Eating Muffins

Halme Polvinen Family Collective. You will all be assillymated

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  • Byatt and Kritzer

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    Posted by Sari

    As you may or may not know I generally detest short stories. With few notable exceptions I find them boring and pointless writing excercises which may well benefit the writer but offer little to the reader. I also know that the above is not exactly a fair and balanced view. So, I have been trying to read short stories trying find some that I like. I have dutifully read one short story a night from the Picador collection, and when my sister, the Byatt scholar lent me thelatest collection of Byatt’s short stories I actually sat down and read the damned thing.

    Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories is actually a genre collection. The five stories are all horror stories and three have supernatural elements in them. I found three of the stories totally pointless and boring (“The Thing in the Forest”, “A Stone Woman”, and “The Pink Ribbon”), and two which were readable. “Body Art”, a story about an encounter between eminent Irish Gynaecologist, and a down-and-out art student who is into installations and body-piercing is vintage Byatt in that it takes the title and spins it into many different directions. Reading it, you can actually feel how words, descriptions, events make connections in your brain. If I was still doing a lit-crit class this would be a great work to analyse, but it isn’t interesting enough to do pick apart on my free time, and I suspect it really is one of those stories that would greatly benefit from being picked a part.

    The other readable short story in the collection is “Raw Material” which is a sort of a story about a creative writing -teacher. His class writes and demands melodrama, stories about abuse and rape and violence whereas the teacher finds that the most satisfying excercises are those of an old lady writing about how household chores were done in the olden days. As it is a story about writing it can’t escape being on some leve a metafiction, and in that light its ending is really interesting.

    So, two out of five, not bad. Certainly better than the Picador collection which at the moment scores one out of fifteen.

    I have also been reading Naomi Kretzers fantasy duology Fires of the Faithfull and Turning the Storm. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Firstly just because it turned one of the usual fantasy tropes around. In Kretzer’s world everybody can do magic, and those who do not are suspected of heresy. And the heresy is Christianity with little tweaking here and there. It also has a nice understated lesbian romance, interesting characters and evil is not something epic, but something very human, and can be seen both sides of the conflict. I was not too fond of the first person narrative, and the plot itself flounders a bit here so that sometimes there is a feeling of deus ex machina plotting. But overall, quite nice.

  • Luminous tags and other paraphenalia

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    Posted by jukkahoo

    I’m well.

    Or so my doctor says. Sirpa (sixth!) saw me last Friday and we decided that my lump has melted a bit and will probably continue to do so, and therefore there is no reason for me to continue seeing a doctor on a weekly basis. Next check-up: Ides of Mars.

    This has been a bit of a drag: waking up one morning with an irritated lump, just after you’ve been told you’re OK and normal life lurks just around the corner. January was a bad month and February has started with a flu, so things aren’t too shiny or happy in Casa Tali. But we shall endeavour to change our combined sour face to something far more cheerful, healthier and positive.

    I have also been to a dentist. I don’t really want to talk about it.

    Have you noticed how gad-awful cold it is?

    …

    I’ve been reading a bit, not too much since I was a bit on the gloomy side of things and I couldn’t be that interested in anything more demanding than tube-watching. I actually watched several dozen episodes of Enterprise. How sad is that? But I did read few books.

    Like John Maddox Robert’s Hannibal’s Children. It’s an AH with the point of convergence at the gates of Rome, whilst Hannibal is outside, waiting to get in. And he does. It is a good, solid book, which smells a LOT like Roberts is going to be write a number of novels in this world. I’m personally looking forward to that. No real review here, since it’s one of my Kutspah-books for the next Tähtivaeltaja. As is Ian R. McLeod’s The Light Years. A superior book that ranks high on my list of great, new speculative fiction books. Something like China Miéville, something like Sean Stewart, something like (ghasp, a Real Author!) Charles Dickens. Look for it, you’ll like it too.

    Another book I read just recently, is Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (it is in fact one of our dozen or som BookSale-books, more of that later). This here is a biography of sorts, about two men, who both had a wee bit more than just a bit to do with Oxford English Dictionary. Dr W. C. Minor was a millionaire Civil War (American, that is) surgeon – and a madman and a murderer. Dr James Murray was the editor of OED. Minor moved to London after Civil War and lived in various "ill-reputed areas" of London, before he killed a total stranger and was sentenced to mental institution, since he was considered to be totally bonkers (most probably paranoic schizophrenic). English correctional system had just "invented" humane methods and since Minor was also American, he got sent to a spanking new Broadmoor Asylum. From there he assisted as a volunteer contributor (reading LOADS of books and collecting words from them) of the OED for several years.

