petrea_mitchell | Entries tagged with til

I've been thinking a lot recently about Revenge of the Sith, and all the reactions at the time about how dumb a plot twist it was to have people just voting to hand their semi-democratic government over to a dictator, because obviously people would never do that!

Well, it turns out that Revenge of the Sith is getting a 20th anniversary re-release. One week, starting April 25. So I'm curious to see if anyone will be rethinking their reaction on watching the movie again.

I also expect that Jar Jar Binks will not have improved with age.

I have just learned about Famous Birthdays from a news story calling it "Wikipedia for Gen Z". This appears to be wrong on two counts. One is that it doesn't allow every passing rando to edit it. (There's an edit icon but it just takes you to a form suggesting changes.)

The other is that it skews older than that description makes it sound. I had no trouble finding the big TV shows I was watching as a Gen X kid. When I looked up sf authors, I found Samuel R. Delany, C. J. Cherryh, and Mercedes Lackey, but not N. K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, or Lois McMaster Bujold. It does include Seanan McGuire, but then claims she lost the 2013 Best Novel Hugo to Isaac Asimov. (It was actually John Scalzi, who doesn't have an entry.)

Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas has been a fascinating journey through a region of the world I know almost nothing about so far. Covering how the modern idea of walled-off, spiritually advanced Tibet formed in the late 1800s, against a background of popular interest in the occult, it drops this aside:

Take for example the concept of "vril", an "all-permeating fluid" which first appears in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's proto-science-fiction novel The Coming Race, published in 1871. At the time Bulwer-Lytton was a hugely popular novelist and politician, the man who coined the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword". Vril was a kind of power or strength, and it briefly caught on. A Scottish butcher called John Lawson Johnston used the name to market his nutritious beef stock: Bovril.

I've heard of vril, and I've heard of Bovril, but I would never have guessed they had any connection.

Shortly afterward there is a mention of a book I'll probably decide to hunt down and read:

When Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to resurrect Sherlock Holmes following his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, it was only natural that he should emerge from mystical Tibet; the Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu wrote a pastiche of what the detective got up to in The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes.

Looking up that book, it turns out to also be fan fiction of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which I've never read. So two books to hunt down and read.

darkoshi pointed out on my last post about this that golden raisins are made from the exact same grapes as purple ones. Fascinating! At least I wasn't imagining the taste difference.

So cross those out. But I can add tomatoes and yellow peas, in the year's first batch of minestrone. I've had tomato sauce and ketchup this year, but wanted to wait for the whole tomatoes to count them.

Master list here.

Thanks to the comments on this Ask a Manager post.

TIL that China has a pork reserve.

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Natterings From Nepantla

Entries tagged with til

George Lucas tried to warn you

Keeping up with pop culture

Surprise etymology and a book

Fruits and vegetables, correction and update

New word: "Toxic Positivity"

Everything is hedgeable

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