Weekend Listening Post got deleted??!!

I got a significant chunk through this post and then pressed rong button. Eurgh. At any rate. I'm back at work as of today, and yet, I barely got the urgent emails dealt with. Not because they took 8hrs, but for lack of Cope. I did, however, revisit the conference paper I nearly finished in December, and delete a chunk of not-strictly-necessary waffle. I think I need to completely restart it, AGAIN, to fit everything in, though.

My minor win was fighting off the combo jetlag/despair that wanted to go to bed at 6pm, and eating dinner and sitting down to make A Post. Therefore, I shall repeat what I had drafted and keep going.

---

Music:

Most notably, I bought, with an itunes voucher I swapped my sister (she'd been given it but doesn't use itunes - crap, I just remembered I was given an AUD gift-visa card, for a modest amount, that I forgot to use, too. I can probably use it online), an album by Kate Nyx. You may recall Nyx from last Listening Post, her song 'Bean's gotta scream' feat. Winslow the Cat. These days Nyx does sort of caberet-type stuff I think? But the Sage and Silver Bullet's album is sorta Americanah. I particularly liked, for its 'huh, that's a neat literary device' value, this song using the 'curse of Eve' to refract a meditation on disordered eating:

Watch on YouTube

Other musical observations:

1. Having finally read Niko Stratis on the queerness of Green Day, I bought and re-listened to American Idiot. I can report that I had never noticed the line about "faggot America". I had always heard /fag end/ America. I understood this to be a classed reference vis a vis the smoking habits of the "rednecks" in the next line - like, the speaker, a fag end, was cast off even by the "redneck agenda" of the next line. But no. Huh.

2. Partner introduced me to the defunct Melbourne outfit 'The Jane Austen Argument', who are basically the Whitlams crossed with Amanda Palmer, but not, AFAIK, arseholes. Reminiscent of The Indelicates (to whom I finally forcibly exposed Partner). NB esp kayloulee: when seeking replacements for AP in our respective shuffles, we did not find this group but we ought to have.

---

Audio Fiction:

Ben Aaronovitch, False Value: powered through in the last few days before flying out. Frankly disappointed with the opening dramatic-irony ploy. Remains worth it for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's narration.

Rusty Quill Gaming: I'm up to episode 52, past the Inception plot ploy. I particularly enjoyed Bertie's side quest. Listened to some episodes with Shiny in Sydney - particularly Mr Ceiling, one of Shiny's favourites. I enjoyed Mr Ceiling as a character, but no single episode really stands out. I enjoy RQG because, by and large, I don't NEED to pay close attention to entire episodes ("Everything's Fine" being a startling exception).

---

Other Audio:

I cannot possibly be comprehensive here, so, some highlights:

Contemporary Misc:

How airlines quietly became banks, a YouTube piece recommended by Siderea.

Still plodding through the RTS / SRF news from Switzerland, supplemented with SBS German, and the occasional Radio France and Deutsch Welle learner news podcasts

ABC 'Conversations' with Sue Ellen Kusher, whose father was a (domestic) spy. Parents recommended it, and it is actually pretty damn fascinating.

Queer Misc:

Queersplaining - conversation episode Choose To Live with someone named Eli, whose surname either wasn't mentioned or I didn't gather it. Eli is an apostate from Islam, and the episode is about grief and trauma - due to Eli's background it was SUPER relevant to my specific brand of Queer Angst, but there's a lot of time devoted to "processing this whole pandemic thing: ugh", Unprecedented Times, and other varietes of no-specific-big-bang-moments-but-everything-sucks trauma. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I continued to binge Gender Reveal right up until a few days before Xmas Eve, whereupon I abruptly switched to Ben Aaronovitch because there's only so much Gender a gal can take in December. Still excellent stuff. A sticker arrived in the mail for me, purchased by Partner (aka Shiny) and long in the mail, saying "Gender is a shitty group project", which I 100% wholeheartedly believe to be a more accurate description than either "gender is performative" or "gender is a social construct". If I had my way we'd redo gender theory from about 1995 onwards via Bourdeiu, but I do not have my way, etc.

QueerLit by Lena Matthias - I particularly appreciated the episode on Queer pets. TL,DR, very academic literary scholar type stuff. But good.

History and such:

The Loremen podcast as a whole. All of it. Some bits I love more than others but the standard deviation of my love for it is small. I know I listen to certain episodes and think YES, CLASSIC; but a few days later I can't separate them from the general background of excellence. Mostly 16th-19th c local history and folklore. Both hosts are comedians, many puns.

Forgotten Australia, The Plague Returns Part One and Part Two. Part Three pending. Michael Murray follows the bubonic plague through Sydney, 1902, with particular attention to a. the pollution of the river bays (with offal from the Glebe Island slaughterhouse, eww) and b. the staging of Ben Hur at Her Majesty's Theatre. Murray is often frustratingly apolitical, to the point of lacking *analysis*, but in this case I think his restrained quips about contemporary resonances (I thought I was so clever for thinking of a rats/RATs joke... but Murray had a three part episode devoted to it) and political buck-passing works well. And as ever his archival work is both meticulous and vivid. I'm shaky on my historiographical trends, but I'm pretty sure Murray's methods owe something to both the Annales school and the sub-Ginsberg tradition of microhistory. (Psst monksandbones if you're ever bored, I'd love to know your take on this podcast. Either start with the plague episodes, or if you want to steer well clear of pandemic vibes, there were some good ones on minor seafaring Drama that I noted back in 2020)

I... think that's it. Quite a few other things I got halfway through and vagued out, but these are the things that stuck.

Please accept this offering of Weekend Listening Post.