    Murray was also somewhat oddball himself. Since the family was poor he was forced to quit school when he was 14, but he was so smart and eager to learn more, that at 17, he was the vice-principal of the said school. He also tried to teach Latin to cows and, my personal favourite: "[]…comparing, in lexical terms, the sheep-counting numerology of the Wowenoc Indians of Maine with that of the moorland farmers of Yorkshire". Eventually he managed to find himself with the Best and the Brightest of the British scholars and was finally chosen as the editor of OED.

    This is microhistory, interestingly told and with a sensible ratio of serious academic jargon mixed with genial banter and humour. Liked it a lot, not the least because it’s rather short (200 pages) and it tells a tale worth telling. Winchester has a good sense of telling a good story instead of the facts (which he also mentions, but on occasion very cursorially). This has all the ingredients for a very nice BBC-drama. Will Self calls this "Tour-de-force", so it must be good.

    As said, we went and checked the BookSale last… (Thursday?, no) Friday – and managed to spend far too much money. Not that there was that many really interesting books, but because the Sale-part of this hullabalooza has been lost, probably forever. OK, half-price is good, but if one compares the sale-prices with, let’s say six-seven years ago, the gap is huge. Those days you could really make some finds and save a LOT of money, but now – in order to do the same thing – you have wait for the very final days of the Sale and count your blessings. Not that much to write home about, me reckons. I have these few items I’m interested in, but not really that much, that I’d be willing to pay the price that is there right now. We’ll see what happens.

    And if you don’t already own a copy of China Miéville’s The Scar, go NOW. Akateeminen is selling for measily €5,90. Buy it, buy two and give the other one as a present.

    I went to HKL ticket service at the Railway station and loaded some value to my Travelcard at the counter. The nice woman servicing me decided that I needed new covers for my card (she was right, the old ones were pretty torn) and gave me them. But only after she had taped a luminous tag to it. I kept wondering the need for that the whole time I was sitting on the bus. I keep my Travelcard in my pocketsies, no car (nor the actual driver of any vehicle) can see the reflection from there. What a silly idea! Am I now supposed to  wave the blasted card in my hand while promenading the dark streets and alleys of our fair town? And then I saw the light. Just like with them fri£@$€ng Rose petals!!! By the way, Tuhkis-Yuza is a complete moron, a regular nimcampoop: he figured out the solution in 15 seconds! Ha!

    Does anyone know which is the first actual Finnish comic book? And when it came out? I came across this rather delightful sequential picture book today and it is from 1905.

    Next weekend promises to include only turkey and more turkey. Syksy is in Finland and Da Prufussionaals are having a real good old honking turkey-film festivities at Nalle’s place. Hot diggity dang!

  • The Quiz to end all Quizes

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    Posted by Sari

    Up until about four or five years ago I thought I was pretty good with all sorts of general knowledge quizes. The net and Playstation versions of Millionaire are quite doable and the only person I have lost in boardless Trivial Pursuit (both the Whiskey and dry version) is Jukka. Then I discovered the infamous King William’s College quiz. It is a general knowledge test given to the pupils of the King William’s College on the Isle of Man. It used to be a real test, but now it is just given out as something fun to do on your Christmas holiday.

    The questions are obscure to the point of impossibility and, but they are so enticing that you get a terrible urge to spend your days googling for the stories behind them. I mean would you not want to know “Which pioneer combined a surgical approach to Schizophrenia with Portuguese diplomacy?” or” in 1903, who was the sublime paralytic who died of Cholera?”

    Apparently the average number of correct answers is 2. Out of 180. Next year this venerable practice celebrates its 100 birthday and is bound to be even more obscure than usual, so to start practicing early:
    Here is this year’s quiz and here are the answers.

