Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 122

Messenger birds and poisonous exhalations

On September 21–22 in Pen Pal, Kaya first started using her crow Sumi to carry messages. Although crows are messenger birds in many mythologies, they're not actually used as couriers in real life, not regularly anyway--pigeons are. People all over the world enjoy keeping homing pigeons (including in my town: I got a tour of a dovecote some years back--picture here); pigeons were used to deliver mail in India into the 2000s; and China still keeps military homing pigeons as a safeguard in the e...

Some excellent things of a Tuesday

You can choose between poems, novels, folklore, cool nonfiction, or nature, or--you can have all of them

poems

People who read this blog will no doubt be aware of the new zine Liminality. Well its first issue is out! With a lovely portrait of a mangrove dryad by haikujaguar on its cover and so. many. wonderful. poems.

Maggie Hogarth's cover
LIMINALITY



I have a deep and special fondness for cafenowhere 's "Love Letters for the Itinerant":

You took a pocket knife
slashed some keys and
kirigami
presented...

September 20 (belatedly): Floating Gardens

On September 20, a TV crew visited Mermaid's Hands, and some of the kids showed off various aspects of their daily life, including tending floating gardens. People in Mermaid's Hands didn't always make floating gardens--Silent Soriya gave them the idea. She came to Mermaid's Hands from Cambodia.

I first learned about floating gardens from a PDF from an NGO called Practical Action--the PDF was about creating floating gardens in Bangladesh. Here's a webpage about the project, and here is a page...

Three excellent things

music and dancing at the street corner

Last week, on my way to the jail, I saw a guy sitting on a street corner, strumming a guitar. Just sitting on the curb, noodling. I can't remember what he was wearing, but though he was a young guy (teenaged, or twenties), the scene had a 1930s feel to.

This week, on that same corner, a guy was dancing. Cool dancing, where you isolate bits of your body, where you pivot on your heels. He was in a bright yellow sports jersey with a number on it, and yellow s...

multicolored acorns

This year some of the white oaks, whose acorns are less full of tannin than those from red oaks, are making lots of nuts! These nuts are practically edible out of hand. They don't make your mouth go all fuzzy the way red-oak acorns do (at least, the red-oak acorns from the trees around here). I've been nibbling on them--they're nice, though I hesitate to eat lots raw.

I'm going to try to make another acorn cake.

They're so pretty in different stages of ripening--multicolored. Here are some in a...

Interview with Patty Templeton

Today I have something different for you: an interview with Patty Templeton, the author of the darkly humorous historical fantasy There Is No Lovely End.



Spanning the second half of the nineteenth century, There Is No Lovely End features outlaws and patent medicine salesmen, mediums and besotted journalists, and not a few ghosts. It also features Sarah Winchester, the real-life wife of the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

Sarah Winchester (Source)


I gather that Sarah Winchester’s...

September 16: birth certificates

On this day in Pen Pal, Em learns that the people born on dry land are given certificates to commemorate that fact . . . and for other, more weighty purposes. Everyone who's ever needed to establish their identity knows how crucial a birth certificate can be.

They can be elegant--here's some fancy lettering on a Massachusetts birth certificate:



Here is the top of a Japanese birth certificate:



And here is the top of an English birth certificate:



If you're a US citizen and you have a baby overseas,...

September 13 (belatedly) in Pen Pal: Fumaroles

Isn't fumarole a lovely word? Fuming, which is what the earth is doing--letting off steam through a vent. But also with that "role" at the end, which makes me think of rolling, or roiling. Roiling, rolling, twisting and steaming, and that steam--those fumes--are like ocean spume. Vapors and exhalations.

On September 13 in Pen Pal, Kaya discovered that some days earlier, an earthquake had opened up just such a vent, which released poisonous gas. Some exhalations are more pleasant than others.

A...

Concoction Rice

With a whole bottle of palm oil to use, I clearly need to make more Nigerian recipes, so on Flo's advice, I decided to tackle Concoction Rice, which has lots of traditional ingredients in it.

Of course, having lots of traditional ingredients in it means that it has lots of things in it not easily obtainable in a semi-rural town in western Massachusetts. Fortunately, a nearby city has this shop:



I went there and got several of the ingredients I needed, including a lovely smoked mackerel--a whole...

a historic sailing ship, ocean currents, and a message in a bottle

My this-week's message-in-a-bottle story took me to some interesting places--first, to the story of the STS Sedov, a famous sailing ship.
STS Sedov, image from Wikimedia Commons


It started its days as the German Magdalene Vinnen II, built in 1921 as a cargo ship. According to Wikipedia, she carried all sorts of cargo:

apart from coal, she took timber from Finland, wheat from Australia, pyrite from Italy and unit load from Belgium.

She changed her name to Kommodore Johnsen when she was bought by a...