These are not recipes: A List of Things I Cooked, Dec-Jan 2021

In Switzerland:

Fruit cake, iced, for Christmas: two small, one mini. Fed up with the trapezoidal shape of the loaf tins I used last year, I bought square cake rings. These were... annoying. Yes, sharp corners; but given the lumpy nature of fruit cake, I'm not sure that they were better than round-corner square tins would be: I had to place them, one in a baking tray and one in an oven-proof frying pan, on a lined base, and then line the tin, and... this worked okay but not worth the fuss. The mini one was in a tiny round tin with a removable bottom. I gave the square ones to my two immediate colleagues, and the round to Prof Medieval (UNIBE), who was uncomfortable and !! because she only planned gifts to her immediate minions. HOWEVER. She reported that her children were delighted, as the iced cake reminded them of school in the UK; so she's on next year's victim list regardless.

Fruit cake, iced, possibly gluten-free but not vegan: two small, one mini. Mistakes were made (eggs added on autopilot) and then I wasn't actually sure that the stash flour I'd used was GF. I iced one and sent it to friend J's husband, who is a Brit but hadn't made his own cake this year due to the household having a SMOL CHILD. The rest got crunched into cake-pudding-balls, see below.

Fruit cake, gluten-free and vegan: not entirely satisfactory. Too MUCH apple sauce replacing egg, definitely- leaked out of all the tins (I did this batch entirely in mini round tins with pop bottoms). I iced one, with a mere single fondant layer, for friends. Attempts were made at making my own hazlenut icing for the base layer, but I had chunky hazlenut meal rather than fine hazlenut flour and it failed abjectly. For myself, I ate one and froze the rest.

Fruit cake-pudding-pops, in a. regular and b. vegan issue. The regular ones consist of: take the top of the fruit cake that you carve off when you flatten it for icing; blend; add chocolate ganache and brandy; add almond meal when you realise it's too wet; form into balls and refridgerate. Top with melted white chocolate and half a glacé cherry the next morning. The other ones much the same except you try to make vegan ganache (dubious) and you roll them in dessicated coconut because vegan white chocolate is horrible to work with.

NB: for the cake-pudding-pops, note that my base recipe is something akin to this taste.com.au recipe for mini pudding, although I encountered it in Brownie Guides rather than on line. Cross-referenced with various online recipes for cake pops, and for rum balls. Reinvented annually based on what I have to hand.

Vegan coconut ice, which took two tries - the first time I didn't condense the coconut milk enough (needs more than the recipe indicates); the second time I had only brown sugar to hand and so ended up with an unsual colour of confection.

White Christmas. I have since been vehemently informed by my mother than White Christmas should NOT involve white chocolate, so I shall investigate before next xmas. If the alternative involves condensed milk, I might nope out, because vegan white chocolate is easier to find than coconut condensed milk, here.

In Australia:

A miscellaneously roast chook (with plenty of butter, onion and garlic rubbed into it; lemon and a bit of apple in the cavities)

A slimmed down version of Ottolenghi test kitchen celebration rice (no lamb; leftover roast chicken eliminates the first step; ad-libbed a bit with reference to Samin Nosrat)

An almond chocolate cake from the Women's Weekly gluten-free cake book, i forget exactly what the title was now. It was supposed to have a peanut butter icing but I did maple philly cream cheese. It lacked structural integrity but tasted pretty good - I'd be delighted if the recipe came from anyone other than the WW. At any rate I don't think my mother loved it, but at least SOMEONE made her a birthday cake, and that someone was me.

"Popcorn Lamb", which is what happened as a result of me attempting to make Stephanie Alexander's Witty Lamb/ Epigrammes d'angneau , given my lack of precision and the fact I didn't have a former biology student to hand to help. Also I gluten-free-ified it on the fly, and I couldn't get the good Ograms GF panko crumbs. This whole adventure deserves its own write-up. The end result was worth it; I can't figure out why the de-boning part bore NO RESEMBLANCE AT ALL to the instructions, and would honestly like to try it with my Mum supervising for clarity.

Two batches of GF pancakes, using Ograms's buckwheat mix (which is less than 50% buckwheat, upon inspection).

Regarding the Christmas cake problem: at one point I attempted to colour leftover fondant icing (with a view to carving stencil trees or bells and sticking them on top of the white cake), and failed with the particular variety of gel colouring in the supermarket here. Too tacky. Gross. Ew. BUT. By angry googling I found a proper cake decorating store in Zurich, who sell both powder and traditional liquid colouring, plus proper cake tins, and cutters, etc. Probably also pre-coloured fondant in colours other than the ugliest green, which is what the supermarket sells.

PLAN. Please remind me in august-sept 2022: By mid october, I aquire new professional standard cake deco supplies. I bake the regular-flour-and-egg christmas cakes (3-4 of them) Then I organise my birthday party (birthday early Nov), which shall consist of: my colleagues bring their children to my house, and then they fuck off to drink coffee. I, possibly with someone as backup (friend LW? R who is partner of KHC?), ice christmas cakes with children; Ms Bee, who can draw quite well, shall be in charge of tracery for fondant stencils. This will solve a. a large amount of mad christmas rush and b. the thing where I never do anything for my birthday and people feel sorry for me because I am Alone. After making cakes, perhaps we then eat a DIFFERENT cake I have pre-prepared for birfday reasons. Or mid-cake, between almond and fondant layer stages.
The need for a demo cake or several means Prof Medieval, and probably also non-tt-lecturer-medieval, will get another Xmas cake. I see no problems here. I'd invite both THEIR kids, but I know my limits, I am no brownie guide leader. And we may yet be in a pandemic; both my immediate team members are in my second-string-personal-life-contact ring anyway.