    There usually is a theme in each set of ten questions, and if you get the theme, it might make it easier to guess other answers. I made my record this time 26 correct answers. It helped there was one easyish group of questions. Go me 🙂

  • Ice Dance

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    It was so close! Does not look like it looking at the results but it really was. And there were really interesting up and coming teams. I really enjoyed Ice Dance this year much better than last year, so much so that I have not even wanted to do my analyses on the twissels and dance holds and amount of progressives, because I am still at the point where I just want to enjoy the programs as whole.

    Okay, I am disapointed for my babies, Denkova/Stavinski, who are my all-time second favourite Ice Dance team ever. They lost the free dance with the absolutely smallest possible margin, and the third place in the OD was due to being royally screwed by the sekrit computer. (Have I mentioned that this secret judging sucks?) But I am trying to think positively: if they get a non-waltz compulsory in Dortmund, they might be closer to Navkamorovs, if the computer picks an actually representative selection of judges they will – if all other things are equal – be second. And Navkamorovs have a defenitely beatable free. So they just might still win the worlds. So go Beanie & Pocket.

    As you might infer, I am not a great fan of Navka/Kostomarov. Beautiful people with beautiful edges and lines, but they just seem so detached from everything they do. The pink panther – Austin Powers FD is very dancey but still empty, and I just think that Den/Sta are just so much more interesting and have the sort of pairness Naakka and Kostomarenki (as Jukka calls them) lack. They do, of course, have the nostalgia factor. Every time I see Tatiana, I remember the wonderful days in the early nineties, when Ice Dance was real soap opera with fights at restaurants and strange goings-on in Zhulin’s famous Moskow apartment 😉

    Grushina/Goncharov deserve their medal for the hard work, and they have the best material ever this year. The OD is actually rather nice though sing sing sing is just a bit trite choice of music. I suppose the FD was meant to be somehow thematically serious as she was dressed as a dove of peace and he was dressed in some sort of representation of armour (or crocodile, you never can be quite sure about these things), but it never really grabbed the audiences. Grushgons still lack that magic that can pull audiences in.

    Delobel/Schoenfelder have a great OD this year, shame about the fall. I don’t like them as a pair because Oliver is so much taller than Isa that they never really look compatible on ice. It allows them to do great tricks, though, and the FD had plenty of really innovative lifts.

    Poor Scary Sergei and Gallopin Galit. They are so not going anywhere. There was some improvemet last year when they were with Dubova, but now that they are back with Tarasova they have relapsed. Frantic movement, running steps and not a clean edge anywhere to be seen. Galit still pushes from the toepick and sort of hops over the skate every time she is supposed to do a turn.

    But Faiella and Scali are going places. If you want to do an old school ballroomy dance, this is the way it should be done. Pizzazz and dazzle and fun. Torino here we come.

    Outside the six best teams, there were few positive suprises. Finns Huot/Valkama had their best result ever (18th), it is nice to see them improve even though they are full time students at MIT and have other priorities in their lives. The Brits Kerr/Kerr were really entertaining, great result for them and for the first time in a long time a British Ice Dance team which has potential to get better. And I did also like Gudina/Beletski’s humorous free dance to Largo al Factotum. The idea could have fallen totally flat, but they carried it of with panache.

  • Men’s Free Program

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    Posted by Sari

    Eugh. This was really dificult to judge. Joubert won fair and square. He is the kind of skater I don’t like, but he has two strong concept programs, was very concistent with his jumping and though his spins are nothing to write home about they were OK. He did leave the door open by having only one combination (4t+3t), but nobody walked through or even crept to the treshold.

    Poor Zhenya was held up, just a bit. Not so much in the first mark, his technical content even with two fallen jumps was impressive, but by having to go three times for the axel really should have affected the second mark more. Now the first two minutes of the program was jump, pose to the judges, jump, pose to the judges, jump…

    Klimkin deserved his third place. I’d probably have him even second. He fell on his second 4t, and stepped out from both of his 3f attempts, but he had two solid combinations (3a+3t, 4t+3t), really cool camel variations and back-outside spins, neat entries to jumps, nice linking moves and the kind of avant-garde coreo that usually is more the french style.

    Apparently, the federation have been making noises about Dambier’s fourth place. Please! Good jump content though easer combos than Klimkin, mediocre spinning, and the linking movements: stroking forward and spread eagles. It still ain’t called ice jumping you know. Personally, If Lambiel would have gotten that 3a, I would have put him ahead of Dambier in the free.

