west London, and Frank stepped out, looking unusually grave. Putting out a fire, saving several lives and many millions of pounds: morceau de gateau. Now he was going to have to do something really difficult and scary. He was going to try and buy a shirt.

Holt goes on for more than a page as Frank attempts to buy a shirt, fretting he’ll end up looking like a waiter in whatever he picks out – something Emily confirms when next they meet, on their way into more mortal peril.

Then there’s this, where Emily faces the greatest of perils:

That’s, um, fascinating. Does the dream also record how Emily Spitzer manages to kill the greatest dragon of all time armed only with a mobile phone and a roll of peppermints?

Of course.

Well?

The dream also ordains: Don’t spoon-feed the lazy cow, make her figure it out for herself.

Ah. The dream sounds suspiciously like my mother.

Dealing with dragons, well, Bilbo can tell us how that works out. Maybe not the time to fret about feeling poorly treated by your mother. But there you are again, grounded in reality as the character talks to an actual dragon in the darkness.

We’re clearly in a fantasy world, but a world so anchored in our own we can almost imagine ourselves making these same Choose Your Own Adventure Choices, only getting muddled when things go badly and we find ourselves facing one of those “deadly” situations we encounter in real life and think are so terrible to behold.

Maybe that’s what Holt does right with the absurdity of the ordinary.

More ideas for my own novel. Chuck Jones is right. Fill your head with ideas, lest nothing ever come out of it, if I can paraphrase the man.

Just one funny thing on this book. A Goodreads reviewer commented on the number of grammatical errors in the novel. I didn’t see any, but I wasn’t looking for them. But I did note whomever wrote the blurb on the back probably wrote the blurb for other Tom Holt novels in rapid succession, as Jane, one of Holt’s other characters, shows up on the back cover but not in the book, where the role of Jane is adequately filled by Emily Spitzer.

The Better Mousetrap, Part One

A week or so ago, I offered the following backhanded gallantry toward Tom Holt’s “The Better Mousetrap,” though I did leave the title of the book a mystery:

I said this after reading (and re-reading, and enjoying) “Flying Dutch” and “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf,” thinking the former was better but lamenting with each read how similar the two novels were.

Nevertheless, when I saw “The Better Mousetrap” at the local thrift store, I scooped it up because I knew I liked Holt enough to give him a fourth try (the other is “Blonde Bombshell,” which was okay).

But “Mousetrap” is growing on me.

I’m learning more about Holt as I go. He’s almost as prolific as Terry Pratchett, to whom he’s compared. But he writes a different kind of novel – less silly, just as thoughtful.

But why am I writing about “Mousetrap” now?

Because of this:

Character Frank Carpenter is off on an impossible mission – picking out a shirt to wear on a date. As a fashion-ignorant individual, I thought the scene clever. And it’s a great way to show character – not in the derring-do of preventing deaths at the behest of an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay out, but at an ordinary task that’s just as daunting, viz:

[S]ome of these shirts were right and some of them were wrong, and he had no idea of how the rules worked. All he knew was that if you got it right, you looked a million dollars and lovely women melted into your arms alike an ice cream on a hot day, and if you got it wrong, children pointed at you in the street. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, a bit like the other incomprehensible scary thing, the one he was buying the shirt for [a date with Emily, a woman whose life he has saved at least three times]. Finding the right one, having the wit to know it when he found it, keeping it, looking after it properly, never letting it go. Washing it occasionally. Ironing. Life is so much easier, of course, if you never bother.

Make your characters relatable, even if they’re magical or clever or both, far beyond the ken of your readers, and the readers will beat a path to your door, or at least to your books in the thrift shop with the hope that maybe in the future they’ll pay full price for one of your novels.

So now, one more thing to do in my own novels . . .

RED ALERT!

So I’m trying to figure out what the hell happened with our taxes this year.

Last year, the Year of the Renewable Energy Credit, was incredible. Massive refund from the federal government, which we promptly plopped on our solar panel loan so the payments wouldn’t balloon. And we owed the state about $300.

This year, I knew the federal refund would be smaller, and it was.

But the state. Yowza. The state, we owe just over $2,000.

What happened?

We’re already low on the number of dependents indicated on our W-4s, particularly on my main job, which is the lion’s share of our income (I work two jobs while my wife works three.)

But four of those jobs, no federal or state tax collected. We’ll have to re-evaluate those W-4s right away.

