Look! Nothing about fandom!

Albertson's grocery store had a 2-for-1 deal going on with roast, so I grabbed the last two packages of roast left on the shelf. Have utterly forgotten exactly what sort of roast they were, other than beef, but no matter. Sunday night I set one up in the slow cooker crock, fully intending to cook it while I was at work, but early in the morning I was consumed with worry that Some Mysterious Thing would happen and it would catch fire and destroy the apartment and the cat,* and after a strangely long time it occurred to me that nobody was holding a gun to my head and forcing me to make pot roast during the day, so it stayed in the fridge and went in overnight. Which may have helped the flavor, actually.

Baby carrots, potato chunks, onion chunks, sliced mushrooms into crock. Rub roast with smoked salt, minced garlic, onion soup mix, put on top. Leave in fridge 24 hours, add 1/2 cup water right before cooking,** slow-cook on LOW 9 hours.

Wake up to house smelling wonderful. Munch on pot roast for breakfast while decanting into plastic bowl so it will cool faster in the fridge, and siphon liquid out into separate bowl so fat will solidify and be easy to take off after work, when juice will be thickend to form gravy and added back to meat and veg. Yum. Mushrooms, thrown in as a what-the-hell decision, were very good choice.

* I get weird this way occasionally. It usually means there's other things I'm worrying about but not allowing myself to think about them.

** I know it didn't need anything more: this cooked in foil makes plenty of its own juice. I just panicked again, see previous note.

Mangatalk: Paneling thought

No real spoilers for Saiyuki book 7 (or 8), but cut Just In case.

( Momentary thought... )

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Dorian at Postmodern Barney is going through the July Previews to order comics for his store, and this blog entry is his rundown of manga titles and what is and is not selling at his store.

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So I'm watching, off and on, this British show on martial arts that a friend downloaded for me, and it's your absolutely typical mix of information and misinformation about the martial arts. The host is some sort of kung fu guy and he's all "OOoOOOoooOOO teH mYstIcAL PowAh of cHI!!!1!!!!!1!!" and going around various bits of the world interviewing various martial arts guys and - the best part - getting beaten up by various masters. There's some wacky arts and some serious ones as well; primarily played for sensationalism, but OTOH that's how they've always been played, even in the areas they originated.

I am lucky in my anthropological training, because I can switch off the bits of me that know a little about martial arts and are curled up in the corner whimpering, and instead view the cultural context that the host is in and how it borrows from all these various things.

I couldn't quite restrain that part of myself during the fourth episode, which I just watched. The host was in a bowling alley watching some break dancers (an Enligsh bowling alley and English dancers, BTW) and was all "You see, this can be made into an effective martial art with just a little bit of adjustment" and I actually screamed "THAT'S BECAUSE BREAK DANCING DEVELOPED FROM CAPOEIRA YOU NIMROD!!!" at the monitor. Not a word about capoeira did he give, just mentioned the similarity of some of the moves to kung fu moves. Nimrod.

There's a certain amount of "martial art" tricks meant to impress the rubes shown as well, and taken seriously, but they're really tricks that just about anybody can perform and just look impressive.

And then the host gets beat up again and I cheer up.

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Episode 5 of the martial-arts thing is showing a lot of aristocratic Japanese archery-from-horseback, which is definitely very impressive. Major change from the "OoooOOOoOOO I shall push you over from the back with my MASSIVE CHI!!!" that's been going on.

And damn those archers have them some ( funky hats )