  • What is it with you people?

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    Posted by Sari

    I spend my time writing anal-retentive posts about figure skating, and our traffic increases by third. Don’t worry, I’ll continue but later. Our connection has been down for most of Thursday and Friday, so there is some catching up to do.

  • Bookshelves (and the books on them)

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    Posted by Sari

    See I can still talk about other things besides skating. The problems begin if I have to talk about something other than books or skating…

    Anyway, Jukka was ranting about how neither interior decorating shows nor magazines ever seem to cover homes where there are lots of books. Quite the contrary, it often seems that interior decorators are shallow morons who do not seem to think that people who own books would be interested in getting decorating tips. Or maybe they think that there are no people who own books and bookshelves are invented just so people could put their nicknacks there. This gets on my nerves. Books in quantities dominate any room they are in almost as badly as a big TV, and take up lot of space. So it would be nice if the pros would even once try to give tips to bookowners.

    What brought this on was that I was watching Inno, the latest of these popular programs where a decorator will redo a space of your choise for a set sum. And fo the first time ever on any decorating show I thought the end result actually looked good. And then the decorator who designed the room happily went on explaining that they built these shelves and put the few rows of books on the upper shelves and CD’s for the lower, because “you don’t need the books so often”.

    Now, it is of course possible that the owner of the apartment had told the decorators that the CD’s are more heavily in use and should be more accessible in which case I apologise and this particular the rant is in this instance misdirected. But if that was just an assumption from the part of the designer, could I please kick him in the nuts? It would give me great satisfaction.

    As far as books themselves are concerned, Doris Egan’s Ivory trilogy was nice reasnably entertaining SF fluff about an anthropologist who gets stranded on a planet where magic actually works and gets mixed up in the convoluted plots of the planet’s aristocracy. Very readable SF romance if you have already read your Asaros and Bujolds.

    Caton’s cultural study of Lawrence of Arabia was a trickier case. It is in many ways excellent study of the many aspects of the film and does give lots to think about. What I found trite and uninteresting was the endless amount of time and space Caton used apologising for his interest in the film and the ways he reads it. For goodness sake, do you really need a twenty-page introduction to state the obvious? That it is possible that a work of art such as film to have more than one thing to say. That the fact that Lawrence is an orientalist epic does not mean that it is not critical of the empire, or that it can’t in other ways tweak the hegemonic cultural representations. The way Caton feels he tries to pre-empty the criticism from feminist and post-colonial cultural scholars is really annoying and detracts from work’s value because it is so pointless. Honestly, anyone who sees the film as an uncomplicated boys own adventure, and heroic representation of the white male among the (noble) savages needs to get his head examined.

  • Pairs’ Long

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    Posted by Sari

    1) the technical demands seem to have gone up a level. All in the top four were doing or trying for two side-by-side triple jumps.

    2) Petrova/Tihonov wusrobbed. This is pairskating, and they were clearly better at all pair elements (twist, lifts, pair spin) than Totmianinova/Marinin, and I do think T/M’s lack of second sbs triple cancels out Maria doublefooting the throw sal. Besides thought P/T have reputation of being the ultimate competent bores, I find T/M much more yawnworthy, especially this year. Circus Princess is great material for P/T but why have they taken out their trademark carry lift where Alexei is in spread eagle and Maria sort of slowly falls out of the lift 😦

    3) Great that Zagorska/Siudek got the bronze, they were clearly more together and had the flow from element to element compared to Obertas/Slavnov who were still going from trick A to trick B. (And I suppose there is no Zayak rule for pairs, as these two went for three triple toes.) I am, however really interested to see O/S next year, when Moskvina has had them in hand. She can turn almost anything into solid gold, and these two already have enormous potential.

    All in all, technically good skating but I have to say – and I say this as a fan of P/T – that when Petrova/Tihonov deliver the most exciting program of the evening, something is sorely lacking. And people who grumble that there is no movement in dance results should take a look at this.

  • Men’s Short

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    Posted by Sari

    Can I again say that sekrit judging sucks? If ordinals fluctuate sometimes over ten placements it means that judges are either incompetent or pulling heavily for or against some skaters.