Nobody seems to be able to explain it to me. There’s some noise on the internet from last year saying Idaho changes its tax laws to align with federal laws, but there’s nothing aside from lambasting me for not updating those W-4s to explain why we owe so much more in taxes.

So maybe that’s it. We’ll have to check those to see how many allowances are on them. Because if I’ve done the math right, at our current tax rate, that would mean we underpaid (on two of those jobs, where we got more money than the other two jobs) equals about $2,300 in unpaid states taxes. But I dunno. It’s also contract work for those two jobs. Maybe that makes a difference? In any case, we’re checking on those.

But that explains only part of the problem – because last year, with the same allowances on those jobs, the amount due to the state was far less. Did I, as Erma Bombeck says, plant crabgrass and taxes came up? Everything I see online is yapping about changes that occurred prior to the 2019 tax year, so I have to assume nothing major happened. We all know what you get when you assume, so it’s probably that kind of situation. But why don’t they speak plain English?

Anyhoo, will be filing lots of new W-4s this month, to avoid a future debacle.

Trying not to Fossilize, or Avoiding Elf Stasis

Zoom is what did it.

Zoom, of course, is the online collaboration platform, where one can have video presentations, chats, and other meetings and such with widely-dispersed groups. We use Zoom at BYU-Idaho in our teaching groups, where we may have teachers from across the nation working together to become better teachers in a teacherly way.

But this semester – it took me five weeks to find my way into the group chat. Because things had changed.

Or maybe not changed. I haven’t used Zoom much, and when we have meetings, I get a link to them. To go into the program – annoying called apps these days – was something I hadn’t done in a long time. So it took some time to remember how to get there. And how to log in. And what my password was. And to realize I didn’t need my password if I used a push notification which, thankfully, I have used more often and remembered how to do.

So there I was, stumbling into the chat four weeks after the fact, like an Elf finally giving up on Middle-Earth and heading to the Grey Havens to sail to the Undying Lands.

Elves, we have to remember form Tolkien’s universe, love stasis.* Their world was perfect, so why change that? But due to the meddling and weaknesses of men – and the scheming of those who destroyed Numenor and brought their evil to Middle-Earth – their existence was threatened and their stability shattered. Though they hadn’t given into the corruption of the One Ring, it hung heavily over their heads, viz:



So when stasis could not be maintained in Middle-Earth, they departed for Valinor, where their stasis could be maintained.

I’m evolving into a technological elf. I want things to remain the same. I’m tired, for example, of our teaching groups changing each semester, having to find the new place in the community, It’s awful.

But I need to be adaptable. Things will change and continue to change, and those who refuse to change are doomed to wander, lustrous and beautiful, in a world that no longer suits them.

*Warning: Major Nerd Alert

The Road to Caradhras

There's nothing I can say that won't start a shouting match, civil as it might be.

And that's what it would be: A shouting match. People talking past each other but not really listening because being right is more important than listening.

It's ironic, given the ease with which we communicate these days. But we all live in gulags. Some are more isolated and brutal than others. And rare are the times we can commiserate without someone taking up the battle cry: "Let 'em all go to hell, except Cave 76."

"It is a strange fate," Tolkein tells us through Boromir, "that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing."

We are on the road to Caradhras, folks. And the snow grows deep. There are many fell voices on the air.

Or as another said, there are mists of darkness that draw us off into forbidden paths, until we are lost.

Troop 1010, One Year On

As I sat in the fort at Krupp Scout Hollow, thrilled to be in out of the chill of Troop 1010’s first Winteree, I thought about the past year.

Well, almost a year. If I remember right, we held our first troop meeting at Tiebreaker Elementary in March, after we organized the troop in February – and that after a long drive to the Pocatello scout office because dealing with the folks in Idaho Falls wasn’t something Michelle could do after getting stonewalled with every bit of paper she presented to them. We had six girls, two leaders, a place to meet and a lot of enthusiasm.

We held our meetings. Our first campout was in our backyard, where we tested out tents and looked to see how the girls would get along.

And what a difference almost a year makes.

As with the boys, progress and maturity. Of the original six, five are left, but two more have joined. We have one First Class scout and three others who are so close one trip to the swimming pool will get them there. As of our last meeting, all have a rank – some progressed quickly as with our newest member, and others, more slowly. But progress has been made, and will continue, with other ranks waiting in the wings.

We’ve been to scout camp.

We’ve camped out in all kinds of weather, including the freezing drizzle the night of the Winteree.

Oh, the Winteree.

The girls worked hard. We tried with what little skill we have, and with what little time we had, to get them ready. But they came through. If they didn’t know how to do something, they worked to learn it there. And they improvised a Klondike sled out of some rope, twine, and about $25 worth of lumber I raced to Rigby to buy for them that very morning.

During the award ceremony, I lowered expectations. They might win something, but we were there with a dozen seasoned troops who knew the Winteree competitions like the backs of their hands. They came with runners prepared for their sleds – within the rules. And they came with a lot more experience.

But those girls of ours. What they lacked in skill they made up with teamwork. We’ve had our rough moments, but it seems when the pressure is on, they work well together. And Michelle and I, we didn’t have to do much of anything except carry some staves and a show shovel.

They came home with four second-place ribbons (Knots & Lashings, First Aid, Signaling, and the Sled Race) and took home the traveling trophy for the first day, among those who weren’t staying for the second day (a Sunday, which we decided we just weren’t interested in).

Was it by default because by the time the award ceremony rolled around, those who were staying only for Saturday had mostly left?

I don’t know. I don’t think so. And the presenter, Dave Shaw, was great, because with the presentation of the fourth ribbon, he said “I present this and love the looks of surprise on their faces, to Troop 1010.” I love that they were surprised. I love more that they worked so hard.

I’m still trying to get gear dried out. It may be ready for our next campout at Green Canyon Hot Springs, when we’ll likely push those three to First Class and set the stage for others to get there. By that time we’ll have one Star Scout, which is exciting. Need to work on those merit badges. And two will want to start planning their Eagle projects.

One year. We’ve done a lot. And we’re still doing.

Hermit Research -- Margueritte de la Roque

Man against Nature is a classic literary trope.

Woman against Nature, not so much.

But that’s exactly what Elizabeth Boyer’s “Margueritte de la Roque: A Story of Survival” is – a somewhat fictionalized account* of a French noblewoman’s survival after she, her soon-to-be husband and her nurse are abandoned on an island off the coast of Quebec in the early days of New France.

While briskly told, Boyer’s tale resembles that of Farley Mowat’s fictional “Lost in the Barrens,” which I read in elementary school. Mowat’s prose is more straightforward, but Boyer’s tale is the more remarkable in that what she tells actually happened to a real person.

I’ll keep this review light on spoilers – suffice it to say all does not go well for Margueritte and company on the island. But we see the familiar tale of survival: Finding and building shelter, finding and preserving food, and then finding and preserving sanity as nature and the elements of the fierce sea coast take their toll.

Almost as entertaining – though far less gripping – are the reminisces de la Roque has as she struggles for survival. She apparently grew up near or was familiar with the city of Perigueux, France, and the surrounding countryside, and spends some time there in the book as well. I lived in Perigueux for about five months as a young missionary, so the landmarks and buildings and streets she writes of are familiar, and for that I felt the same kind of longing de la Rocque felt for her long-lost homeland. I’ve been in the cathedral she recalls, walked on many of the same streets. Of the cities I lived in while in France, that’s the one I’d love to go back and see the most.

As with Mowat’s tale, there is survival, in building a temporary shelter, a more permanent shelter, and then finding a place of refuge to flee to when the elements grew too fierce. And Boyer’s telling of the tale through French eyes kept me running to and from the dictionary, trying to interpret some of the words used, particularly those describing the animals she encounters (puffins I was able to guess, thanks to the vivid description Boyer provides of them, along with the amusing sobriquet de la Rocque gave them: perroquets, or parrots.

Boyer, I think, captures the spirit and the madness of such tales of survival well. I could see myself reacting in the same ways in the situation de la Rocque found herself in, and probably performing better than I would have under the circumstances. Not having lived alone on an island in inhospitable territory before, I don’t know how I’d react in the face of death, but now maybe I have an inkling.

And reading this tale gives me a few ideas of the madness and spirit capable in those who live alone, something that’ll be a help as I work on finishing “The Hermit of Iapetus,” the tale of a man alone for far less noble reasons and in far less noble spirit than Boyer portrays in her historical re-creation.

*Boyer researched the story thoroughly and hews to what is written in historical accounts. The fictionalize parts come, of course, to filling in dialogue and details of what happened to the trio while on the island.

Boyer describes a building similar to this as de la Rocque recalls the architecture from her homeland as she seeks to make her logette on the island more impervious to the weather.