    Also lipping. I really and honestly can’t be certain with some of the guys if they were trying to do flips or lutzes. Lots of guys had as the triple out of steps a jump that could be called flip if you look at the entry (a three-turn) or a lutz if you look at the take-off edge (back outside), so don’t take my word for what they were trying to do…

    Anyway, an excellent competition from the top four guys who all skated excellent world-class programs. Hurray for Kristoffer Berntsson for making history for Sweden. And aww for Lindemann and Lambiel, the two skaters who have the talent to challenge the French and the Russians but did not deliver.

    As for results, it was very, very close. Dambier’s fourth place was IMO least contestable. He had 4s+2t combination, a low but clean 3A and a nice 3f(?). His flying sitspin was good, the rest of the spins OK, and the steps nice but his upper body was so busy that it detracted from the whole. The program was nice enough, but Händel’s suite in D minor nro 4 is getting a bit too popular with skaters, and Dambier’s interpretation did not have the drama or intensity of Smalun or Denkova/Stavinsky.

    If I was Klimkin, I might grumble a bit. Easy 3A+3t, 4t and 2A, excellent spins and his camel to camel spin was a thing of beauty even if it travelled a little. Steps were good and used edges instead of yagudinesque staccato running with toepicks. I also always like skaters who do things a bit differently and Klimkin skated to a selection from Swan lake, but had chosen a theme associated by the swan and not the prince. Good job. In the end his jump content was just that tiny bit easier than the top two so I can live with his being third.

    It gets even more difficult with Joubert. He defenitely had the best jumps of the evening. 4t+3t clean and beautiful running edges out of both jumps, a bit tight but OK 3A and 3l straight out of steps. Where he might be criticised is spins, his change of foot sitspin was merely adequate, I think his free-leg might have brushed the ice on the flying spin and his combination spin did not have as many positions as Kimkin’s or Plushys. As for his steps, I am biased. The annoying toe-pick running without actually doing any steps popularized by Morozov’s steps for Yags annoys me, and though Joubert’s steps excite the audience I just gritted my teeth. The program concept is a thing of beauty and Joubert does his Yags-clone thing well enough. So yes, I can see a case for him being anywhere from first to third.

    Plushenko is Plushenko even when skating with a busted knee. Not one of his most commanding performances and the fact that others stole ordinals from him was justified. The landing on 4t was really wonky and I still marvel that he could put the 2t at the end of it. 3A was really beautiful and 3l was fine. His circular steps are best in the business and even the stopmping in the straight-line sequence had real steps in it. His change of foot sit spin was OK though not very low, flying camel was slow but had the doughnut variation and his combospin had more positions than anyone else and it included the Bielmann.

    So I think the judges did fine with four performances that had very little to separate them. I can live with the result and don’t really think anyone can say they were robbed, but if I had had to decide I would have them in order of Klimkin, Plush and then Joubert. Now lets just hope long program delivers skating of this quality and I am a happy camper. Except for the sekrit judging thing…

  • Pairs’ short program

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    Posted by Sari

    Hello, and welcome to my obsession. Well, one of them. Feel free not to read any further. European Figure Skating championships began today with men’s qualifiers and pairs’ short program. Eurosport did not show the qualifying rounds so nothing much to say about them, but they did all bar one pair live in the evening.

    1) Sekrit judging sucks. Anyone who thinks that it is possible to arrive at more fair results by making the judging process anonymous and secret should get their head examined.

    2) I am prepared to change to digital and pay big money if I can get my skating broadcasts with more sound options than two. Nicky and Chris from British eurosport would be nice. And the nicest of all would be a to get just the live sound feed from the arena without any commentating at all. Bliss.

    3) The competition was mainly boring. Totmianina/Marinin were a total borefest with one gorgeous element (triple throw loop), rest were competent at best. And you really should not skate to Rachmaninov if you are as stone-faced as these two are. Petrova/Tikhonov were first in my book. Good flow and speed, wonderful split double twist and lift, and rest of the elements were well executed except breaking at the waist on the throw triple loop. Zagorska/Siudek were the only ones that had I felt reached out and preformed their very well coreographed program with real presence, and deserve their third place. (Actually, I have put them second, but that probably would have been my anti Tatiana and Maxim bias showing too much…)

    4) Skating photographers really hate their job. It is near impossible to find shots where they have not gone out of their way to capture skaters in the middle of rotation when they look basically butt ugly…